(NEWSER) – “Will you promise me that you’ll … not tell the children?” So asked Saudi blogger Raif Badawi of his wife when he called in early January 2015 to break the news that the first 50 lashes of the 1,000 he had been sentenced by his country to receive would be doled out the next day.
Ensaf Haidar recounts the experience in an excerpt from her new book, The Voice of Freedom: My Husband, Our Story, published by the Guardian. And so, the next morning, she told her children they were taking a break from the Internet and TV, and not going to school either, instead having a play-day with some friends and their dogs. The children were all too pleased; Haidar, later alone, clicked “with trembling hands” to play a video of what had transpired.