Middle East Focus: Tweeting Mohammed: Kashghari and the Princes and the Wahhabi Palace Clergy…….

Arabia Deserta

Tweeting Mohammed: Kashghari and the Princes and the Wahhabi Palace Clergy…….

Rattlesnake Ridge

BFF
“It remains unclear why Kashgari is being held or whether he will be extradited to Saudi Arabia. Last week, just before the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth, Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old Saudi writer in Jidda, took to his Twitter feed to reflect on the occasion. “On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you,” he wrote in one tweet. “On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more,” he wrote in a second. “On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more,” he concluded in a third……………”

Some details on the Hamza Kashghari case and his tweets:

What he wrote was within the Salafi Wahhabi doctrine of not idolizing prophets or any historic figure. He writes like a good young Wahhabi fundamentalist of the old school, many Saudis are.
What he may not have realized was that all that is only on paper: Wahhabis now are expected to idolize the Al Saud princes and absolute tribal kings, and they mostly do so.
The Prophet Mohammed was a simpler more modest man: most people, the Arabs of his era, just called him simply “Mohammed” or later on “Messenger”. Nobody kissed his hand; neither would he have condoned such abhorrent behavior. Nobody bowed to him either; that used to be un-Islamic “I shall not bow to you……. I shall not kiss your hand”.
Maybe the potentates were upset about this phrase the most “I will say that I have loved the rebel in you….” Rebels are not loved nor admired nor tolerated nor left free in Saudi Arabia, have not been since this dynasty came to power. They are sent to cells where they are kept without charge.
All the public protests are just sanctimonious posturing in Saudi Arabia and the palace Salafis of some Gulf states. Once the news spread that King Abdullah himself, no less, has personally ordered his arrest, everyone jumped on the royal bandwagon, fell in line and started to express fake outrage.
Malaysia was the wrong place for Kashghari to go. It is a fundamentalist country clothed in a thin secular blanket, and its rulers are close to the Saudi potentates. Religious freedom has a patchy record, at best, in Malaysia. He ought to have split to somewhere in Europe.