Islamopedia Online

Islamopedia Online is an English-language academic website offering a database on Islam, its leading religious figures and their positions, and translations of current topics and religious opinions. ¹

The site states its purpose as providing news and background analysis on Muslim countries and Islamic topics that Western media do not cover, for lack of familiarity with the country, the issues or the personalities, or of access to sources in their own languages; it translates major news articles into English from Arabic, Urdu and Persian. ¹ It is part of the Islam in the West Program hosted by the Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program at Harvard, supported by Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Harvard's Islamic Legal Studies Program and others, and directed by the scholar Jocelyne Cesari. ¹

It was founded in 2007 with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. Its members surveyed the major topics, opinions and authorities of the Muslim world and judged that the most useful thing they could offer was to aggregate the websites that publish scholars' religious opinions; they gathered 44,000 entries from more than a hundred websites in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and English. ¹

Cesari writes that its analysis found Salafi-leaning websites dominant online because of what she calls "context collapse": people ask without being known, and many take the answer as the "true Islam" even if they do not live by it. ¹ That is the scholar's analysis, attributed to her.

Wikipedia's infobox describes the site as inactive; it has an article in the English Wikipedia only. ^{1 2}

• English Wikipedia, "Islamopedia Online", revision 1376107072. ¹
• Wikidata Q17576108. ²