Saudi writer Hamza Kashgari fled Saudi Arabia after a trio of tweets about the prophet Muhammad brought death threats. Malaysian police apprehended him en route to New Zealand, where he was to request asylum.
A 23-year-old Saudi Twitter user, Hamza Kashgari, fled the country Sunday to avoid being arrested for his religious tweets, only to find himself in the hands of the Malaysian police today. He had been heading to New Zealand to request political asylum.
Skip to next paragraphOn Saturday, the anniversary of the prophet Muhammad's birthday, Kashgari tweeted three times, expressing his religious beliefs about the founder of Islam. Within hours, he was inundated with violent threats. Despite a full renunciation, a warrant was issued by kingdom authorities for his arrest and the Kingdom's religious?Fatwa Council condemned him?as an apostate and an infidel, crimes which are punishable by death.
"Blasphemous" Tweets
According to one of Kashgari's friends, who wishes to remain anonymous, these are the three tweets that were the basis for the Saudi arrest warrant.
- On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you've always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.
- On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.
- On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.
Kashgari's Twitter account, @Hmzmz, has been shut down.
Kashgari's friend points out that these actions have come after a number of reversals for religious conservatives in the Wahhabi-influenced state. These include a law allowing women to work as salespeople in public lingerie stores, and the replacement of the head of the religious police with a moderate, who ordered restrictions on how the religious police operate. It also happened within the context of the unrest of the Arab Spring.
Hashtags of shame
Kashgari's harassment is not out of the blue, nor, apparently, based on these tweets alone. He has been the target of religious Twitter users for months. "Public shaming through hashtags is now a common Saudi pressure tactic, especially against public officials and government scandals," said his friend.
A hardcore Saudi cleric?used YouTube to post his condemnation?of the young man. The cleric, Nasser al-Omar, known as the "weeping cleric" for his tendency to burst into tears at the blasphemy done to the prophet, called for Kashgari to be hauled before a sharia court, according to long-time Saudi blogger,?Ahmad al-Omran (Saudi Jeans).
"These people [like Kashgari] should be put to trial in sharia courts. It is known that cursing God and his prophet is apostasy. And the fact that he has repented with cold words will not probably save him in the court." (Al-Omram's translation.)
The punishment for apostasy is death.
Saudi Arabia's information minister has commanded that no one publish any of Kashgari's writings. Prior to this incident, he was a columnist with al-Bilad, a newspaper based in the eastern city of Jeddah.
"I have instructed all newspapers and magazines in the kingdom not to allow him to write any thing and we will take legal measures against him."
Kashgari was trying to make a connecting flight to New Zealand when he was apprehended and?arrested yesterday in Malaysia?at the Kuala Lumpur airport. It has been reported that Malaysia, an officially Islamic state, will forcibly repatriate Kashgar to Saudi Arabia. Malaysia has no formal extradition agreement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Curt Hopkins is a production editor and international reporter for the technology blog site, ReadWriteWeb.com, where this blog originally appeared on Feb. 9.
Far be it from me to suggest that Christian Bale, the Oscar winning Hollywood star who made his name as Batman, is anything but a noble warrior for international human rights.
But it is hard not to detect a smidgeon of self-promotion in his latest stunt ? getting himself filmed by CNN being roughed up by Chinese thugs during a vain attempt to visit Chen Guangcheng, a famous human rights activist who has been under house arrest for the past 15 months.
Mr. Bale is in China to promote his latest movie ?The Flowers of War,? about the brutal Japanese occupation of Nanking in 1937, which some critics have panned as Chinese propaganda. His successful televised bid to draw world attention to the illegal detention of one of the sharpest thorns in the Chinese government?s side has certainly undercut such criticism.
CNN said Bale contacted the network?s Beijing office asking for help in visiting Mr. Chen, whose village in eastern China has been locked down by plainclothes security men for more than a year. Diplomats, journalists, and ordinary Chinese citizens have been violently turned away whenever they have sought to visit the blind lawyer who helped alleged victims of forced abortions.
In CNN?s report on the visit, Bale says he could not ?look the other way? knowing that Chen was being kept incommunicado, and that he just wanted to shake the activist?s hand.
Bale has also rejected accusations that by starring in ?The Flowers of War,? the most expensive film ever made in China and directed by Zhang Yimou, who choreographed the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, he had contributed to a nationalist Chinese demonization of the Japanese.
?That would be a bit of a kneejerk reaction,? he told reporters at the premiere in Beijing earlier this week.
I found the film, which opened here on Friday and which is expected to be a smash hit, to be melodramatic, sentimental, and implausible. But the two-dimensional depiction of Japanese soldiers as heartless and cunning beasts is not very different from the way US and British films used to portray World War II Germans.
US and British film makers have gotten over that, in a way that Chinese filmmakers have still not. That?s because the Chinese government still finds it politically useful to focus popular nationalist resentment on the Japanese. Perhaps Christian Bale?s publicity coup, by drawing more attention to Chen Guangcheng?s fate, will nudge the Chinese government toward getting over its habit of locking up uncomfortable critics.
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