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Thursday, June 03, 2004
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NEWS OF THE WORLD
If you're anything like me, you enjoy learning about the world. The major media outlets make this difficult and tedious. Different cultures require fairly intensive work to understand and your average television broadcast might run five minutes on a given subject.
That's a big reason I like books. Books good. Books also time-consuming and expensive. Then there's the Internet generally, and Blogs in particular. There's a lot you can learn from a blog, especially a foreign one. The problem with that is that the societies I'm most interested in are so repressive or backward that there's a dearth of blogs coming from them. When was the last North Korean blog you've seen. Ditto Congo.
That's why I take great pleasure in bringing you The Religious Policeman. This a well-written journal on Saudi Arabia by Alamedi, a Saudi citizen. He writes it from within Saudi Arabia. This is a highly risky task. Blogspot and all Blogger pages are blocked by the Saudi government, although Alamedi has figured a way around this. The Blog is, shall we say...uncomplimentary toward the House of Saud. Anyone who knows anything about the Kingdom knows that this carries some pretty dire consequences.
One should remember. Successfully smuggling a bottle of scotch, or even a copy of Cosomopolitan from 1996 can land you prison time. Saudi prisons are famously unpleasant.
What most of know about Saudi Arabia can be boiled down to three or four items. These include,
-No one gets to vote there.
-Women don't get to much of anything.
-The Royal Family personally owns all the oil.
-There isn't much else but oil in Saudi Arabia.
-15 of the 19 9/11 highjackers and Osa bin-Laden himself call it home.
You can learn so much more about the Kingdom from Alamedi. Alamedi is courageous for even writing this blog. He's also an intelligent, gifted and funny writer. He's raised interesting points about Saudi popular opinion that I've been meaning to address, but those would be better suited to a more extended post than this. I might post it here, I might post it somewhere else.
But if your even remotely curious about Arab society, read the Religious Policeman. You'll be glad you did.
Oh, and thanks to the lovely Serenity for hipping me to this page on her blog a few months ago.
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