As you may have read, facebook is banned in Pakistan. Shiraz Maher discusses the dangerous implications:
The Lahore High Court banned Facebook after the social networking site was used to promote a viral campaign called: ‘Everyone draw Mohammed day’. Muslims generally regard any artistic depiction of Mohammed as blasphemous.
But why stop there? Pakistan rarely does things by halves so Youtube, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Blackberry services have also been proscribed “in view of [their] growing sacrilegious content”.
But what are the incidents that led up to the Lahore High Court ruling for the ban and what can be said of the precedent this sets? Urooj Zia writes in himal, tracing the background to the internet ban in Pakistan and string of related international events which set of the ruling by the Lahore court.
The PTA’s ban does not just cover facebook, it is also extended unilaterally to YouTube, to around 400 websites, approximately 850 specific links, and at last count, an additional around 1100 links. The photo-sharing website Flickr came under the axe as well, as did Wikipedia, Twitter, google.com.pk, Huffington Post, and some CNN and Washington Post blogs and many others were also blocked. These websites, it should be noted, were not hosting ‘blasphemous’ content, but were merely discussing the news of the ban.
A couple of months ago, when self-styled ‘security analyst’ Zaid Hamid’s anti-India vitriol started getting out of hand, a group of Pakistanis got together on Facebook to condemn his hate speech and calls for war against ‘Hindu Zionists’. There were jokes about ‘Jihad-e-Facebook’ and ‘Ghazwa-e-YouTube’ because, like former dictator Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf, that’s where an overwhelming majority of Hamid’s supporters were anyway. No one could have thought at the point that an organ of the state would declare jihad against Facebook, but that is exactly what has happened. On 19 May, on a petition filed by a group calling itself the Islamic Lawyers Movement, the Lahore High Court ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to block Facebook in response to the perceived blasphemy of a single page about ‘Draw Muhammad Day’.
What follows is best analysis and account of the events that we’ve seen so far.
Read it in full.
They involve attempts on the life of a Danish cartoonist:
A teddy bear suit on South Park:
and the Drawing Mohammed campaign
The last word should really go the writer of the piece, Urooj Zia, who pleas for sanity:
As the good folks at the wiscatheists blog put it: ‘We must all eventually come to the agreement that no religion, person, idea, or sacred cow should be granted immunity from criticism. In a free society, even opinions which the majority may find reprehensible have the right to be heard. Among these is the right to criticise religion and to perform actions considered “blasphemous.” When that right is under threat, as is clearly is today, we have a moral obligation to exercise it to ensure that it is not lost. We cannot tolerate limitations to our freedom of expression, whether they come from violence, intimidation, or self-censorship out of political correctness.’
The problem, however, lies at the heart of this divide – for each side, the opponent is an undefined ‘other’ out to get them. For the protesting Muslims, liberalism and free speech are ‘Western’ concepts, which encourage ‘attacks’ on Islam; for proponents of free speech, the offence taken by Muslims, even seemingly moderate ones, is an aberration of secular values and a sign of ‘backwardness’. At the end of the day, however, banning an entire population from access to large chunks of the Internet is going to affect only the citizens and businesses of Pakistan. It will not stop ‘blasphemous’ content, nor will it encourage peaceful, civilised debates and exchange of ideas and culture. One hopes that sanity will prevail on all sides, and the battle lines that have been drawn by ignorance and vested interests will be blurred and eventually erased in favour of pluralism and understanding.