Blogged to Death in Saudi Arabia

Clemency for Raif Badawi

By The New York Times editorial board 10 June 2015

The decision on Sunday by Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court to uphold the depraved sentence imposed on the blogger Raif Badawi last May by the criminal court in Jeddah is tantamount to a death sentence for the “crime” of free expression. 

The criminal court sentenced Mr. Badawi, whose case has invited worldwide condemnation, to 1,000 lashes, 50 to be administered “very harshly,” in public, once a week for 20 weeks. In addition, he is to serve 10 years in prison and pay a fine of 1 million riyals, about $267,000.

There is no further appeal possible in the Saudi courts. At this point, Mr. Badawi’s only hope lies in a pardon from King Salman bin Abdulaziz.

In 2008, Mr. Badawi, now 31 years old, helped found a website, Free Saudi Liberals, that hosted discussion critical of Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment.

He was arrested in 2012, charged with cybercrime. His initial sentence of 600 blows and seven years of imprisonment was increased last May after prosecutors deemed his sentence too lenient.

Social media has exploded among Saudi Arabia’s youth, providing a rare outlet for free expression in a society that severely restricts it. It seems clear that the Saudi judiciary intends to make an example of Mr. Badawi.

Mr. Badawi received the first 50 lashes in January. His wounds were so severe that a team of doctors determined he was unfit to receive a second round of lashes the following week. Mr. Badawi has not been flogged since, but there is real fear following the Supreme Court’s decision that the punishment may resume as early as this Friday, putting his life at risk.

His death, or his crippling for life, another real possibility, would be a blot that even Saudi Arabia — known for administering brutal punishments that include amputations and beheadings — would find difficult to live down.

The United States has called Mr. Badawi’s punishment inhumane. The European Union has vowed to make “every effort to engage the Saudi authorities in a dialogue on the need to recognize and respect freedom of speech for all.”

Mr. Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar and the couple’s three children have been granted asylum in Canada. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins on June 18. This is a good time for King Salman, crowned four months ago, to demonstrate his magnanimity, grant Mr. Badawi clemency and allow him to join his family.

Because Turks are not Jewish

Turkish President Recep Erdogan is many things, but he is not Jewish.

Turkey invaded and occupied northern Cyprus in 1974. Two hundred thousand Greek refugees were driven out of this most fertile part of the island which has since been militarised by Turkey.  Turkish settlers have been shipped in from Anatolia and live in Greek homes on Greek land, their theft protected by a large Turkish army.

Turkey is part of NATO, but nothing is said about this outrage.

And Cyprus, the free southern part of the island, is part of the European Union, but nothing is said about the Turkish outrage in the north.

Why not?  Because Turks are not Jewish.

Palestine After Centuries of Arab and Turkish Occupation

Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or mottled with the shadows of the clouds. Every outline is harsh, every feature is distinct, there is no perspective—distance works no enchantment here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.

Small shreds and patches of it must be very beautiful in the full flush of spring, however, and all the more beautiful by contrast with the far-reaching desolation that surrounds them on every side. I would like much to see the fringes of the Jordan in spring-time, and Shechem, Esdraelon, Ajalon and the borders of Galilee—but even then these spots would seem mere toy gardens set at wide intervals in the waste of a limitless desolation.

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists—over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead—about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, good will to men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel, is gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.

- Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

The Levant Fair

Imperial Airways at the Sea of Galilee

Jews Gathering Wheat in Palestine

The Levant Consular Service

One of several specialised sections of the British network of consuls in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Levant Service covered the Ottoman Empire and its fringes, or what today is called the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East. It grew out of the consular posts inherited from the Levant Company in 1825, though it was not formally constituted as a reformed separate service employing natural-born British subjects until 1877. With heavy, and especially judicial, responsibilities under the capitulations and mounting political tasks as Anglo-Russian rivalry increased, the Levant Service was exceptionally large, elaborate and expensive; its consuls also had a higher status than those in the general service and by the First World War had replaced the China Service, the other main specialised service, as the most prestigious element in the whole consular establishment. Because of the ending of the capitulations, among other reasons, the independent Levant Consular Service was amalgamated with the General Consular Service in 1934, and matters have gone downhill ever since.

Beauty and the Beast

From Hanna, an Iranian blogger in Tehran:

'I am listening to all my favourite pop songs. Before the rally I will go to the beauty salon to get my eyebrows plucked ... It may get violent. I might be one of those who gets killed ... I am writing so the next generation do not think we were sentimental and didn’t know what we are doing.'

From Our Man in Jerusalem, 1841

Click on the images to enlarge.

From Our Man in Jerusalem, 1851

Click on the image to enlarge.

The Golden Journey to Samarkand

James Elroy Flecker has already been mentioned here, and his poem The Golden Journey To Samarkand is here. But also you can listen to it by clicking here.

When the Going was Good

THE GOLDEN JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND
by James Elroy Flecker

PROLOGUE:

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why, -
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall towards the West:
And there the world's first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their breasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.


EPILOGUE:

At the Gate of the Sun, Bagdad, in olden time.

The Merchants (together)
Away, for we are ready to a man!
Our camels sniff the evening and are glad.
Lead on, O Master of the Caravan:
Lead on the Merchant-Princes of Bagdad.

The Chief Draper
Have we not Indian carpets dark as wine,
Turbans and sashes, gowns and bows and veils,
And broideries of intricate design,
And printed hangings in enormous bales?

The Chief Grocer
We have rose-candy, we have spikenard,
Mastic and terebinth and oil and spice,
And such sweet jams meticulously jarred
As God's own Prophet eats in Paradise.

The Principal Jews
And we have manuscripts in peacock styles
By Ali of Damascus: we have swords
Engraved with storks and apes and crocodiles,
And heavy beaten necklaces, for Lords.

The Master of the Caravan
But you are nothing but a lot of Jews.

The Principal Jews
Sir, even dogs have daylight, and we pay.

The Master of the Caravan
But who are ye in rags and rotten shoes,
You dirty-bearded, blocking up the way?

The Pilgrims
We are the Pilgrims, master: we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men are born: but surely we are brave,
Who make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

The Chief Merchant
We gnaw the nail of hurry. Master, away!

One of the Women
O turn your eyes to where your children stand.
Is not Bagdad the beautiful? O stay!

The Merchants (in chorus)
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

An Old Man
Have you not girls and garlands in your homes,
Eunuchs and Syrian boys at your command?
Seek not excess: God hateth him who roams!

The Merchants (in chorus)
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

A Pilgrim with a Beautiful Voice
Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly though the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

A Merchant
We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

The Master of the Caravan
Open the gate, O watchman of the night!

The Watchman
Ho, travellers, I open. For what land
Leave you the dim-moon city of delight?

The Merchants (with a shout)
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

(The Caravan passes through the gate)

The Watchman (consoling the women)
What would ye, ladies? It was ever thus.
Men are unwise and curiously planned.

A Woman
They have their dreams, and do not think of us.

Voices of the Caravan (in the distance, singing)
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915)

James Elroy Flecker died of consumption in 1915, only thirty years of age. Flecker was of the Levant Consular Service, and also he was a poet. One of his best known poems, though he is far less known than he deserves to be, is To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence.


I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Mæonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.