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…rential status accorded to BYU athletes as well as the potential for honor code enforcement abuse. Twenty years ago, when I worked for the independent BYU student newspaper Student Review, we regularly ran exposés on honor code enforcement abuses of students whose differences—anything from protesting the Iraq War, to having a tattoo, to being black—made them vulnerable in a community that placed a high priority on conformity. In 1994, the Student…
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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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…e has long been serious talk of destroying the Prophet’s tomb – again, because, according to Wahhabi doctrine, it constitutes an “idol.”) In their place, the Saudi government has been erecting enormous monuments to the grossest form of materialism. With mirror image zeal, ISIS has been demolishing major sites of religious importance, including the Prophet Seth’s shrine. Although it doesn’t have the money to erect its own idols to capitalism and co…
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…
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…
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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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