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MaverickMonotheist:
http://www.zimbabwemetro.com/32845/saudi-man-faces-death-for-having-little-faith/

Saudi man faces death for having little faith
Posted by Donell McGriff on Feb 10th, 2012 and filed under Politics & Foreign.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A 23-year-old Saudi columnist has fled the country, his associates said Wednesday, after he tweeted on popular micro-blogging website Twitter expressing his doubts on religion, something that led prominent Saudi clerics and thousands of their followers to use Twitter, YouTube, email and fax to demand his execution.
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.
Hamza Kashgari
“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.
Reports said that thousands of Saudi scholars, students and online users reacted angrily to his open “sacrilege” and filed cases against him calling for stringent legal action for heresy. Twitter quickly flooded with responses to Kashgari, registering more than 30,000 within a day. They accused him of blasphemy, and enraged Saudis called for his death.

According to Sabq in Saudi Arabia and the London-based Al Hayat daily, Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud has personally ordered his arrest for crossing red lines and denigrating religious beliefs in God and His Prophet.
“The Monarch today issued orders to arrest and try Kashgari for his offences against the deity and the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him),” the newspapers said, quoting a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
Abdul Aziz Khowja, the Saudi information minister, had formally put up a warrant ordering that Kashgari, who is a writer for a Saudi daily, be banned from writing for any publication in future, and barred outlets across the country from publishing his work ever.
“When I read his what he posted, I wept and got very angry that someone in the country of the Two Holy Mosques ‘attack’ our Prophet (PBUH) in a manner that does not fit a Muslim address the best of men,” the minister said.
Saudi King has called for Kashgari’s arrest
Nasser al-Omar, an influential cleric, called for him to be tried in a Sharia court for apostasy, which is punishable by death. Other leading clerics decried Kashgari on their own, and Saudi Arabia’s council of senior scholars issued a rare and harshly worded communiqué condemning him and his tweets and demanding that he be executed.
“Your duty is to defend our religion against those atheists and not let it pass by with no punishment — you must write in the papers, in the Internet, and write the government, and not be silenced,” cleric Nasser al-Omar urged all his followers in a video posted on YouTube.
One tweet from Saudi Arabia has offered 10,000 riyals (US$2,666) to anyone who killed Kashgari. Another posted an image of Kashgari’s house and home address taken off Google Earth, and, his friends say, vigilantes had already came looking for him at his local mosque.
The furor, speed, number and intensity of messages calling for the death of the writer stunned many liberal Saudis. “The most serious thing about this was their ability to organize,” said Abdullah Hamadaddin, an analyst based in Jeddah. “You’re talking about two days, and they mobilized thousands of people.”
Riyadh – the commercial capital of Saudi Arabia.
Others viewed the fatwa-by-Twitter as a sign of deeply ingrained divisions in the conservative kingdom. “It’s going crazy, this level of intolerance. I think it has reached a disease-level in Saudi Arabia,” said political commentator Jamal Khashoggi. “It is a culture of hate, which now dominate Saudi Arabia.”
Fouad al-Farhan, a respected liberal and Saudi Arabia’s most influential blogger, knew Kashgari was in trouble. He quickly got in touch with Kashgari and urged him to issue the apology, which he did. Kashgari retracted his tweets and announced his repentance.
“My tweets were posted during a [difficult] psychological state. I erred and I pray to God that He will forgive me for what I did,” Hamza Kashgari said in a statement.
“I declare my repentance and I distance myself fully from all the misleading ideas that had affected me and made me write expressions that I do not support. I bear witness that Mohammad is the messenger of God. I shall live and die firmly believing in it. I declare my repentance and I strongly adhere to the testimonies that there is no deity but Allah and that Mohammad is the messenger of Allah,” he wrote.

Kashgari has since deleted his Twitter account, and he says some like-minded friends have done the same. He declined to comment on his apology and retraction but insisted his battle was still not lost. “I view my actions as part of a process toward freedom. I was demanding my right to practice the most basic human rights—freedom of expression and thought—so nothing was done in vain,” he says. “I believe I’m just a scapegoat for a larger conflict. There are a lot of people like me in Saudi Arabia who are fighting for their rights.”
Saudi’s clerics however, insisted there is no forgiveness and no second chance for Kashgari, stating that his repentance acquitted him of blasphemy in front of God, but that doesn’t exempt him from personal accounting to the populace, and demanded he be killed.
Even Kashgari’s friends, all of whom requested anonymity, say they’re reluctant to come to his defense, and have even felt the need to attack him themselves. “Everyone who tried to objectively deal with this case was immediately stigmatized and labeled an enemy of the prophet, who therefore should suffer the same fate Hamza is awaiting,” says one.
Adds another: “Right now we’re not worried about freedom of speech. We’re worried about the safety of our friend, Kashgari. And right now we can only help his safety if we condemn him, and [from there] try to rationalize what he said.”
World map – the greener the country, the weaker the religion
Kashgari has fled Saudi Arabia through Jordan and UAE to an unspecified Eastern Asian or Southeast Asian states, where religious tolerance and atheistic opinion are more open. The power of religion is weak and tamed in nations such as China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, while Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia are strictly off-limit to him.
In his first interview with the press, Kashgari told The Daily Beast that he was stunned by the turn of events and has accepted the fact that he can never return home. “It’s impossible. No way,” he said. “I’m afraid, and I don’t know where to go.” Kashgari says he is now planning to apply for asylum abroad.
Kashgari says he never expected such an outcry, but he knows the mindset of his critics well. He was raised as a religious conservative in a traditional Salafi community, but is deemed to be highly-educated, becoming more liberal and “humanist,” in the words of one friend, as he grew older and embraced the Web.
China and Japan, world’s most irreligious countries – nearly one-third of world’s manufacturing industries
Mr. Kashgari had been a columnist for the Jeddah-based al-Bilad daily. He had drawn the attention of Saudi conservatives before, when he appeared—in shorts, rather than robes worn by most Saudi men here—in photographs of a hotel convention attended by women with their hair uncovered.
Ahmed Al Omran, who keeps the popular blog Saudi Jeans, says it’s common for conservative activists to keep watch over liberal-minded social-media feeds. “They wait for the moment when they say something controversial to use it against them. Hamza is apparently one of the people they’ve been monitoring,” he says. “Most people feel strongly about the situation. But at the same time, I feel that conservatives are trying to take advantage of the situation, make an example out of him, and show their strength.”

Saudi Arabia has a low user rate for Twitter—less than 1% of the country’s 27 million Saudis and expatriates as of early 2011, according to the Dubai School of Government.
Clerics dominate the list of most-followed tweeters in the kingdom. Religious conservatives in the past have responded suspiciously to new media, only to learn to harness it effectively to draw followers and spread their messages, via chat rooms, YouTube and other means.
Grand Mufti Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh last month urged Muslims to avoid Twitter, calling it “full of lies.”

Jafar:
I'm happy that the seed of 'critical thinking' starting to grow in the 'Holy Kingdom of Saudi Arabia'.

However it's sad upon hearing on what's happening to them..  a 'natural reaction' of conservatives and oppressor everywhere, they tried to instill fear to quell their resistance..

Student of Allah:
Shalom Aleikhom,

Stupid Pharoahs !!

Anyways, the second picture on the article does not make much sense. Deliberately put there to show how enraged the peace loving muslims are ? I am only saying that because the picture is pretty old.

Peace
----------- Student of Allah

Ikrame:
That s really sad. Believe is a personal matter. The essence of this life is to submit freely with your own free will and not by force, cause if that s the case then it s just fake. Sounds like they re afraid of loosing control. I hope they will some day.

Peace

Shirley:
Is there any particular Human Rights group that has decided to condemn these ridiculous charges and fight to save his life?

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