At Muslim Matters – one of the nominees for Best Group Blog in this year’s Brass Crescent Awards – an interesting discussion thread is developing where they take the Awards to task for promoting (in their view) overly “progressive” blogs instead of traditional ones.
One of the comments expresses surprise that Muslim Matters was “left in” the Awards, making the assumption that the selection of the Awards nominees is done with an explicit agenda in mind. That’s simply false; the methodology for the Awards is very straightforward and public. We invite everyone to comment on our methodology and suggest improvements.
UPDATE: Discussion at Talk Islam on this topic. Please feel free to join the debate there, especially if you agree that the Awards are unfairly balanced towards one group or another, we need to hear everyone’s views!
I’ve never understood this strange obsession with the winners of the BC awards. Most of the winners have been people like Sunni Sister or Mere Islam — people who are not in anyway ‘progressive’. If anything the old-skool progressives that people despised and mocked seem to have dwindled or simply do not exist anymore.
Salaams:
I’ve never understood it either.
Progressive is definitely in the eye of the beholder when it comes to Muslims, Thabet. I know for a fact that during *most* of my blog time I fell on a very conservative side of things in many issues. But that did not stop people from emailing me, approaching me in person, telling me I was “going too far” or a “feminazi” which is really laughable if you consider what I was writing. But my quibble is with the words “not in any way”, b/c I was clearly progressive on various issues even during that time, such as race.
In a way, even, you could understand dissatisfaction with myself and Abdurrahman (among others) winning as an indication that we were too far out, too strange for them. Not that it matters anymore.