Major Shake-up at IOL

According to several news reports, there is a major crisis taking place at IslamOnline.net (IOL), where it is expected that more than 250 journalists will be let go at the end of March. These reports say that IOL's servers have been taken over by a new administration, which seeks to change the editorial focus of the website. Protests began on March 15 and continued yesterday. As of now (Wednesday morning), I am still waiting to hear an update on the situation. In the meantime, here are some articles explaining more about the conflict:

Islam Online in crisis as administration threatens to fire journalists

Islam Online goes offline

Islam On-Strike

For those who are unfamiliar with IOL, it is a major Islamic website that has grown tremendously over the past decade and which is quite unique as far as the type of content it publishes. 

According to the website, its goals are:

• To work for the good of humanity, as Islam teaches us.
• To work to uplift the Islamic nation specifically and humanity in general.
• To support the principles of freedom, justice, democracy, and human rights.
• To reinforce values and morals at the individual, family, and community levels.
• To expand the circle of introducing Islam; present its comprehensiveness and the way its system and laws complement each other; to affirm its balance, fairness and applicability in all places and times; and present the tolerance and the humanity of its laws.
• To strengthen the ties of unity and affiliation between the members of the Islamic community and support informational and cultural exchange.
• To expand awareness of important events in the Arab, Islamic and larger worlds.
• To build confidence and a spirit of hope among Muslims.

Target Audience: All people, Muslim and non-Muslim, regardless of geographic boundaries, race, religion, language, background, culture or gender

You might be interested to know that: 

IOL began as a project of IT specialist Maryam al-Hajari during her final year at university. She attended a course on zakat taught by Qaradawi at the Shari^'a faculty in 1996. Al-Hajari says it was then she was exposed to a meaning of zakat that ran deeper than the standard notion of paying a portion of one’s income: "How you suppose to dispose your knowledge. That was a new concept to me. Before I thought zakat was only for money. So, I thought, I have got a lot of knowledge, I was a top student, so, what am I going to do with it ....I thought about it a long time."

Take a look at this fascinating in-depth report on IOL's history here.

IOL publishes a huge amount of content each day and is a paying market that employs many writers from around the world. Right now, there is a lot of speculation about the nature of the conflict and the future of the site, but let's hope that this conflict is temporary and will be resolved soon.

More on the crisis at IOL