Letter From Karachi
The Facebook Fiasco and the Future of Free Speech in Pakistan
Article Summary and Author Biography
Pakistani authorities banned the Web site Facebook for nearly two weeks with the support of religious parties and, surprisingly, many journalists. The ban has now been lifted, but anti-blasphemy laws may mean that some forms of censorship are here to stay.
MADIHA R. TAHIR is a freelance journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in The National, Global Post, and Columbia Journalism Review.
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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 Lahoreand 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.
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