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Faith Freedom International

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Faith Freedom International
File:FFI-logo.png
File:FFI-2.pngLogo and Screenshot of FFI
Type of siteReligious/Political
Available inEnglish, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Spanish
OwnerAli Sina
Created byAli Sina
RevenueDonations
URLhttp://www.faithfreedom.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationeNom, Inc. (R39-LROR)

Ali Sina redirects here, as it is the name the founder of Faith Freedom International uses.

Faith Freedom International (FFI) is a secularist organization which is critical of Islam. FFI was founded by Ali Sina, an Iranian ex-Muslim residing in Canada, who has issued a standing challenge that he will remove the FFI website if proven wrong on a number of issues. Faith Freedom International is listed by Richard Dawkins in his book, The God Delusion, as one of the few Islamic related "...friendly address(es), for individuals needing support in escaping from religion". FFI's mission statement is included in Ibn Warraq's book Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out.

Faith Freedom International hosts the Mediawiki page WikiIslam.

Debates

In 2001, Faith Freedom International issued a challenge to Muslims to disprove all his allegations against Mohammad, and if they succeed, the website will be removed, and they will receive US$50,000. Since then, writers of FFI have held numerous debates with both Muslim scholars and non-scholars on the website. Prominent scholars among those who debated with members of FFI include Abu Saleh, Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Dr. Alireza Assar, Khalid Zaheer, a student of Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, Yamin Zakaria and Edip Yuksel. Arguably the most prominent of the scholars with whom Sina exchanged a letter with was the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, the former deputy of Ayatollah Khomeini who later became a dissident and critic of the Islamic Republic. Sina also posted a letter in his website claiming to be sent to Dr. Zakir Naik inviting him for an open online debate. Mr. Sina received the information that Dr. Naik does not debate online but rather in person in public view. Dr. Naik's office said "There are hundreds of such Ali Sina who have requested Dr. Zakir Naik to debate with him to gain popularity."

Several months prior to the establishment of Faith Freedom International, in January, 2001, Sina had a discussion via email with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran, regarding a potential regime in Iran that could replace the current one. Sina argued it should be a democratic republic, Reza Pahlavi advocated a democratic government determined via a national referendum which could lead to a constitutional monarchy.

The Website's Challenge

The challenge of the Faith Freedom International website is that Ali Sina, the founder of the website will remove the website if all his allegations against Muhammad are proven wrong. Ali has promised a prize of $50,000 to "...anyone who can disprove my charges and prove Islam is a true religion in an objective (not subjective) way." He invites any refutation of the charges to be posted to his forum and he publishes the resulting debates to allow people to judge the success or failure of the challenge.

Website access in Muslim countries

According to a 2002 study by professor Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University, Saudi Arabia had banned the Faith Freedom Website .. Khalid Zaheer, a former student of Ghamidi had earlier reported that he was unable to access faithfreedom.org in Pakistan. The website operates well in one of the most populous Muslim countries, Indonesia and also Pakistan (ibid). The Public Interest Registry (PIR)service used by all .org domains,and Alexa.com state that FFI website is hosted in Qoom province, Iran..

Disambiguation

There is another website with similar name, faithfreedom.com. This website is contrary to Faith Freedom International and claims to provide the rebuttals of the accusations of 'Faith Freedom International' against Islam. Note that this website is typosquatted on the .com Top Level Domain (TLD).

Traffic rankings

Traffic ranking for Faith Freedom International has fluctuated since its inception in June 2001. According to the online source Alexa, which reports traffic from Alexa toolbar users, in early 2003 faithfreedom.org was in the top ten thousand sites on the Internet. Currently it is in the top thirty thousand. It saw a significant spike in site traffic during February 2006. This occurred at the onset of the cartoon riots stemming from the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, but has since returned to average levels. The site has had significant highs and lows. During the end of September 2006 the site went below the top 100,000 and then spiked up and reached 20,000 by the beginning of October. During the same month it went back down to 60,000. It has fluctuated between 20,000 and 80,000 till February 2007, and has fallen down below 100,000 again. According to Ranking.com, Faith Freedom International is in between the top 30,000 and 40,000 websites. According to Site Meter, Faith Freedom International has had over 25 million views since its creation, receives approximately 10,000 visitors every day and about 1 million page views every month.

WikiIslam

File:Wikiislam logo.png
WikiIslam: a wiki hosted by Faith Freedom International.

In September 2006, Faith Freedom International launched WikiIslam, a community-edited wiki collecting negative and critical material about Islam. According to the FAQ section on the website, "the main difference between WikiIslam and Misplaced Pages 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 is the subject of an article in the 7/2007 issue of the journal Contemporary Islam, entitled "Cyber-Islamophobia? The case of WikiIslam", which observes 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." 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."

Death threat claims

Ali Sina claims that he receives death threats. In July, 2005, FFI posted that it had been threatened with a lawsuit, however the lawsuit never occured. The archive copy of Ali Sina's interview with The Infidel Guy has been removed "as Ali Sina has been receiving Death Threats".

See also

References

This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources.
Find sources: "Faith Freedom International" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
  1. "Ex-Muslim's site trashes Muhammad". WorldNetDaily. Retrieved 2007-06-25.
  2. Dawkins, Richard (2006). The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. p. 379. ISBN 0-618-68000-4.
  3. Ibn Warraq (2003). Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. pp. 433–436. ISBN 1-59102-068-9.
  4. Faith Freedom International's challenge
  5. Mr. Javed Ahmad Ghamidi vs. Ali Sina
  6. Yamin Zakaria vs. Ali Sina
  7. Exposing Blindness of "Freethinkers" about Islam- A Debate between Yamin Zakaria and Ali Sina (Yamin Zakaria's version)
  8. Edip Yuksel vs. Ali Sina
  9. Intelligent People's guide to code-19 and a debate between Edip Yuksel and Ali Sina (Edip Yuksel's version)
  10. Letter from Montazeri
  11. ^ Ali Sina's letter to Zakir Naik
  12. http://www.faithfreedom.org/debates/ZakirNaikp2.htm
  13. Debate with Reza Pahlavi II – Ali Sina version
  14. Ali Sina's challenge
  15. Ali Sina's Forum
  16. Ali Sina's debates
  17. websites banned in Saudi Arabia
  18. http://www.faithfreedom.org/debates/Ghamidip6.htm
  21. http://www.whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=faithfreedom&tld=org
  22. Alexa.com's traffic ranking for: Faith Freedom International
  23. Alexa.com: Ratings for FaithFreedom.org
  24. Alexa traffic detials
  25. Faith Freedom at ranking.com
  26. "Faith Freedom International". Site Summary. Site Meter. July 14, 2005.
  27. On Monday Sept 4, 2006, (WikiIslam) was opened to the public.
  28. ^ Cyber-Islamophobia? The case of WikiIslam, Journal: Contemporary Islam, publisher Springer Netherlands, ISSN 1872-0218 (Print) 1872-0226
  29. "Compared to “Muslim homepages,” i.e. those set up by believing Muslims, WikiIslam contains only negative and critical examples. This bias is clearly represented in the section called “laughing with the prophet”, which presents stories and reports from the life of prophet Muhammad (i.e. hadith reports). My impression is that the stories reported by WikiIslam have merely been selected to show that Muslims are ignorant, backward or even stupid." ibid.
  30. Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All, p. 5, Runnymede Trust (1997).
  31. http://www.faithfreedom.org/mcommets.htm
  32. http://www.faithfreedom.org/oped/sina60209c.htm
  33. The InfidelGuy Archives, Tape 253 The Psychological Profile of Muhammad (...)

External links

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