The UAE’s Gulf News reports that a Saudi lawyer is suing Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi over statements the lawyer sees as slandering the Shi’a.
Scholar faces lawsuit over controversy
Duraid Al BaikRiyadh: A prominent Saudi lawyer said he is bringing a lawsuit against Egyptian scholar Shaikh Yousuf Al Qaradawi, 81, over his public statement critical of Shiites trying to impose their beliefs on Sunnis.
Ameen Taher Bediwi told the Saudi website Elaph he was filing the case in Qatar since Al Qaradawi enjoys Qatari citizenship and resides in the country.
This is the first time Al Qaradawi, who has hitherto been held in high esteem among both Sunni and Shiite scholars, is facing legal action.
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The British newspaper Guardian has a story today on the flap that Qaradawi’s comments have raised: Unholy row
Saudi Gazette reports that Saudis are both applying for US visas in greater number this year, and obtaining them with minimal delay. Saudi students are having even better luck, with an increase of 28% in the number of visas issued, with 92% of applicants succeeding.
Not all Saudis are equally lucky, however. The story also reports that some students continue to have trouble getting their visa renewed in a timely manner. That problem can now largely be avoided as the US is now issuing student visas valid for the entire planned course of study, with no renewal being required.
Hike in US visas for Saudis this year
Shahid Ali Khan — Saudi GazetteRIYADH – There has been an increase of 28 percent in the number of US visas issued to Saudi students this year, according to a press release from the American Embassy in Riyadh.
Erin Pelton, Deputy Press Attaché at the US Embassy, informs in the statement that the number of Saudi nationals receiving US visas has increased to 67,000 this fiscal year – a 20 percent rise on the previous year – while the number of student visas issued to Saudi citizens has increased by 28 percent.
The visa process requires time. “We regret that some Saudi students are experiencing delays in renewing their US visas,” the release reads.
Many Saudi students return home to spend time with their families while still enrolled at US universities and to apply for a fresh American visa.
“We urge students who need to renew their two-year visas to apply for a new visa as soon as they return home from the US, in order for the visa to be ready in time for them to return to school in the US in the Fall.”
The recent extension of visa validity from two to five years for students and visitors is expected to significantly reduce the problem over the next two years
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Arab News reports that the congestion that was blocking the Port of Jeddah has finally cleared. Earlier problems saw shippers moving their ships to secondary ports rather than incur high demurrage charges and port fees. Jeddah is the principal port for imports into the Kingdom and delays were the source of many complaints.
Port crisis resolved
Freight handling at JIP back to normal, says official
P.K. Abdul Ghafour I Arab NewsJEDDAH: The crisis at Jeddah Islamic Port (JIP) is over and business there is back to normal, Khaled bin Ahmed Bubshait, president of the Saudi Ports Authority (SPA), announced yesterday. He said the delay in unloading shipments at the port was solved with the cooperation of other government departments.
The unprecedented congestion at the region’s largest port was caused by an increase in imports before Ramadan and Haj seasons. There was a 23 percent increase in cargo arriving at JIP compared to 19 percent in other ports of the Kingdom, he said.
Bubshait said the Jeddah port deals with 65 percent of goods imported to the Kingdom and such delays were possible during peak seasons.
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Saudi King Abdullah reconfirmed his commitment to dialogue in this speech reported by the Saudi Press Agency. Not only social issues need to be addressed, he said, but society needs to keep focused on the goals of the Madrid Conference on Religious Dialogue.
The next National Dialogue will be on the theme of ‘Health’. It’s not clear whether that will be limited to issues of physical health, or also include mental health.
Dialogue is vital: King — ‘Use KANDC as platform to air views’
P.K. Abdul Ghafour I Arab NewsJEDDAH: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah stressed the important role being played by King Abdul Aziz National Dialogue Center (KANDC) in deepening the values of love, tolerance and dialogue in Saudi society.
“These values are based on Islamic teachings that call for moderation and brotherhood,” the king said while meeting with the president and members of the center’s higher committee.
“Dialogue is vital for human progress because it is the torch that enlightens our minds, strengthens faith and deepens moral values,” the Saudi Press Agency quoted the king as saying.
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‘Emirates Business 27/7′, a product of the Dubai-based Arab Media Group, has this story. It reports on a study suggesting that Saudis fear the consequences of decreasing demand for oil and pressures to find alternative fuels. The way in which high oil prices affect the global economy is a concern as well, as Saudi Arabia is well integrated into that global economy. What hurts other countries ends up hurting Saudi Arabia.
Saudis see $100 oil as too high, says study
Nadim KawachSaudi Arabia may believe oil prices at $100 are too high as they could depress crude demand amid the current global financial crisis, a study said yesterday.
Despite a sharp decline in oil prices over the past few weeks, their climb to a record high of nearly $150 in July has already affected growth in demand and the latest financial crisis could push it down further, said the study by the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES), which is run by former Saudi Arabia’s oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Al Yamani.
The centre’s monthly oil report, sent to Emirates Business, said the Kingdom appears not in a hurry to cut its crude output in line with a collective Opec agreement this month to reduce production by 520,000 barrels per day (bpd).
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Here’s a story from Arab News that’s sure to put a wrinkle on the brow of more than a few Saudi conservatives!
Strut your stuff guys! Jeddah is gonna host first men’s pageant
JEDDAH: The bride of the Red Sea will soon make history with the Kingdom’s first men’s fashion show. A number of well-known designers will participate in the show which aims at promoting and developing fashion design. Abdullah Sindi, head of the pageant’s organizing committee, said the main goal of the event was to create an annual event that caters to the demand for fashion and to develop the field by encouraging talented designers to become professionals. “The event has been approved by the authorities but the date has not yet been decided,” Sindi said, adding that he expected it to be before the year-end. He said that the organizing committee was eager to create an event up to international standards so that it would become an annual world fashion event. Sindi said that Jeddah, because of the emergence of various designers, was carving out a niche for itself among the world’s fashion capitals. He said that the fashion show would include participation by international brands for both formal and casual fashion.
Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed’s column in Asharq Alawsat takes on the intersection of religion and politics, particularly as it pertains to Sunni-Shi’a differences and conflicts. He says that people change their religions en masse only through losing a war or having a ruler who changes their religion for them. Thus, Shi’ite efforts following the Iranian Revolution to convert the Sunnism to Shi’ism were always going to fail. This fact did not affect Iranian efforts to promulgate the Iranian form of Shi’ism in places like Lebanon or Egypt, but it did result in the failure of those efforts. Those efforts did result, unfortunately, in suspicion toward the Shi’a in Sunni-majority states unfortunately, as well as in grand conspiracy theories about religion which were, in fact, always and only political differences.
Political Not Sectarian
Abdul Rahman Al-RashedSeldom has a political event passed without the involvement by Clergymen, and this is happening once again in the Arab-Iranian differences. A battle is being waged on rostrums and Internet websites. Why? Because this is politics and they are politicians.
In reality, there is no Shia/Sunni problem; there are only differences between governments. And, contrary to widespread rumors, neither the Shia are going to become Sunnis, nor are the Sunnis going to become Shia and neither party is going to change its religion. Nations change their religion on a large scale only when the ruling regime changes its religion, or when a political system falls into the hands of another. In other words, nations change their religion either by force of arms or when their rulers officially change their religion. Iran became Shiite in the 15th century when it was ruled by the Safavids, and the Egyptians changed their sect with the change of the ruling dynasty, from Tolons to Fatimites to Ayubites. The story is similar in other religions. The English abandoned Catholicism and adopted Protestantism when Queen Elizabeth, a Protestant, came to the throne in the 16th century. Apart from that it is merely a byzantine debate between the public and men of religion.
Soon after the success of its revolution, Iran discovered that despite its religious success, it has not become a leader in the Islamic world because 80% of Muslims are Sunnis. Iran thought at that time that it was possible to change the sectarian geography, and thus inaugurated its project by celebrating the conversion of an unknown Sunni who published a book in which he declared his conversion.
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Here’s an Associated Press story that’s making the rounds today, commenting on the arguments between Sunni cleric Yousef Al-Qaradawi and Shi’a cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah:
Asharq Alawsat runs this interesting Reuters piece. It points out the medical reasons why it is important to understand the genetic make-up of Arabs as they seem to have particular sensitivities toward particular diseases. The piece also notes, though, that some of the research could be politically contentious, as in determining who is a ‘real Arab’. One aspect of the research that could be very interesting is in working out the origins of the Semites and how they moved from an African origin to the Middle East.
Saudi project hopes to put Arabs on genetic map
RIYADH, (Reuters) – Saudi researchers have mapped the first Arab genome in a project to put the Arab world on the global genetic map and improve healthcare.
Geneticists from Saudi Biosciences say unlocking the genetic profile of 100 people from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries will help tackle medical problems in Saudi Arabia and encourage sorely-needed scientific research.
The collaboration between the private Saudi company, Danish firm CLC Bio and the Beijing Genomics Institute will make their sequencing of Arab genomes available on a public database. “The advantage of the project is that it studies the differences between peoples, and that will explain the spread of specific illnesses such as diabetes, heart diseases, etc.,” said Saeed al-Turki, Arab Human Genome Project Coordinator. “Twenty-five percent of the Saudi population has, or is liable to have diabetes and that will form a big burden on health services,” he said.
Almost one in four Saudis over 30 has diabetes, according to the World Health Organization. The project will help establish if the high incidence is due to a shift to urban living and rich diets among rural and Bedouin populations, as often claimed.
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Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science & Technology has announced that it is acquiring an IBM supercomputer as part of its infrastructure. The computer “is a 16-rack IBM Blue Gene/P System with 65,536 processor cores delivering 222 Teraflops (222 trillion operations per second.)”
The purposes for the computer include computer research, applied mathematics, and weather and climate modeling. With the university’s focus on the Red Sea, I’d be surprised if that was not a focus as well.
Saudi Arabia unveils world-leading supercomputer ambitions
SAUDI ARABIA. Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the ten most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn’t stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system.
The move represents a big leap for Saudi Arabia and the Middle East generally, which, despite massive oil wealth, has not had much of an impact on information technology, except as consumers.
But Saudi Arabia is turning its oil wealth in a new direction. This supercomputer, which is being built by IBM, will be located at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a research university that was announced in 2007 and is due to open in a year from now.
A data centre that will house the supercomputer will be completed in the Summer months next year.
“The best thing about KAUST is we have no legacy systems and no legacy thinking,” Majid Al-Ghaslan, the university’s interim CIO, said in an interview for Computerworld.
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Saudi Gazette reports that the Saudi government is acting to ensure that the momentum of the Madrid Conference on Religious Dialogue does not die through inattention. Saudi Foreign Minister, Pr. Saud Al-Faisal has raised the issues of the conference both with EU and Latin American/Caribbean leaders on the margins of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.
Saud Al-Faisal meets to discuss Madrid World Conference recommendations
New York – Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Foreign Ministers held two meetings at the United Nations headquarters last night with the foreign ministers of the Rio group and the European Union Troika on the sidelines of the Sixty-third session of UN General Assembly.
The Rio group represents South America, Latin America and Caribbean countries. During the two meetings, Prince Saud Al-Faisal spoke about the Madrid World Conference for Dialogue, held in July, and its recommendations which focused on the common humanitarian values which reject all forms of evil and call for good to mankind.
Prince Saud said that the recommendations of the Madrid Conference responded to a real need to find a solution to a multitude of problems affecting societies worldwide such as: violence, extremism, intolerance, family disintegration and the spread of drugs.
The foreign minister also said that the Madrid Conference appealed to King Abdullah, Custodian of the
Two Holy Mosques, to work on implementing its recommendations on an international level. He said he hoped that the UN General Assembly would hold a special session to discuss the recommendations of Madrid Conference. – SPA
The Saudi media is reporting on the woes of Saudi economy air carrier Sama. The carrier, which competes against Saudia, the national carrier, is faced with a double whammy: high fuel costs and a government cap on the fares it can charge domestic passengers. Saudia, it points out, receives subsidized fuel. Sama, on the other hand, must buy fuel on the market, at market rates. It cannot pass on higher prices to its passengers because of the cap on fares. As a result, it is shutting down some of its domestic flights.
The arguments presented in the Arab News and Saudi Gazette articles, if true, paint an unfortunate picture. The low-cost carrier Sama, which has a 60% Saudi staff, is being priced out of the market. It should either have access to subsidized fuel or—better, in my opinion—Saudi should be paying market prices for its own fuel.
Here’s a good op-ed from Saudi Gazette on how religious accommodation works in both directions… or should.
The writer focuses on a story covered here earlier, about a group of Somalis working in a meatpacking plant in Nebraska (actually, Colorado UPDATE: Nope. This is indeed another case developing in Nebraska.) who ran afoul of their employer’s work rules when it came to five-times-a-day prayers and observing Ramadan.
The writer notes that US labor law requires employers to accommodate various religious practices when it can do so without seriously interfering with the process of work. Here, there were both safety and productivity issues (like semi-automated production lines) that worked against providing what the workers asked. Even more critically, the writer asks what conservative Muslims are doing taking jobs that they know will run against their religious beliefs. Why would a Muslim choose to work in a pork processing plant if his aversion to pork is so serious that it prevents him from working there? Why would a Muslim choose to drive a taxi when every city in the US encourages people to take a taxis instead of driving under the influence, yet the driver believes it wrong to deal with alcohol at even this remove?
She correctly points out that in Saudi Arabia, expats are expected to comply with local laws and customs, most of which stem from a religion those expats do not follow. Isn’t it only reasonable to expect expats living in non-Muslim lands to assimilate into the local environment, no matter its religious or secular origin?
Muslims and US culture
Sabria S. Jawhar Saudi GazetteA religious battle – nothing to do with terrorism or the invasion of American troops in a Muslim country – is going on in the heartland of the United States. Central Nebraska to be specific. The land of corn, pickup trucks and evangelical Christians.
The issue is whether Muslim workers at a food processing plant can be allowed to pray during working hours and to break fast at sunset during Ramadan. It hardly seems to be a burning issue among Muslims worldwide, but in the city of Grand Island there have been protests, firing workers and allegations of religious discrimination by Christians and Muslims alike.
The workers at the plant are primarily Somali refugees who have long struggled to assimilate into the American society. There has been a huge influx of Somali immigrants into America’s Midwest because of its low cost of living, modest housing prices and a generally tolerant view of Midwesterners toward immigrants.
These immigrants have been at the center of controversy before. Somali taxi drivers have refused to take passengers possessing or being under the influence of alcohol or have a dog with them. With the exception of rather loud opinions of American conservative extremists, these small cultural and religious eruptions settled down quietly.
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