Type of site Anti-Islamic Created by Ali Sina | Owner Ali Sina Revenue Donations | |
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Available in English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Spanish Website | ||
Faith Freedom International (FFI) is a website that is critical of Islam. FFI identifies itself as "a grassroots worldwide movement of ex-Muslims and all those who are concerned about the rise of the Islamic threat". According to the website, FFI was founded by an Iranian residing in Canada, known as Ali Sina. On the website, Ali Sina has issued a standing challenge that he will remove the FFI website if proven wrong on a number of issues.
Contents
- Website access and traffic
- Alleged deaths threats and hacking attempts
- Articles
- Debates
- Books
- WikiIslam
- References
Faith Freedom International is listed by Richard Dawkins in the Appendix of his book, The God Delusion, as one of the few Islamic related "friendly address[es], for individuals needing support in escaping from religion" (although it was removed from the website following protest from other ex-Muslims and atheists). FFI's mission statement is included in Ibn Warraq's book Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out. According to Internet Infidels, "Faith Freedom International echoes the voice of Muslim dissidents that strive for freedom of faith and freedom from faith in Islamic countries."
Website access and traffic
According to a 2002 study by professor Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University, Saudi Arabia had banned the website. Ranking.com and Alexa list faithfreedom.org among the top 70,000 and 200,000 websites, respectively, as measured by traffic as of January 2016.
Alleged deaths threats and hacking attempts
Because of the content of the site, Ali Sina claims to have received death threats from "two imams in India" who he alleges have offered a reward of USD 20,000 (or 1 million Rupees) for anyone who kills him. The site itself has been hacked and subject to DDOS attacks several times since the website opened, most recently in January 2010.
Articles
The website contains several articles authored by notable persons, including:
Debates
The website includes several debates between Ali Sina and Muslims, among them are prominent scholars such as Edip Yuksel and Yamin Zakaria of the ICSSA.
Sina’s contention is that Islam promotes hate and disunity, and thus poses an impediment to peace. According to his website, he has issued a challenge that should anyone prove him wrong he will publicly acknowledge his error and withdraw his charges against Islam, and will pay $50,000 to that person.
Books
FFI contains several books by Anwar Shaikh:
WikiIslam
In September 2006, Faith Freedom International launched WikiIslam, a community-edited wiki collecting critical material about Islam. According to the FAQ section on the website, "the main difference between WikiIslam and Wikipedia is that opinions critical of Islam are not censored on WikiIslam for political correctness." Due to the controversial nature of the website, it has been subject to vandalism, due to which increased security measures have been employed.
WikiIslam was the subject of an article in the 7/2007 issue of the journal Contemporary Islam, entitled "Cyber-Islamophobia? The case of WikiIslam", which argues that the website commits selection bias by collecting only negative or critical material. The article states that "In relation to the criteria set up by the Runnymede Trust ... it should be quite easy to label most of the material published on WikiIslam as expressions of Islamophobia." Göran Larsson adds that "[m]y impression is that the stories reported by WikiIslam have merely been selected to show that Muslims are ignorant, backward or even stupid." Because of the presence of material obtained from other websites, such as MEMRI, the article notes that "it becomes much more difficult to argue that all information posted on WikiIslam is Islamophobic by nature."
In August 2008, the WikiIslam site was moved to a new server and since then it has been operating independently.