Liberate Our Books From Censorship
Dr. Mohammed T. Al-Rasheed, comments@d-corner.com

RAMADAN is a time of forgiveness and reprieve. Many prisoners are freed and many more forgive their private grievances. Is it too much to hope that books receive such treatment? While the world sheds its chains we have censorship offices in town and on our borders and airports that live in pre-industrial times.

They are petty dictators who rule according to their own whims. The citizen does not know what is allowed and what isn’t. And neither do they; but they will pass judgment and make life miserable for anyone who brings in a book picked up at the airport somewhere.

Doesn’t the minister in charge of this apparatus understand that no one brings in anything anymore? Who would bring a CD of pornographic movies and risk detention when it can be downloaded on the Net? Direct links to the web are there and no one can censor them. If sedition or “anti-Saudi” material is the stuff we are looking for, why bother when Aljazeera station is in every house?

Dr. Al-Rasheed, as usual, puts his finger on the problem. Censorship in the day of satellite TV and the Internet simply makes no sense. It only heightens the annoyance when minor officials at borders or post offices freely interpret poorly written regulation, banning what they choose to ban. Saudi Arabia does not have a problem with too much information, I believe, but with too little, outside a particular mindset.

There’s also a nice piece by Lubna Hussain in the October 21 issue of Arab News, We See Them, We Hear Them, but We Can’t Name Them. The article describes the lengths to which the so-called guardians of morality will go to be protective, with no ability whatsoever to see how idiotic it all is.