Alaa al-Aswany on Islam in the media

Another day, another novelist offering political analysis in The Guardian. Balancing out their recent contribution to the Amis Dental Reconstruction Fund, the paper has Alaa al-Aswany commenting -- rather more knowledgeably -- on the Western double-standard/standard-issue blindness where Islam is concerned. al-Aswany lived in Chicago (setting for his second novel) for several years, and his op-ed reflects his doubly-aware perspective, concluding

It is true that the west's policy treats us as colonial peoples who do not deserve to enjoy the rights of their citizens, and it is true that its media is mostly biased against Arabs and Muslims – but it is also true that the retrograde Wahhabi reading of Islam that is now widespread helps to entrench an unfair and mistaken image.

It is our duty to start with ourselves. We must save Islam from all the nonsense, falsehoods and retrograde ideas that have attached themselves to it. Democracy is the solution.

PEN Atlas: Site of the Week

Thanks to the Guardian's Books Blog for calling us their Site of the Week, and drawing particular attention to our Voices from Gaza feature running throughout this month.

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.