A Turkish teacher has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for insulting Islam with his Twitter handle @__AllahCC__ , the Hurriyet daily newspaper reported on its website.
Ertan P. was sentenced in the eastern province of Muş on charges of “humiliating the religious values accepted by a part of the people.”
Prosecutors accused him of “writing harmful content” and embodying the name of Allah and the Prophet.
The abbreviation CC comes from of the Arabic expression “Celle Celaluhu” (or Jella Jelaluhu), meaning “[Allah’s] glory is so almighty.”
Ertan P. claimed his account had been hacked and appealed against the sentence, Hurriyet said.
“The suspect has accepted the use of the nickname and the posts, but in order to avoid the crime, he said posts could have been written after the account was hacked. It is understood that this claim is unfounded and the investigation files prove him guilty as charged,” the indictment said.
Pretending to tweet as Allah, he wrote: “In my present state of mind, I would not have created the little finger of human beings.”
“Here (heaven) is very safe because there is no police,” he tweeted in reference to police crackdown on protesters during mass anti-government demonstrations in June last year, according to AFP.
Last year a Turkish court sentenced prominent pianist Fazıl Say for re-tweeting a poem by 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam poking fun at the Muslim vision of the afterlife.
The Islamic-rooted government banned Twitter in March after the micro-blogging site was used to spread corruption allegations against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his inner circle.
The ban, which earned Turkey a strong rebuke from rights groups and its Western allies, was lifted two weeks later after the country’s top court ruled that it violated rights.
Citing the same reason, the Constitutional Court on Thursday lifted a similar ban on Youtube, also imposed in March after the website was used to spread damaging leaked audio files from a state security meeting debating possible military action in Syria.
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