This post is about readers in Pakistan. Unfortunately readers in Pakistan won’t actually be able to read this. Which is what this post is about.
Pandaemonium is a WordPress site. This week WordPress received an email from the ‘Web Analysis Team’ of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) ‘The webpages hosted on your platform are extremely Blasphemous and are hurting the sentiments of many Muslims around Pakistan’, it read. What particularly seemed to concern the PTA were my articles about Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine targeted by Islamist gunmen in a machinegun attack that left 12 people dead in January 2015. These articles, and the images from the magazine that I have published (in particular the one above), are, according to the PTA, ‘in violation of Section 37 of Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 and Section 19 of Constitution of Pakistan’. It ordered WordPress to block access to my website in Pakistan in order ‘to contribute towards maintaining peace and harmony in the world’. Which is why readers in Pakistan can no longer access Pandaemonium.
The best way for readers in Pakistan to circumvent the censorship is through a VPN. I will also see about setting up a separate self-hosted site to mirror Pandaemonium, though the reason I stopped self-hosting and moved to WordPress is because self-hosting took up an inordinate amount of time.
I am not, of course, the first person whose website has been blocked in Pakistan. Nor is Pakistan the only country that blocks websites deemed unacceptable. China, Russia, and many others routinely do so. Britain has its own list of unacceptable extremist sites, the takedown of which will no doubt also ‘contribute towards maintaining peace and harmony in the world’.
What the Pakistani action does do is provide a new perspective on the attitudes of many Western liberals towards Charlie Hebdo. When the Charlie Hebdo offices were attacked in 2015, many liberals in the West were reluctant to offer their solidarity. As I observed in the immediate aftermath of the attack (in one of the articles that caused offence to the PTA), ‘hardly had news begun filtering out about the Charlie Hebdo shootings, than there were those suggesting that the magazine was a ‘racist institution’ and that the cartoonists, if not deserving what they got, had nevertheless brought it on themselves through their incessant attacks on Islam’. ‘Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Muhammad’, I added, ‘appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.’
Perhaps the most disgraceful refusal of solidarity came a year later with the boycott by a host of writers – including Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Geoff Dyer – of the annual gala of PEN America in protest against the free speech organization’s decision to present Charlie Hebdo with its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award.
In countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, writers and cartoonists constantly risk their lives facing down blasphemy laws, standing up for equal rights and fighting for democratic freedoms. They constantly challenge the kind of censorship imposed by the PTA. They are the people whom many Western liberals betray in their refusal to support free speech and in their insistence that to mock Muhammad or to champion blasphemy is to be ‘racist’.
Such liberal critics would no doubt object to Pakistan’s decision to censor ‘blasphemous’ websites. But it’s worth asking: is there really that great a distance between their refusal to support Charlie Hebdo and the Pakistani authorities’ takedown of websites that do demonstrate solidarity?
A shorter version of this article was published in the Observer, 22 July 2018.
Pandaemonium 
No, there is no daylight between those actions. Thank you for insistently repeating this call for basic freedoms. I find this leftist effective devotion to extremist Islam abuses very disturbing, clothed in the thin chintz of minority protection and respect for religion.
There is a parallel, certainty-tinged march away from broader speech freedoms occurring among the left. It’s understandable in a sense, given the right’s populist meanderings, but it is just as ill-advised as respect for blasphemy laws. A recent Times article derided a Millsian respect for partiality and controversy, while advocating limiting institutional speeches to ‘real’ scientists, tossing hypertexted ad hominems in all directions. Leftist know-it-alls are dangerous as well.
I declined to offer my solidarity to Charlie Hebdo not because of some particular reverence for Islam, but because Charlie Hebdo is an extreme assault on esthetics. Depicting Jesus or Muhammad in lewd sexual positions is not blasphemous, it is bad taste. Gratuitously and cynically demeaning a religion instead of articulating intelligent criticism is violence as well, verbal and psychological violence against the faithful. Violence is not only physical. Freedom of speech in the public sphere comes with responsibility. Would you say that pornography should be available in primary schools for the sake of freedom of speech?
I find many things in bad taste (including the argument that you are making here). That does not mean that they should be banned. The idea that you refuse solidarity with a magazine a dozen of whose journalists and cartoonists have been slaughtered because it represents in your eyes ‘an extreme assault on esthetics’ shows how ludicrously self-centred and banal the anti-free speech arguments have become.
No, there is a fundamental distinction between physical violence and ‘demeaning a religion’ (however ‘gratuitous and cynical’ you might deem it to be). Machinegunning 12 people constitutes violence. Mocking Muhammad or Jesus does not. Many Muslims found The Satanic Verses to ‘gratuitously and cynically demean a religion’. The writer Ziauddin Sardar suggested that reading it felt like being raped. Should The Satanic Verses have been banned? Presumably you would have ‘declined to offer your solidarity’ to Salman Rushdie when the fatwa was imposed on him?
Many gays may think that religious views on homosexuality constitute ‘psychological violence’. Should believers be banned from expressing their religious views? Christians may find Muslim views that non-believers will languish in Hell (and Muslims similarly about Christian views) amounts to ‘psychological violence’. Should that be banned? And so it goes on. Once you fail to make the distinction between physical and verbal violence, then almost anything can be banned.
That’s what the Pakistani authorities say in banning ‘blasphemous’ websites. That’s what the Russian authorities say about those who criticise Putin. That’s what the Chinese authorities say about those who defend freedom of speech. That’s what Donald Trump says about what he deems to be ‘fake news’ attacks on him. Be careful what you wish for.
The idea that we should all be treated like children is part of the problem. Do I think ‘pornography should be available in primary schools’? No. Do I think adults should be able to access pornography? Yes. The fact that you seem unable to distinguish between the two is telling and gets to the heart of the free speech debate.
Yes it is, otherwise why bother with the word ‘violence’ at all.
I think your words are more offensive than anything Charlie Hebdo printed. I think you are a genuinely disgusting human being.
That doesn’t mean I think you should be slaughtered like an animal because you hurt somebody’s feelies.
Kenan said it more effectively than I would have, but I enthusiastically associate myself with his responses.
Excellent answers Keenan
My site, “Why Evolution is True” was also banned in Pakistan through the complicity of WordPress; in my case it was because I posted Jesus and Mo cartoons. It’s reprehensible that the banning is done by WordPress cutting off access, making them complicit with the Pakistani government in censorship, despite WordPress’s claim that they’re in favor of free speech. I guess the company is more interested in keeping other WordPress sites going in that country (hence getting dosh) than enforcing its own principles.
Thanks for the support. The relationship between market principles and political principles is a tricky one to negotiate. Few companies would these days act as Penguin did with The Satanic Verses when it withstood considerable commercial and political pressure, and enormous physical threats, to continue publishing Salman Rushdie’s novel. In the end it’s only social and political movements that can uphold principles and effect change. That’s why those who stand up for free speech and democratic rights in countries such as Pakistan are so important. That’s also why the pusillanimity of many Western liberals towards free speech is such an act of betrayal.
It does not make up for it, but your Pakistan ban has got you another English follower, and I hope many more.
Thank you. I hope you enjoy Pandaemonium .
A small detour: language banning in the Chinese Postal service http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=39299
To hell with WordPress. Strength to your pen.