By Mark Aldrich - Who is Raif Badawi? Badawi is a writer from Saudi Arabia who started a blog entitled “Saudi Arabian Liberals,” then was arrested in 2012 and charged with “insulting Islam” and with apostasy for his writings. In Saudi Arabia and many countries, apostasy, the abandonment of a belief—in this case, belief in […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) sadly marks the three-year anniversary of the blasphemy sentence handed down in Saudi Arabia to Raif Badawi, the founder and editor of Free Saudi Liberals, an online forum for diverse views. “The Saudi government continues to imprison Raif Badawi for exercising his internationally-guaranteed rights […]
By KAREN ZRAICK The New York Times - His writings had challenged Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment. In October, the European Union honored him with its top human rights award, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Since his arrest, Ms. Haidar, 36, has become an outspoken campaigner on his behalf. She organizes weekly protests with Amnesty […]
By Grant LaFleche, The Standard Conference: Maajid Nawaz, the conference’s keynote speaker, knows more about the internal working of the jihadist mind than most. As a young man living in the U.K., he was radicalized by the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Eventually, his involvement with the group landed him in an Egyptian jail for five […]
NPR - Author: TOM GJELTEN Free-thinking bloggers in some Muslim countries face criminal prosecution and even death for expressing their ideas. There are Islamic scholars who say this is a distortion of what Islam teaches. Some of the most deadly terrorist attacks have been Muslims killing Muslims. Earlier this month, a truck bomb targeted Shia Muslims […]