Saudi Gazette reports on a new youth fad in Saudi Arabia, ‘car-stoning’. I don’t entirely see the point of it, but certainly commend it as an alternative to the more dangerous types of car stunts like ‘drifting’ and drag racing!
The fad of “car-stoning” – raising up vehicles on stones to give what fans describe as an “artistic appearance” – has reached areas of Jeddah and Makkah after attracting attention in Abha and Taif. “It’s something fun to do in your free time,” says car-stoner Faisal Al-Ghamdi. “First you raise the car with a jack and then start stacking the stones underneath, in the same way they used to build traditional walls. Then you paint the stones. It takes several hours, and we leave the car on display for two or three days.” Al-Ghamdi and friends are hoping the pastime becomes popular enough to be invited to automobile events such as the Hail Rally. – Okaz photo
Saudi Gazette translates an article from the Arabic Al-Hayat on Shoura Council member Ibrahim Al-Bulaihi’s view of the use of broadcast TV and radio to send messages of hate. These messages completely miss what Islam is about, he says. He also condemned TV shows that seem to put the memorization of facts ahead of the appreciation of the complexity of culture.
Preachers broadcasting hatred, says Al-Bulaihi
AL-BAHA – Well-known member of the Shoura Council Ibrahim Al-Bulaihi has accused some Friday sermons of “broadcasting hatred”, saying that it is common “in our mosques and for our preachers to curse people asking that Allah orphan their children and render their wives widows, as if we were at war with everyone”.
Al-Hayat Arabic daily reported Thursday that Al-Bulaihi, who is known for his outspoken views on a range of topics, gave a lecture at Al-Baha Literary Club on Tuesday in which he said that “Islam is not at war with everyone, for the Qur’an begins with the Most Gracious and Most Merciful and not with the All-Compelling and the Irresistible”.
…
Writing in the Arabic daily Al-Watan (here translated by Arab News), Turki Al-Dakheel comments on the way the issuing of fatwas has gotten out of hand. He notes that unqualified people are issuing judgments on issues for which they are intellectually unprepared and that that is dangerous. He wonders whether the day will come when every Muslim will have his own mufti to tell him what he wants to hear.
A time of extreme fatwas
TURKI AL-DAKHEEL | AL-WATANSome people criticize us for getting irritated with fatwas (Islamic rulings) despite asking for more freedom of expression. They are correct. We are really fed up with some of the more extreme fatwas, which are tantamount to jokes.
We are bothered by such fatwas because they are not intellectual opinions. They are solely concerned with religion and as such they might have implications on people in this world and the life after.
They become Shariah rules to be observed and followed. They are not individual views on topics such as universities, education, health, which represent a wide area on which people can tread and express their own views.
We know that the Grand Mufti of the Kingdom, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Ashaikh, leads prayers in Riyadh’s biggest mosque. He is available in his office and his telephones are always on. So anyone requesting a fatwa on a certain topic can always turn to him.
Many members of the Ifta Committee have programs on satellite television and radio stations, partly so fatwa seekers can talk to them.
I wish the Supreme Council of Scholars would take up the issue of those issuing fatwas when they are not qualified or authorized to.
…
The Washington Post‘s ‘On Faith’ section carries this story about the difficulties American Muslims are facing when they travel outside the US and then seek to return. Security concerns and personal travel seem to work at cross purposes and lead to problems. Security concerns usually win.
One take-away point for American Muslims is that they do need to pay attention to what’s going on the world around them. Travel to Yemen as a recent convert, for example, is not a wise thing to do these days, particularly if you’re studying Arabic at the same school as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged Christmas Day bomber.
Could security do a better job in screening, be less categoric in its anti-terror profiling? Probably yes. Just how it is to do so, however, is not entirely clear.
More U.S. Muslims facing problems
in return from abroad, groups say
Tara BahrampourMuslim advocacy groups say an increasing number of Muslim and Arab U.S. citizens and permanent residents who travel abroad are facing new complications in returning to the United States because of heightened security.
An attempted Christmas day bombing on a Detroit-bound airplane caused soul-searching in government agencies after it became clear that the alleged would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was not on a watch list. Since then, the no-fly list has swelled from 3,400 people to about 6,000, with thousands more on the list for travelers who warrant extra screening.
The lists are not made public, and most people don’t know they are on one until they arrive at the airport. In one case, an American says he has been barred from returning to the United States without explanation.
…
A US District Court in California yesterday decided a case involving the now-defunct Al-Haramain Foundation (originally based in Saudi Arabia). The case was about the US government’s monitoring/wire-tapping, without a warrant, phone conversations between Foundation offices in Oregon and their attorneys, including Wendell Belew, a sometimes commenter here. The Court issued a summary judgment [45-page PDF] based on the fact that the government offered no real defense to its actions, instead relying on a “state’s secrets privilege” defense which the judge found unpersuasive.
NSA eavesdropping was illegal, judge says
In the strongest legal repudiation yet of the George W. Bush administration’s program of warrantless wiretapping, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency acted illegally by eavesdropping on the phone conversations of two American lawyers and an Islamic charity.
U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker said that the lawyers and the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation — plaintiffs in a high-profile lawsuit challenging the now-abandoned Terrorist Surveillance Program — are entitled to damages because of the government’s actions.
President Obama’s Justice Department followed the Bush administration’s strategy of asserting a “state-secrets privilege” to try to stop the case, a tactic that provoked an outcry from the American Civil Liberties Union and other public policy groups. The effort by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. marked the first time that the Obama administration tried to invoke the privilege.
…
An interesting sidelight to the issue is this piece from Volokh Conspiracy. In it law professor Orin Kerr is commenting on a report in The New York Times that is essentially similar to the Associated Press story which The Post ran.
What Al-Haramain Says, And What It Doesn’t Say
The New York Times reports on Judge Walker’s new decision in Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama with the following opening:
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.
In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.
The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration’s claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans’ international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.
I’ve seen some similar reports online, so I thought I would register a somewhat technical objection to this characterization of the opinion. The Obama Administration wasn’t arguing that the surveillance program was lawful. As a result, the decision doesn’t rule that the program was unlawful. Rather, the Obama Administration was just arguing that Judge Walker couldn’t reach the merits of the case because of the state secrets privilege. After Judge Walker rejected the state secrets privilege claim, the case was over: DOJ not having argued that warrantless monitoring was lawful, Walker had no choice but to grant relief to the plaintiffs on their claim.
As I said, this is sort of a technical objection: It’s quite right that the plaintiffs prevailed in their legal claim that they were illegally subject to surveillance. And as I have written many times before, I happen to agree that the Bush Administration’s arguments were quite weak. But the opinion isn’t quite what the Times is reporting: The decision today wasn’t actually about the lawfulness of the warrantless surveillance program.
…
The Washington Post runs this article today. It’s about the difficulty Muslims are running into with the US visa process that now includes extra layers of ID verification as an anti-terrorism measure. The article notes that the problem is a difficult one, too many Muslim travelers with too few names to distinguish them from bad guys with the same or similar names. Solutions, including more intrusive biometric data being included on ID cards, present their own problems.
Travelers with Muslim names
find themselves fighting for U.S. visas
Edward CodyLYON, FRANCE — The clean-cut young Frenchman seemed to have everything going for him. A graduate of an elite French engineering school, he had interned at the upper-crust Rothschild bank in Paris, handled wealth management for a while on Wall Street and was accepted for a prestigious master’s degree program at the University of California at Berkeley.
Except for one thing: His name was Mohamed Youcef Mami.
The State Department held up his student visa for more than two months for “administrative processing,” which according to diplomats is the euphemism-of-art for a check against multiple watch lists maintained by intelligence agencies in Washington designed to prevent suspected terrorists from entering the United States.
Since President Obama scolded the agencies for overlooking warning flags against Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with trying to blow up an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas Day, the checks have been reinforced and the lists have grown. With that comes a higher likelihood of “administrative processing” for visa applicants whose names may resemble those of terrorist suspects but who are “guilty” of nothing more than having Muslim parents.
…
Saudi Gazette translates a wonderful story from the Arabic daily Al-Watan about the goings on of Moudhi, a Saudi woman who is willing to take on Saudi attitudes about women and transportation. The story also informs us that it’s not just cars that women are forbidden to drive: bicycles are off-limits, too! When it comes to donkeys, however, even the police have to take a step back. Now, donkeys are noted for being stubborn, but I don’t think they have anything on Ms. Moudhi!
Moudhi riding on a donkey
Abdullah Nasser Al-FouzanMOUDHI, a noted Riyadh secondary school headmistress, is continuing in her five-year quest to persuade the relevant folk that women have as much right to drive a car as men, furnishing them with the evidence piece by piece, showing that the benefits outweigh the perils. The persistent failure of her previous efforts, however, led her to turn to more practical methods, and so it was that she recently got behind the wheel of a car and drove off into the streets of the capital.
When stopped by police Moudhi produced her international driving license, but the failure of officers to be persuaded by such a document led to a lengthy exchange during which Moudhi showed them that their reasoning was more fragile than a spider’s web. Unmoved, the police told her that she was required to have a driver to protect her and help her should she find herself in difficulties, such as her car breaking down.
“Okay…,” Moudhi said. “We’ll see…”
A few days later Moudhi got behind the wheel again, only this time, seated in the back of the car, was her foreign driver. When the police stopped her – along with the young men who had been pursuing her down the street – officers believed the man in the back to be her bodyguard, and so were taken aback along with the rest of the gathering crowd when Moudhi told them he was her driver, there to “protect her and help her if the car broke down.”
“Isn’t that what you told me I had to do when you stopped me last time?” Moudhi said as perplexed officers glanced at each other.
…
Saudi Gazette reports that the Jizan University is removing books that promote extremism out of its library. It’s been a couple of years since books by Sayyed Qutb’s have been deprecated in Saudi eduction, so I’m not sure what’s taken this university so long. Perhaps it was that the earlier removals were limited to secondary schools. In any event, it’s a welcome move.
Note, please, that this is not censorship. Qutb’s books are widely available in the Kingdom. This move only takes them out of a university library, not out of general circulation, so anyone who’s really interested in Qutb’s philosophy can find it readily enough. It’s that the university is declining to promote that philosophy by having it ready to hand. I don’t see any real issue in this other than it is a useful step to rid Saudi schools of materials that present a danger to not only Saudi society, but the world.
Jizan University removes ‘extremist’ library books
JIZAN – Jizan University has removed from its library collection books described by its chief librarian as containing “extremist thought” and which “promote terrorism”.
Hussein Al-Daghriri, the university’s Dean of Library Affairs told Al-Watan Arabic daily on Sunday that the titles removed from shelves include works by Sayyid Qutb and books related to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“We hope to make the University of Jizan a national university with graduates matching global standards,” Al-Daghriri said. “The books which were removed during indexing had previously been included in college libraries by the Ministry of Education and were later included in the university library.”
Books containing extremist thought, according to Al-Daghriri, were “few”, and became the responsibility of the university when faculty collections were assimilated into the university.
…