CAIRO, 2 November 2004 — Ramadan e-cards, “iftar” recipes, spiritual guidance and praying tips blend online with children’s stories and the latest news out of Iraq, as Muslim websites aim to compete with Arab television for Ramadan audiences.
Despite the growing number of “hits”, the special Ramadan sections of scores of Arab websites are still far from attracting as many viewers as the countless soap operas which keep millions of people glued to their sets after Muslim evening prayers. But with a fast-growing pool of Internet-users, which currently stands at around 3.3 million, Egypt has witnessed a surge of interest in Ramadan-related surfing this year.
As life in general moves at a slower pace during Ramadan, young users say they “like to kill time” by surfing the web before the cannon goes off at sunset, signaling the time to break the dawn-to-dusk fast with your family.
The www.islamonline.net website has one of the most extensive Ramadan offers, with a wide variety of sections supported by state-of-the-art graphics. The site provides a wealth of Islamic background, with excerpts from the Koran holy book, fatwas, or religious edicts, on fasting and recommendations from leading clerics.
Cooking tips also feature widely, with health pages informing the reader that “fasting is the single greatest natural healing therapy”.
The “Palestine competition”, which challenges its participants to remember dates of landmark killings and massacres in Palestinian history, sits in the on-screen menu just above a special science section on fasting.
Another page carries feature stories on how Somalis living in London or various other Muslim communities outside the Islamic world observe Ramadan.
The site has enough depth to keep users clicking for days and plenty of links to other websites related to the holy Muslim month of fasting, which started in mid-October.The “Good News For Me” website (www.gn4me.com) tries to build a readership on the back of the tremendously successful Ramadan TV series, with a people section providing all the latest gossip on the soaps’ celebrity actors. It also posts a list of Cairo’s best “kheimas”, the festive tents that have drawn criticism from fundamentalists who see them as keeping youth away from mosques during Ramadan, which is supposed to be a month of piety and charity.
Amr Khaled, a televangelist-style Muslim cleric popular with young people, dedicates his site (www.amrkhaled.net) to his own sermons and advice on the value of fasting.
His site also has a link allowing visitors to donate money for the “Ramadan basket”, which is used to buy meals for the poor during the holy month.
Web surfers skipping prayers at their local mosque can catch up with leading imams’ best sermons on www.almslm.com, while other pious Internet users can delve in religious lore by consulting www.al-islam.com’s glossary of names describing paradise and hell in Islamic literature.
On some sites, nutritionists offer advice to heal ailments generally associated with Ramadan, a month of fasting that for some has turned into a systematic nightly eating binge.
Like the DIY pumpkin-carving sites for Halloween in the United States, many web pages in the Arab world recommend manual activities for children, such as making a paper “fanus”, the traditional lantern which hangs outside homes during Ramadan.
