by Marwa Rakha    September 16, 2008

The Egyptian blogosphere has turned into the new jihad field for Muslim, Coptic, and secular fundamentalists.

Quranic Studies defines jihad as "Jihad is simply the process of "exerting the best efforts," involving some form of "struggle" and "resistance," to achieve a particular goal."

It is no big secret that the number of Egyptians who believe that Egypt should become a secular nation are increasing. Mainly, intellectual bilingual well-educated people have realized that inter-faith strives are holding the country back.

"This group is open to anyone that wants to make Egypt a better place to live in, and that believes in:

1. All Egyptians are born free and equal in dignity and rights
2. All Egyptians have the right of free thought and religion.
3. All Egyptians are equal before the law.
4. Any Egyptian is entitled to all rights and freedoms without distinction such as race, gender, religion or origin.
5. An Egyptian Secular (civil) state is the only way to achieve these objectives." Says the creator of Egypt, A Secular Nation group on facebook.

The same group defines a secular state as being: "neutral in matters of religion, and treats all its citizens equally regardless of religion. A secular state is protecting freedom of religion. It also prevents religion from interfering with state affairs, and prevents religion from controlling government or exercising political power."
 

This is just one example of many groups and blogs that support this view. On the other hand, the number of Islamic fundamentalists and Muslim Brothers is increasing. Their jihad methods have evolved from swords, bombs, banners, stickers, and tapes to invade the world wide web.

Within the "enlightened" crowd, emails about hackers, hacking techniques, names of hackers, and protecting one's account from being hacked have been circulating. Facebook's liberal activists were the main target of hackers who took over accounts, changed the name of the owner, sent out messages to his or her friends, deleted the account altogether, sabotaged his or her groups, and used obscene pictures and words to totally defame that person.

Groups that were hacked began posting offensive messages about the admins who lost control over the group and the hackers had more access to more people who do not think that Egypt is an Islamic country. Other than hacking, they created fake accounts that mimicked those of known liberal writers and activists.

Opposing groups we also created and invitations were sent out to all the members of the pro-secularism groups. Most of those groups, instead of dialogue, used harsh profane headlines and content on their walls and discussion boards. Videos of sheikhs and priests were used from both sides to show the posted back and forth to support the argument of one party and defy that of the other.

One of the activists said "my account was hacked which is painful, especially that I had previously lost all my content while joining a network and I had to start all over"
 

Another activist said "I personally suggest for group owners to have always a backup account as well and both of them admins; I learnt this tip from other group owners. As for not using my own self I don't like the idea. I prefer being me, if there are sick people out there its their problem. Facebook was meant for us to get together decently and to get to know each other normally; if I need to go through all this hassle I'd rather then not use it at all."
 

Warning:

1 - Do not accept or install any application without knowing exactly what it does.
2 - All members are advised to remove all their current installed applications to avoid such hacking techniques .
3 - Users can only keep the most famous applications that make sense to them.
4 - Religious applications are not recommended as they may hide hacking codes within these applications .
5- Never accept friend requests from strangers. Always verify their identity either online or offline.
6- Don’t fall for the ‘collect as many friends as possible’ game that amateur Facebook users often get into.
7- Review your full list of friends once in a while (I know it’s daunting and who’s got the time anyway?) to ensure you didn’t add someone by mistake. There’s also a big chance that someone on your list was special to you for a particular moment and that’s no longer the case. You should not hesitate to remove him/her from your list.
8- If you create a group have no more than 2 admins who should join the group using a new profile that has no real information about them and no friends - just in case it gets hacked.
9- Do not open any messages from facebook before you make sure that the domain name and the https:// is written correctly.
10- If you are a member of an enlightened group, anti-hijab group, or any other religious or political group do not use your real account or real pictures when leaving comments on the group.

More on hacking: http://egyptianvulture.blogspot.com/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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