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New Muslim virtual world

Now might not seem a good time to launch a virtual world aimed at a specific community, given the general economic woe and the decline in Second Life. However, Mohamed El-Fatatry, an Egyptian working out of Finland, reckons now is an excellent time to create a world aimed at Muslims.

El-Fatary is the man behind the two-year-old Muxlim, a kind of MySpace for Muslims, visited more than one million times a month by members in almost 200 countries. And this week his latest project, Muxlim Pal, a virtual world similar to Second Life, opened its doors to avatars.

Muxlim Pal creator Mohamed El-Fatatry is an entrepreneur with an impressive track record for tailoring technology to the Islamic diaspora in innovative ways. More than a decade before popular photo-sharing websites such as Flickr, he was creating personal web pages where he and his friends could publish and comment on photographs, and by the time he was 16 he was teaching web development at the Emirates Institute of Technology.

Muxlim and Muxlim Pal are the latest in a series of Muslim-orientated web projects that began with the DigitalHalal portal, leading one profiler to describe El-Fatatry — still in his early 20s — as “the Linus Torvalds of the Muslim world.”

The creation of a 3D virtual world, however, represents a different scale of ambition. Development-intensive, launched against the backdrop of a global recession and only weeks before Google plans to pull the plug on its own (never very) “Lively” digital fantasy world, it looks as if it could be a struggle. El-Fatatry, however, is undaunted. So far, Islam and the social web haven’t had a completely comfortable relationship. YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, microblogging network Twitter and Google’s own Blogger network — the brand giants of user-generated content — have all, at different times and in different Muslim countries, fallen foul of the censors.

Data relating to Muslim take-up of digital alternative worlds is scant, and anybody who doesn’t identify themselves primarily by their religion won’t easily be distinguishable by casual observation. Clearly there are Muslim communities in Second Life, arguably the internet’s best-known virtual world; but they seem out of place. Then again, in Second Life, doesn’t everything seem out of place?

What began as an experiment in the socialising potential of an immersive experience in cutting-edge technology has degenerated into an ethically ambiguous playground devoted to random sexual encounter, violence and the behavioural excesses largely denied in “first life”.

Within this context, Muslim communities aren’t offered the opportunity to express anything like a normal, multi-faceted lifestyle; and to encounter religious Muslims there feels like stumbling across an Amish village in Tokyo. They build virtual mosques, visit a virtual Mecca and distract themselves with an intense focus on religion.

In Muxlim Pal, the focus will be elsewhere, on what El-Fatatry calls “the Muslim lifestyle”. But how does the Muslim lifestyle differ from the non-Muslim lifestyle? “Ah,” says El-Fatatry. “That’s it. It doesn’t. We think of the Muslim lifestyle as a very rich experience which is not very different to any other lifestyle out there. But at the core are the core Muslim values.”

These are the values, he says, that will continue to guide the discourse on Muxlim, keeping things polite; and they’ll guide the behaviour on Muxlim Pal, too. They’ll keep things nice.

Visually, Muxlim Pal’s more Habbo Hotel than Second Life. But how specifically Muslim is it? “There’s a mosque social yard, but that’s about the only place related to religion,” says El-Fatatry. “Pal City does, however, have a mall, a caf?, an arena where virtual concerts will be held. It will be an enjoyable experience for everyone, whether they are Muslims or non-Muslims.”

Culture-specific elements include a Pal’s ability to pray; and female Pals can - should they wish - wear headscarves. What Pals do in the privacy of their own rooms is their business, but the technology for sexual activity isn’t provided - not for religious reasons, says El Fatatry, but because he wants it to be family-friendly, Other than that, it will be entirely self-moderated.

And this is what makes the Muxlim experiment so potentially fascinating. While the combination of anonymity and quick and easy publication has led many read-write web projects into a lowest-common-denominator mire, a waste of their technological potential (consider the comments section over at YouTube), the shared values of the Muxlim membership appear to have created something like an intelligent consensus.

Inevitably, the elephant in this particular room is religious extremism. Has the Muxlim network been tested by a fundamentalist element? El-Fatatry says: “When something like that does happen, users are very vigilant and they tell us. If enough people report something, the technology means it’s automatically buried. If it happens time and again, the user account is removed. Honestly, they would find more freedom to go and express their views on YouTube. Here, their voice just won’t be heard. When the power is in the hands of the majority to self-moderate, you have nothing to worry about.”

El-Fatatry’s argument is that the mainstream remains the mainstream, whatever fringe elements join or leave, and a mainstream that operates with shared core values will make Muxlim Pal a tolerant and enjoyable place. As Muxlim grows and reaches out, El-Fatatry says he expects that the world will be joined by security forces. Is he concerned? “We welcome on board anybody who’d like to come and look at Muxlim, and look at the community in there,” he says. “Please come and create an account, we invite you, and you will find that this is a friendly, accommodating and very enjoyable experience that you might not find in many other places.”

There is already a non-Muslim presence in Muxlim, says, El-Fatatry — 2 per cent of the membership is not Muslim. He wants to increase that figure to 10 per cent. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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