تمت

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My friend A__ S____ asked me a few days ago to come by and take a look at his collection of books, as he was downsizing on his personal possessions. I went over, experiencing what Christmas must feel like to some; I was filled to the brim with wonderment and gratitude, and was not disappointed.

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A__ S_____ had undertaken a reading of the western canon of literature (according to Yale's Harold Bloom), and while he'd not gotten far in the reading department, he'd completed some of the purchasing involved, and so had many treasures to offer me. Aside from the decidedly euro-centric selection suggested by Harold Bloom, A__ S____ also had a few books in Arabic, which I took as well. Some of these were bestsellers, though that means little in a place like Egypt, where The Yacoubian Building was one and sold all of 3,000 copies to Egypt's populace of 83+ million...and this after being made into a movie with an all-star cast.

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I packed my little windfall up as best I could, and headed home. It was late when I got there, and so I prepared for bed, and got into it in the hopes of quickly falling into sleep in order to function the next morning.

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My excitement got the better of me. I made a deal with myself to skim through the books for a maximum of 15 minutes, and then go to sleep with a temporarily sated appetite. I picked up one of the books in Arabic, realizing with dismay how long it had been since I'd done anything but doodle in my native language. I read the back cover and the author bio, studied the packaging and the cover art. I found myself smiling wryly at the irony of Mama Suzanne's smiling endorsement of a book charting the history of Egyptian liberalism. I leafed through it, skimming, noticing that my self-appointed 15 minutes were almost up. I flipped to the final page of text, and there my thoughts of encroaching daylight and the associated workday died, overtaken by the image of the three letters that ended the book: تمت.

I stared for a couple of seconds, then threw off the covers and approached the pile that made up the remainder of my recent acquisitions. I brought all of the Arabic language books back into bed with me, and found their final pages: تمت , تمت , تمت , تمت. Every volume ended that way, with an announcement of its ending; the end, finito, this your signal to close this volume now and consider it read.

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I will own up to the fact that this was something of an over-reaction to a publishing convention that probably meant very little. Very little, that is, if it were to be considered outside of a mind perhaps too affected by dystopia-obsessed novels the likes of 1984, A Brave New World, etc. I remembered then also that those same three curvaceous, unobtrusive letters appear at the end of all of the Arabic black and white film credits I'd ever sat through...a tradition we probably picked up from Hollywood, as we did its aesthetics, its ostentation, and its movie scripts (this last with particular fealty).

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But it seemed to me strange still, to see this announcement at the end of a book. Did one really need to be told, in language external to and separate from the narrative arc of storytelling, that one should expect no more? Could the reader not be trusted, in the case of non-fiction, to know when a writer was done summing up her argument?

I eventually did go to sleep, and thought about this not too much in the next few days. On one of my look-at-random-things-on-the-Internet breaks at work, I came across the following website: imhalal.com. Someone had apparently developed a Muslim search engine, which would rate search term returns on a three-point scale of haramness. I found the idea of this amusing, and tested out some terms. Here are my initial findings:

pamela anderson: Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 1 out of 3. This means that the results fetched by ImHalal.com could be haram!

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sex: Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 2 out of 3. This means that the results fetched by ImHalal.com could be haram!

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homosexual: Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 3 out of 3! I would like to advise you to change your search terms and try again.

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the devil: Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 2 out of 3. This means that the results fetched by ImHalal.com could be haram!

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[lesson of the day - homosexuals are more haram than the devil himself.]

Notice that with a 3-star haram rating, no search results are actually provided to the user, only the stern injunction to change the search term, and to try again. Also, in case you were wondering: "sperm" is a three-star offense, but "ovum" passes muster.

Anyhow, I shared this with friends, amused at the glitchiness and the bad logic of whatever algorithms these people had thought up with which to censor/censure life. I invited those I'd tagged in my note to share discoveries of their own, and moved as a result from amused to disturbed as this search engine uncovered - rather, confirmed - the dangerous biases rampant amongst the Muslim community.

That "homosexual" elicited a "Hell, no!" from this search engine was of very little surprise to me. But that my twin brother's disturbing "how to kill someone" was only a two-star offense was shocking, if only relative to how other search terms were rated. "Breast cancer", as my friend discovered, came with a warning, but "testicular cancer" was halal. "Rape" was a three-star word, with no results returned...and so was "rape victim".

I have no doubt that some of these ratings are resultant from bad coding rather than deliberateness no the part of the developers. That being said, I think they'd likely endorse their stance on homosexuality, as well as on many of these other apparent biases. What concerns me now is not that this engine does its work badly, but that it does it at all.

On a religious level, I fail to see how having this kind of tool makes any sense. Few people old enough to operate a computer don't know what a "sex" input is likely to return them. This engine, therefore, is not made for deliberate, willful voyeurs of all that is soiled and sordid according to Islam. Those people will most likely use Google Image Search.

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Should we suppose that this is an engine meant to protect willful sinners from the whisperins of iblees, then one must ask the following question: have we become so far removed from the idea of resisting temptation as a part of practicing faith? Has our religion become so much about surrender that we leave our own judgement to computer programmers, lest our curiosity get the better of our will? And if that were the purpose of this search engine - where are the brownie points in that? Do Muslims nowadays ever choose what they perceive as virtue, rather than set up a rigid societal/legal structure that enforces "morality" by stifling all other forms of expression or being? We sleep away Ramadan days until sunset, and consider ourselves to have fasted. We drape women in black by force of law, and call them chaste, modest, God-fearing.

So who is it that is targeted here? What is the purpose of this engine, and for whose protection was it created? Is it for little Zeina, who comes home from school having heard an unfamiliar word, and upon seeking enlightenment, is told that the knowledge she desires is contraband of the three-star variety? She hears it again in her Muslim community, this time attached to "Lot" and "pillar of salt" and "fire and brimstone", and that becomes the sum of her experience?

On a secular level, this has tones of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron for me. It is a way of handicapping our minds, by having something do the deciding for us, and by instructing us where no instruction is needed, and where it should be unwelcome. But apparently, somebody has decided that there is need for this, this gatekeeper.

Repeat after me, Muslim world: tempt me not challenge me not put on my blinkers prescribe the world to me and I will swallow it whole.

تمت

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