Saudi clerics attack media policy amid reform push

Mon Mar 23, 2009 10:11am EDT – http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLN387568

RIYADH, March 23 (Reuters) – A group of hardline Saudi clerics have called on the Islamic state’s new minister of information to halt efforts to liberalise the media by taking Saudi women off state television.

In a statement posted on Saudi websites, the 35 clerics including leading independent Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak argued that the Saudi government was violating its own rules on religion and morals.

Saudis order 40 lashes for elderly woman for mingling

• Story Highlights
• Saudi newspaper says religious officer found two men in Syrian woman’s house
• Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi said she breast-fed one of men when he was infant
• Sawadi argues that under Islamic tradition, that makes man related to her
• Men to receives lashes, too; case sparks outrage in conservative Saudi Arabia

By Mohammed Jamjoom and Saad Abedine
CNN

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/03/09/saudi.arabia.lashes/?iref=hpmostpop

(CNN) — A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-old Syrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house, according to local media reports.

According to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan, troubles for the woman, Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi, began last year when a member of the religious police entered her house in the city of Al-Chamli and found her with two unrelated men, “Fahd” and “Hadian.”