Two Websites for Brisbane's Muslim Youth

By: Abdul Rahman Keri 

A joint initiative by Muslim Youth Services and Brisbane City Council has seen the development of two social networking websites for Brisbane Muslim Youth to communicate their ideas and opinions on issues that affect them.

‘Muslim Youth of Brisbane’ web pages from the Brisbane City Council's Community Portal, Visible Ink, (under construction) and the YMBriz social network site give Brisbane Muslim youth the opportunity to upload multimedia files such as digital pictures, video,  audio and text;  as well as different mediums for blogging space to communicate youth matters.
Muslim Youth Services community development officer Taufan Mawardi said the web pages also created a medium for the wider Brisbane community to familiarise themselves with Islam and Muslims.
‘There has been a lot of media misrepresentation of Muslims and in order to break down these social barriers...it is vital for Muslims to engage society about Islam’, he said.

‘A lot of the [Muslim] youth are second and third generation Australians...sometimes they are caught up between what is Australian and what is Muslim...they don’t get accepted as mainstream Australians but they also feel they should be Australian because that’s all they know,  they’ve been brought up and born in Australia’,  Mr. Mawardi said.

Brisbane City Council Web Space Coordinator, Tim Graham said the social networking pages are associated with ‘ning.com’, which, unlike established networking sites, emphasise more on group orientated web pages as opposed to individual based content.

‘It is a platform where you can really talk about anything...because all of the content is generated by people who are members’ he said.
But Mr. Graham said there would be oversight by web page administrators to ensure that breaches of the law wouldn’t occur but in general, a culture of civic participation would be encouraged on the web pages.

Editor-in-Chief of Crescent Community News (CCN), Mustafa Ally, said it is important for Muslim youth to express themselves through a medium where they feel comfortable, and amongst peers from different ethnic backgrounds who share a Brisbane Muslim identity.

Visit www.visible-ink.org and click on the multicultural link to gain access to the web pages. To get to the YMBriz site go to http://ymbriz.ning.com.