{"id":30623,"date":"2014-02-22T18:07:57","date_gmt":"2014-02-22T14:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=30623"},"modified":"2014-02-22T18:07:58","modified_gmt":"2014-02-22T14:07:58","slug":"hirsute-fury-tweet-saudi-beards-peril","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/hirsute-fury-tweet-saudi-beards-peril\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Hirsute Fury’: Tweet About Saudi Beards At Your Peril"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"beard\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe New Yorker\u201d magazine\u2019s online site runs an article about the consequences a Saudi woman is facing after writing about the meaning of beards in the Kingdom (\u201csilly,\u201d in her terms). The critique could have been applied to Pakistan as well, but the article focuses on Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very clear that there are subtle and not-to-subtle messages being sent by beards \u2014 shape, length, color, as well as lack of a beard. The signalling is primarily used in a religious context to identify people who share the same beliefs. As the \u201cNew Yorker\u201d writer notes, the beards of members of the Muslim Brotherhood differ from those of Salafis and the Al-Saud, including King Abdullah, wear them differently as well.<\/p>\n

Messing around with religious signals can be risky because it\u2019s seen as a challenge to one\u2019s piety. And if there\u2019s one thing the religiously conservatives hate \u2014 and fear \u2014 is that their piety be challenged. Sometimes, as here, the result is threats to one\u2019s life and that of one\u2019s family.<\/p>\n

A Saudi Woman Is Threatened After Tweeting About Beards<\/a>
\nKatherine Zoepf<\/p>\n

The controversy began\u2014as virtually all political and religious debate in Saudi Arabia does these days\u2014with a provocative tweet. On January 18th, Souad al-Shammary, a liberal activist with more than a hundred thousand Twitter followers, tweeted her thoughts about the idea, popular among devout Saudis, that Muslim men should grow long beards in order to differentiate themselves from unbelievers. The notion was \u201csilly,\u201d Shammary wrote, pointing out that \u201cJews, priests, Communists and Marxists\u201d have also been known to wear beards.<\/p>\n

Shammary is the co-founder of a group that calls itself the Saudi Liberal Network, in a country where liberaliyeen\u2014Saudis use the English word, giving it an Arabic plural\u2014are so widely reviled that even prominent feminists and human-rights advocates shy away from the label. She has never been popular among Saudi conservatives. But her remarks about beards were met with an unusually violent reaction. Sheikh Adel al-Kalbani, a former imam at the Grand Mosque in Mecca (in 2008, when he became the first black man appointed to the post, some in the Kingdom dubbed him \u201cthe Saudi Obama\u201d), announced that Shammary should be tried for insulting the Prophet, adding that he prayed for her to become blind and to lose the use of a hand.<\/p>\n

In the past month, via Twitter, thousands of conservatives have echoed Kalbani\u2019s remarks, attacking Shammary and calling for her to be put on trial. Some have gone a step further, accusing Shammary of apostasy, an offense that carries the death penalty under Sharia law. Last week, Shammary told an interviewer for the BBC World Service that she and her family had received so many threats that she had gone into hiding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CROSSROADS ARABIA: A Saudi woman has had to go into hiding following her comments on social media about varying beard styles in the Kingdom<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":30625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,5],"tags":[1209,18136,16496,18275,18137,17285],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30623"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30623"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30627,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30623\/revisions\/30627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}