New Age Islam in Pakistan: Techno-savvy readers manage to open the blocked pages to the dismay of Taliban and Hafiz Sayeed
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
June 25, 2013
Last week, some of the pages of the multilingual website New Age Islam were blocked by Pakistan. The progressive readers of NAI in Pakistan were disappointed with this act of Pakistan government as it is perhaps the only multilingual website in the world that has been running a relentless fight against sectarianism, communalism, fundamentalism, religious intolerance and extremism, and terrorism. It is also the only website that counters and refutes the misleading ideas and perfidious interpretations of Islamic messages and teachings by Taliban and other like-minded organisations. It has published point by point refutations of Taliban’s misleading ideas on democracy, on its fatwa favouring killing of innocent non-Muslims including Muslim minorities like Shias and Ahmadis and its wrong interpretation of the duty to enjoin good and forbid evil.
New Age Islam has also exposed the duplicity of successive Pakistan governments and the Pakistani army on the policy of their fight against terrorism as they harbour, fund and help terrorists and terrorist organisation in Pakistan. Apart from this, New Age Islam has also been trying to present the true, all inclusive, women-friendly and tolerant Islam which is not to the liking of the obsurantist, anti-women, sectarian and extremist outfit like Taliban. Since New Age Islam had been hurting its interests in the world, the Taliban and other terrorist sections of Pakistan put pressure on the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to ban some of the ‘offensive’ pages of NAI. About ten Urdu, English and Arabic pages were blocked by Pakistan.
The first page that we noticed blocked was a humorous piece in Urdu on Hafiz Sayeed’s invitation to Shah Rukh Khan in January this year following the publication of the latter’s article in the Outlook and the New York Times in which he had lamented the fact that the communal forces in India always took a jibe at him as a supporter of Pakistan and asked him to go and settle in Pakistan. Since, the article mentioned Hafiz Sayeed and his unwanted suggestion and Shah Rukh Khan’s stinging response to him, the page containing the article was blocked. Similarly, articles written by international Islamic scholars like Maulana Wahiduddin Khan and Md Younus whose book ‘The Essential Message of Islam’ has been authenticated by Al Azhar University were blocked. Similarly the articles in Urdu, English and Arabic that exposed the nefarious and diabolic modus operandi of terrorist organisations luring the Muslim youth and promoting terrorism, advocating the rights of women and other progressive topics were blocked.
Normally, government of a country blocks or censors only those websites that publish pornographic and blasphemous content. In Pakistan, last year 13,000 websites were blocked. The government claimed they were “pornographic” and “blasphemous”. But we have no idea yet under what charge some pages of our website New Age Islam were blocked. These pages condemned and refuted the terrorist and extremist ideas of Taliban and advocated equal rights for Muslim women in the light of Qur’anic injunctions. How can a government that claims to be based on the ideals of Islam and vows to fight terrorists till the last breath take the action of blocking the pages condemning terrorism and promoting women’s religious rights? Does this not suggest that the bans were imposed by the Talibani elements active in Pakistani bureaucracy? Does it not point to a secret takeover of Pakistan’s policies by the Taliban?
However, the progressive readers of New Age Islam did not give up. They explored ways to open the blocked pages using the latest technology. Finally, they succeeded to open New Age Islam’s blocked pages with the help of Tor browser. Please watch the video uploaded below to see how Tor browser helped our readers in Pakistan to open our blocked pages.
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/multimedia/pakistan-techno-savvy-taliban-hafiz-saeed-/d/12278
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