Saudi detains prominent preacher after Internet article

RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia has detained a prominent Saudi preacher who wrote an Internet article criticising the ruling family’s advisers, colleagues said on Monday.

They said Mohsen Al Awajy has been in police custody since Friday after writing an article, which suggested that a liberal clique of ministers and officials were the real power behind the scenes with a direct line to King Abdullah.

As a companion piece to the article below, there’s this story from the UAE’s Khaleej Times.

It’s known that the Saudi government has “red lines” about what can or cannot be published in the country. Direct criticism of individual government officials is one of them. Articles that are seen to destablize the country, to spread disruption (in other words, “seditious speech”) are also prohibited.

Here, a preacher called into question the motivations of ministers and officials in seeking reform. Given that he is a preacher, it’s obvious that his argument is about the religious aspects of reform–he doesn’t like what he sees.

The war between modernizers or reformers and the traditionalists has been going on since before Saudi Arabia became a country. It’s going to go on for quite some time.

This article updates, a bit, an earlier article in the same paper that identified the government minister involved as Labor Minister, Ghazi Al-Gusaibi. Al-Gusaibi is no stranger himself to being on the wrong end of the censorship stick having been removed from earlier positions because of his outspokenness.

This Reuters piece, by the way, errs in calling the government of Saudi Arabia an “absolute monarchy.” No king has had absolute power since the founder of the country, Abdul Aziz ibn Abdul Rahman Al-Saud. Since his death in the 1950s, the government has been characterized by consultation among various power groups in the country.