The Right to be Forgotten: an Islamic Perspective

Abstract

In a landmark 1994 case, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that individuals had the right to ask for Internet links that contained certain information about them to be delisted by search engines. This came to be known as the “right to be forgotten.” This paper discusses the extent to which this right is consistent with the Islamic tradition. Following an overview of some aspects of the right to be forgotten and why it is endorsed in the European Union with its emphasis on privacy but not in the USA with its exaltation of free speech, the paper discusses two related issues: (1) elements in the Islamic tradition potentially conducive to endorsing a particular understanding of the right to be forgotten and (2) some possible obstacles from that tradition that could challenge the recognition of this right from an Islamic perspective. The paper concludes that despite some challenges, including Qur’anic verses and certain views, activities, and institutions, the right to be forgotten is defendable from within the Islamic tradition by reference to the principle of satr, which breaches that one should not seek to publicize personal information that causes harm to other people or even to oneself. The paper seeks to contribute to discussions on this new right by showing what a religious tradition such as Islam can offer to them.

Introduction

In a landmark 1994 case, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU, hereafter the court) ruled that each individual had the right to ask for Internet links that contained certain information about him or her to be delisted by search engines. This came to be known as the “right to be forgotten.” This paper asks a straightforward question: is the right to be forgotten consistent with the Islamic tradition? To answer this question, the paper begins, in part 2, with a brief overview of some of the issues that were raised in the context of debating this right in the European Union and the USA. Specifically, it discusses how this right benefited from the status that privacy has in the EU, whereas in the USA, its endorsement is impeded by the belief that it contradicts the right to freedom of expression, a constitutional right that the American political culture cherishes. In part 3, the paper discusses two questions: Are there ideas in the Islamic tradition that can lend support to any understanding of the right to be forgotten, and under what conditions? What are some possible obstacles from that tradition that could impede the recognition of this right from an Islamic perspective? The paper concludes that the right to be forgotten can be defended from within the Islamic tradition by relying on the notion of satr, namely, refraining from searching for and publicizing whatever could harm other people’s reputation, with harm aversion being another principle of the Islamic worldview.

The Right to be Forgotten

In 2014, the court made a landmark ruling endorsing the right of a Spanish citizen—Mario Costeja González—to request that a search engine (Google) remove links to a previous debt on which he had defaulted and later settled.¹ Citing articles from the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the EU’s 1995 Data Protection Directive,² the ruling stated that the “right to erasure” applied to Internet links containing personal information that was “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive,” absent an overriding public interest. The court accepted that the public had a right to remain informed, but it stated that this right must be balanced against the privacy and interests of individuals. The right that this ruling established came to be known as the “right to be forgotten,” a right that came to be associated with two other rights—the right to privacy, which is used to support it, and the right to freedom of expression, which is used to challenge it.³

Procedurally, to exercise this right, a European citizen (the “data subject”) would need to initiate a request to the relevant search engine—which, under the court’s ruling, is treated as a data controller that processes personal data (Antani, 2015)—demanding the delisting (or deindexing) of certain search results that mention him or her by name. This usually involves filling out a certain online form.⁴ The search engine will look into the request and decide whether the specified links should be deleted in compliance with the ruling of the court. If the search engine does approve the request and remove the link, that would be the end of the matter. If not, however, the requestor can appeal to the relevant “supervisory authority” and take legal action against the search engine should this appeal fail.

What we are dealing with then is a right that is particularly related to a specific technological invention, that is, the Internet and some of the software associated with it, such as search engines. Today, personal information is much easier to find, whereas in the pre-Internet world it was “scattered, forgettable, and localized” (Lavelle, 2018, 1117). The speed with which personal information now spreads and the ease of finding it with the help of sophisticated tools such as search engines have raised challenges that individuals and communities never faced before. This, of course, is an issue that the law cannot ignore for long. Yet the court’s ruling has stirred controversies worldwide about the meaning, scope, feasibility, and applicability of the new right. The following section presents some of these discussions.

Meaning and Scope of the Right to be Forgotten

Simply put, the right to be forgotten is the right of individuals to request the deletion of search engine links to information about them when this information is no longer “relevant” or is “excessive.”⁵ Here, it does not really matter whether the published information—which was at one point already published and accessible to the public—is true or otherwise, or whether it causes harm to the requestor. In this sense, the right to be forgotten must be distinguished from other things. It is to be set apart, for instance, from defamation, which deals with the deliberate and malicious publication of false information about someone or the failure to ascertain its truthfulness. It is also to be distinguished from the “right to erasure of personal data”—whereas the latter right deals with data that was processed illegally or the publication of which lost a previous consent by the data subject, the right to be forgotten deals with data that is accurate and that has been legally collected and published (Werro, 2020).⁶ This distinction is important because the right to be forgotten could easily be confused with the “right to oblivion,” which requires making certain information fully and permanently inaccessible (Lavelle, 2018). Put differently, whereas under the right to be forgotten links containing certain personal information remain operative but are removed from the search results using a specific name, under the “right to erasure,” the original publisher of that information would be required to remove links to this data altogether (Şchiopu, 2020). In other words, the right to be forgotten does not actually delete information from the Internet altogether, but only makes it harder to find through search engines (Lavelle, 2018).⁷ This explains why the court only speaks about one particular consideration relating to the new right, that is, whether the public has an interest in the information contained in the removed links. It does not speak, however, of the freedom of expression of the publisher of that information.⁸ For this reason, it has been suggested that the right to be forgotten should be accurately called the “right to be delisted on search engines” or the “right to dereferencing” (Şchiopu, 2020).⁹ Be this as it may, it is precisely because of this confusion between the right to be forgotten, on the one hand, and the right to erasure or oblivion, on the other hand, that the former is thought by some to be irreconcilable with free speech, as will be discussed in more detail later.

It is noteworthy that according to how this right is implemented in the EU, search engines now play a role that courts would typically play; that is, define relevance, excessiveness, and public interest, and, consequently, decide what remains online and what cannot (Friesen, 2020).¹⁰ Unfortunately, while we do know that European subsidiaries of search engines have been receiving, since 2014, thousands of requests from European citizens demanding to “be forgotten,” we do not have specific information on the kind of data that these citizens ask to delist, and how search engines decide on each case. In fact, it has been noted that not only are “relevance,” “excessiveness,” and “public interest” obviously subjective terms, but that even the very definition of a “search engine” is “ambiguous and broad” (Kerr, 2016).¹¹ It is precisely because of this vagueness that a Dutch commentator on the ruling argued that the application of the new right would necessarily require “concretization at a national level,” which defeats the goal of standardizing the European approach towards this issue (Verheij, 2016)¹² and, a fortiori, globally. This leads us to the next discussion on the feasibility and applicability of the right to be forgotten.

The Feasibility and Applicability of the Right to be Forgotten

One of the most important criticisms of the right to be forgotten is that it is nearly impossible to implement fully unless the delisting of certain information is both complete and comprehensive. This, however, is not the case. Not only did the court not request that information be removed from the Internet altogether, but it even failed, to the dismay of the supporters of the new right, to order search engines to delist links to the information worldwide. Under the court ruling, search engines need to remove links from their specific national or regional domains; for example, Spain in the case of González. This has rendered the right to be forgotten largely symbolic and effectively useless. Even when an individual’s request for delisting is granted, Internet users can still easily find information about her or him by using other search keywords, or by using a virtual private network (VPN) application to bypass the specific domain from which the relevant links have been deleted (for example, finding information about an EU citizen on a non-EU or a global domain) (Friesen, 2020). Having realized this loophole in the ruling, France did indeed try in 2015 to compel Google to apply the right to be forgotten globally by delisting links in all its domains worldwide, a request that Google challenged and the court rejected in 2019 (Friesen, 2020; Stewart, 2018).¹³

This disinclination to attempt to enforce the right to be forgotten globally has to do with the fact that the court does not have jurisdiction outside the EU anyway. Against this “unterritoriality” of the court’s jurisdiction, the Internet is “transnational” in nature (Erdos, 2021). Given that personal data is now unterritorial, it has been rightly concluded that “only a global application of EU data protection law can guarantee an effective enforcement of privacy rights” (Fabbrini and Celeste, 2020, 56). This global application requires some degree of agreement on the need for and usefulness of the right to be forgotten. This agreement seems to be difficult—perhaps even impossible—notably because the right to be forgotten is deemed to be in conflict with another right that is considered close to being absolute in some parts of the world, namely, the right to freedom of expression, to which we now turn.¹⁴

The Right to be Forgotten vs. the Right to Freedom of Expression

Perhaps the biggest challenge to the right to be forgotten is that it is thought to contradict the right to free speech, a right that is recognized, even if only theoretically, in most parts of the world. Some commentators have argued that the right to be forgotten is tantamount to censorship, especially if the person requesting the removal of links to news about him or her is a public figure. For others, it obviously conflicts with the right to obtain information from public sources, as a former Advocate General at the court is reported to have said (Şchipou, 2020). Here, having access to information is considered an essential requirement for the effective exercise of free speech.¹⁵ Some people went so far as to argue that “history is a human right” and that the right to be forgotten is bound to create “memory holes” similar to what used to happen before the age of the Internet (Antani, 2015). On this view, opinions necessarily include “memories of past events,” which establish a “right to memory” for each human being that he or she would need in order to be able to exercise their right to free speech (De Baets, 2016).¹⁶ Furthermore, it has been argued that, in a free society, people have the “right to know the truth” (De Baets, 2016), which would be jeopardized by the right to be forgotten precisely because it does not deal with information that is false (but is only deemed no more “relevant”). Human right activists have warned that some governments may use the right to be forgotten to request the global erasure of information and opinions that expose their abuses of human rights (De Baets, 2016). Likewise, security experts have voiced concern that the right to be forgotten will allow terrorists “to hide behind a process by which they can easily delete data that was not so easily removable before [the right to be forgotten]” (Goldfield, 2020).

Now, if the right to be forgotten is considered incompatible with the right to free speech, how is it possible that it be recognized in the EU? Specifically, why would it find a favorable environment in the EU but not in the USA, for instance, which has a common tradition with Europe and belong to the same “free world”? The next section discusses how Europe’s appreciation of the “right to privacy” has made it possible for it to adopt the right to be forgotten, whereas in the USA, where the right to free speech is almost consecrated, the status of the right to privacy remains largely uncertain. The discussion of this difference in the next section aims to shed more light on other aspects of the right to be forgotten and how it may be served or impeded by certain values.

The Right to be Forgotten Between the Right to Privacy and the Right to Free Speech: Europe vs. the USA

A scholar has once noted that “[w]hen it comes to the Internet, many U.S. citizens want to be famous, while most Europeans want to be forgotten” (Stewart, 2018, 850). Regardless of how accurate this statement may be, it seems to capture an important difference between Europe and the US. In continental Europe, the right to be forgotten was associated from the outset with the right to privacy, which—“embarrassingly difficult to define” (Whitman, 2004: 1153) as it may be—is regarded as an overarching right that aims to protect the dignity and honor of individuals, a basic requirement of which is to be free from shame and humiliation, but also to have full control over one’s public image,¹⁷ as well as one’s personal data.¹⁸ This idea is so entrenched in continental Europe that an individual’s right to privacy would even trump another individual’s right to property, even when one willingly compromises their privacy (Whitman, 2004).¹⁹ Seen from this perspective, the right to be forgotten is considered essential for realizing and consolidating individual honor and autonomy, not only by maintaining a dignified image in society, but also by exercising what has been described as the right to “informational self-determination” (Correia et al., 2021b). In a powerful expression of the centrality of dignity in Europe, it is argued that while individuals can be free to surrender their liberty, they are not free to surrender their dignity (cited in Whitman, 2004: 1193). In a particular sense, then, privacy is not only a right as such in the EU, but also a duty.

In the USA, on the other hand, establishing the right to privacy was not an easy task,²⁰ for the US Constitution does not even mention the word privacy. To be sure, privacy rights have been acknowledged in the USA at various judicial levels. In a case that involved credit report agencies, for instance, the US Supreme Court ruled that a key factor in deciding whether to favor freedom of expression in cases of a person’s creditworthiness or his or her right to protect their reputation was whether the information at hand was a “matter of public concern.”²¹ In another case, Florida Star,²² the US Supreme Court did not rule out the possibility of censoring truthful information in the presence of “a state interest of the highest order” (Shuntich, 2016).²³ At the state level, a California court decided in one case that protecting the plaintiff’s privacy was a requirement to “pursue and obtain safety and happiness,” something that the state’s constitution guaranteed.²⁴ These cases aside, it has been argued that it is simply wrong to think that Americans do not care about privacy as much as the Europeans do, but it is true that their understanding of privacy differs, perhaps significantly, from the continental European understanding. Specifically, whereas privacy to continental Europeans reflects the right to control one’s image, reputation, and dignity, the main threat to which comes from the media, to Americans it is meant to protect them from the intrusion of the state in their homes (Whitman, 2004).²⁵ Privacy then is meant to serve two different purposes in the USA and Europe, and the threat that it faces in each of them comes from two different directions.²⁶ Be this as it may, the right to privacy in the USA, at least outside one’s home, is far from certain and is obviously not comparable to the right to free speech, which is explicitly protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. In contrast, the right to privacy remains an unenumerated one that is relegated to “a second-tier right” (Werro, 2020; Lavelle, 2018).²⁷ Accordingly, it has been argued that the right to be forgotten does not have a future in the USA (Stewart, 2018), or that the USA will have to develop its own version of it if it were to have a future there.²⁸ But in order to do this, the right to be forgotten needs first to be justified from within the existing US legal culture.

Indeed, in the past few years, there have been several attempts by those who wanted to find a place for even a modified version of the EU’s right to be forgotten in the USA. Some scholars have compared the right to personal data to property rights (Tai, 2016).²⁹ It has also been suggested that the right to be forgotten was analogous to copyrights, which, similarly, restrict access to information that would and could otherwise be public, not to information that should not be public to begin with. A third suggestion was to frame the right to be forgotten in terms of “publicity” rather than “privacy” right.³⁰ According to this, an infringement on privacy rights causes emotional harm, whereas an infringement on publicity rights—which was once part of privacy rights before the US courts distinguished between them—causes financial loss (Lavelle, 2018). Seen also as a kind of property right that allows individuals to benefit financially from their own name, data, and image, it is believed that publicity has a better chance of recognition and survival in places where emotional harm is not deemed sufficient to curtail free speech and the associated rights to access and share information (Lavelle, 2018). Interestingly, it has also been suggested that search engines should be treated as credit report agencies since they keep and provide data about the creditworthiness of individuals to third parties (Ardus, 2016a, b).³¹ As has been noted, “[i]f a private individual’s credit report is not a matter of public concern, then perhaps neither is a search result link to an article chronicling old irrelevant debts” (Antani, 2015, 1190). If this were to happen, the same restrictions by which credit agencies must abide will apply similarly to search engines. Finally, in a rather creative view, it has been suggested that since the right to privacy asserts the prerogatives of each individual against their society, it appeals to the idea of individualism that is firmly rooted in the American tradition (Glancy, 1979).

Many of these solutions suggest that for the right to be forgotten to strike root in the US and other countries that elevate the right to free speech above other rights, it must be established that the exercise of that right would have a particular value, or perhaps economic and financial repercussions.³² In fact, it has been argued that the difference between the EU and USA is actually based on economic rationales more than anything else and that there is a “correlation between a state’s treatment of the right to be forgotten and the importance its legal systems give to capitalism and free market ideas” (Werro, 2020, 2). Here, it is emphasized that most search engines are run by American companies. These companies seek to generate revenues and make profits, primarily from the advertisements that they publish. This, however, depends on the availability of information in the “organic” links (links that relate to what people actually search for) that make some search engines more attractive to Internet users than others. This means that search engines have a “legitimate interest” in making information available to the public (Lavelle, 2018; Werro, 2020). In other words, when search engines are forced to delist links containing information that Internet users seek, this may turn the users away from it, thus affecting its ability to generate revenues from advertisements (Lavelle, 2018). Obviously, this complicates the issue of the right to be forgotten in the USA even more, for someone’s gain is likely to come at the expense of another, which can be a company or any other corporate entity for that matter.

In short, the right to be forgotten has found a place in the EU’s legal system primarily because of the value that the EU gives to the autonomy, privacy, and dignity of each individual. These obviously trump the right to free speech in cases where information is not relevant to the public. In the US, on the other hand, the constitutional right to freedom of expression is paramount and is not constrained by such notions as relevance. Attempts to find grounds other than privacy to establish a version of the right to be forgotten in the USA are likely to succeed only in cases of financial loss. But it is evident that this falls short of covering cases where individuals seek to have their personal information removed from the Internet when they simply find it embarrassing or too personal to be shared with others, even if and when they were responsible for sharing them on the Internet in the first place. The following discussion of some elements of the Islamic tradition suggests that it comes closer to the EU’s vision on this subject, even if on other grounds.

The Right to Be Forgotten and the Islamic Tradition

As used here, the “Islamic tradition” simply means the totality of Muslim views in their engagement with the religious texts. In what follows, it is argued that a certain value that exists in the Islamic tradition, namely, satr, provides a powerful foundation for the endorsement of the right to be forgotten. Next, some possible challenges to the endorsement of the right to be forgotten from within the same tradition are discussed.

Satr: a Branch of the Muslim Faith

The basic meaning of satr (from the Arabic root s-t-r) is to cover. This root is commonly used in Muslim sources to refer to covering one’s private parts, or “covering” other people’s faults and transgressions, in the sense of abstaining from seeking to find or publicize them. The well-known fifth/eleventh century scholar and jurist al-Bayhaqī (2003, 12:154) presented this latter sense of the word as one of the “branches of faith”: a good Muslim is one who does not seek to expose the faults of others if he or she happens to learn about them. Likewise, in a chapter on the proper manners of brotherhood, friendship, and social life, and in another chapter on the “rights of the Muslim,”³³ the celebrated scholar Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) (2005) lists satr as one of the characteristics of a good believer.

To demonstrate the status of satr as an eminent and meritorious Islamic value, Muslim scholars have used Qur’anic verses and Prophetic Hadith (that is, statements attributed to the Prophet Muhammad or reports about his actions). A Qur’anic verse that is typically associated with satr is Q. 24:19: “Indeed, those who like that fāḥisha should be publicized regarding those who have believed will have a painful punishment in this world and the Hereafter.” Although this verse can be read variously,³⁴ Muslim exegetes and scholars have agreed that it warns against spreading the news about others’ moral transgressions. This reading is supported by reports that the verse was revealed on a specific occasion, which the textual context of the verse does support.³⁵ Yet despite the fact that the verse was associated with a specific incident, Muslim scholars, as they habitually did, made a general rule out of it: good Muslims do not spread the news about others’ faults, a generalization that the language of the verse makes possible.³⁶

This understanding was further supported by the many Prophetic traditions that condemn seeking to find out about others’ faults or publicizing them. In one of these traditions, the Prophet is reported to have said that a Muslim who conceals the faults of his brethren, God will conceal his or her faults on the Day of Judgement. In another tradition, a Muslim who covers the sins and lapses of others is likened to one who rescues a girl whose father has buried her alive. In a third tradition, a person tricks another to confess to the Prophet Muhammad that he committed adultery. The Prophet is reported to have said to the former person: “If only you had covered him with your garment!”³⁷ In a more general tradition, the Prophet is reported to have said that “A [good] Muslim is one from whose hand and tongue Muslims are safe” (al-Ghazālī, 2005, 653). Refraining from publicizing other people’s faults, Muslim scholars held, is part of keeping others safe from one’s tongue.

Not only do Muslims need to exercise satr in their relationship with other people, but they must also apply it to themselves as well. Unless his or her transgression relates to the rights of others,³⁸ a person who has committed a sin that others have not found out about is encouraged to abstain from exposing himself and telling others about it. In a Prophetic tradition, the Prophet warns that all Muslims will be forgiven except those who expose their sins. This person, the Prophet explains, commits a sin that God covers on his behalf, yet he wakes up the following morning and exposes himself (al-Bayhaqī, 2003, 12:169–171). In this sense, confession was not typically considered a virtue in the Islamic tradition, unless the right of others is at stake. A Muslim who does expose himself either by committing sins in public or revealing his transgressions (a practice called mujāhara) loses the right of moral immunity from backbiting, even if by revealing his transgressions he does not intend to show contempt to the rules of Islamic ethics or defy God’s laws. In fact, if a Muslim is indifferent about hiding his lapses to the point that he becomes known as a moral transgressor (fājir, fāsiq), he even loses the right to be protected against publicizing his faults by others. In fact, in a Prophetic tradition, he or she is to be exposed so that people learn about their characters and deeds (al-Bayhaqī, 2003, 12:163–169).

This last point, which is integral to the Islamic discourse on satr, may be problematic as far as the right to be forgotten is concerned. An individual who transgresses the boundaries of morality publicly loses the protection that satr provides. This may suggest that a person loses the right to ask for the removal of personal information that he has willingly published online at a certain time of his life. This, however, assumes that a person who is known to be fājir or fāsiq at a certain point of his life remains so until the end of his life. We will see soon that fisq (lack of morality) does not have to be permanent. Accordingly, it may be argued that it does not necessarily contradict the Islamic tradition to say that a person should have the right to ask for the removal of embarrassing or harmful personal materials that he has published online himself if he regrets having published them. In other words, by publishing that information online, an individual may already lose the right to oblivion (since others may still keep a record of his personal materials), but he does not have to lose the right to be forgotten too.

Satr, then, is an Islamic value that can furnish powerful support for the right to be forgotten. Not only does it exhort people to abstain from publicizing what could shame or harm other people, but it also admonishes them to abstain from publicizing their own faults. In this sense, it provides a two-pronged protection to individuals: they are, on the one hand, advised to not share information about themselves that may shame or even criminalize them, and, on the other hand, they are protected against the circulation of this information by others. The only and significant caveat here is that satr was regarded in the Islamic tradition as a religious and moral value, not a legal requirement. Rather than arguing that people who did not exercise satr must be legally prosecuted in this world—except in particular cases, such as the case of accusing others of engaging in illicit sex as will be seen—Muslim scholars thought that satr was a meritorious act that would be rewarded in the Day of Judgment. If this value is translated into law, it can give people the right to ask for the removal of whatever they do not like others to know about themselves from records that are easily accessible by the public, foremost among which today are Internet websites.

This notwithstanding, there are other elements in the Muslim tradition that may pose a challenge to the endorsement of the right to be forgotten from an Islamic perspective. These are discussed in what follows.

Some Challenges to the Right to be Forgotten in the Islamic Tradition

This section discusses some possible challenges to the right to be forgotten in the Islamic tradition, including certain texts, activities, and institutions.

Two Qur’anic verses are potentially problematic in the context of contemplating an Islamic perspective on the right to be forgotten. These are verses 2 and 4 of Surah (chapter) 24, the same Surat al-Nūr that we have encountered earlier.³⁹ Since verse 5 is intricately connected with verse 4, it ought to be mentioned as well. The three verses read as follows:

• 2. The woman or man found guilty of illicit sexual intercourse (zinā), flog each one of them with a hundred lashes, and do not be taken by pity for them in the religion of Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day. And let a ṭā’ifa of the believers witness their punishment.

• 4. And those who accuse chaste people (al-muḥṣanāt) and then do not produce four witnesses, flog them with eighty lashes and do not accept from them testimony ever after. And those are the iniquitous (fāsiqūn, sing. fāsiq).

• 5. Except for those who repent thereafter and reform, for indeed, Allah is forgiving and merciful.

As they stand, these verses can pose obvious challenges to the right to be forgotten. Verse 2 calls on Muslims to witness the punishment of fornicators and adulterers, whereas verse 4 prescribes three punishments for those who accuse others of engaging in illicit sex, including stripping the offenders of their eligibility to give testimony and branding them as iniquitous. In what follows, we discuss how Muslim exegetes and scholars dealt with these two verses.

Verse Q. 24:2 stipulates that the prescribed punishment for the crime of zinā be meted out before a ṭā’ifa of Muslims. In interpreting this verse, Muslim exegetes typically report a disagreement on the minimum number of individuals that make a ṭā’ifa, a word that is typically translated as party or group in English. This translation, however, does not cover all the potential senses of the Arabic word that Muslim exegetes list. According to these exegetes, early authoritative Muslim figures held that the minimum number of individuals that made a ṭā’ifa was two. Others said three, four, or even ten (al-Ṭabarī, 2001, 17:145–149). This notwithstanding, these exegetes also report that the word can refer to one person only, a view that some of them endorse explicitly (al-Ṭabarī, 2001, 17:149). This means that Muslim scholars have allowed for the possibility that one person only, or as few as two or three persons, may witness the punishment of individuals guilty of zinā. This suggests that although some Muslim scholars held that public shaming of fornicators and/or adulterers was an integral part of the punishment, others seem to have had a different view.⁴⁰

Moving on to verses 4 and 5, we find that verse 4 prescribes 80 lashes for those who accuse others—particularly those who are not known to be of ill repute⁴¹—of engaging in illicit sexual relationships without producing the required evidence, an offense that is called qadhf (defamation).⁴² Additionally, these offenders lose the eligibility to give testimony and are declared to be fāsiq (iniquitous, moral transgressor, or evil-doer). Verse 5, however, excludes those who repent.⁴³ Muslim exegetes and legal scholars have disagreed, however, on what this latter verse excludes of the three punishments of sexual defamation mentioned in verse 4. A few scholars held that if an offender repents before he or she is punished, they are absolved from the three punishments, including the scourging. Most scholars, however, held that the exception applied to both the second and third punishments, or to the third punishment only. On the former view, slanderers who have sincerely repented regain their credibility and eligibility to be considered trustworthy witnesses. On the latter view, however, they regain their moral integrity and are not considered iniquitous anymore (which demonstrates that fisq does not have to be a permanent status, as intimated earlier), but their testimony remains unacceptable nevertheless.⁴⁴ The obvious problem here is that a person who is branded as fāsiq must be known because this status comes with certain religious, social, and legal disabilities, even, in some opinions, if that person repents. Those scholars who decided that repentance was sufficient to rehabilitate the offender fully obviously sought to allow him to reintegrate into the community by benefiting from the “legal forgiveness” to which repentance entitles him or her. Remarkably, it is reported that the majority of Muslim scholars held that the exception applied to this part of the punishment too (al-Qurṭubī, 2006, 15:133).⁴⁵

In addition to these verses and traditions, some other elements in the Islamic tradition may pose other challenges to the right to be forgotten. Certain activities in Islamic history required that the reputation of certain individuals be known. An obvious activity was giving testimonies in civil and criminal cases. Before accepting the testimonies of witnesses, Muslim judges were required to ascertain that they were reliable and trustworthy (‘udūl, sing. ‘adl). Being of moral character was part of reliability and trustworthiness. In certain contexts, especially when judges were not appointed from the local population, certain individuals—whose own reliability was beyond question—were in charge of vouching for or against other individuals in the community. This means that the reputation of individuals could at times be a public concern (Tyan, 1960–2005).

Another, perhaps more important activity, even if much less relevant today, was the collection of the Prophet Muhammad’s Hadith, a huge movement that dominated the scholarly and religious life in the Muslim world for most of the third/ninth century onward. Hadith came to be known as “al- ‘ilm” (the knowledge), and because it was considered the second source of Islamic law after the Qur’an, its transmission and collection became the most meritorious activity of the time. Famous Hadith transmitters spent the better part of their lives traveling from one part to another of the large Muslim world at that time to collect Prophetic traditions, which primarily meant hearing them directly from those who possessed them and then transmitting them to others or committing them to write. It was at that time that the most authoritative Hadith collections were compiled.⁴⁶

Obviously, however, for people to accept the transmissions of Hadith transmitters, they needed to make sure that there were reliable. A special group of scholars known as the Hadith critics—who were typically transmitters themselves—took it upon themselves to ascertain that the individuals who transmitted traditions were reliable, which, once more, required that they be morally upright as well as accurate in their transmission. To this end, the Hadith critics needed to collect information about the transmitters and make this known to others. One thing that they disagreed on, however, was whether they only needed to say that a certain person was unreliable, or must reveal what they learned about him that rendered him unreliable to them. The dominant view seems to have been that Hadith critics must disclose what they knew about the Hadith transmitters whose reliability they dismissed.⁴⁷ This was not meant to give those transmitters the chance to respond, but rather to give other Hadith critics the chance to decide for themselves whether they agreed with the reasons on which those critics relied to disqualify certain transmitters. There were certain grounds for disqualification that all critics have agreed on (e.g., if a transmitter was known to drink alcohol, lied to people or cheated them, committed sins in public, or never went to the mosque), but there were other qualities and behavior on which they disagreed. Be this as it may, the point here is that Hadith transmitters did not enjoy the full benefit of satr and would not, in all likelihood, have enjoyed the right to be forgotten as presently understood.

Admittedly, however, Hadith transmission is not particularly relevant today. What remains relevant to this subject, however, is the fact that Hadith transmitters were “public figures,” in the sense that people needed to know them well. In fact, Hadith transmission itself needed to be a public act if traditions were to disseminate or be collected, which was the goal of transmission to begin with. This suggests that the Islamic tradition held that news and personal information relating to at least some public figures should be circulated. Yet again, if we look at the totality of the Islamic tradition, we find other elements that seek perhaps to extenuate this requirement. For example, in a rather problematic tradition that features in the context of discussing Qur’anic punishments, the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said: “Pardon the lapses of ‘dhawī al-hay’āt’, except [in cases involving] the prescribed punishments (ḥudūd).”⁴⁸ This tradition has been interpreted in two different ways. In one interpretation, “dhawī al-hay’āt” is taken to mean people of authority. On this understanding, exposing the lapses of these public figures would undermine their authority, an outcome that people presumably want to avoid, if only for their own interest. In another interpretation, it refers to anyone who is not known for disregarding and disrespecting the teachings of Islam. In other words, it refers to people who are generally known to be morally upright and respectful. In this understanding, what the Prophet wanted to avoid was to make these people despair because of an isolated lapse.⁴⁹ Be this as it may, as it stands, the tradition seems to reinforce the value of satr rather than undermine it.⁵⁰

Finally, it may be suggested that the Islamic injunction to “commanding right and forbidding wrong”—which gave rise to the notion and institution of ḥisba—constitutes a constrain to the principle of satr, for it requires people to call out injustice and misdeeds and hold the perpetrators to account. This is generally true, but it seems to apply primarily to cases when people’s behavior inflicts harm and injustice on others. Yet when it comes to issues that only affect an individual’s moral integrity, a person practicing ḥisba, including official muḥtasibs, has to exercise satr to the extent that is possible. In addition to not being allowed to spy on people, muḥtasibs are required to admonish people before they take action against them and encourage them to avoid situations that make others suspicious of their moral integrity. The only exception to this is perhaps repeated offenders who do not conceal their moral transgressions, an issue that has already been discussed here. The ḥisba literature does not seem to suggest that offenders must always be exposed and paraded. But even if this were to happen, this does not necessarily mean that the past of the offender cannot be forgotten. In theory, the ḥisba institution, too, seems to actually enforce the centrality of satr in Islamic ethics rather than undermine it.⁵¹

Conclusion

The right to be forgotten is here to stay, in one form or another. Even in the USA, it has been argued that “it is only a matter of time before the USA is forced to react to the [French data protection] agency’s extraterritorial reach” (Stewart, 2018, 867). Remarkably, it seems that everybody accepts the very legitimacy of the right—even those who insist that the right to free speech must take precedence over it do not seem to dispute its legitimacy, but only subordinate it to what they regard as more fundamental rights. Yet despite all the ink that has been shed on it, the right to be forgotten “is still not theorized very well” (Tai, 2016). This paper sought to add some other ideas to the discussion from a religious tradition that has a large number of followers worldwide. Particularly, it has sought to show that the right to be forgotten can be discussed independently of other rights. The impasse that the right to be forgotten seems to be facing in Western countries seems to be partly due to the fact that it has derived its legitimacy from another right—namely, the right to privacy—that has a shaky status itself in some of these countries, notably the USA. Furthermore, it is not hard to see why some countries and scholars insist that the right to be forgotten is inconsistent with the right to free speech, which requires, among other things, free access to information, including information that some people may consider private, irrelevant, or even embarrassing.

When it comes to the Islamic tradition, it can simply be argued that Islam obviously shares with continental Europe its emphasis on the honor and dignity of individuals, but also shares with Americans their emphasis on the inviolability of homes. In this sense, privacy in Islam is a right that is exercised in both the public and private spheres.⁵² But perhaps unlike both Europe and the US, Muslims believed that privacy was also a social right, meaning that the society had an interest in keeping things private. So not only are people admonished to not expose the faults of others, but to even refrain from exposing their own faults. And if someone were to reveal his own faults, he is always given the chance to retract to regain their dignity and the dignity of his family, community, and society. Legal forgiveness and the encouragement to exercise satr can play key roles here, but also instrumental is each individual’s right to be able to regain their dignified image in the society by having written or visual materials that could tarnish it removed from the World Wide Web, even if he or she were responsible for publishing them there in the first place.

Yet the Islamic tradition seems to emphasize another element, one that is admittedly part of a particular worldview. This worldview does not approve of sharing personal information that may cause harm, broadly defined, to others. This idea is taken to what may be considered an extreme in other worldviews, that is, one should not even share personal information about oneself. The idea here is that the sharing of this information may prove harmful in the future when the individual is no longer able to remove it from people’s memories (which may be impossible in the age of the Internet), and it may prove harmful to the society if it happens to encourage people to engage in activities that contradict societal norms, religious teachings, or the law. The idea of harm, material or otherwise, is key here, and harm aversion is indeed an integral part of that worldview.⁵³ And it is everyone’s duty to prevent harm to oneself and to others, irrespective of whether these others have specific rights that they can actually exercise.⁵⁴

But similar to rights that can easily conflict with other rights, avoiding one harm can come at the cost of a greater harm, in which case a balancing exercise would be essential. For example, if an individual seeks to remove from the Internet information that is irrelevant to the public, then it does not really matter whether or not he has good reasons to make that request. If, however, the information is relevant to the public, the harm that may befall the individual if the materials were to be left online must be weighed against the harm that may befall the public if kept unaware of that information. But the rule should perhaps be that individuals have the right to ask to be forgotten and that others who want to challenge this rule in a specific case have to prove that that would lead to a harm that is greater than the harm that the concerned individual may endure (such as in cases where a society needs to be protected from a particular individual with a criminal record). Be that as it may, satr is a principle that establishes duties with the aim of preventing harm. But even if satr does not establish rights as such, the harm that the right seeks to avoid would be averted, if the duties that it establishes are fulfilled. The harm here, as has been pointed out, is a comprehensive term that includes material and emotional harm, a point that has an obvious advantage to the effective implementation of the right to be forgotten.

Yet for the right to be forgotten to thrive, it obviously requires global coordination, a fact that the EU has realized but seems unable to do much about. For this to change, more and more countries need to adopt at least some version of this right. Countries where Islam is a or the main source of legislation can easily incorporate this right. Muslim minorities in other countries can also embrace it. These countries and communities, however, do not have to argue for this right with reference to other rights. In fact, it may be tempting indeed to argue that since Islam does emphasize the duty of respecting others’ privacy (Saifee, 2003; Alsheeh, 2004), and since the right to free speech, as currently understood, was virtually absent in the Islamic tradition,⁵⁵ then the right to be forgotten is actually Islamic. This is an understanding that obviously sacrifices free speech and fails to take a critical stance on some elements of the Islamic tradition. A better solution could be using and employing other elements, ideas, and principles from that tradition to avoid this circular way of theorizing rights by reference to other rights. Be this as it may, when an established religious tradition such as Islam can be shown to support the right to be forgotten, this can significantly help in the process of promoting and endorsing it. It also means that attempts to extend the scope of the new right outside the EU (which is, as has been pointed out, the only way to apply it effectively) do not necessarily have to be an act of legal “imperialism” that undermines the “sovereigntism” of other national legal systems (Fabbrini & Celeste, 2020).