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On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia was elected to the executive board of UN Women, a new body which merges the activities of four previously separate UN agencies – with a vastly increased budget of at least $500m a year.
Saudi Arabia's inclusion in the 41-member board of an… Read more
The extraordinary tale of Walid Husayin, a quiet barber from the West Bank who dutifully went with his family to the mosque every Friday – while secretly posting atheist rants on Facebook – is reported by various news websites this morning, including al-Arabiya.
Among other things, he is said to… Read more
I have written an article for Comment Is Free which pulls together various strands from the Saudi story of the fatwa against female cashiers in supermarkets (which I reported here earlier). My Cif article adds some analysis and discusses the wider implications of the… Read more
More signs of political in-fighting in Libya. Twenty journalists working for al-Ghad publishing company – run by Colonel Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam – have been arrested by the Internal Security Agency during the last few days, though according to AFP, the Libyan leader has now ordered… Read more
I really didn't mean to keep going on about Saudi Arabia but sometimes it's difficult to stop.
The Jeddah-based Arab News has been talking to a Saudi woman who was married at 13 to a man she had never seen (though, helpfully, her mother and sisters were allowed to describe him to her). The… Read more
In 2007, a 22-year-old Egyptian blogger known as Kareem Amerwas given a four-year prison sentence for "spreading information disruptive of public order and damaging to the country’s reputation", "incitement to hate Islam" and "defaming the president of the republic". He was the first… Read more
Considering the general preoccupation with religion in Saudi Arabia, you might think the kingdom has more than enough people willing and able to teach the Qur'an. Not so, according to Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah Hanafy, chairman of the Charitable Society for Holy Qur'an Memorisation in the Mecca… Read more
It looks as though Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti and other top religious scholars in the kingdom have done themselves more harm than good by rushing out a fatwa last week which forbade women from working "in a place where they intermingle with men" (i.e. at the tills in supermarkets).
As I… Read more
Freedom of association – the right of people to get together and organise for a common purpose – is one of the essential building blocks for a free and open society. In most of the Middle East, though, governments seek to restrict civil society activity, as I discussed here and in my book,… Read more
Various news reports today mention that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is claiming responsibility for the crash of a UPS cargo plane at Dubai on September 3, as well as the more recent incidents involving parcel bombs.
The Boeing 747 aircraft had taken off from Dubai 45 minutes before… Read more
ARAB ART ONLINE: Susan Hefuna: Al Sabr Gamil (Patience is Beautiful) 2007. Ink stained on wood 140 x 170 cm. More information | Click to enlarge
