Telling the Truth, Facing the Whip

A week ago yesterday I was supposed to appear at the Sahafa police station to receive 75 lashes on my back. I had been sentenced by a religious court because of articles I had written calling for freedom of speech and criticizing Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia's official religious doctrine. At the last minute, I decided not to go to the police station and undergo this most humiliating punishment. With the nation at a virtual standstill for the holiday Id al-Fitr, the sentence remains pending. I will leave this matter to fate.

Even before the attacks on foreign housing compounds in Riyadh in May, many writers and intellectuals in the kingdom, myself included, were being bombarded with letters and e-mail and telephone messages full of hate. We still receive death threats from Al Qaeda sympathizers. I have informed the Saudi authorities of the threats and provided them with the names and numbers of some of the people involved, against whom I have also filed a lawsuit. So far, no official action has been taken.

The most recent government crackdown on terrorism suspects, in response to this month's car-bombing of a compound housing foreigners and Arabs in Riyadh, is missing the real target. The real problem is that Saudi Arabia is bogged down by deep-rooted Islamic extremism in most schools and mosques, which have become breeding grounds for terrorists. We cannot solve the terrorism problem as long as it is endemic to our educational and religious institutions.

Yet the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs have now established a committee to hunt down teachers who are suspected of being liberal-minded. This committee, which has the right to expel and punish any teacher who does not espouse hard-core Wahhabism, last week interrogated a teacher, found him "guilty" of an interest in philosophy and put on probation.

During the holy fasting month of Ramadan, imams around the country stepped up their hate speech against liberals, advocates of women's rights, secularists, Christians and Jews — and many encouraged their congregations to do the same. I heard no sermons criticizing the people responsible for the attacks in Riyadh, in which innocent civilians and children were killed. The reason, I believe, is that these religious leaders sympathize with the criminals rather than the victims.

I cannot but wonder at our officials and pundits who continue to claim that Saudi society loves other nations and wishes them peace, when state-sponsored preachers in some of our largest mosques continue to curse and call for the destruction of all non-Muslims. As the recent attacks show, now more than ever we are in need of support and help from other countries to help us stand up against our extremist religious culture, which discriminates against its own religious minorities, including Shiites and Sufis.

But we must be aware that this religious extremism, which has been indoctrinated in several Saudi generations, will be very difficult to defeat. I know because I once espoused it. For 11 years, from the age of 16, I was a Wahhabi extremist. With like-minded companions I set fire to video stores selling Western movies and even burned down a charitable society for widows and orphans in our village because we were convinced it would lead to the liberation of women.

Then, during my second two-year stint in jail, my sister brought me books, and alone in my cell I was introduced to liberal Muslim philosophers. It was with wrenching disbelief that I came to realize that Islam was not only Wahhabism, and that other forms preached love and tolerance. To rid myself of the pain of that discovery I started writing against Wahhabism, achieving some peace and atonement for my past ignorance and violence.

And that is what Saudi Arabia, as a nation, also needs: a rebirth. We need to embrace the pain of it and learn how to accept change. We need patience and the ability to withstand the consequences of our crimes over the past two decades. Only when we see ourselves the way the rest of the world sees us — a nation that spawns terrorists — and think about why that is and what it means will we be able to take the first step toward correcting that image and eradicating its roots.

What are the chances of such a change occurring? Some of the younger generation of princes, including Abdul Aziz, son of the ailing King Fahd, have been trying to create alliances between the liberal and the religious wings of society, which could possibly play a pivotal role in the future of the country. But can any of these young men become a truly great leader like the country's founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, or his son King Faisal?

Those in charge must realize that to avert disaster we will have to pay the expensive price of reforms, to be ready to live with the sacrifices that starting over entails. Only then will I be hopeful of the future of my country.

Mansour al-Nogaidan is a columnist for the newspaper Al- Riyadh. This was translated by Faiza Saleh Ambah from the Arabic.

The Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why [Long but interesting]
New York Times Magazine ^ | 3/7/04 | Elizabeth Rubin
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1091793/posts

(snip)
Mansour is a small, roundish man, with intense, protruding eyes and a gentle voice. He pouts and broods and smiles like a child. He's the vexing kid who never stops asking why. That constant questioning is what got him into Islamic radicalism and got him out if it -- and landed him in prison six times during the last 15 years.

He now lives alone in a studio in a small peach-colored building with a marble facade in a suburb of Riyadh. It's sparsely furnished with a bed, desk and a computer. Books that just four years ago he would have considered heretical are now piled up along the wall -- the banned novels of Turki al-Hamad, a liberal reformist from Mansour's hometown, Buraida; ''Religions of the World''; texts by Nietzsche and Habermas; and a book of Michelangelo's art. He also keeps a CD-ROM, ''Fatwas of Ibn Tamaya,'' the 14th-century scholar and eminence grise of Wahhabism, upon whom much of Saudi law is based. Mansour is locked in an intellectual battle with Ibn Taimaya, finding in his fatwas justification for terrorism. Most dear to him these days, however, is a biography of Martin Luther, which surprised and inspired him. For Martin Luther was not what Mansour had expected -- a soft messenger of God. Instead, Mansour discovered that Luther was tough and cruel with his enemies.

Mansour himself is attacked on all sides for his raw, brazen writing. I met him in December, when the capital was on high alert for terrorist attacks. Police checkpoints were sprouting up randomly in the middle of traffic. Hotels and government ministries were ringed with concrete barricades. A few weeks earlier, during the fasting month of Ramadan, militants sped through the gates of a residential compound just beneath one of the hilltop royal palaces in an S.U.V. packed with explosives. It detonated and killed 17 mostly foreign Arab workers and their families.

Mansour had just spent five days in prison for his recent anti-Wahhabist writing, and he told me that he often turns for strength to a story about Luther and Erasmus during the Protestant Reformation. ''When Erasmus told Luther to calm down and be polite,'' Mansour said, ''Luther told Erasmus: this is war.''

Mansour is in a virtual war. Jihadi sympathizers routinely flood his e-mail and cellphone text messages with death threats and insults. Earlier last year, Mansour replied in kind -- calling one jihadi the Arabic word for ''bitch.'' Insults are punishable by lashings under Islamic law, and the recipient of Mansour's retort filed a complaint with the judicial authorities, who are all Wahhabi scholars in law. In fact Mansour's curse was a pretext for the plaintiff and judge to threaten him for his recent heretical writings. When the confrontation came to a head, Mansour was sentenced to 75 lashes. Feeling desperate, alone and defenseless -- Saudis in such cases have no right to an attorney -- Mansour published an Op-Ed essay in the The New York Times. It appeared the day after Thanksgiving, during the festival Id al-Fitr, the feast that ends Ramadan fasting. In it he told the world that though the Saudi government was cracking down on terrorists, they were missing the real culprit.

''Saudi Arabia is bogged down by deep-rooted Islamic extremism in most schools and mosques,'' he wrote. How can officials claim Saudi society ''loves other nations,'' he asked, when state-sponsored preachers ''continue to curse and call for the destruction of all non-Muslims?'' He appealed to the world ''to help us stand up against our extremist religious culture.'' He dared his fellow Saudis to ''see ourselves the way the rest of the world sees us -- a nation that spawns terrorists -- and think about why that is and what it means.'' Only then ''will we be able to take the first step toward correcting that image and eradicating its roots.''

A few days later, the police showed up at the newsroom of Al Riyadh and ushered Mansour to jail. Mansour had made such criticisms before in various autobiographical essays published in the Saudi press and on popular Saudi Internet sites. But this was different. As Mansour recalled, the judge shouted, ''How did you dare to write in the enemy's newspaper?''

Not everyone in the Saudi establishment wanted Mansour silenced. As Khalil al-Khalil, a prominent expert on Islamic law, told me, ''Mansour has the guts to criticize some of the unquestioned ideas here because he cares about the future of the country.'' Jamal Khashoggi, a former editor of Al Watan, the most progressive newspaper in the country, and now a media consultant to the Saudi ambassador in London, explained: ''Mansour comes from the hard-core camps. He knows their narrow minds. That's what makes the clerics so angry. Every ideological movement hates the breakaway, the traitor.''

Mansour's views seem to be known throughout Saudi Arabia to anyone who reads. You can hear everything about him these days: that he's a bright young hope, a loser, an apostate. He's hated, adored, written off as an extremist who is now simply embracing the opposite extreme. A Saudi mother with a teenage son told me Mansour's Op-Ed had given her so much hope that she printed it out from the Internet and carries it in her purse to ensure all her friends read it. A year ago, three of the most radically extremist sheiks -- who are independent from the state clergy -- put out the word on the Internet and in mosques that Mansour al-Nogaidan rejected fate (up there with rejecting God) and believed in a new ''humanist'' Islam, and they asked God to destroy him. ''If there is Islam in this country, he must be put to the sword,'' they decreed. Neither the Ministry of the Interior nor the official Wahhabi clerics denounced the death threat. Instead, they banned Mansour from writing.

Mansour is still on salary at Al Riyadh, though since his Times Op-Ed he cannot publish there, or anywhere else in the kingdom. If he does, the authorities have threatened to imprison him and take away his passport. So in the tradition of dissidents from repressive countries throughout the world, Mansour has chosen to keep his voice alive through the Western media -- both as a matter of liberal principle and as a safeguard against being forgotten and left to languish in prison.

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