“The True Furqan - The 21st Century Quran” – banned in India.
You know who decides what foreign books you should read in India? Surprisingly, it is the serious officers of the Finance ministry who decide about your reading choice. And they in their wisdom have banned the import of the American book “The True Furqan”. Under Section 11 of the Customs Act, the Government has the power to absolutely prohibit the import goods and using this power the Government generally bans import of books. Some of the interesting banned books with the year when they were banned are:-
Title of the book | Year of ban | Title of the book | Year of ban |
|---|---|---|---|
Hindu Heaven by Max Wylie | 1934 | The Face of Mother India by Katherine Mayo | 1936 |
Old Soldier Sahib | 1936 | The Land of the Lingams by Arthur Miles | 1937 |
Scented Garden – Anthropology of Sex life in the Levant | 1945 | Britannia and Eve | 1946 |
Behind the Iron Curtain of Kashmir | 1949 | Khak aur Khoon | 1950 |
Chandramohini | 1952 | Bhupat Singh , a Gujarathi book | 1954 |
Hamara Kashmir | 1954 | American Military aid to Pakistan | 1954 |
What has religion done for mankind | 1955 | Ram Retold | 1955 |
Bhupat Singh | 1955 | The Ramayana by Aubrey Menon | 1956 |
Nine Hours to Rama | 1962 | Desabhimani – a Tamil weekly | 1963 |
Goan Voice | 1964 | The Jewel in the Lotus | 1968 |
Man from Moscow | 1970 | Early Islam | 1975 |
Nehru, a Political biography | 1975 | Who killed Gandhi? | 1979 |
And they are still banned!
The latest ban is on the book The True Furqan. This is a book published in the United States in 1999 and is almost unknown in India. Now the Finance Ministry’s ban is going to make this book quite popular. The True Furqan is a private attempt by evangelical Christian Arabs to convert Muslims to Christianity. It is seen as “a tool to evangelize Muslims”. It was written in Arabic and translated into English.
Does banning a book have any impact in these days of internet explosion? If the book was not banned, in the whole country about 30 copies would have been sold and nobody would have known anything about this. Now the Government’s ban gives so much publicity to the book that people will be tempted to go to the net and find out all about the book. So the effect of the ban will exactly be the opposite of the intention. More people will read the book now than before the ban, more so when the entire text of the book is available on the net – absolutely free! When technology rules, Law should stand in attention and obey – otherwise it will simply be brushed aside.
The import of the book is prohibited to maintain the security of India and the import of any extract, any reprint or translation or any document reproducing any matter contained in the book are also prohibited. Does it include internet? Does downloading the book from internet amount to an offence? And what happens if somebody sends you the copy of the book by e mail? Who is the offender? The sender or the receiver? If it is the receiver, when is he the offender? When he opens the mail or when he reads it? What will happen to his offence if he deletes the message after reading it?
Or is the whole purpose of the ban to stop those thirty copies which would have been imported into India and which for all that you know have already been imported. After all, the book was available for the last six years and nobody simply noticed it.
The ban on the import of the book is effective from 7th September 2005. DDT telephoned a few of Air Customs offices to find out if they were aware of the ban. None claimed any knowledge and like the rest of us they did not know what Furqan was all about and when it was banned. And so if any copies were imported into India in the last two days they would have been happily cleared by Customs!
A friend in Customs asked me for a copy of the notification. I agreed to barter it for a couple of Scotch bottles. “Is there no cheaper way of getting it?’, he asked me. “ It is available absolutely free in our ‘What’s New’ section”, I had to honestly admit to him and losing my scotch!
NOTIFICATION NO. , Dated: September 7, 2005