The Washington Post editorializes on the contrast between the ‘takfiri’ attitude of extreme Saudi conservatives like Sheikh Barrak, who issued a fatwa condemning two Saudi journalists and the actions of King Abdullah in calling for interreligious dialogues. It finds the King’s position far preferable, of course, and a welcome change from the intolerance we’ve all come to expect from parts of the Saudi religious establishment.

A Hint of Tolerance
Saudi Arabia’s king proposes a dialogue with Christians and Jews

ONE OF Saudi Arabia’s senior Muslim clerics, Sheik Abdul-Rahman al-Barak, committed a familiar outrage last month. The 75-year-old scholar of Wahhabism, the severe strain of Islam that is Saudi Arabia’s official ideology, issued a fatwa saying that two writers should be put to death if they did not renounce articles suggesting that Muslims need not regard adherents of other faiths, such as Christians and Jews, as apostates. This was a shocking but not surprising judgment in a country where non-Muslims are banned from publicly practicing their faiths, where citizens can be sentenced to death for converting to another religion and where al-Qaeda has found fertile ground for its extremist agenda.

What is surprising — and encouraging — is what preceded and has followed the sheik’s fatwa. The two writers who published the articles, Abdullah bin Bejad al-Otaibi and Yousef Aba al-Khail, are Saudi; their writing appeared in a well-known Saudi newspaper, al-Riyadh, published in the capital. While noting that their murder had been sanctioned by the cleric, the two men did not back down — one said he would bring a lawsuit against the sheik. And this week the writers were supported by a group of more than 100 Arab rights groups and intellectuals from across the region. In a statement sent to the Reuters news agency, the group — which included Islamist thinkers such as the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi and Lebanese scholar Radwan al-Sayyed — said the fatwa amounted to “intellectual terrorism.”
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