There is a story in the Times of India about a new search engine that has been launched in Pakistan called “Halalgoogling”. Basically it does a search using Google or Bing, then filters out un-Islamic content in order to render Islamic approved results.
I tried it out, and sure enough it does what it claims to do …
The times explains …
the search engine has a built-in advanced special filtering system that blocks Haram content according to the Law of Islam.
According to the Express Tribune, a special and unique filter system in the search engine excludes forbidden content from its search results such as pornography, nudity, gay, lesbian, bisexual, gambling, anti-Islamic content.
The system has been designed to respect Muslim culture
There is of course a rather subtle little flaw here, anybody can bypass this filter that removes the forbidden such as porn and gay related things by simply going directly to google, but then the folks in Pakistan will need to be able to bypass this if they wish to maintain their position as the No. 1 nation on the planet for google searches for gay porn …
It is about here that I’m tempted to insert a rant about the pure hypocrisy of a nation peopled with folks who in public condemn all things gay, yet secretly are the most voracious consumers of gay porn on the planet, but I suspect the real fault may in fact be an oppressive belief system that does not allow many to come to terms with their actual sexuality.
So anyway, what bothers me here is not the hypocrisy involved with the filtering of things such as pornography, nudity, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and gambling, but rather the things that do not get filtered out and so are clearly quite acceptable. Here is a search I tried …
This in many ways more or less sums up Pakistan … catching a glimpse of a bit of flesh has the clerics throwing a fit, but making bombs, not a problem, that’s fine.