j’s blog

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.

Here’s a good overview on the lack of freedom of speech in many countries, especially the Middle East. Would you be brave enough to write what you do if there was the possibility of punishment such as 14 years in an Iranian prison? Don’t take your freedom of speech, if you have it, for granted:

Scoop: William Fisher: Blogging In The Middle East

Tuesday, 15 March 2005

By William Fisher

In democracies throughout the world, ‘blogging’ - setting up personal websites, known as weblogs, able to receive comments from readers - has grown exponentially over the past few years.

In the United States, there are literally millions of ‘blogs’. Their growth has been accelerated by five main factors.

1. First, the number of home computers has grown enormously. Some 61% of adults in the U.S. have Internet access at home and 71% have computers.

2. Second, access to the online technology for creating a blog has become easier and simpler.

3. Third, the U.S. has a relatively high literacy rate.

4. Fourth, for the past decade - but particularly after the historic and controversial presidential election of 2000 - Americans have become increasingly cynical about reporting by newspapers, radio, and broadcast, cable and satellite television controlled by giant corporations.

5. Finally, America has become a deeply divided nation politically and socially. Citizens with widely divergent points of view have found blogging a way to express their ideas and join or create communities of like-minded bloggers.

When satellite television arrived, it was hailed by journalism watchers as the ‘the new media’. But, predictably, its novelty was short-lived. Now, there are indications that, over the next decade, the Internet generally, and blogging in particular, may become the ‘new new media’ - America’s primary source of news.

However, it’s not there yet - a recent survey Gallup for CNN showed that only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs. So the jury is still out on whether virtual reality will replace Gutenberg. However, trends point in that direction.

Not yet in the Greater Middle East, though there are many parallels. For example, blogging technology is available to anyone with access to the Internet, and content can easily be created in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and other languages. While home computer ownership is still embryonic, there is pretty solid anecdotal evidence of deep suspicion of government-owned ‘mainstream media’ that spurred growth in the ‘blogosphere’ elsewhere.

But there is at least one critical difference. In most of the countries in the Greater Middle East, using a personal weblog to express political dissent can land you in jail as easily as taking part in an unauthorized political protest in the public square.

Iran is one of the worst offenders. Recently, an Iranian weblogger was jailed for 14 years for ’spying and aiding foreign counter-revolutionaries’ after using his blog to criticize the arrest of other online journalists. Despite the risks, an estimated 75,000 Iranians among its five million Internet users maintain online ‘blogs’. Especially among middle class youth, they have become an important way for Iranians to express dissatisfaction. As in Iran, most countries of the region impose varying degrees of restriction on weblogs.

Saudi Arabia, where authorities block some 400,000 websites, is among the most restrictive. It is unclear how many blogsites there are in the Kingdom, but those that are accessible focus largely on political dissent.

Typical is a site called "The Religious Policeman". One recent posting said, "What Reforms? There aren’t any Reforms! The government promised to set up a higher commission on women’s affairs, guaranteed women participation in the recent National Dialogue Forum… .and in the National Human Rights Commission… the National Dialogue Forum… agreed to change nothing, the ‘team photo’ had no women in it, anyone with any sense left in tears."

In Iraq today, there are hundreds of blogsites, most run by Iraqis, some by American and other coalition soldiers. They are communist, monarchist, Kurdish, Assyrian, Islamist, Shiite, Sunni, nationalist and secularist. Their political positions range from full support for the U.S. invasion and occupation to rabid calls for jihad against the Americans.

For example, on the one-year commemoration of the start of the Iraq war, a 24-year-old woman computer programmer wrote in her "Baghdad Burning" blog, "Occupation Day, April 9, 2003: The day we sensed that the struggle in Baghdad was over and the fear of war was nothing compared to the new fear we were currently facing. It was the day I saw my first American tank roll grotesquely down the streets of Baghdad - through a residential neighborhood. And that was April 9 for me and millions of others…and the current Governing Council want us to remember April 9 fondly and hail it our ‘National Day’ … a day of victory … but whose victory?"

Mona El Tahawy, a columnist at the daily Asharq Al Awsat, writes that bloggers in Iran and Iraq "have inspired others in the Arab world… Despite working in an elite medium, requiring a computer and literacy", she said, "bloggers are the voice of the true Arab street, especially the young." But free expression comes at a price.

In Egypt, authorities have tightened their control of the country’s 600,000 web users. The webmaster of the English-language Al Ahram Weekly was sentenced to a year in prison for posting a sexually-explicit poem, and a 19-year-old student was sentenced to a month in jail for "putting out false information" after reporting a serial killer on the loose in Cairo.

In Syria, one blogger asked others to sign an online petition addressed to " The White House" and "The Elyses" (palace). "With the killing of Hariri in Lebanon" it said, "Syrian Ba’athists are out of control. Who’s next? Syria is inciting civil war in Lebanon." Another Syrian, calling himself "Kafka", wrote that President Assad’s speech "made the Syrian people forget that (he) "never cared to give a damn about us since he came to power… ."

In Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine ben Ali has been determined to stamp out all cyber-dissidence. Among many others, a prominent lawyer was arrested for posting an article online. In Bahrain, two online forum moderators were arrested. Nonetheless, a Bahraini blogsite, called "Sabbah’s Blog" was busy organizing a "Middle East Bloggers Meetup". Dozens of enthusiastic comments were posted by readers.

Even in Afghanistan, poorest of the poor, blogging is beginning to catch on. One Afghan blog reports, "During the Taliban we didn’t have the Internet, but now there are about 25 net cafes in Kabul, and also some in Herat, Kandahar, and Balkh provinces. People are really interested to use the Internet but it’s too expensive… only rich people can afford it."

If political dissent via blogging has not yet risen to the level of "new, new media" in the western democracies, it is at least not yet constrained by government regulation (though Congress and the Justice Department have floated various proposals to do just that). In fact, there may be a bizarre inverse relationship between the suppression of free expression and the proliferation of blogs. In the U.S., the number of blogs has increased significantly during the Bush Administration, when millions of Americans feel passionately that their civil liberties are being eroded by the ‘war on terror’. That outcry has generated equally passionate response from bloggers on the right.

Maybe the lesson for heads of state in the Middle East is: Increase freedom of speech and reduce the challenge and expense of having to deal with this cyber uproar.

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William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. His weblog is THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BILL FISHER (http://billfisher.blogspot.com/)