Economist reports on the fatawa condemning TV channel owners. It says that Saudis aren’t surprised much by such outrageous comments coming from religious leaders. It notes that Luhaidan’s condemnation is dangerous in that it targets people with significant political connections.

It also reports that Luhaidan’s radio program has been taken off the air by state authorities.

I guess Luhaidan gets some street cred for tackling the issue of TV programming that many Saudis find objectionable. But he loses it for being stupid.

Death to the media moguls!
The abiding puritanism of some senior Saudi sheikhs

IN MOST countries, incitement to murder is a crime. But in Saudi Arabia, encouraging people to kill is a special privilege reserved for those whose job it is to uphold the law. At least, this appeared to be the case when the kingdom’s chief justice, Sheikh Saleh Luhaidan, speaking on a live radio programme, answered a caller’s question about the broadcast of “lewd” television shows during the holy month of Ramadan. The 79-year-old religious scholar described the owners of some satellite channels as “apostles of depravity”, and said it would be lawful to kill them.

Understandably, those words from the head of the Supreme Judicial Council, Saudi Arabia’s highest court of appeal, sparked an uproar. Not only Saudi liberals but prominent rival sheikhs condemned the ruling as an example of the ideological extremism that has encouraged violent radicals. In response, Mr Luhaidan qualified his words. He did not mean to imply that anyone should just go out and murder broadcasters, said the bearded sheikh in a subsequent interview on state television. Such people should only be killed after being tried in a Saudi court and only after being given a chance to mend their ways.

Saudis are used to chilling pronouncements from the country’s 700 religious judges, all of whom are schooled in the puritanical Wahhabist interpretation of Islam. The kingdom’s most senior religious authority, the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, recently scolded a fellow scholar for suggesting that celebrating birthdays was a harmless thing to do, declaring instead that such festivities are sinfully unIslamic. He also blasted a Turkish television serial, whose dramatisation of intrigue and romance among the rich and unveiled Muslims of cosmopolitan Istanbul had attracted record audiences this summer, as subversive to the faith.
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