Tag Archives: Country: Saudi Arabia

Emirates247.com: A well-known Saudi Islamic scholar has issued a new fatwa (edict) saying holding elections for a president or another form of leadership is prohibited in Islam.

Gatestone Institute: Saudi Arabia has officially opened the doors of a controversial new “interreligious and intercultural dialogue center” in the Austrian capital, Vienna. The King Abdullah International Center for Inter-Religious and Inter-Cultural Dialogue was inaugurated during an elaborate ceremony at the Hofburg Palace in downtown Vienna on November 26

Religion Clause Blog: Yesterday, the inauguration ceremony marking the official opening of the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID) was held in Vienna, Austria, the Centre’s home base.  Among those speaking at the opening ceremony was U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (full text of remarks).

Reuters: Saudi judges who enforce sharia (Islamic law) have condemned what they see as “the stench of Western ideas” in sweeping legal reforms pushed by King Abdullah, underscoring friction between government modernizers and religious hardliners.

StCatherinesStandard.ca: Saudi millionaires who flout Canadian laws by arriving with multiple wives will be kicked out if immigration authorities find they lied about their polygamous relationships.

Jerome Corsi at WorldNetDaily: In the interview, Musa Ismail Obama, President Obama’s first cousin in Kenya, told the Arabic-language satellite TV network Al-Jazeera that the Saudi Arabian royal family has developed a strong relationship with the Obama family in their home village of Kogelo in Alego, Siaya District, West Kenya.

AP: Saudi authorities instructed the religious police, run by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, to draw up guidelines to keep individual officers from imposing their personal interpretations of Islamic rules

Washington Times: Since late July Saudi media have been buzzing with reports that a 28-year-old Saudi woman has embraced Christianity and fled the country, staying initially in a church in Lebanon before moving on to Sweden. …

Al Arabiya: Western Michigan University is getting ready for the arrival of 300 students from Saudi Arabia, one of the Middle Eastern countries’ largest delegations.

AP: Saudi Arabia has entered an objection to the Vatican’s bid for a new “.catholic” internet domain.

BBC: Opposition to the creation of the internet address ending .gay has been voiced by Saudi Arabia.

Catholic Culture: The six men and 29 women were arrested after police stormed a prayer vigil at a private residence in Jeddah, the nation’s second largest city, in December.

PressTV: The numbers of political prisoners in Saudi jails are shocking. How is it that this goes unnoticed by much of the international community?

AP: Saudi authorities are warning non-Muslim expatriates against eating, drinking or smoking in public during Ramadan, the monthlong sunrise-to-sunset fast – or face expulsion.

Reuters: Saudi Arabia is studying new regulations to criminalise insulting Islam, including in social media, and the law could carry heavy penalties, a Saudi paper said on Sunday.

Carnegie Endowment: Arabic press reported on May 29 that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia summoned twenty prominent Salafi clerics to Riyadh to ban them from soliciting donations for Syria’s embattled citizenry.

San Francisco Chronicle: Venezuela surpassed Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest holder of proven oil reserves, a resource that President Hugo Chavez promises to tap if he gets re-elected in October.

Breitbart embeds the CNBC interview with Trump. The last quarter of the interview discuss the international oil situation and this story.

Telegraph: Three Saudi women have been refused entry into France because they refused to remove their burkas.

Catholic Culture: A Melkite Greek Catholic archimandrite has denounced Western media coverage of the Syrian conflict. “The reality on the ground is far from the picture that imposes disinformation in Western media,” said Msgr. Philippe Tournyol Clos. “Opposition forces have occupied two areas, Diwan Al Bustan and Hamidieh, where there are all the churches and bishoprics.

Washington Post: A defense lawyer in Kuwait says a court has sentenced a man to 10 years in prison for Twitter posts deemed insulting to Islam and to the rulers of Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Reuters: Saudi Arabia is edging closer to setting a minimum age for marriage, a Justice Ministry official was quoted as saying on Wednesday, following international criticism of cases of child brides.

JD Journal: A law that bans gays and ‘tom boys,’ lesbians, from attending schools and universities is being enforced by the Saudi Arabian government. The country has stated that they have to change their appearance and their behavior.

Christian Science Monitor: A tentative UN-brokered ceasefire does not settle Western concerns over Saudi intervention in Syria. While the US and its allies are wary of seeing Syria become a sectarian battleground, the power brokers in Riyadh seem to have been hurtling toward it – with a form of state-sponsored jihad.

Washington Times: Turkey’s top imam blasted the Saudi grand mufti’s call to “destroy all the churches” in the Gulf region, saying that the announcement is in total contradiction to the peaceful teachings of the Muslim religion.

AP: Plans for Saudi Arabia to send women to the Olympics for the first time appear to be in jeopardy.

Catholic Culture: Church leaders in Europe have decried the announcement by Saudi Arabia’s top Islamic leader for the destruction of all Christian churches on the Arabian peninsula.

Financial Times: Tehran has warned Saudi Arabia several times over the last two months not to increase its oil production to offset the impact of the US and European sanctions on Tehran’s crude exports.

Washington Times: If the pope called for the destruction of all the mosques in Europe, the uproar would be cataclysmic. Pundits would lambaste the church, the White House would rush out a statement of deep concern, and rioters in the Middle East would kill each other in their grief. But when the most influential leader in the Muslim world issues a fatwa to destroy Christian churches, the silence is deafening.

Religion Clause: The New York Times reported yesterday that Saudi journalist Hamza Kashgari was stopped by Malaysian authorities at Kuala Lumpur airport on Thursday and was deported back to Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi king where the journalist will face blasphemy charges . . .

OneNewsNow.com: Thirty-five Christians have been jailed in Saudi Arabia for worshiping in their own homes according to a recent report. The news only surfaced this week that the Christians have been imprisoned for over a month.

News from The Associated Press: An Australian man who received 75 lashes in Saudi Arabia after being convicted of blasphemy has returned home.

News from The Associated Press: A Saudi-backed interfaith center was inaugurated Thursday in Vienna, igniting debate over the subject of religious tolerance.

Boston.com: The alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States may be an act of war against the U.S., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Wednesday.

Jerusalem Post: The textbook, which warns students of democratic countries’ attempts to Westernize Muslim countries by advancing the United Nations’ human rights agenda, has received little attention in the media, where restrictive laws passed in response to the Arab Spring. The Saudi government can levy fines and jail sentences for criticizing government institutions.

News from The Associated Press: Saudi King Abdullah has overturned a court ruling sentencing a Saudi woman to be lashed 10 times for defying the kingdom’s ban on female drivers, a government official said Wednesday.

BBC : A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a woman to 10 lashes for breaking the country’s ban on female drivers.

News from The Associated Press: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, considered a reformer by the standards of his own ultraconservative kingdom, decreed on Sunday that women will for the first time have the right to vote and run in local elections due in 2015.

OneNewsNow.com: The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) welcomes the Obama administration’s release of the Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, and the Commission is urging the U.S. government to increase action to promote freedom of religion or belief. Burma, Eritrea, China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan are eight “countries of particular concern,” but USCIRF spokesperson Elizabeth Cassidy says her group thinks the list is incomplete . . .

Religion Clause: According to a press release this week from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Delta Airlines has now give assurances that, even though Saudi Arabian Airlines will join the Sky Team global airline alliance in 2012, Delta does not currently and will not in the future request on behalf of any airline that passengers disclose their religious affiliation

The Washington Post: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton might be reluctant to interfere in Saudi Arabia’s affairs, but the women of the U.S. Senate are more than happy to tell the king what they think.

AP: Human Rights Watch urged Saudi authorities on Tuesday to release a female activist who led an online campaign against the country’s driving ban and posted a video clip showing herself behind the wheel.

Christian Science Monitor: Samia fled to a women’s shelter rather than be forced by her male relatives to marry a less educated cousin. Her case illustrates women’s growing fight against Saudi Arabia’s guardianship system.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) today released its 2011 Annual Report and recommended that the Secretary of State name the following nations “countries of particular concern” or CPCs: Burma, China, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Barnabas Fund: An Eritrean Christian is facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia after being arrested for sharing his faith with Muslims.

Fast Company: “The Middle Eastern kingdom has just enacted one of the world’s most stringent sets of blogging regulations: Non-citizens can’t write about news, chat room users are encouraged to register with the government, and everyone needs to be very careful about religion.”

Doug Bandow writing at The Center for Vision & Values: “There is more than enough bad news to fill the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s latest annual report. Worst of all were the conditions in 13 ‘countries of particular concern.’”

Daniel Pipes: “[T]oday, thanks in large part to Abdullah’s efforts to ‘tame Wahhabi zeal,’ the most retrograde country has taken some cautious steps to join the modern world. These efforts have many dimensions, from children’s education to mechanisms for selecting political leaders, but perhaps the most crucial one is the battle among the ulema, the Islamic men of religion, between reformers and hardliners.”

Eugene Volokh writing at The Volokh Conspiracy: “That’s the issue lurking in In re Aramco Servs. Co., now on appeal to the Texas Supreme Court . . . The contract provided that it was to be interpreted under Saudi law, and arbitrated under Saudi arbitration rules and regulations. Those rules and regulations apparently call for the arbitrators to be Muslims or Saudi citizens.”

Jennifer Rubin writing in the Washington Post: “The lack of serious action by the administration on this issue, however, is not an isolated event. Earlier this year the USCIRF issued a report documenting that religious freedom was of ‘shrinking importance’ in the Obama foreign policy agenda. That has contributed, according to the USCIRF, to the ‘disturbing trends that threaten freedom of religion across the globe.’”

Asia News: “The Hajj sermon delivered by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, at the Nmira Mosque in Makkah has raised interest levels among specialists because of its harsh condemnation of terrorism. Excerpts from the sermon, which condemns terrorism and urges moderation, were reprinted in hundreds of newspapers in the Arab and Islamic worlds.”

WNCT: “Year after year, a 42-year-old Saudi surgeon remains single against her will. Her father keeps turning down marriage proposals, and her hefty salary keeps going into his bank account.”

Associated Press: “She arrived in Saudi Arabia a high-spirited 23-year-old, eager to start work as a maid to help support her family back home. Four months later, Sumiati was Indonesia’s poster child for migrant abuse, alone and staring vacantly from a hospital bed, her face sliced and battered.”

Devils Lake Journal: “An official with Saudi Arabia’s communications authority says it has blocked Facebook because the popular social networking website doesn’t conform with the kingdom’s conservative values.”

The Christian Century (RNS): “Some 12,000 American Muslims are expected to join an estimated 2.5 million pilgrims in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca for the hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage that this year runs between Nov. 14 and 18.”

The Oklahoman (AP): “The imam co-leading a drive to build an Islamic community center near the World Trade Center has politely brushed aside a suggestion by one of his past benefactors that the project be moved to a different spot.”

Damian Thompson writes at the Telegraph: “These religious young Muslims are more likely than their parents to name their boys after the man they (and the ever-respectful BBC) refer to simply as ‘the Prophet’. This is a function of the Islamification of Britain’s Pakistani community, which was encouraged by the last government to identify itself by faith rather than national background.”

Associated Press: “A Saudi prince who has aided the imam spearheading a proposed Islamic center near New York’s ground zero is appealing for another site not associated with the ‘wound’ of the Sept. 11 attacks, a report said Thursday.”

Associated Press: “A leading rights watchdog is accusing Saudi courts of empowering men to abuse their positions as guardians of female relatives.”

Reuters: “At least 3.5 million Christians of all denominations live in the Gulf Arab region, the birthplace of Islam and home to some of the most conservative Arab Muslim societies in the world. The freedom to practice Christianity — or any religion other than Islam — is not always a given in the Gulf and varies from country to country. Saudi Arabia, which applies an austere form of Sunni Islam, has by far the tightest restrictions.”

AFP: “A gay Saudi prince strangled and beat his male servant to death during an apparent sex attack in a London hotel room, a court heard on Tuesday.”

ABS CBN News: “About 14 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) were reportedly among the 100 expatriates arrested during a forbidden religious service in Saudi Arabia.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State: “On behalf of President Obama and the people of the United States, I congratulate the Custodian of the two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, and the people of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on your national day this September 23.”

AFP: “The diplomat, which NBC identified as Ali Ahmad Asseri, the first secretary of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, reportedly told US federal officials that Saudi officials refused to renew his diplomatic passport and terminated his job after they discovered that he was gay and was close friends with a Jewish woman.”

Patrick Goodenough writing at CNSNews: “At a time when religious tolerance is in the spotlight globally, President Obama should challenge Islamic governments to lift restrictions on religious freedom that target non-Muslim minorities, some activists say. Some of the countries that have been the most vocal about the threatened Quran-burning also are among those where intolerance of religious minorities is widespread and often state-sanctioned, according to advocacy groups.”

Yahoo (AP): “A Saudi judge has asked several hospitals in the country whether they could damage a man’s spinal cord as punishment after he was convicted of attacking another man with a cleaver and paralyzing him, local newspapers reported on Thursday.”

ABC: “The developers behind the Islamic center planned for a site near Ground Zero won’t rule out accepting financing from the Mideast — including from Saudi Arabia and Iran — as they begin searching for $100 million needed to build the project.”

“In an Islamic country like Saudi Arabia, where they are in a position to impose sharia in full, that is exactly what they do. In other places, the degree of imposition depends on relative Islamic strength, and it increases as that strength increases.”

Associated Press: “Some questions and answers about foreign countries planning to ban the use of BlackBerry’s messaging and Web services: Q: Which countries are involved? A: India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have threatened to shut down some BlackBerry services in their respective countries. Lebanon and Indonesia have said they’re considering similar moves, but have no firm plans.”

CBS (AP): “Saudi Arabia will test what it is billing as the world’s largest clock in the holy city of Mecca during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, the official news agency reported Tuesday.”

Christian Science Monitor: “BlackBerry messenger services will continue in Saudi Arabia after the company reportedly satisfied the kingdom’s demands for data access. It is unclear exactly what Saudi Arabia requested or what BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) allowed. But it amounts to RIM caving in to Saudi Arabia and compromising the security of users’ phone data, says Robert Guerra of Freedom House.”

Family Security Matters: “Zaytuna College, which has attracted applications from Muslims throughout the world and substantial financial support from Saudi Arabia, is located in Berkley, California. With the motto ‘Where Islam Meets America,’ Zaytuna upholds the goal of cultivating Islamic scholars. What kind of Islamic scholars? The examples have been set by the three Islamic radicals, who serve as founders of the college.”

Haaretz: “Two Saudi clerics have declared Muslim women are exempt from wearing full veils in France, which is planning to ban them, but added they should avoid visiting it as tourists.” | Via Religion Clause