A Turkish court ordered Facebook to close the offending pages in a ruling handed down and threatened to block access to the social network if it doesn't comply.

The ruling comes amid heightened tensions in the Middle East over this month's attacks on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which appears to have been motivated, in part, by the publication's depictions of the Prophet Mohammed.

However the current Turkish have been trying to get Facebook removed from the country for several years and have managed it with similar court rulings before.  Previously they managed to get it banned because of pages which insulted the founder of the modern Turkish state Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.  Although we would suspect that Atatürk would have been mortified about what had been done in his name. Youtube and Twitter were other sites which felt the Turkish government’s wrath for daring to expose government corruption.

In December, police arrested more than two dozen journalists and media executives in a move that the European Union condemned as an attack on the free press.

Earlier this month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would not censor content published in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, adding that the social network would "never let one country or group of people dictate what people can share across the world."

Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post this month that it stood up for this because “different voices — even if they’re sometimes offensive — can make the world a better and more interesting place.”

In the past, however, Facebook has complied with Turkish requests to censor content. In its latest report on government takedown requests, the company said that censorship on the site increased by 19 percent during the first six months of 2014 compared with the previous six-month period. In Turkey, Facebook removed 1,893 "pieces of content," second only to India.