Rattlesnake Ridge      

 
      BFF
“At Book World Prague 2011, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the “guest of honour”. But guest, in this context, actually means high-paying client: an oppressive regime hoping to buy itself some cultural legitimacy with its petrodollars. And honour? Given the dismal Saudi Arabian record on freedom of speech and other human rights, honour basically means shame. Under the soft rainbow colours of an arching art nouveau roof, the Saudis have erected a huge and lavish stand, in the form of a turreted (and carpeted) mock fortress, replete with scale models of Mecca and Medina, children’s play area, some blonde women in Saudi costumes, and plenty of individually plastic-wrapped dates for all. There are even a few books, presumably as a concession to this being a book fair – and one or two of them are literary titles. But where are the Saudi writers?………”

Like the almost-proverbial guys said, or could have said: “You pays your money and you does your thing….”
The al-Saud are such known book lovers, as are their Salafi mutawa’een of the Commission for the Propagation of Vice (religious police). Normally they love to ban books from the country but, barring that, they also love to burn books. Writers can go to prison for writing the “wrong” stuff; they can get flogged for writing the truly ‘wrong” stuff. To prove their love and devotion to books, only a few weeks ago they published and distributed 1.5 million copies of the religious fatwas banning protests against Arab regimes (edited by none other than Shilk A Al Al Shaikh). That was the second printing: the initial printing was half a million copies.

(No need for me to state, again, that the Mufti shaikh A Al Al Shaikh is a direct descendant of Imam Mohammed Bin abdulwahhab and that he is to bedistinguished from the late great Egyptian musician and singer Mohammed Abdelwahhab who was not a Salafi Wahhabi. There are a passel of Al Al Shaikh progeny in high positions in Saudi Arabia).
Cheers
mhg



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