Cubby is the CEO of Aquila Media Group and while he is not a Muslim, he has learnt to trust his team of experts in the Muslim lifestyle field, while bringing his own experiences earned over 18 years in building a digital publishing business.
Sure, there is a lot of editorial and creative joy in carving out the Aquila Style articles on a daily basis. And while we soak in the pleasure in conjuring up content that addresses all facets of Muslim lifestyle of this 21st century, our voice is nothing compared to the ones that matter the most. You, the Aquila Style reader.
Over the last three years since Aquila went fully digital – we’ve received from time to time – requests to take down comments voiced by fellow readers, either on the website or on our Facebook page. For various reasons ranging from aggressive language to personal assault, the potpourri of requests (truth be told) are often very valid, very polite and very well-articulated.
As a general rule for the team, we do not condone any vulgarity and most especially, manipulate our service to harm, threaten, or harass another person. Fundamentally, with regards to our moderation policy, we as a team want to as much as we can, not to disrupt conversations via heavy censorship, as well as to empower and allow the Aquila community to govern themselves.
Agree to disagree
The reason behind that policy is rather simple. In this world that we live in, we will not always agree on all matters and see eye to eye on everything. We want to think that our audience are mature and intelligent human beings, Muslim or not. It’s fascinating from our perspective that from a survey done last year, we found out there was as many as 10% of our audience who aren’t Muslims but are immensely interested in finding out more about Islam. In that respect, to impose an intense moderation or censorship policy within any of Aquila Style’s channels is unhealthy in my view, because everyone rightly or wrongly, Muslim or not, is fully entitled to their personal opinion.
We are in firm belief that logic, integrity, knowledge, rationality and sensibility will always come to the fore. We want to encourage our audience (you) to generate discussions with positive motives, allow different opinions and views from everyone to propagate so that any topic or story that we put out there gets more muscular.
That said, whenever conversations and debates get too intense, we do close out the comments section for the simple purpose of stopping arguments from getting out of line. A good example is the story ‘More Hispanics turning to Islam, majority women‘. We as a team felt the dialogue was beginning to lean against the grain of our story angle, an article which we felt was a necessary showcase to demonstrate converts exist in every corner of this planet, especially in Muslim-minority countries.
I am personally a big fan of Omar Shahid’s work. His piece ‘Shaking faith: How ISIS is causing Muslims to abandon Islam‘ was a finely written and balanced opinion piece. However, despite generating 67 comments, we also felt some of the opinions from all around the world were beginning to turn into a Muslims against Christians spat. I personally wanted the comments to continue to come in for the simple respect for free speech. But after consultation with the editorial team, we decided to close the comment thread after much deliberation.
In fact, Aquila Style as a brand has also from time to time, been criticized for various reasons. We respect and acknowledge the criticism and thus, do not delete those comments either. I do not feel the need to ‘protect’ the Aquila brand by faking a persona that everyone agrees with us by deleting those comments. Those ‘negative’ voices against Aquila for me are in fact, the most important in terms of helping us flag our progress as a company. Those are the views and questions that make us take two steps back as a team, take a good hard look at ourselves and see what we’ve possibly done wrong and how we can improve moving forward.
Admittedly, we are far from being perfect but on the same note, we are constantly striving to improve a content service that will hopefully, stimulate thoughts and place the Aquila brand on a pedestal that many will consider the go-to-place for premium Muslim lifestyle content.
Your stamp of approval means the world to us
Of course, there’s also been many heartwarming comments that have flown into Aquila Style. One good recent example is Asoomii Jay’s social experiment video ‘Hug a Muslim experiment yields heartwarming results amid frigid winter‘. The “Blind Trust Project” got my wife’s eyes welling up with joy within the opening seconds and I am very certain she wasn’t the only one out there whose heart got bigger from watching the video and knowing very well inside, that there are so many decent people out there (Christians, Buddhists, Hindus etc.) who understand how the average Muslim on the street has been maligned by general media and having to suffer through misconceptions.
We’ve won numerous awards in our short time, such as the outright winner of the 2013 Singapore infocomm Technology Federation Awards in the Digital Media Category, as well as coming in second in the most prestigious Start-Up Category. We’ve also been featured at the 2013 Global Islamic Economy Summit in Dubai and while immensely proud of the various recognitions, trophies aren’t as important as what we hear from you.
We’ve learnt so much about ourselves by hearing from you. We’ve gone from a female-centric brand to a company that today, addressing the lifestyle needs of Muslim men and youth as well. We’ve morphed from a fashion-focussed product to a dedicated content provider that celebrates Muslim high achievers, sporting achievements of Muslims, creative artisans, dispelling the misconceptions of the modern Muslim, celebrating the converts and reverts around the world and ensuring Islamophobia is not swept under the carpet.
Did we plug those ideas from thin air all by ourselves? No, we didn’t. Your suggestions and comments come thick and fast on a weekly basis and nothing ever gets ignored. Who we are today – editorially, creatively, technologically – is all because of you.
And we are eternally grateful for your love. You are the mipster and we are very proud to be on this journey together with you.
Cubby Leong
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