Kuwait Professor Gives Up on Speech Fight
Yahoo! News - Kuwait Professor Gives Up on Speech Fight
By DIANA ELIAS, Associated Press Writer
KUWAIT CITY - A liberal university professor — tired of legal and verbal assaults from fundamentalists who say he mocks Islam — has given up his fight for freedom of speech in a country he says has become infested with the "germs and viruses of hatred and tyranny."
Ahmed al-Baghdadi — sentenced last week to a suspended one-year prison term for mocking Islam — said he has written his last newspaper column. Earlier, he said he would seek asylum in a Western country to protect his life, his family and his freedom of expression.
On Saturday, the Kuwait University political science professor told The Associated Press he also was considering less drastic options, such as retirement or spending a year abroad, which would be easier on him and his family.
"Writing and living in the shadow of fear is impossible, and dignity is above all," al-Baghdadi wrote in his final column Saturday.
He said legal battles have broken his only weapon — his pen — and there was nothing left for him but to surrender.
Al-Baghdadi’s decision came a week after the Appeals Court convicted him of mocking Islam and handed down a suspended one-year prison sentence, overturning an acquittal by a lower court. It also ordered him to pay a $6,825 deposit, which would be forfeited if he commits the same offense within the next three years.
Al-Baghdadi, an archrival of religious extremists who also took him to court in 1999, has appealed the verdict to the higher Cassation Court, but he said Saturday in his final column for the Al-Siyassah daily newspaper that he would not return to writing even if he won the case.
"It is not a matter of a court ruling here or a court ruling there," he wrote. "It is the sick climate that is filled with germs and viruses of hatred and tyranny."
The legal battle stemmed from a June 5, 2004, column in which al-Baghdadi wrote that he sent his son to an expensive foreign school rather than a state school because he did not want "ignorant" teachers to teach him "how to disrespect women and non-Muslims." Wrong teachings could lead his son to terrorism, he said.
"In short, I want to have a son with an education and a mind I can be proud of, not (a son) with backward thinking," he wrote.
Two Muslim fundamentalists complained to judicial authorities about the column and al-Baghdadi was tried and acquitted by a misdemeanor court.
The Appeals Court, however, ruled the professor had made "derogatory" comments about Islam by linking terrorism and "backward thinking" to religious classes at state schools.
For more than a decade, this small, oil-rich ally of Washington has been pulled between politically strong fundamentalists, who want to fully implement Sharia, or Islamic law, and the less powerful Westernized liberals, who call for more democracy and freedom of expression.
The 1962 constitution guarantees freedom of expression but laws penalize those who insult the country’s religion.
In his farewell column, al-Baghdadi said he could not play "the Kuwaiti roulette" by continuing to write without knowing when the next court case would come.
The U.S.-educated al-Baghdadi, who specializes in political Islam, has been campaigning for years against fundamentalists who he said "terrorize" writers and journalists.
"If terrorism spreads, nobody will be spared. Everyone could be gripped by the neck for a word or a joke unsuspiciously uttered, and accused of being against religion," he wrote in a December 1999 column.
That year, al-Baghdadi was convicted of blaspheming Islam when he wrote that the Prophet Mohammed initially failed to convert nonbelievers in the holy city of Mecca. Kuwait’s emir, Sheik Jaber Al Ahmed Al Sabah, pardoned the professor and he was released from prison after serving about half of his one-month sentence.
