More on OCR religious studies exams

I have received a very prompt reply to my email to OCR which I posted about here. This is what the board had to say:

Thank you for your email. The claim that candidates must put 'pbuh' after Muhammad is nonsense. OCR will always write 'peace be upon him' after Muhammad in the form of an Arabic colophon as a mark of respect, but we do not expect candidates to do this. A reference to this can be found on page 13 of the OCR
GCSE Religious Studies Notes for Guidance. The article has been removed from the
website www.holford.org.uk/mt.

Yours sincerely,

Libby Wilson
Subject Officer (GCSE Religious Studies)

Initial thoughts: good that it is not required for candidates; can't quite understand why a mark of respect is required.

Update:

The original post on which this blogstorm was based has indeed been taken down. The blogger, David explains:

I have done this for two reasons. First, too many of the comments do not reflect my views. Second, because the underlying information was related to me by a work colleague as being how she was told to inform students in response to my query about this, I have not had an opportunity to check this further with my
department or with OCR. As this is half-term, I may not be able to confirm this for a few days.