A Pakistani court has ordered authorities to ban Facebook over a competition encouraging users to post caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed on the social networking site. A Facebook Page – Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! encourages users to draw caricatures of Prophet Mohammed. It is prohibited in Islam to depict the prophet in any form. Lawyer Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali said

“The competition has hurt the sentiments of the Muslims”.

The access to the site will remain blocked till 31st May when the court will begin a detailed hearing into the matter. The page – Everybody Draw Mohammed Day has more than 40k members and apparently the protest page AGAINST “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” has around 60k members and are growing every minute. Many users have also started changing their profile pic to the one beside [this in] order to show protest over the page. Facebook page Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! claims “Hopefully this page will spark serious debates in international forums. This page will continue to exist and the date will remain the same.” The website on the page point to a WordPress blog – everybodydrawmohammedday.wordpress.com which again gives some details about the contest and intention of creation.

Pakistan has around 45 million Facebook users and is it started gaining huge following there (only after Orkut). Facebook has not commented on the issue yet. But one thing looks certain here – Until Facebook removes this page, the ban will remain and could very well spread to other countries in the middle east, But very likely expect Facebook to be  removing this page soon.