Website Promotes 'Progressive Muslim Movement'

Even more startling is the site's "Hug a Jew" feature, which includes short interviews with Jews and photos of them hamming it up in hugs of solidarity with Muslims.

Most shocking is the site's Sex & the Umma section. Here are racy fictional works about a single, pregnant Muslim woman living with an alcoholic non-Muslim, Islamic love poetry and articles by scholars urging Muslims to "celebrate the sexual impulse."

It's all found at www.muslim wakeup.com, which was established last year by two UCLA graduates, Ahmed Nassef and Jawad Ali. With more than 800 articles posted and 90,000 hits per month, the site is billed as representing the "vanguard of the progressive Muslim movement."

The nascent movement aims for a broad-based reformation that champions social justice, gender equality, pluralism and free inquiry into the full range of the religion's 1,400-year-old traditions.

The website and movement are attracting a largely younger, Americanized Muslim audience that finds most mosques and U.S. Islamic organizations too conservative and rigid, Nassef said.

In April, he posted a piece, "Time to Listen to the Muslim Silent Majority in U.S.," that criticized such organizations as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America as reflecting "an ultraconservative Muslim agenda not shared by most within their community."

"Among the new generation, there is a tremendous feeling of disaffectedness from the established Muslim community," said Nassef, 38, in an interview.

An Egyptian native who moved to Los Angeles at age 10, he majored in Islamic studies at UCLA and has worked in marketing in New York and the Mideast.

In general, U.S. mosques "are run by people trained in Saudi-funded institutions abroad or who have no formal training," he said. "As a result, you have a very conservative approach that is foreign-dominated, which is not realistic for the American environment."

Some of the community's established leaders disagree that their organizations are out of touch. Some, such as Muzammil Siddiqi of the Islamic Society, said they had never heard of Muslim Wakeup! Others privately dismissed it as "childish" or simply in bad taste.