New Clicks in the Arab World
Bloggers Challenge Longtime Cultural, Political Restrictions
Faiza Saleh Ambah

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia — When he was a college student in Washington state, Saudi Arabia’s most popular blogger, Fouad al-Farhan, donned a T-shirt emblazoned with “Animal Rights Equals Human Rights” and slept on the campus lawn during a hunger strike protesting the slaughter of foxes.

That type of freedom during six years in the United States gave Farhan a taste for expressing himself that he was unable to satisfy when he returned to Saudi Arabia in 2001.

“You can’t write whatever you want in the newspaper here; you can’t even lift up a poster in protest,” said Farhan, 31, a computer programmer who attended Eastern Washington University in Spokane. “On the blog, it’s a different world. It was the only way to express myself the way I wanted.”

Farhan is part of a growing wave of young Arabs who have turned to blogging to bypass the restrictions on free expression in a predominantly authoritarian, conservative and Muslim region. Blogging is so novel here that the equivalent term in Arabic, tadween, to chronicle, was coined only this year. But it has spread rapidly among the increasingly urban youth and in the process has loosened the limits of what’s open for discussion.

The Washington Post runs this article today about Saudi bloggers. What’s most interesting in the piece is the way young Saudis are still Saudi: they draw limits on the acceptable, that is, they practice self-censorship. The article discusses one female blogger, “Mystique”, who write erotic fiction in her blog The Emancipation of Mystical Thoughts. She’s not going to be confused with Pauline Réage, author of “The Story of O” or Henry Miller. She’s certainly not pornographic in any Western sense, but she pushes the envelope of Saudi cultural tolerance. While the young Saudi (male) quoted in the piece says he supports her “right to blog”, he doesn’t care to support what she writes. It’s not at all clear that he—and the new Saudi blogger association, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Bloggers, mentioned in the piece—would actually defend her were she to come under legal attack. Perhaps it’s just as well that Mystique blogs anonymously.

The article notes that Arab governments are disquieted by blogs. The writer notes the brief blocking of Mahmood’s Den, a blog out of Manama that was recently discussing a political scandal in Bahrain. [Visit his blog and check out the posts from Nov. 2 and how Mahmoud dealt with the Bahraini Ministry of Information to get himself unblocked. Very interesting and promising!] The Post article missed reporting on the various Saudi blogs that had been blocked, then unblocked, including Saudi Jeans, whose writer she interviews.

Saudi blogs aren’t very dissimilar from blogs from other countries. Most aren’t worth more than a glance; some are worth bookmarking to visit daily. The article notes that young Saudi women are making use of blogs to express themselves. That’s certainly true, but most of their blogs are pretty light on content, not much beyond the “Dear Diary” entries typical of teenage girls. They do shine a light on the lifestyles of middle class and above young women in a very different cultural climate, though. That can be of both interest and utility in making Saudis more human, more “like us” than a host of newspaper articles or TV specials.

It’s clear that young Saudis are testing the limits. They’re in new territory, both for their government and for themselves. The article points out that the Saudi government is trying to come to terms with the new technology, but as I’ve noted in earlier posts, even the government knows that they really can’t control blogs and bloggers, or most aspects of the Internet.

Will blogs push reform in Saudi Arabia? I’d say, “Yes”. I doubt that they will become the motor for change, but they will serve to help others who are looking to open doors and windows in a places that can become stifling.