Anastasia Karklina

Anastasia Karklina, a senior at Duke University, is an international student pursuing a dual degree in Political Science and African and African American Studies. Currently an intern at the Duke’s Women’s Center, Karklina has been engaged with Duke Students for Justice in Palestine, Duke Students for a Democratic Society and the Muslim Student Association. The research in Israel and Ghana described in the article was conducted this past summer with the generous support of the Duke Human Rights Center and the Undergraduate Research Support Office, and Duke’s Muslim Chaplain Abdullah Antepli was her faculty mentor. Karklina aspires to activist scholarship in critical theory and cultural studies.

“Halalgoogling” and the Censorship of Ahmadiyya Islam

As I casually scrolled through my Facebook newsfeed one morning, I stumbled across an Al Jazeera English post linking to an article  on a “Muslim-friendly alternative” to Web searching that filters haram content. Intrigued, I clicked and read on:  functions much like Google or Bing, but with a built-in “advanced special filtering system” that blocks content deemed haram or forbidden in Islam. According to its web site Halalgoogling aims to be the number one search engine in the Muslim community: “Everyone has the right to enjoy the possibilities that the internet offers, …