Fact Check: Has China lifted ban on Quran following Coronavirus outbreak?
By Satya Priya BN Published on 11 March 2020 5:36 AM GMT
Hyderabad: There has been much misinformation about the deadly Coronavirus which has now reached several countries, including India. A video which claims that China has lifted a ban on the Quran after the outbreak of the virus has been going viral on social media. A Twitter user posted the video with a tweet that read, "The Holy Quran was banned in China. Now the ban has been lifted. Chinese Muslims are allowed to read Holy Quran... Look at the Joy!!! Subhan'Allah (sic)."
The video has been shared on Twitter and Facebook.
Fact Check:
Newsmeter team found that the claim is FALSE. We took keyframes from the video using the Invid tool and performed a reverse image search on Google as well as Yandex, a Russian search engine.
In Yandex, the search fetched several results, some of them dating back to December 2014.
The reverse image search in Google fetched an article from a website named Churchleaders.com which said Bibles were distributed among Christians for the first time in China. The men and women were overcome with joy after embracing the books, it said.
https://churchleaders.com/daily-buzz/285013-chinese-christians-receiving-bibles.html
This website also had a link for a Youtube video on a channel called International Christian Concern. The video was published on 17 March 2014.
We also found another article on a website christianpost.com which was published in January 2014. The article said this video was from the 1980s when Christians in China received the Bible for the first time. However, the video link from this article is NOT working and the video seems to have been deleted.
We are not sure how old this video is or the exact place where it was shot but it is more than six years old. The book we see in the video is most likely the Bible and NOT the Quran. Therefore, the claim that Chinese Muslims are now allowed to read the Quran after China lifted a ban on the holy book after the Coronavirus crisis is FALSE.
