WordPress and the Pakistani government censor my site again, removing a “blasphemous” quote—from the Qur’an!

47 thoughts on “WordPress and the Pakistani government censor my site again, removing a “blasphemous” quote—from the Qur’an!”

1. What we have, then, is an Islamic government declaring that the words of the Qur’an are blasphemous!

   That’s unbelievable but true. What this means is that the Pakistani authorities want to control what the people see about their own sacred text

   And a corroborating quote from The Visitor by Sheri S. Tepper (the “Happening” referred to is a strike of the Earth by an asteroid that is responsible for the state of the world in the book): “Not many years before the Happening, one of your country’s largest religious bodies officially declared that their book was holier than their God, thus simultaneously and corporately breaking several commandments of their own religion, particularly the first one. Of course they liked the book better! It was full of magic and contradictions that they could quote to reinforce their bigoted and hateful opinions.”

2. Perhaps it was in one of the replies, rather than you blogging about it?

   1. We could at any point get this site censored. So much blasphemy, so little comment space.

      1. Yeah and Jerry was only #52 in the league table. Needs to move up a bit.

         I wonder how often these lists of offending material get sent out?

         1. I wonder whether this blog itself will end up on a new list?

3. If it is from 2016, the Pakistani “Web Analysis Team” (lol) must have quite a back log. You are keeping them in jobs.

4. I hope WordPress, if they’re going to agree to censor, would show an honest message that explained that they were censoring “blasphemous” content as requested by authority.

5. The Twitter handle for Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, is @automattic. The CEO is Matt Mullenweg, @photomatt on Twitter. I’ve made my opinion known and I hope others will join me.

6. The image is in the main body of the blog (not in reader comments) at https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/10/07/puffho-tries-to-whitewash-islam-again-yawn/

   1. Aha! It was PCC then. He must be stoned.

      1. “Stoned”, as in one interpretation of “4 20”?

   2. The image is also identified by the (shorter) URL https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=185825

      In keeping with the comment that appears there, the complaint is probably a “taken out of context” issue, as the “meme” omits the “from where they turned you out” (or similar) part…

      1. This.

   3. It would appear the censors did not understand the intent of the post. The blogpost was actually arguing against its use.

      Strange world.

      1. OK I retract that.

7. I think I read somewhere that the fuller context of the offending quote from the Koran is that after unbelievers have oppressed the Faithful, then they should be hunted down and killed (as a sad duty of self-preservation).

   Not that I care enough to look it up myself. I prefer to get my 7th-century advice from… come to think of it, I don’t take advice from 7th-century sources.

   1. The full context is that the unbelievers oppress the Faithful by their existence.

      1. No it isn’t actually. It’s talking about unbelievers that pack a fight with Muslims.

         1. pick*

         2. If you listen to that sort of Muslims, they will say the same about Prof. Coyne.
            The fact is, Muslim historians themselves talk about their warlord prophet killing, raping and enslaving.

            1. I was just talking about the context of the particular quote in the Koran as was the person to whom you responded.

            2. So am I.
               That place of the Koran specifies that the Believers should attack the unbelievers “once the holy month (Ramadan) is over”.
               If the Believers were under any sort of real attack, they would never be recommended to wait before defending themselves.
               Every oppressive and genocidal ideology portrays its victims, no matter how hapless, as attackers.

8. Still, it is kinda great that the pPakistan ‘religious police’ deems Surah 2:191 blasphemous.
   Or was it the accompanying picture, maybe they considered it depicted the prophet?
   Note, since the warrior is veiled the question is moot. 🙂

   1. Maybe it was one of the horses that “triggered” them. Haha, get it, trigger, horse, haha.

      1. No, I’m slow, I don’t get it.

         1. Roy Rogers (not necessarily this “Roger”, but he’s probably been reminded of this all his life) was a cowboy in the era of cheap black & white cowboy movies, riding a horse called “Trigger”, who was the intellect of the pair.
            It’s an American thing.

9. Maybe they thought one of the riders or one of the horses were a depiction of Muhammad. That would be poo-pooed in many of the sub-cults of the Islam cult.

10. this must mean if anyone wants a WordPress page blocked from the viewpoint of Pakistan, they need only write the quote in the comment section of whatever page they desire.

11. alternatively, one could write the quote with the slight of hand trick as shown here :

    Mary
    Had a
    a little lamb

    or

    I
    Love Paris in
    in the springtime

    … for example, add an extra “the”, or add a letter, for example “whereever” and the webpage would not be blocked. In theory.

12. So the Pakistani authorities are saying that Allah’s words are blasphemous? That’s blasphemy! The must punish themselves appropriately.

    1. *they*

    2. I agree some auto-flailing is indicated.
       Seriously though, the Islamic ‘police’ deems a quote from the Quran blasphemy, priceless!

       1. To be precise, they say “extremely blasphemous”. And the blasphemer seems to be Allah himself. That’s probably the greatest blasphemy in the entire history of Islam.

13. The curious thing is that what they blocked—on the grounds of blasphemy—is a quote from the Qur’an!

    Sounds like something out of a comic novel — maybe by Joseph Heller, or by one of those wise-ass Brits, like Tom Sharpe or the Amises, père or fils.

14. I’m guessing the very name of your blog blinds them, so looking for accurate reasons for their requests for censorship might be a waste of time.

15. Your bones Prof(E)will never cast a shadow in Pakastain

16. … or give it 200 years in line with your prediction of religions “be dead by then.

17. “The sin of disbelief in God is greater than committing murder”. So we’re all mortal sinners who are worse than, say, Timothy Veigh or Fred West.

    What f*cking depraved b*ll*cks. How can anyone with a working brain cell actually believe in such stuff?

    I guess the answer is that most Muslims don’t read, know or understand their Big Book of Magic Stuff properly, just as most Christians don’t read or know anything much about theirs.

18. It sounds silly, but one could perform an experiment writing quotes from the Koran, Mia-spelled quotes from the Koran, quotes that sounds like the Koran but aren’t, etc, and observe which pages get blocked – to find out what exactly the problem is. I think it is the evolution, and other topics, being alongside Islam.

    1. The “post” they are complaining about is a png image and the text only appears as pixels in the image. This would suggest that it was actually reported by a human being rather than found in some generic search.

       In the post in which the image appears, it is preceded by this text:

       Here’s an example of “anti-Muslim garbage.” And indeed, it’s meant to incite fear, but it’s not garbage; in fact, the call for killing of apostates and unbelievers appears repeatedly throughout the Qur’an.

       https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/10/07/puffho-tries-to-whitewash-islam-again-yawn/

       My theory, which is mine is that somebody read that paragraph and then mistakenly reported the image URL.

19. Well, for giggles, perhaps one might post the below to see if the benevolent and omniscient Pakistani analysts consider it blasphemy:

    “Do NOT slay the unbelievers wherever you find them. QU’RAN 2:191.”

20. Have you considered setting up some sort of duplicate site where you copy all of the posts here over? That way the censors may miss it (since presumably it would have much fewer subscribers) and those who suffer from the censors could read your posts there.

    -Ryan

    1. You’re volunteering to do the work? I tried moving a couple of posts from one blog to another last week, and it took 20 minutes. Some of that was learning curve, but that would be quite a task. I’d be surprised if you could move 200 per working day, so you can start to price the job from that.

       1. I’m not saying abandon this website entirely, but publish the posts on another site at the same time.

          -Ryan

21. Why not call and ask? They left a phone number…

    1. No thank you, but you can feel free to ask!

22. Isn’t there a non-trivial branch of Islam which considers any translation of the Korean into anything other than the Arabic dialect in which it was dictated as a distortion of the word of Fido, and so a blasphemy in and of itself.

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