Blogging in Egypt and Saudi Arabia
Before I get into this post, I wanted to pass along the news that the has been released after a 45-day detention. We have spoken to Alaa before on the programme, and he was detained with some 47 other activists after protesting . Alaa continued to blog from jail, smuggling out posts.
But we're going to take a look at blogging in another country in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia. The numbers may be small, but the growth in blogging has been phenomenal in .
In Saudi Arabia, there are some 300 bloggers, and around the Gulf States, Haitham says that there are now 1000, a five-fold increase from 2004.
We're going to be joined by two sisters, and Aziz, who blog. I didn't actually realise they were sisters until they both told me via e-mail. Farah describes her blog as: "The everyday natterings of an exhausted, repressed, and bored "Saudi" Arabian chick..."
As Farah said in an article in the : "I love blogging because it helps me to express myself and I like to write in English."
She is a translation student at King Saud University in Riyadh who started blogging in January 2005, and one of her recent posts condemned the of women's facilities at her university.
Her 16-year-old sister Ruba gives a piece of her mind on Islam, women and voting:
You know what's so haram??
Even more haram then women voting!??
Is making religious excuses!
You cant just forbid something that’s ok in Islam then start making excuses!!!
I've just had a late e-mail from Jo, who writes the blog . She recently posted about a new conservative bloggers association in Saudi Arabia, the Official Community of the Saudi Bloggers (OCSAB). In this post, she quoted Shakespeare:
Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed, When not to be receives reproach of being;
. She had got to know one of the members of the OCSAB via instant messaging. During one conversation, he propositioned her to engage in 'cyber-sex'.
Just a point of clarification from the programme, OSCAB doesn't block blogs. They are just a group of conservative bloggers. As it says at the , the Internet Services Unit of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology maintains the firewall and its content filters
Talk of sex and religion seems to have got one notable Saudi blogger, Saudi Eve, on the government's list of blocked sites. She recently wrote a post about being blocked and still speaking out "". One of her fellow Saudi bloggers, Ubergirl87, says . And she links to the form at Internet Services Unit to .
Update on Alaa
As I was writing this post, this update on Alaa came into my inbox from Rachel Rawlins, the managing editor of the project. She said that Alaa's detention had not been renewed, but it was not known when he might be home.
This story was even picked up by one of the most popular blogs in the world, BoingBoing. was writing about why the story should matter to her readers:
Stories of jailed bloggers like this always seem remote and "over there" until you sit down and read their stuff for a spell. They guy's into Radiohead and Nirvana, for chrissakes. He's like you or me, only -- well, he's in Egypt.
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