By Rachel Shafer  |  Photos By Courtesy Shahed Amanullah

 

By day, Shahed Amanullah (B.S.’91 CEE) works as a project manager for a Texas development firm. By night, he logs on to altmuslim.com, an online news and discussion forum he created and launched in 2001. As editor-in-chief, Amanullah oversees six volunteer editors, a team of contributing writers and 1,750 registered users who debate important issues facing Western Muslims today.

The site’s news summaries strive for objectivity, Amanullah says, and its opinion pieces encourage discussion. “High Stakes in Texas Muslim Charity Trial” read a news headline this summer on the U.S. government’s case against the Holy Land Foundation. Farther down the page, an entry about a Canadian girl who was asked to remove her hijab (headscarf) elicited more than 40 responses from readers. With 8,000 unique visitors a day, altmuslim.com is the go-to place for many Muslim Americans reading and discussing ideas that affect their community, and non-Muslims in high places are paying attention.

The Department of Homeland Security, State Department and National Security Council rely on Amanullah for briefings. So does the media. The father of two has made appearances on national television and contributed analyses to the New York Times, Newsweek and the Washington Post.

That’s catapulted Amanullah from regular-guy webby to Muslim American advocate—all to promote open dialogue. “We’re in the great Berkeley Free Speech tradition, where people have a safe and welcoming space to discuss ideas and ask hard questions of each other in a civil and respectful manner,” he says.

In fact, it was at Berkeley where Amanullah, an American citizen whose parents are from India, first earned his advocacy stripes. He helped found the Progressive Muslim Alliance in 1988, which morphed into today’s Muslim Student Union. Altmuslim.com traces back to September 11.

“Most Muslims I know didn’t want anything to do with 9/11 or the aftermath,” he recalls. “It was just too much of a nightmare scenario for them. And most responses from the Muslim community were, for my tastes, too dismissive of the real fears that Americans had. It’s not easy to talk about extremists in your midst. But I knew silence wasn’t an option. If we didn’t ‘own’ our problems, other people would.”

Amanullah envisioned an Internet-enabled community. With an engineer’s instincts to problem solve and a startup veteran’s love of technology, he coded the site himself and christened it with a nod to the alt./usenet newsgroups, the original computer discussion forums first created in 1980.

Last year, a Danish newspaper ran a cartoon of Mohammed that enraged Muslims worldwide, and altmuslim.com jumped in. The site advocated ignoring the cartoon. Amanullah ran commentary and sent his editors to appear in the media. “There was significant debate on our site, and I think many in the Muslim community were waiting for someone to take this position so that they could rally around it,” he says. “I think we shaped a lot of the debate.”

The civil engineer claims no personal agenda other than concerned dad. “I want my children to grow up in a country where they, as Muslims, feel valued,” he says, “and where their religion doesn’t contradict their nationality.”