• I’mHalal search engine
• BBC: A beginner’s guide to Islam

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Yesterday, there was another question on the subject in the British Parliament.  Prime Minister Gordon Brown was asked how his government would prevent future attempts to keep Parliamentary debate out of newspapers.  Here is what he said.

PRIME MINISTER BROWN: This is an issue where an injunction has been awarded but it’s been awarded in the context where it has to remain a secret, and people are not told what the outcome is generally.  The Justice Secretary has talked to the parties concerned.  He is looking into this issue, and I hope that on the basis of what he suggests progress can be made not just in this case but in more generally to clear up what is an unfortunate area of the law.

WERMAN: Tweeters and other Internet users face severe access restrictions in several countries around the world.  China and Iran, for example, most of the time any restriction on the Internet is frowned upon by users.  But our next story turns the issue on its head.  Cyrus Farivar reports on a new Internet search engine designed to help Muslim Internet users avoid certain kinds of content.

CYRUS FARIVAR: Halal is an Arabic adjective meaning something that is permissible in Islam.  The opposite of halal is haram, or “forbidden.”   That explains the message you get after you search for “alcohol” on IMHalal.com.

SOM POURFARZANEH: Oops, your search inquiry has a haram level of one out of three. This means that the search results fetched by IMHalal could be haram. If you still think the results will be clean, click me.

FARIVAR: That’s Som Pourfarzaneh, a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He studies Muslims in America, like himself. He says IMHalal is an example of Muslims trying to negotiate their theology and their values in a secular, public sphere like the Internet.  IMHalal.com was created by Reza Sardeha, a 20-year-old Iranian studying business in Amsterdam.

REZA SARDEHA: Our goal was actually to create a safe and clean environment for those people and Muslims from all over the world who really don’t want to bump into explicit content.

FARIVAR: Sardeha says that he consulted for months with imams and other Muslim scholars in the Netherlands to come up with a list of search terms that could potentially be problematic for observing Muslims. His site launched in early September.  It has three levels of warnings for users.   The first one being for relatively minor things that are haram, like alcohol and pork.

SARDEHA: Level 2 is probably a search term which could be risky because some keywords for example like the term sexual education is perfectly fine. People still got the chance to click through and see the result and inform themselves.

FARIVAR: So what’s Level 3?

SARDEHA: Level 3 is really a no go. If you get a Level 3, the content that will be fetched as highly inappropriate, and therefore you won’t get the chance to click through.

FARIVAR: This isn’t the first religious themed search engine.  There are already a number of Christian ones, and at least one Hebrew language ultra-Orthodox Jewish search engine.  In January, a Moroccan company started “Islamic Google,” a way to filter Google searches for Islam-friendly sites. And in June, a Saudi company even launched NaqaTube, a clean and Islamically pure version of YouTube.  Sam Pourfarzaneh says there’s a growing demand for such websites.  Porfarzaneh also points out that the finer points of what exactly is Haram and Halal are up for constant debate depending on the particular religious school or tradition.  Still, in its first two weeks of operation IMHalal reported that it had received hundreds of thousands of visitors to its site. Some are skeptical that Muslim Internet users around the world will really embrace the concept of a restrictive search engine.   Helmi Noman is a Yemeni researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He studies the Internet in North Africa and the Middle East, which he says is already very restrictive.

HELMI NOMAN: Governments and authorities implement and impose different forms of censorship, installing cameras in Internet cafés, requiring Internet users in cyber cafes to provide their names and I.D.s before they can use the services in Internet cafés in addition to arresting and harassing online writers and activists.  So I do not think that users in the region would add another layer of filtering by using these services.

FARIVAR: But the creator of IMhalal is optimistic. Reza Sardeha says he’ll continue to improve the searching mechanism, and he hopes that by this time next year IMHalal will be the number one search engine in the Middle East.   For The World, I’m Cyrus Farivar.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.