Peace TV

Peace TV launched from Dubai on January 21, 2006, an English-language satellite channel built around Zakir Naik's own comparative religion lectures and the question and answer sessions that had already made him a well known speaker at live events across South Asia and the Gulf. The format translated directly to television: long lecture segments followed by audience questions, delivered free to air so that anyone with a satellite dish, anywhere the signal reached, could watch without a subscription.

The channel expanded by language rather than by format. An Urdu version launched in 2009 to reach South Asian audiences more directly in their own language, followed by a Bangla channel on April 22, 2011 aimed specifically at Bengali-speaking viewers in Bangladesh and eastern India. A Chinese-language version followed in 2015, broadcasting for several years before its later closure. Each new language channel carried largely the same lecture-and-answer format that had defined the original English broadcast, extended to new audiences rather than reimagined for them.

By its own network's reported figures, Peace TV reached roughly 200 million viewers across more than 200 countries at its broadest extent, spanning Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and North America on free-to-air satellite distribution. That reach, built from a single Dubai studio and one founder's lecture format, made Peace TV one of the most widely distributed religious broadcasting networks covered anywhere in this atlas, in the same category of scale as far older and more institutionally established broadcasters.

No broadcaster in this atlas has drawn as many separate national bans as Peace TV, and each one is a matter of dated public record rather than a single continuous controversy. India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting banned the channel in December 2012, citing the network's failure to register with Indian regulators and content it judged not conducive to the country's security environment, a full four years before the separate 2016 action against the channel's parent organization. Bangladesh banned the channel in July 2016, days after a terror attack in Dhaka in which investigators reported a connection between one attacker and Naik's online presence, a link Bangladeshi authorities cited directly in their broadcast ban.

The United Kingdom's regulatory record is the most extensively documented, because Ofcom, its broadcasting regulator, issues formal published rulings. Ofcom found the channel in breach of content standards in 2012 over statements concerning apostasy, and again in July 2019 over three separate programs found to breach the regulator's hate speech rules. Peace TV surrendered its UK broadcast licence in 2020, following a 300,000 pound fine, rather than continue contesting the finding. Sri Lanka ordered cable operators to remove the channel in May 2019 following the Easter Sunday bombings that year, and Canada banned it in November 2022.

None of these actions removed Peace TV from the air. The network continues broadcasting from its original Dubai base, reaching an estimated 200 million viewers in the many countries that have not restricted it, and remains accessible by app even in some jurisdictions where terrestrial or cable carriage has been withdrawn. What the regulatory record shows is not a network shut down but a network whose reach is now defined almost as much by where it has been excluded as by where it still broadcasts freely.