Religion Dispatches
…s simultaneously marrying two of her friends. Because polygamy is legal in Saudi Arabia, this isn’t surprising; what’s more surprising is that the wife-to-be proposed that the husband-to-be take a second and third wife, and then stipulated who those wives would be. Know your co-wives, I guess. (It’s a Big Love episode in Arabic.) At first the man resisted. Maybe he didn’t like her friends? We don’t know. Maybe he didn’t want to pay for three house…
Read More…oted sheikh, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, in Dir`iyyah, near the capital of Saudi Arabia. Dir`iyyah, which is essentially a suburb of Riadh, was ruled in the middle of the 18th century by a tribal sheikh named Muhammad ibn Saud. It was also the home base of the founder of Wahhabi Islam. As the Times notes, the two Muhammads made a deal that would eventually take over most of the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammad ibn Saud would supply the warriors and Muh…
Read More…uck by her husband for the very same reason, because she too was raised in Saudi Arabia. Don’t you know Muslim women are invariably oppressed? Don’t you know Hillary Clinton’s not a Muslim, except she should be, for Dowd’s column to deserve the space it received? (All this time we were worried about Obama.) Perhaps aware of the thinness of her causation, Dowd offers other specious possibilities. Like, Clinton’s apology was more sincere. Or, his c…
Read More…de, we sounded a note of caution here at RD about the “dark side” of honor code enforcement. After all, the honor code had been created during the 1960s in an effort by ultra-conservative BYU President Ernest Wilkinson to root out liberals, and honor code enforcement (including anonymous referrals) had been used to bait and harrass feminist, liberal, and gay students, shut down campus free speech, and compromise the privacy of pastoral counseling…
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…police took cues for a discriminatory raid from a militant Islamist group. Saudi Arabia: Profile of transgender man The Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Ellen Wulfhort profiles Salman Al-Dukheil, a transgender man from Saudi Arabia, spoke publicly about his identity for the first time at Trust women, a conference on women’s rights and human trafficking. “If I can help one person, if one person can somehow benefit from my having gone through this, why…
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…d Abdul Wahhab’s alliance eventually became the cornerstone of the present Saudi kingdom, established in 1932 with the long-term support of the British, who had wanted to gain a foothold in Arabia, and to destroy the Ottoman caliphate (both of which had been achieved by then). Fast forward to the present. ISIS is systematically butchering Christians despite their Quranic designation as “People of the Book” – a special status also accorded to Jews….
Read More…HING that worried me the most about being able to make the hajj this year. Saudi Arabia has a “no women travel alone” policy that affects both its own citizens and millions of other women who wish to perform the lesser or greater pilgrimage. A woman must have a mahram. Now a mahram is a male relative, usually understood to be in the guardian role. That means he starts off the father of the female person, or an uncle. When she marries, it is the hu…
Read More…s pilgrimage for the thousands of gay Muslims who were too scared to go to Saudi Arabia, who would feel they would never be welcome,” Sharma said. “I felt I was doing it for them.” The CBC reports that Sharma had received death threats and the Hot Docs festival had added extra security for the film’s three sold-out screenings. Seventh-Day Adventists: Long history of support for gay ‘cures’ We recently noted that a “healing from homosexuality confe…
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…habism—which the Saudi government helps promote and fund in and outside of Saudi Arabia—is not representative of Islam globally. Such Wahhabism, according to Salaymeh, is an “extremist strain” on the periphery of the Muslim community. “In a weird way,” she says, “the neo-cons are in dialogue with the extremists and are legitimating the extremists’ position by refusing to recognize that there are other interpretations of Islam and experiences of Is…
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…g digital tools for the promotion of social interaction and engagement. In Saudi Arabia, dating sites are one of the few options for LGBT people to socially interact. However, the religious police even tracks gay dating sites actively and convicted two men to 450 lashes for using Twitter to meet in 2014. Even such private use is considered “promoting the vice and practice of homosexuality”. According to the new anti-terrorism law, Saudi Arabia con…
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