A thousand and one e-mails

The Taliban has declared the Internet un-Islamic, but elsewhere in the Muslim world, going online is one way to avoid the censors.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Oct. 12, 2001 | In July 2001, the Taliban banned the use of the Internet by Afghan citizens. "We are not against the use of the Internet, but we are against the broadcast of obscene and immoral material, and material on the Internet that is against Islam," said Taliban foreign minister Maulvi Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil in a statement.

By late August, the Taliban added computer disks to a growing list of official "un-Islamic" products, including nail polish, neckties and wigs made out of human hair. Border officials were to confiscate contraband disks and turn them over to the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. The government also extended the Internet ban to government officials and nongovernmental organizations doing humanitarian relief work in the country, decreeing that throughout Afghanistan there should be just one point of Internet connectivity through the Office of the Supreme Leader, "to be accessed by a trusted man."

Twenty-six million people with one lousy Internet connection?

Such attempts to put chokeholds on the Net usually get Westerners frothing at the mouth about universal rights to freedom of information. But the Internet ban by the Taliban was hardly a great blow to the people of Afghanistan. "You can't use something that you don't have," says Farhad Azad, the publisher of Afghanmagazine.com, an English-language site based in the U.S. read by Afghan expats. His magazine is one of many Afghan sites hosted outside the country that cover Afghanistan.

Azad points out that even before the U.S.-led bombing of the country began, many cities in Afghanistan had electricity only a few hours a day, much less computers or the land lines to get online. Even many relief workers relied on satellite phones for basic phone service while they were based in the country. And the limited number of Afghans who were online before the Net ban mostly used Pakistani phone lines to dial up.

But Afghanistan stands in sharp contrast to many Arab countries in the Middle East, where the Net is a growing source of information for students, as well as for the middle and upper classes, despite the clumsy attempts of autocratic governments to censor it. "A lot of people try to trumpet the fact that the common man doesn't have access to information. But that's not really true anymore," says Kevin Brown, creator of Middle East Internet pages, a Web directory for Arab countries that's been online since 1995. "People know someone who has access to information with the Internet."

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