By Aishwarya Iyer / Scroll
Aslah Kayyalakkath was 18 years old when he started sending out the messages in 2012. The SMSs with news about marginalised groups were meticulously crafted to fit the 140-word limit and sent out to 100 people every day. Kayyalakkath and three of his friends would take time out after their lectures at Farook College in Kerala’s Kozhikode town to type them out.
Within months, they had started to make a name for themselves in colleges across Kozhikode. “We came to be known as the students who would share news,” said Kayyalakkath. “We would sign off with our trademark, Maktoob.”
They had got the name from Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist. In Arabic, Urdu and Persian, the word means “it is written” or “destiny”.
After starting out as an SMS service, Maktoob became a blog in 2014 and a website in 2016. “We made the website ourselves on our mobile phones,” Kayyalakkath said. “We did not have laptops or money then.”
For Kayyalakkath, the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which spread across the country in December 2019, were a watershed moment. Before that, the website had covered all marginalised groups. The protests cemented Maktoob’s identity as a website documenting the condition of Muslims in India.
“The violence across university campuses left a huge mark,” said Kayyalakkath, who is now 28. He is the only one of his college friends still soldiering on with Maktoob Media.
Maktoob is not the only digital publication doing this. As Hindu majoritarianism grew entrenched in Indian politics and news in the mainstream media demonised Muslims, TwoCircles.net, Clarion India and Milli Gazette, as well as a number of YouTube channels, have also devoted themselves to offering Muslim perspectives on developments.
With lakhs of impressions and views, these websites and YouTube channels have built a loyal audience over the years. They report on how Muslim youth are targeted by law-enforcement agencies, on lynchings, hate crimes and communal riots. But that is not all. As many of the journalists involved pointed out, they portray a world where Muslims are not always victims but a part of everyday Indian life.
“The sad reality is that this development is a response to the complete abdication of the mainstream media,” said Mohammad Ali who works as a freelance journalist. “Television studios have become peddlers of hate speech and calls for genocide, where else does the average Muslim go?”
He added that the process of watching news channels has itself become traumatic as Muslims are constantly being demonised. “The only job they have done perfectly, especially post-2014, is to alienate Muslims further from the mainstream,” Ali said. “They’ve pushed them on the margins, to the physical and mental ghettos that most of us never wanted to go to.”
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here