A Saudi blogger was freed on Tuesday, 20 months after he was detained for publishing an imaginary conversation with Islam’s Prophet Mohammad on Twitter, his friend and a lawyer said, though there was no confirmation from the government. Hamza Kashgari fled Saudi Arabia for Malaysia in February last year after his tweets enraged some conservative…
A few women filmed themselves driving in Saudi cities on Saturday, defying government warnings of arrest and prosecution to take part in a campaign against men-only road rules, activists said. But some others stayed at home, put off by phone calls from men who said they were from the Interior Ministry, reported organisers of the…
Upset at President Barack Obama’s policies on Iran and Syria, members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family are threatening a rift with the United States that could take the alliance between Washington and the kingdom to its lowest point in years. Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief is vowing that the kingdom will make a “major shift” in…
On Thursday, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting at the UN General Assembly in New York with his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif, a Saudi diplomat turned to his Israeli counterpart. “What’s going on here?” he asked. “What do you make of all this?” Over the past week, similar conversations have taken place…
A group of Saudi activists has begun another campaign for the lifting of a ban on women driving, urging women to get behind the wheel on Oct. 26 in defiance, according to its website. The “October 26 Driving” campaign says it has gathered 8,700 signatures for a petition it published on Sept. 21. “If the…
Saudi Arabia’s ban on women driving is not mandated by any text in Sharia, the Islamic legal code which forms the basis for most Saudi law, the head of its morality police told Reuters on Thursday. Sheikh Abdulatif Al al-Sheikh stressed that he has no authority to change Saudi policy on women driving, but his…
Israel’s Walla News site offers a fascinating and, I think, crucial insight (in Hebrew) into the turmoil in Egypt and Syria. It’s by Dror Ze’evi, a professor of Turkish and Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. He writes that the two conflicts, however similar or related they might appear on the surface,…
An international rights group condemned the sentencing of a Saudi Arabian website founder to be whipped 600 times and jailed for seven years for violating Islamic values, saying it undermined the kingdom’s stated support for religious debate. A court in Jeddah handed down the sentence on Raif Badawi, who started the ‘Free Social Liberals’ website…
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