“The competent authorities at the Ministry of Information have been instructed to block a number of sites bearing the name of Bahrain that carry pornographic material and insult Islam,” a ministry statement yesterday said.

The addresses were not mentioned, but the ministry said that it would not allow “suspicious sites that tarnished Bahrain’s reputation abroad and sought to erode the nation’s religious ethics and moral traditions”.

According to the statement, the sites were aiming to spread pornography and debauchery in the Arab and Islamic world.

Other sites doubted the existence of God and attacked the Holy Quran, the ministry said, without providing details.

“The sites were the work of people with an anti-Islamic agenda and who wanted to promote vice and debauchery in the region,” the statement said.

“What made it worse is that they were in Arabic, making them easily accessible to internet surfers and users in the region.”

Information Minister Dr Mohammad Abdul Gaffar said that the decision to shut down the sites was not a measure to curtail freedom of speech.

“There is a need to protect our deep-rooted Islamic and social values, and what we did was not in any way meant to limit the freedom of speech or to curb the right to publish opinions,” he said.

“This is our identity and our way of life, and there can be no compromise on the issue,” he said.

Bahrain has one of the highest internet penetration rates in the region.

In 2003, the kingdom had an estimated 195,000 internet users out of a population of 720,000 people, up from 123,000 in 2002.

About 120,000 people had personal computers.

A 2004 testing by the Open Net Initiative concluded that “at the present time, internet filtering is neither a focus of the Bahraini government nor a major impediment to the efforts of Bahrainis to obtain internet information.”

The testing which focused on material often blocked by Islamic states and on domestic Bahraini political issues, including the state’s human rights record, political opposition, pornography and religious conversion of Muslims, said that “Bahrain’s filtering concentrates on a limited number of sites either because this effort is merely symbolic or because these sites attracted state attention for reasons that are not clear”.

In 2002, Bahrain blocked access to some opposition and other internet sites, claiming that they were inciting sectarianism and carrying offensive content.

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