On Facebook the other day someone had posted a link to http://imhalal.com, a new ‘Halal’ search engine that allows Muslims to search the internet without coming across content that is considered ‘haram’. Knowing how complicated search engine algorithms are, and also being very aware of the colossal amount of ‘haram’ content on the internet (!), I was intrigued by how this website purported to filter ‘all’ this readily available content.
Being a massive egoist, naturally the first thing I searched for was my own name. There I was at the top, and I’m proud to call myself halal. To test it’s similarity to Google, I then searched for ‘Chugger Haters’ (see the article Thoughts on Chugging), and there I was at the top again. All well and good. A search for the word ‘pork’ returned a haram rating of 1/3. ‘If you think the results will be clean,’ it said, ‘click me.’ Then I searched for the word ‘gay’. To my horror, it returned a ‘haram’ rating of 3/3 and I wasn’t allowed to click through to see the results. ‘Homosexual’ was the same, as was ‘lesbian’. The makers of imhalal.com obviously considered any mention of same-sex sexuality to be so shocking that Muslims should not encounter it, ever. This appalled me.
I fired off an outraged message to the support forums. You can read the full thread here. My point was that you could search for ‘boobs’ or ‘cunt’ and see a list of results, so someone actively seeking sexual content would be gratified by imhalal.com, whereas someone wanting to research ‘homosexuality’ was utterly frustrated.
You could argue that this was none of my business. It’s a Muslim search engine for Muslim people. But, I’d argue very strongly that it is my business. As someone who came out as gay (and now would describe himself as ‘an advocate of a post queer society’), and who identifies with gay culture, and as an egalitarian who is intolerant of intolerance, I felt this was very firmly my business.
So you can imagine my delight when I received a prompt reply from an imhalal.com Staff Member, Reza Sardeha. ‘We will loosen up on those terms when our filters filter out all trash that will be fetched from the world wide web,’ he said. ‘At the moment we can’t already provide “clean” results for those terms and that’s why those have a 3/3 haram warning. So were working on it and maybe even tomorrow this issue is solved.’ I was reeling a bit from Reza’s choice of words (at least he put ‘clean’ in quotation marks, I thought), but the overriding sensation was one of amazement. Not only had they replied, he’d said they were going to ’solve’ the issue. I checked back today, and lo and behold the search terms ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘homosexuality’, and ‘queer’ all now return a haram ranking of 2/3 and you can click through and see the results! ‘Homosexual’ still returns a ranking of 3/3, but as Reza pointed out, they are working on it. I shall update this post when it’s 2/3, and might even pester Reza about it. But ultimately, feedback in their forum has led to a significant change to the Search Engine.
Obviously I can’t take all the credit for this change. There are a couple of other threads about it in the imhalal.com forums. See this one for quite an interesting debate about homosexuality. What this article seeks to show is how something so small as a post in a forum can have such a huge impact. Last week Muslims wanting to research homosexuality on imhalal.com would have been told that homosexuality was totally unacceptable, a full-on 3/3 haram subject, not to be discussed, thought about, looked at. Now, they can get a list of results (with no gay porn), and come to their own conclusions. This is great for Muslims, great for the relationship between gays and Muslims, and great for the world as a whole.
This article was published on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 2:04 pm and is categorised as Diatribes, Semantics, Sexuality. If you're of the RSS disposition, you can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can write a comment, or just trackback from your own site.
