On May 20, my rickshaw puttered
alongside a large rally organized by the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami.
Hundreds of young male protesters moved in knots behind an overstuffed bus
adorned with a banner reading: "To protect our Prophet against blasphemy, we
will even sacrifice our lives!" In other times, these young men might have
protested the countrywide ban on Facebook, which lasted from May 19 to 31, but
last week they were marching resolutely in support of blocking the site. For
them, Facebook had insulted their religion and community; for the country's
leaders, the ban was political currency. Even as five bomb blasts shook Lahore
and U.S. drones attacked the Federally Administered Tribal Areas last week,
Pakistan's Islamist organizations pressed ahead with demonstrations against
Facebook. -- Madiha R.
Tahir
By Madiha R. Tahir
More than 30 people have been
murdered across Karachi this week in politically motivated violence between
Mohajirs and Pashtuns, but it is Facebook -- or rather the controversy raging
over its ban in Pakistan -- that draws a crowd. When Facebook hosted a page
encouraging users to submit cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in mid-May, many
Pakistanis reacted by denouncing the Web site as blasphemous on the grounds that
Islam prohibits images of Muhammad as part of a wider edict against idolatry.
Some have taken to the streets.
On May 20, my rickshaw puttered
alongside a large rally organized by the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami.
Hundreds of young male protesters moved in knots behind an overstuffed bus
adorned with a banner reading: "To protect our Prophet against blasphemy, we
will even sacrifice our lives!" In other times, these young men might have
protested the countrywide ban on Facebook, which lasted from May 19 to 31, but
last week they were marching resolutely in support of blocking the site. For
them, Facebook had insulted their religion and community; for the country's
leaders, the ban was political currency. Even as five bomb blasts shook Lahore
and U.S. drones attacked the Federally Administered Tribal Areas last week,
Pakistan's Islamist organizations pressed ahead with demonstrations against
Facebook.
The Jamaat-e-Islami rally came
to a halt outside the gates of the Karachi Press Club. Inside, a press
conference was getting rowdy. "Contempt of court!" shouted a rotund reporter
interrupting Awab Alvi, a dentist known in the Pakistani blogosphere as Teeth
Maestro. Alvi was one of four speakers attempting to reframe the debate about
the ban as a question of free speech rather than of blasphemy, but the reporters
shouted him down.
At first, the Pakistani
journalists who fought mightily during Pervez Musharraf's presidency against
curtailments of press freedom seemed the likeliest group to reject the Facebook
ban. In late 2007, they had marched in the streets and were physically beaten;
many of those who reject the Facebook ban today marched with them. But late this
month, the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists announced its support for the
ban, leaving its former allies feeling betrayed. "Freedom of speech doesn't give
anyone a right to play with religious and sacred feelings of others, or to play
with the societal norms," PFUJ declared in its press
statement.
The journalists assembled at the
Karachi Press Club on May 20 did not seem to mind that there had been
irregularities in the legal process, such as petitioners misleading the judge to
believe that Facebook, rather than its users, had created the competition and
that other Muslim countries had also blocked the Web site. They were much more
concerned with what they perceived as Facebook's insult to the Muslim community.
"Pakistani sentiments are involved, and you're saying that you're siding with
them!" bellowed one in Urdu. Alvi's arguments about free speech seemed to
confirm what they already believed: anti-ban activists are elitists who care
more about poking their friends on Facebook than protecting the honor of their
fellow Pakistani Muslims.
Although only a fraction of
Pakistan's 170 million people have regular access to the Internet, the ban --
which was repealed here on May 31 -- has exposed the broader battle over how to
define the fraught relationship between religion and citizenship in Pakistan. It
is a fight that the defenders of individual rights are losing.
The Facebook controversy is no
longer a laughing matter, but it actually began as a joke. For its milestone
200th episode on April 14, 2010, Comedy Central's South Park depicted the
Prophet Muhammad as a cartoon character. A few days later, the New York-based
group Revolution Muslim -- which was founded by an American Jew who converted to
Islam after attending rabbinical school in Israel -- published threats against
South Park's creators on its Web site. In response, Comedy Central quickly
removed all Muhammad references in the sequel. The Seattle artist Molly Norris
reacted to the network's move by drawing a Muhammad cartoon dedicated to the
co-creators of South Park and declaring May 20 "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day."
Following her announcement, Facebook user Jon Wellington created a fan page
where users began submitting content.
On May 19, the Lahore High Court
instituted a blanket ban on Facebook until the end of the month. Government
telecommunications regulators took the ban further, widening the censorship to
include other social networking sites such as Flickr, Twitter, Wikipedia, and
Youtube; even Gmail and Google suffered sporadic blocks. Nearly one thousand
sites were banned throughout Pakistan until yesterday, when Judge Ejaz Ahmed
Chaudhry, who was responsible for ordering the ban, asked authorities to lift
it. Yet, at the same time, Chaudhry urged the government to institute a
"mechanism" for banning blasphemous material in the future, effectively lending
further legal cover to government censorship. Mudassir Hussain, the director of
the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, reportedly volunteered to continue
blocking links to blasphemous content associated with the "Draw Muhammad Day"
contest.
The issue has pitted those who
speak the language of individual rights against those who use religious rhetoric
to air community grievances. Pakistan's largest demographic -- the young, urban
middle class born during the Islamization campaigns of former General Mohammad
Zia ul-Haq's U.S.-backed dictatorship -- has in recent years adopted the second
narrative. They are bound together by a sense of membership in an aggrieved
Muslim community that they feel is under attack from both the West (in the form
of drone strikes, the broader U.S. war on terror, and Washington's efforts to
influence Pakistani political and military decision-making) and from the
militant Islamists who regularly bomb their fellow Pakistanis.
These frustrated youth are not
Taliban-style Islamists who want to do battle with the state. They are
nationalists with grandiose visions of Pakistan as a potential leader among
Muslim nations if it could only be saved from the extreme forces trying to
destroy it. This national narrative has found eager supporters, from celebrities
such as the televangelist Zaid Hamid to the fashion designer Maria B., who
imagine the Pakistani nation not as a community of individuals with inalienable
rights and autonomous choices but one that is based on an ideal: Islam. As in
France, which banned the burka in the name of French secular republican values,
Pakistani critics of Facebook sought to block the site in the name of defending
community ideals.
Meanwhile, those who speak about
individual rights find themselves dismissed as unpatriotic Pakistanis. It does
not help their message that the most prominent faces in the anti-ban camp belong
to the largely English-speaking, upper class that appears to be more culturally
tied to the West than the Pakistani masses. As one exasperated journalist
exclaimed at the May 20 press conference, "We are a roomful of intelligent
people, and you can't even explain to us what you mean! How will you explain it
to the court?"
The prevalence of a communal
narrative that privileges Muslim identity and anti-ban activists' inability to
clearly articulate their case in an idiom that the average Pakistani understands
explains why none of the usual groups one might expect to reject the ban --
students, journalists, and lawyers -- actually opposes it.
In fact, it was a lawyers group
that first invoked the notion of an aggrieved community to demand the ban in
court, asserting that Facebook was "insult[ing] the emotions and feelings of
Muslims." Shifting between religious justifications and constitutional
reasoning, the Islamic Lawyers Movement petition protested "unlawful activities
towards the constitution and Islamic injunctions and values."
The Islamic Lawyers' ambiguity
is partly the legacy of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a secularist
who nevertheless rewrote the constitution in 1973 to appease Islamists. As in
Israel, the only other country intended as a secular homeland for a religious
group, it is unclear in Pakistan whether the state acts in the name of its
citizens or the global Muslim community. The Islamic Lawyers' petition refers
repeatedly to "Muslims of the world," on whose behalf they claim to act. "The
role of religion in the state and the relationship of Islam with law has never
been debated in this country," says the lawyer and newspaper columnist Babar
Sattar. "Consequently, the only people speaking in the name of religion are
those belonging to the religious right."
And the religious right has been
speaking the language of the masses: Urdu. Although opinion in the
English-language press has decried the incendiary nature of the "Draw Muhammad"
campaign, it opposed the ban for its violation of individual rights. Comments in
the Urdu press -- which outstrips English circulation by about seven to one --
have reinforced the idea of an Islamic community expressed in terms of kinship.
Aamir Liaquat Hussain, a former minister of religious affairs, a televangelist,
and a columnist for the largest Urdu daily, Jang, has employed familial
analogies to argue for the ban. If children are expected to make sacrifices on
behalf of their parents, he asked in a column, then how can Pakistanis as a
community "be unwilling to give up Facebook for our beloved Prophet who taught
us how important family is in the first place?" Ban supporters such as Hussain
have deftly painted those arguing against censorship as hopelessly
self-interested and a threat to the larger Muslim "family."
For their part, political
parties have either steered clear of the controversy or openly supported the
ban. The secular Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which governs Karachi, faulted the
Web site but remained silent about the ban; the party of the former cricket
superstar Imran Khan, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which tends to attract younger
idealists, supported it; and President Asif Ali Zardari's Pakistan People's
Party has allowed government regulators to widen censorship beyond the court
order. This suggests that the government is interested in tamping down social
networking sites, which have been effective organizing tools in the past.
On May 31, the court provided
further legal cover to do just that. Even as it struck down the ban, Judge
Chaudhry declared that telecommunications authorities could be charged with
contempt of court if they do not block blasphemous material in the future, a
handy excuse for overeager regulators who have already interpreted the Facebook
ban in broad terms. Chaudhry did not institute any judicial oversight or
procedural safeguards to govern such censorship, and he legitimized his stance
in the name of public opinion. "It is the government's job to take care of such
things, which spark resentment among the people and bring them onto the
streets," the judge said. "They should take steps to block any blasphemous
content on the Internet." Chaudrhy's statement is essentially a bow to the
religious right -- the group that has been on the streets in droves -- and
consequently, an endorsement of their view that the honor of their imagined
Muslim community comes before individual freedoms.
And the legal battle is not
over: a second petition has now been filed in court demanding Internet
censorship based on Pakistan's blasphemy laws. The Lahore High Court is expected
to hear the case on June 15.
The anti-censorship movement has
an uphill struggle in Pakistan, and those in the West who claim to believe in
individual rights and free speech are not helping. The "Everybody Draw Muhammad
Day" Facebook page was set up in defense of "freedom of speech," but it
misconstrued a concept that refers to government curtailments, not to the
actions of private corporations such as Comedy Central, which constantly make
editorial judgments for various reasons. The page also quickly became a forum
for extremist comments. "There was a lot of calling Muslims 'vermin' and
'savages,'" says Arsalan Khan, a doctoral candidate, who debated with commenters
on the site. After attracting more than 85,000 users and precipitating an actual
free speech battle in Pakistan, the page was voluntarily shut down by its
administrators. Facebook, which, according to one of the page's own
administrators had received complaints "like 100,000 times" from users across
the globe, did nothing.
Another "Draw Muhammad" page has
since surfaced with even more derogatory content; some of its users have
cautioned commenters to keep the page clean, "[u]nless of course we want this
page to disappear and give Islam another victory?" Like the defenders of the ban
in Pakistan, many in the West also imagine a monolithic Islamic community.
Incendiary Facebook pages, the French burka ban, and the anti-Islam
advertisements placed on New York City buses by the right-wing blogger Pamela
Geller and the Stop the Islamization of America campaign are just some of the
West's reactions to that community. All of this -- combined with wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan -- has led many young Pakistanis
to understand that they are being attacked because they are Muslims.
"If we do something they don't
like, they kill us. Look what they did in Iraq, look at Pakistani deaths," said
a shy teenager who had joined the May 20 Jamaat-e-Islami rally outside the
Karachi Press Club. "And you're saying we can't ban them?"
MADIHA R. TAHIR is a freelance journalist based
in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in The National, Global Post, and
Columbia Journalism Review.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/features/letters-from/letter-from-karachi?page=2
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Sultan Shahin
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