¹ “Islam and Islamic Studies Resources” originally www.arches.uga.edu/~godlas, now www.uga.edu/islam or islam.uga.edu; “Sufis Without Borders,” groups.yahoo.com/group/sufis_without_borders/, and “Sufi News and Sufism World Report” www.sufinews.blogspot.com/. Note that all of the urls in this paper (unless otherwise stated) were current as of May 23, 2011.

² One of the most popular blog sites is Google’s Blogspot or Blogger, www.blogspot.com and www.blogger.com.

³ Alan Godlas, “Islam and Islamic Studies Resources,” www.uga.edu/islam. Ernst, Carl W., Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1997)Google Scholar; reprint ed., under the title Sufism: An Introduction to the Mystical Tradition of Islam (Shambhala, 2011).

⁴ Two websites that appear at first to be comprehensive sites on Islam but which are actually Salafi sites that exclude both Shi‘ism and Sufism (almost entirely) are “Islam 101,” www.islam101.net and “IslamWorld,” www.islamworld.net. Two examples of contemporary anti-Islamic and polemical websites are “Answering Islam,” www.answering-islam.org and “Jihad Watch,” www.jihadwatch.org.

⁵ One scholar who also recognized the need for scholarly evaluation of websites on Islam is Gary Bunt. His “Islamic Studies Pathways” currently at web.me.com/gary_bunt/pathways/home.html, includes his brief descriptions and evaluations of the over 100 Islamic websites that are listed but not organized. What is needed is an ongoing online equivalent of Index Islamicus of the most significant articles on websites (not the best websites) dealing with Islam. Nevertheless, there are a few obstacles to this happening: a lack of librarian interest (print still being the dominant paradigm), lack of funding, lack of expertise to discern the jewels, and the exponential rate of growth of the net. Hence, on-going funding either from outside granting agencies or from individual institutions should be provided to experts who compile the jewels of their field. One excellent example of a professional quality web index of websites on Islam is MENALIB (The Middle East Virtual Library) www.menalib.de/index.php?id=18, which is maintained by State- and University Library Saxony-Anhalt in Halle (Germany).

⁶ The metaphor of bringing together scattered jewels or pearls in describing or titling works of Islamic literature is certainly not new, eg., Jalāl al-Din al-Suyūṭī, al-Durar al-muntathira (The Scattered Pearls) fī al-aḥādīth al-mushtahara, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiya, 1988.

⁷ The particular hit counter that I settled on was a free public counter, “Extreme Tracking,” extremetracking.com. In addition to counting hits, it shows the links that readers follow to get to one’s website as well as the words they are searching for when using a search engine to access one’s website.

⁸ For a list of reviews that called attention to my “Islam and Islamic Studies Resources” website between 1998 and 2002 (when I stopped keeping track of such notices), see http://www.uga.edu/islam/awards.html.

⁹ The founders of Google, writing in 1988 about the logic behind Google’s page ranking, expressed it as follows, “Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally” (Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International World Wide Web Conference, 1998. See http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html). See also Julie McCormick, “Truth About .Edu Domains: Registration, Links and Google Juice,” Search Engine Journal, 12 December 2007, http://www.searchenginejournal.com/truth-about-edu-domains-registration-links-and-google-juice/6095/.

¹⁰ My hypothesis is that one of the reasons interest in Islam became heightened after 9/11 (aside from the fact that the perpetrators were Muslims) is that after 9/11, President Bush made a number of speeches in which he stated in many different ways that the U.S. was not at war with Islam; rather we were at war with terrorism, which had no basis in Islam. (See the collection of his remarks to this effect, “In his own words: Bush on Islam,” July 7, 2007, www.muslimrepublicans.net/Article.asp?ID=164.) This forced some Americans, who were all set to start hating Muslims and Islam, to ask what the distinction was between Islam and Muslims, on the one hand, and Muslim terrorists, on the other. Consequently, such Americans turned to the internet (and often to my website), for answers.

¹¹ Joan Stroer, “And the winner is…Islam or the Vatican?” Athens Banner-Herald, June 16, 2002 http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/061602/uga_20020616065.shtml.

¹² Brock Read, “Georgia Professor’s Website on Islam Attracts New Attention After Attacks,” December 7,2001 http://chronicle.com/article/Georgia-Professors-Web-Sit/2550/ (full text accessible only to subscribers); copied at <http://it.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/albeuropa/message/11750.

¹³ Esposito, John and Kalin, Ibrahim, eds., The 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World (UK: The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center, 2009 and 2010.Google Scholar) See http://www.rissc.jo/docs/OA-FullVersion-LowRes.pdf.

¹⁴ “Internet Archive Wayback Machine,” wayback.archive.org/web/.

¹⁵ “Sufis Without Borders,” groups.yahoo.com/group/sufis_without_borders/.

¹⁶ For “trolls” and “flaming,” see H2G2 (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), “Flaming and Trolling,” July 25,2003, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1082512.

¹⁷ Marina Montanaro, “Frogs Without Borders,” www.suficartoons.com.

¹⁸ “Sufi News and Sufism World Report,” sufinews.blogspot.com.

¹⁹ With Google News, one can create an automatic feed of articles in which one has an interest, http://www.google.com/alerts.

²⁰ For the salafization and wahhabification of the Muslim world see El Fadl, Khaled Abou, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (New York: Harper San Francisco, 2005).Google Scholar