Love vs Blogs. funny. (Arabic)

Saudi Arabia’s newly installed King Abdullah pardoned five activists on Monday, including three sentenced to up to nine years in jail for calling for political reforms in the absolute monarchy, state television said. More…

The ministry of foreign affairs has announced that Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf will be the new ambassador to Britain. Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf is the son of Prince Nawaf bin Abdul Aziz, former intelligence chief, and is a is a graduate of Georgetown University School of Foreign Studies and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

In one of her latest posts, the Saudi blogger Farah said she imagines herself living in a home where there is no maid around. But this is not the case for most Saudi families, because, according to Arab News, the “average Saudi family has at least one servant helping in the daily chores of the house.”

The paper says that maids, or servants, provide a service to their sponsors — a service that the sponsors are perfectly capable of doing themselves. However, it does not seem it is a matter of capability. “Yet society dictates that all “prestigious” families have a servant to keep the house in order. Having a servant is expected in this society; not having a servant is seen as “shocking and out of the ordinary,'” the newspaper added.

Here is a few questions for the members of our little Saudi bloggers community. Do you have a maid? Or should I ask how many maids do you have? Can you imagine living without the help of a maid in the house?

I know that some of you may say: why are you making a problem out of this? Actually, I don’t have a problem with that at all. It’s a personal choice, after all. I only want to see how the society looks at this issue of maids in general.

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

A+Freeware: “In other words, all you need is the operating system and you won’t have to spend one cent on software.”

Sheikh Hasan al-Saffar, one of the main Shiite leaders in the country, told Arab News that he is expecting a meaningful change to come in a slow, deliberate matter, because that is how the Saudi policy works. Al-Saffar was talking in the presence of Mohsen al-Awajy, a Sunni scholar from Riyadh, who agreed with al-Saffar.

Al-Saffar could be right. However, I don’t think it is supposed to be this way. We need to move now, and we need to move fast. We need a democratic reform, where Shiites and other minorities (or call them ‘madahib’ if you want) can have their rights naturally. If we have democracy, all minorities will gain their rights, and they don’t have to get their rights given to them by somebody.

“Some of the followers of certain Islamic schools, however, complain of abuses of their religious rights as well as some of their civil rights,” al-Saffar said. He attributed these abuses to “inaccurate practices from certain parties who monopolize religious representation to them and want to cancel the others’ (representation).”

Al-Awajy has ignored admitting there was discrimination, and thinks we all should forget about the past. “Start anew, and assure all citizens their rights,” he said. Sounds fair enough? OK, how about this: Give them their rights first, and then they can think about forgetting the past and all the suffering.

In his first speech, King Abdullah vowed justice for all. Does this mean stopping all kinds of discrimination in the country? I’m looking forward to this, but I’m trying to keep my expectations low. Change is coming, but the question is: how long it would take to come?