An İstanbul court on Friday sentenced a YouTube host and his guest to seven months in prison but ordered their release due to time served, ending their detention over a joke that prosecutors said mocked a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, Turkish Minute reported.
Boğaç Soydemir, the host of the popular YouTube program “Soğuk Savaş” (Cold War), and his guest Enes Akgündüz had been jailed since late September on charges of “inciting hatred and enmity or insulting a segment of the public” under Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code.
The İstanbul court found both men guilty but ruled that their time spent in pretrial detention be counted toward their sentence and ordered their release.
During the hearing Soydemir said he had apologized publicly after realizing the phrase used in the broadcast was a hadith, or saying of the Prophet, and denied any intent to offend. “There was no planned or deliberate act before or after,” he said.
Akgündüz also denied wrongdoing, telling the court that he did not know the phrase cited in the show was religious. “If I had known it was a hadith, I would never have joined the program. I’m a Muslim, and I would never mock my faith,” he said.
Prosecutors had sought sentences of up to four-and-a-half years for both men after they were detained on September 23 and subsequently arrested, following a segment of the show in which Soydemir read a viewer-submitted joke that played on the saying “Alcohol is the mother of all evils,” commonly cited as a hadith. The punchline added a sexual pun that critics said amounted to an insult of Muhammad.
Soydemir later apologized on social media and removed the clip, saying he misunderstood the phrase as a wordplay rather than a religious reference.
Soydemir, known online by the username “Educatedear,” is a social media influencer. Like Soydemir, Akgündüz is also a well-known content creator.
“Soğuk Savaş” has around 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube.
Turkey is a predominantly Muslim but officially secular country, though authorities frequently pursue cases against public figures over comments about Islam, Islamic law or the Prophet.
In a similar development earlier in the summer, five staff members of the LeMan satirical magazine were arrested over a cartoon in its June 26 issue that allegedly insulted religious values by depicting the prophets Muhammad and Moses. Four of them were released under judicial supervision by a court in late September.
In recent years Turkey has tightened control over digital platforms through laws expanding state oversight of online content. Authorities regularly block access to websites, investigate social media posts and sanction platforms for failing to comply with content removal orders.
Turkey was ranked the lowest-scoring country in Europe for online freedoms, according to a report from the Washington-based Freedom House last October. Turkey has a score of 31 in a 100-point index, with scores based on a scale of 0 (least free) to 100 (most free) and is listed as “not free.”
