Saudi Arabia

BBC News reports: The UK has urged Saudi Arabia not to carry out a reported sentencing of paralysis for a Saudi man as punishment for paralysing another man. A Foreign Office spokesperson said London was “deeply concerned” by the sentence, describing it as “grotesque”. Such punishment was “prohibited under international law”, the official added. Saudi [...]

The Independent reports: The authorities in Saudi Arabia have begun dismantling some of the oldest sections of Islam’s most important mosque as part of a highly controversial multi-billion pound expansion. Photographs obtained by The Independent reveal how workers with drills and mechanical diggers have started demolishing some Ottoman and Abbasid sections on the eastern side [...]

Marc Lynch writes: Two of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent human rights activists, Mohammed Fahd al-Qahtani and Abdullah al-Hamed, were sentenced over the weekend to lengthy jail terms. As Ahmed al-Omran reports today for the Middle East Channel, the sentences were not a surprise (when I met him in January, Qahtani told me that they were [...]

Al-Akhbar reports: Saudi religious police stormed a house in the Saudi Arabian province of al-Jouf, detaining more than 41 guests for “plotting to celebrate Christmas,” a statement from the police branch released Wednesday night said. The raid is the latest in a string of religious crackdowns against residents perceived to threaten the country’s strict religious [...]

The Independent reports: Three of the world’s oldest mosques are about to be destroyed as Saudi Arabia embarks on a multi-billion-pound expansion of Islam’s second holiest site. Work on the Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina, where the Prophet Mohamed is buried, will start once the annual Hajj pilgrimage ends next month. When complete, the development will [...]

Homa Khaleeli writes: Are radical feminist separatists infiltrating Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite? Have the women of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia undergone a wild revolution, read Love Your Enemy? and decided to eschew all male company to create their own political systems and free themselves from the patriarchy? I hope so, because otherwise it’s hard [...]

Guy Adams interviews Manal al-Sharif, the Saudi Arabian woman who became famous around the world last year after posting on YouTube an eight-minute video of her steering a car through the streets of the city of Khobar, railing as she went against the misogyny of laws that make it illegal for women in Saudi Arabia [...]

NASA reports: Saudi Arabia is drilling for a resource possibly more precious than oil. Over the last 24 years, it has tapped hidden reserves of water to grow wheat and other crops in the Syrian Desert. This time series of data shows images acquired by three different Landsat satellites operated by NASA and the U.S. [...]

Al-Akhbar reports: Protests have spread to a number of cities in Saudi Arabia following the suppression of a demonstration held by female students at a university last Wednesday, the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said on Tuesday. The Cairo-based NGO released a statement saying the anger of students has spread and “gone beyond [...]

Saad al-Faqih writes:‘Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest,” the French 18th century philosopher Denis Diderot said. The same phrase is now widely repeated across Arabia – or Saudi Arabia, as it is currently named under the dynastic autocracy. It is only a matter of time before the revolutions [...]

Toby Matthiesen writes: As the British prime minister, David Cameron, visited Riyadh in mid-January, wooing Saudi business and strengthening bilateral relations, a young Shia man in the eastern province was shot dead. Following the kingdom’s huge arms deal with the United States, Cameron apparently wanted to persuade the Saudis to buy Typhoon Eurofighters. His visit [...]