The Brotherhood's Facebook Clone and Other MB Online Sites

I'm a little late to the discussion but there's been some blogosphere talk about the Muslim Brotherhood's own version of Facebook, IkhwanBook, and why the Ikhwan doesn't just use tjhe regular Facebook. (Short answer: it does.) Starting from this article in The National, there are discussions by Brian Whitaker, who notes the following: (many of the links don't work):

The Muslim Brotherhood (known in Arabic as "al-Ikhwan") is engaged in a rather curious project to duplicate some of the world's most popular websites with its own "Ikhwan" versions.

So far, these include Ikhwan Wiki (resembling Wikipedia), Ikhwan Tube and Ikhwan Web Tube (YouTube lookalikes), Ikhwan Google (which searches the Brotherhood's websites) and – the latest addition – IkhwanBook which resembles Facebook.

The interesting and slightly puzzling question is what the Brotherhood hopes to achieve by this. It's hard to imagine the Ikhwan sites gaining anything like the popularity of those they replicate, and they look like a move towards exclusivity which is generally uncharacteristic of the Brotherhood.

To which Issander El Amrani at The Arabist adds this:

I think both Matt and Brian miss the point slightly. The first reason for having all these sites — and believe me, there are a LOT of Ikhwan sites out there, practically one for every governorate of Egypt plus many more on specific issues before you reach the Facebook and Wikipedia clones — is that there simply is enthusiasm to build them. Beyond the apparent correlation one notices between tech-savvy and religious inclination (just visit any of the computer malls on Midan Sphinx in Cairo), there are a lot of young talented programmers in Egypt who would love to show their enthusiasm for the gamaa by building websites for it. And there are a lot of young people in the Brotherhood, no matter how elderly the leadership is, for whom these websites may be a way of expressing their views as well as gain practice in the art of political and religious rhetoric.

The second reason is that this resonates with the groupthink and in-group mentality that the Muslim Brotherhood cultivates. These sites won't replace Facebook or Wikipedia, they are a virtual gated community (gated, that is, by strong symbolic references and imagery that are likely to alienate those not already versed in the Ikhwan universe) for like-minded people, where they can create a more orderly version of the sites that they copy and where the membership is self-selecting. The Muslim Brothers tend to socialize together, marry within each others' families, work together (or for each other) and a whole lot more. It's a support group as much as a political organization. It makes sense that, online, they will tend towards a closed ecosystem — alongside the open internet, not instead of it.

The original article offers some of the Brothers' own rationale:

But defenders of the site say they envision IkhwanBook as a complementary parallel – not a replacement – for Facebook. The organisation, members say, wants a social networking site of its own that can be tailored to its unique need for privacy, security and decency.

“I think that it’s important that we have channels which are not contradictory to the original Facebook but which are parallel to it,” said Ahmed Said, an engineer and a member of the Brotherhood’s media development team. “We will not be isolated. Many groups have their own social network on the net. The name is Ikhwan, but it is not limited to Ikhwan. It is open to everyone.”

They also note that when the real Facebook receives a lot of complaints about a site or user, it may take it down, and that this is used by Egyptian and other security services to attack Ikhwan sites on Facebook.

I suspect at least some of these sites may have problems with trademark infringement. The URL for IkhwanBook is www.ikhwanfacebook.com, though it now just calls itself IkhwanBook.