中国穆斯林网 (China Muslim Net)

» see 2muslim.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The corner of the internet this belonged to has no overlap with mine at all. I am not Chinese or Muslim, and I was not reading mainland forums in 2016. What makes it worth a grave here is the mechanism rather than the community, because the way this site died is a thing that can only happen to a forum.

中穆网 opened in October 2003, run out of Lanzhou in Gansu by an outfit called the Zhongmu Culture Communication Center. It described itself as the largest Chinese-language Muslim community on the internet and it had a reasonable claim to it. Users were mostly Hui, there were local boards for cities across the country, and the daily traffic was the ordinary business of religious life: questions about practice, arguments about theology.

On 10 December 2016 a user posted an open letter to Xi Jinping into the current affairs board. Chinese students overseas had written it and it was already circulating elsewhere. Within a few hours 2muslim.com would not load, and it has not loaded since.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ thirteen years of forum ~

A site like this does most of its work invisibly. Thirteen years of a national community board is thirteen years of people finding out how other people in their situation handled the same thing, which is what forums were for before feeds replaced them. The logo was a crescent and star over a rising arrow with 中國穆斯林社區 across the bottom, and the whole design belongs to the phpBB decade as clearly as a date stamp would.

It also had opinions, and some of them were the reason it was already being watched. The site had argued against state atheism and had published criticism of the restrictions on headscarves in Xinjiang. Neither position is unusual for a religious community site anywhere. Both are the kind of thing that becomes a file.

~ the day it died ~

The sequence is documented closely enough to follow. The letter went up on the current affairs board on 10 December. A user identifying themselves as an academy professor posted a screenshot of it and accused the site of having long promoted religious extremism. That accusation post was itself deleted afterward. The site stopped resolving the same day.

Its WeChat public account, last updated on 10 December, switched to a maintenance message and was then removed. The Weibo account went too, and the name was added to the list of terms that return nothing when you search. Management told the Hong Kong Economic Journal that it was a technical issue and that people online were attacking the site. They could not give a date for reopening. Thirteen years of archives went with it, since a forum that will not load is a forum whose back catalog is also gone.

~ the inheritance ~

The banned Baidu Tieba boards of the same era tended to reappear under a homophone, rebuilt by the same moderators at a fraction of the original size. That did not happen here in any form anyone has documented. The community dispersed into group chats, where it is not indexable and not archivable and, from the perspective of whoever made the decision in December 2016, no longer a single object with an address.

2muslim.com does not resolve today. No lander and no for-sale page. The domain has been left exactly as empty as the day it stopped, which is rarer than it sounds and reads as its own kind of statement.

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