Okay, here's my best guess at what's actually going on here. Sorry in advance about the length — it's complicated, but this explanation seems to cover all the bases, at least that I know of.
Pakistan has the largest population of
Ahmadiyya (T-H-L) (more commonly known as "Ahmadi") Muslims in the world. This is a "messianic movement" led by a fellow named
Mirza Masroor Ahmad (T-H-L), whose formal title within the movement is "Caliph," a word which as you all know roughly translates to "leader" or "ruler" in a civil, rather than religious/spiritual sense (though it's also translatable as "successor," as in, "successor to the Prophet").
While a lot of these Ahmadi folks (several million) do live in Pakistan, apparently the Pakistani authorities don't consider them to be Muslims at all, but rather an heretical offshoot at best. And that's not just a prevailing opinion, it's actually the
Second Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan (T-H-L). There's been quite a lot of anti-Ahmadi activity over the years, most recently in Burkina Faso (
Ahmadi version,
non-Ahmadi version) which Wikipedia also covers in its
Persecution of Ahmadis (T-H-L) article. Masroor Ahmad lives in exile in London, because he'd be arrested (perhaps even executed) for heresy if he ever set foot in Pakistan or any other Muslim-governed country.
Meanwhile, at some point late in 2020, someone noticed that when you typed "caliph of islam" into Google, the Wikipedia article on Masroor Ahmad appeared right at the top of the results, because his title is "caliph," and Google's ranking system is, at best, unaware of religious politics, and at worst, utterly moronic. That made Muslims around the world — and especially in Pakistan —
extremely unhappy, resulting in several days of angry SPA edits and
talk-page posts to the Masroor Ahmad BLP and related articles, followed by the article being
protected on Dec. 14. That didn't completely quash the dispute, but it would have made it more "manageable" from the Wikipedian perspective.
As a side-note, Wikipedocracy had
a thread on the subject too, started by Mr. Rhindle on Dec. 23. But probably because the article had already been protected, it didn't look like it would be an ongoing issue. Also, it was Christmas, and we were paying more attention to US political events at that point anyway. So, we moved on. (And yes, obviously,
I blame Trump.)
Needless to say, protecting the article in its more-offensive state didn't solve the problem from the Muslim perspective. The WP editors weren't going to help because as we all know, they don't care about how their own high Google rankings affect the rest of the internet, or the world. With few exceptions, they simply take it for granted that they'll be positioned at the top and don't even think about the ramifications. So at some point during all this, the
Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) was assigned to deal with it on a more official, "top-level" basis, and
on Christmas Day 2020, the PTA issued a
notice to both Google and WP to make it stop, which
explicitly mentions "Wikipedia's portraying Mirza Masroor Ahmad as a Muslim" — the only thing it mentions in relation to Wikipedia.
I believe the Christmas-Day timing of this was both providential and intentional from the Muslim perspective, because they wanted to call as little attention as possible to the situation in the Western media. This would also explain the PTA's failure/refusal to specify the exact nature of the "blasphemous content" they're blocking Wikipedia over right now. They really want the Masroor Ahmad deleted completely, or at worst, have the word "caliph" (and also "leader," ideally) completely excised from the article. But if they say so, that's going to elevate Masroor Ahmad's profile
enormously in the West, especially among right-wingers. As of now, nobody has even heard of this guy, but as soon as the Fox News
et al types realize how much this situation pisses Muslims off, they'll probably drop everything in order to promote the Ahmadiyya movement as a "more reasonable" (i.e., "more West-friendly") alternative to currently-predominant Islamic religious practice, so "why isn't the Biden Administration defending them?" For a preview of
that, there's
this article. (It's a lot like what they tried to do with the
Mojahedin-e Khalq (T-H-L) in neighboring Iran, for example.)
It's possible that this even explains the 48-hour "warning block" tactic, which they also didn't do in 2020, because maybe since then they've developed a clearer understanding of how Western media news cycles work. The 48-hour block was reported in a few places, but since it was "only for 48 hours," no big deal, right? And then when the permanent block happens a few days later, it becomes a case of "oh, that's the same story as last week, we already covered it, no need to run it again."
The other thing that's interesting here is that it looks like
Google tacitly complied with the initial 2020 demand. If you enter "©@⎿!℗ℌ of !$⎩@ℳ" in Google right now (using the actual words instead of the absurd l33t versions I just put in to see if Google would stop blacklisting this page), the Masroor Ahmad Wikipedia article is nowhere to be seen, along with (I suspect) a lot of other pro-Ahmadiyya material. This explains why only Wikipedia is being blocked now — they still want the article gone, or at least heavily redacted, but at least it's not appearing at the top of those Google results for that particular search. And as for the question of "why now," admittedly that's not so clear, but it could just be because the Pakistani economy is in a big slump at the moment and the government badly needs some distractions. And of course, the angry talk page posts are
still going on.
Anyway, the obvious conclusion for our purposes (at least as I see it) is that it really shouldn't be all that big a deal, or even all that hard, for the Wikipedians to fix this in a way that satisfies the demands of the Pakistanis and other Muslims — without necessarily making the article(s) in question "non-neutral" or even inaccurate. All they
really have to do is replace the word "caliph" with a sentence or two explaining that "Masroor Ahmad's title consists of a term that refers to or describes someone who is deemed a responsible authority in civil matters," or something to that effect, and then point out that his use of the term is rejected by mainstream Islam. And then the whole thing would
probably be over.
Will they even consider that? Of course not! Not least because so far, public reaction in the West and even among many Pakistanis is
almost totally on their side. But if I'm right about this and this is all the Pakistanis actually want, then they really should. Deleting the article is probably too much to ask of them (though of course it's what I personally would do), but just removing the word "caliph" is not such an unreasonable demand.
