Salam Dunk: The Pax is Back!

The blogger who shook the world with his posts from Baghdad, and whose posts became one of the first (and most successful) blooks, has returned to Iraq after a postgraduate journalism degree in London. In this article for the Guardian (who hosted his blog on their site way back when), he talks about where he's been, what life was like in exile, and why he's decided to go back.

And his blog is back as well, with a 12 Jan 2009 post celebrating Al-Jazeera's Creative Commons license on their Gaza footage, allowing bloggers to host and remix for free.

Freedom to Blog?

Siobhain Butterworth, the Guardian Readers' Editor, had a comment piece in the paper on Monday about the Free Speech and the Internet conference that took place at Cumberland Lodge last week. English PEN director Jonathan Heawood summed up his experience of the conference as part of the Guardian's multi-authored blog on on the issue. Heawood concludes that he:

came away from the conference convinced that we need to strengthen the international human rights framework if we are to realise the internet's capacity for freedom of speech. For this reason I believe we need an international treaty on the internet – not to encourage censorship, but to underwrite freedom of speech. One contributor to the conference suggested that the internet has "globalised the First Amendment".

Unfortunately, this simply isn't true for bloggers in Iran, Egypt, China and elsewhere who have been imprisoned for expressing their views or transmitting information online. Nor is it true for those of us whose searches are blocked, whose downloads are monitored, and whose postings are subject to "take-down" notices without any right of reply.

He points out that even in the UK and US, where democracy and freedom of speech are supposedly universal rights,

National legislators are struggling to keep up. Where they do create laws on the internet, they often do so badly, or without regard to the consequences. Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 creates an offence out of downloading material which might be useful to a terrorist. It led to the detention of a junior academic at Nottingham University who was legitimately researching terrorism.

The case brought home to (perhaps complacent) UK internet users the extent to which their web use (even on a personal computer, from home) is monitored, for political as well as commercial reasons.

It's a reality that bloggers in the Middle East and China face far more explicitly -- but the internet also gives them a way not only to speak out against censorship, blocking, take-downs, and arrests, but to be heard globally. Global Voices today has statistics on internet use in Egypt from Bloggers Times [Ar], showing (unbelievably) that

the number of internet users in Egypt increased from 650,000 users in 2000 to 9,170,000 users in 2008.

Marwa Rakha, who translates the blog, notes that

One in every three people in the sample [of 1,338 Egyptians 18-35] has a blog.

and that 89% of them are in favour of an internet censorship law, details unspecified.

There's a contrasting view from blogger Khalid in Bahrain, who writes (in Amira Al-Husseini's translation) hopefully that in the blogosphere:

Writing has become without limits, or outside the scope of being limited

. Like Heawood, he believes that

writing today needs a code of conduct, and what is this code? Who will write it? Who will approve it? The government, or the people, or the writers, or the intellectuals, or the clergymen? There will continue to be writings, and these writings will remain outside the restrictions.

Freedom of Expression: Covering All the Angles

Egyptian novelist and blogger Marwa Rakha has posted an English translation of fellow Egyptian blogger Hanan El Sherif's discussion of blog censorship and online community at Global Voices. It's a fascinating angle, from the blogger community, on the rights and responsibilities being discussed by policy-makers, editors, lawyers and journalists at PEN's conference this week.

The online community, particularly in Iran and throughout the Middle East and North Africa, is very reflective and supportive, with bloggers openly discussing government censorship and persecution of other bloggers, with an emphasis on "strength in numbers" speaking up and campaigning for the release of bloggers, for freedom of speech. Bloggers are quick to draw attention to the censorship or blocking of particular sites. It acts as a powerful argument for online *community* and that community's ability to set its own boundaries (distinguishing, for example, defamation from valid comment) and to defend its members.

Journalists have faced this kind of censorship and intimidation for years, and have developed a number of organisations such as Reporters Without Borders and International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) to collect information, such as the number of reporters killed on the job (up 244% between 2002-2007), to make headlines and provide a unified front.

Perhaps bloggers need a grassroots-generated focal point for drawing up online behaviour charters and for rallying to bloggers' defense -- something along the lines of OnlinePEN, or a union (something freelance writers in North America have been working towards for decades) or CARA, the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics, which has just announced its 2008 conference. Between 3rd and 5th December, attendees will learn about CARA's history, present and future, and about current issues affecting refugee academics finding work and publishing.

They are currently focusing on the plight of Iraqi academics, and are fundraising for two dedicated fellowship schemes via an emergency appeal for Iraqi academics, shadowed by a chilling list of Iraqi academics assassinated in the five years since the invasion.

The Nobel Art of Blogging

Jose Saramago has started a blog. It's in Portuguese, so if you speak the language it looks like a great way to get the inside scoop on a Nobel Laureate's writing process, particularly as Fernando Mereilles' film adaptation of Saramago's Blindness is released.

Saramago will be welcomed to the litblogging community by writers Ghada Abdel Aal, Marwa Rakha, and Rajaa Alsanea, who are part of a new trend in the Middle East for gossip-girl novels based on blogs. These women writers have successfully used the internet as a forum in which to speak about the inner lives of Arabic women, to dispense advice about marriage, men and education, and have found a following for their work. Where Rakha is a sharp, secular critic, Alsanea writes about balancing halal behaviour and belief with the desire to be an emancipated, educated woman. All three point to the hypocrisies and double standards exploited by men in their societies -- but their powerful critiques are delicately layered inside what seems like Sex and the City fluff.

Perhaps these aren't novels that might win a Nobel prize for Literature, but can the time be far off when a blook wins one of the major literary awards?

Welcome to the Blogging Revolution

Following the publication of a number of influential blooks from the Middle East, including those by Salam Pax and Riverbend, Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein has collected together interviews with bloggers based in repressive regimes in his book The Blogging Revolution, which he's been talking about on SBS Radio Arabic and in today's Guardian. He asserts that citizen journalism and new media publishing can literally change the world, by providing freedom of information from within countries where media is closely state-controlled, and can allow internet users around the world to make connections with one another.

With the Online World Atlas, PEN hopes to become part of that revolution -- not least because good-news stories like Loewenstein's are balanced by increasingly frequent site closures and arrests of bloggers such as Moroccan Mohammed Erraji. The blogging revolution - like all change - needs _you_: send us links to news stories, new publications, great blogs, good books and interesting discussions.

As Loewenstein points out, "Allowing people to speak and write for themselves without a western filter is one of the triumphs of blogging. The online culture, disorganised and disjointed in its aims, is unlike that of any previous social movement." Like international blog collector sites Global Voices and The Literary Saloon, or Syrian aggregator al-mudawen, the World Atlas blog collects some of the new voices being heard in this fertile landscape -- and we want you to add yours.