Category Archives: Freedom of Expression

It’s official: banning facebook in Southasia is now a nationally transmitted contagion. Bangladesh has imposed a “temporary ban” on facebook.

The official statement used the Pakistani pretext. The government banned facebook because it had “hurt the religious sentiments of the country’s majority Muslim population” by carrying “offensive images” of Mohammed.

Go a little further and it transpires that the Bangladesh government enforced a ban not because facebook contained images that were offensive to muslims, but because it contained images that were offensive to the Prime Minister. A Bangladeshi blogger writes:

After publishing perverted images of Hasina and Khaleda (The Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition) in the second most popular site in Bangladesh Rapid Action Battalion (RAB – a special force) arrested a youth named Mahbub Alam Rodin. Bangladeshis could not access Facebook soon after that.

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.

South Park is a popular cartoon well known for satirising almost every aspect of popular culture, religions, class, race. Most of ‘victims’ of the cartoon from Comedy Central have been sensible enough to see the funny side and shrugged off the piss-take.

Not the Islamists, however. True to form, a New York based Islamist groupuscule have threatened the makers of South Park with death, ordained by the prophet himself!

Here they are (see video) invoking Ibn Taymiyyah to reinforce the dubious doctrine of “Defence of the Prophet” and their religious obligation to behead the cartoon creators of South Park. They justify their intention by qualifying it with the story of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, chief of the Jewish tribe of Banu Nadir and a poet, who was assassinated by an order of Muhammed for writing, and here we rely on Ibn Taymiyyah, ‘offensive poetry’.

Here is the censored episode of South Park:

In Pakistan, you cannot joke about sex, religion or the president. Shazia Mirza performed in Lahore and and told jokes about sex, religion and the president.

The last time I performed in Lahore I was told: “You can talk about anything you like – religion, politics, drugs, you can swear and curse, just don’t mention ‘The Sex’.”

Any sexual words or connotations were banned – because in Pakistan there is no mention of sex on television, radio, or in public.

In Lahore this time I am told by armed security personnel before going on stage: “Be careful, it’s best you only do halal comedy.” Halal comedy? There is no such thing. That’s like saying, I only eat halal bacon.

I had some requests from members of the audience who came to my dressing room before the show to ask me specifically to do jokes about sex and religion. Which is what I had intended to do, anyway.

Philip Pullman at the Oxford Literary Festival, on the offence caused to Christians by the publication of his new novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ:

’nuff said.