Death to the media moguls!

Saudi Arabia

Sep 18th 2008 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition
The abiding puritanism of some senior Saudi sheikhs

IN MOST countries, incitement to murder is a crime. But in Saudi Arabia, encouraging people to kill is a special privilege reserved for those whose job it is to uphold the law. At least, this appeared to be the case when the kingdom’s chief justice, Sheikh Saleh Luhaidan, speaking on a live radio programme, answered a caller’s question about the broadcast of “lewd” television shows during the holy month of Ramadan. The 79-year-old religious scholar described the owners of some satellite channels as “apostles of depravity”, and said it would be lawful to kill them.

Understandably, those words from the head of the Supreme Judicial Council, Saudi Arabia’s highest court of appeal, sparked an uproar. Not only Saudi liberals but prominent rival sheikhs condemned the ruling as an example of the ideological extremism that has encouraged violent radicals. In response, Mr Luhaidan qualified his words. He did not mean to imply that anyone should just go out and murder broadcasters, said the bearded sheikh in a subsequent interview on state television. Such people should only be killed after being tried in a Saudi court and only after being given a chance to mend their ways.

Saudis are used to chilling pronouncements from the country’s 700 religious judges, all of whom are schooled in the puritanical Wahhabist interpretation of Islam. The kingdom’s most senior religious authority, the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, recently scolded a fellow scholar for suggesting that celebrating birthdays was a harmless thing to do, declaring instead that such festivities are sinfully unIslamic. He also blasted a Turkish television serial, whose dramatisation of intrigue and romance among the rich and unveiled Muslims of cosmopolitan Istanbul had attracted record audiences this summer, as subversive to the faith.

Clerical challenges to television content are hardly surprising in a country where religious scholars gave their assent to broadcasting only in 1965, after being shown that Koran recitation and Wahhabist sermons could be beamed through the air too. Many Saudis agree that the fare on satellite television, especially during Ramadan, is unnecessarily racy. Yet many admit that, given bans on other forms of entertainment, there is not much else to do.

What made Mr Luhaidan’s outburst particularly piquant is that the owners of most of the channels that Saudis watch are, in fact, fellow Saudis, some of them with close ties to the ruling family. The chief shareholder of MBC, the region’s most popular entertainment network, boasting some 80m regular viewers, is a brother-in-law of the late King Fahd. Prince Waleed bin Talal, a prominent financier and the current king’s nephew, owns the Rotana network, best known for video clips featuring buxom Lebanese pop tarts. Saudi regulators cannot touch these channels, because they are based outside the kingdom, in more open-minded Dubai. But the authorities have taken disciplinary action. They have abruptly taken the long-running live radio show that featured Mr Luhaidan off the air.

http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12267354