If you visited IslamOnline recently, you may have found dead links to many articles and fatwa answers. That's because hundreds of workers in the site's editorial office in Cairo have been staging walkouts and sit-ins accusing their managers in Qatar of plotting to replace them with a team of religious hardliners. The managers are allegedly unhappy about a recent trend at the site to run more articles and advice columns about social issues, art, and youth-related topics. IslamOnline has become over the years an important reference stop for thousands of Muslims who are looking for pragmatic answers to practical questions ranging from relationships and homosexuality to banking and parenting. In the last few months, the site has loosened its range of topics even more by including reviews of films, articles on Valentine's Day and sexuality, and giving reformist Muslims a larger space. This is apparently not what the managers had signed up for, prompting them to adopt cheap censorship measures like shutting down the site's servers and changing the passwords so the editors in Cairo can't update the content.

This is precisely why I'm a big supporter of Muslim media because a growing audience forces content producers to explore and accommodate alternative views, ultimately enriching the discussion about what constitutes Islam today. The more Islam is discussed, the more likely its boundaries (often set by rigid interpretations of the texts) will be relaxed. This of course is not always a sure bet, but as the evolution of IslamOnline shows, you can objectify the dogmas and start asking tougher questions. The despicable censoring tactics of the site's managers are so 20th century. The Web is full of reformist Muslims (the journalists at IslamOnline are actually the least progressive of the bunch), and the interpretation wars of Islam are already underway online. There is nothing these conservative managers can do to stop that.