Ashraf Fayyad (left): his ideas "do not suit Saudi society"
Ashraf Fayyad, a Palestinian poet and artist incarcerated in Saudi Arabia for the last two years, has now been sentenced to death for "questioning the Divine Self" (i.e. God), according to the Arabic Network for Human...
Blog archive: Saudi Arabia
-
20th November 2015
-
30th September 2015British prime minister David Cameron receiving a decoration from King Abdullah in 2012. The award, The Order of King Abdul Aziz, is given to foreigners for "meritorious service" to the kingdom. Not only are many Saudis jumpy about their incautious King Salman, the world surrounding the Gulf...
-
24th September 2015The municipal elections in Saudi Arabia scheduled for December will be the first in which women have been allowed to take part. Now that registration of voters and candidates has closed it is possible to get a clearer picture of the actual levels of female participation. Across the kingdom,...
-
15th September 2015A lot of misinformation is being circulated about the crane accident on Friday which killed more than 100 people at the Grand Mosque in Mecca during a storm. Several spurious claims have gained credence simply because no one bothered to check them against the abundant photographic evidence. One...
-
13th September 2015More than 100 people died on Friday when a crane toppled over during a storm and crashed on to the Grand Mosque in Mecca. An engineer on the construction site around the mosque described this as an act of God. "It was not a technical issue at all," he told Agence France...
-
3rd September 2015For the first time in Saudi Arabia's history, women will be allowed to take part in municipal elections scheduled for December. The big question, though, is how many will actually do so. With only 11 days left in the voter registration process, it seems that women have not exactly been queueing...
-
26th August 2015Women have been excluded from previous municipal elections With municipal elections scheduled for December, Saudi women have begun registering to vote for the first time in the kingdom's history. Although the elections themselves are not particularly significant, the inclusion of women as...
-
27th July 2015In an Orwellian twist of logic, Gulf states are once again pushing to restrict religious freedom under the guise of promoting tolerance, combating extremism and protecting human rights. At a conference in France at the weekend, a Saudi official from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs called for...
-
20th July 2015Recent night-time pictures of the White House illuminated in rainbow colours, plus millions of rainbow-tinted profile photos on Facebook, have alerted Saudi Arabia's religious police to a previously unrecognised peril in their midst: the discovery that "emblems of homosexuality" are on public...
-
5th July 2015King Salman: which way will he jump? Short of nuclear war, it is difficult to envisage a more cataclysmic event in the Middle East than the collapse of Saudi Arabia. The centrality of Saudi Arabia in Islam, in the global economy and in the region itself, would make turmoil in the kingdom...
-
29th May 2015When making policy decisions it is generally a good idea to have as much input as possible from the people who are going to be affected. Listening to a broad range of views – not just those you want to hear – may seem like an unnecessary nuisance but it usually results in more workable policies...
-
21st May 2015Saudi newspapers are prominently reporting a speech given by King Salman yesterday, in which he made a series of absurd claims: The Saudi government guarantees freedom of expression. Saudi Arabia respects other religions. The law does not discriminate between Saudi...
