Earlier this year, STC started a huge promotional campaign to force their customers (almost everybody as STC were the exclusive provider of mobile service) to add an extra “zero” to their mobile phones numbers which start with “05”. STC added the “zero” after the “5” to make the numbers start with “050” and the announced goal was to expand the network capacity.

STC, well known for their bad customer service and their greedy nature, did not ask the customers at the first place if they were OK with adding a “zero” or not. If people were asked to add anything, they would definitely go with “5” instead of “0”, however, STC did not pay enough attention and added an f**cking “zero” to every f**cking mobile number.

Now, after STC finally discovered people wanted “5” instead of “0”, they are shamelessly asking the customers to pay SR 25 (around $7) to change the numbers from “0” to “5”, or you can stick to your ugly “zero-ed” number. Yes, we pay money to correct a mistake STC made when they changed our numbers without our will (they could run SMS-based poll before taking such idiot decisions!).

It seems that STC will try to suck every possible riyal from people’s wallets before the entry of the new telecommunications provider after six months. The new company, called Etisalat Union (who made up this crappy name?), is owned by UAE’s Etisalat and some Saudi investors, and it will be the first competitor to STC in the Saudi fast growing market.

A Saudi sociologist told Asharq Al-Awsat that Saudis are wasting $192m every year on foreign chauffeurs they bring to drive the cars of their women. “This is a huge loss to our national economy,” She added.

It is a huge bill that extremists may consider when they yell everyday that they’ll never ever let women drive their own cars.

A French Muslim female student has protested against the stupid French law to prevent the religious symbols in schools by shaving her hair. The student told the press that she respects the law but the law does not respect her.

I called this French law “stupid” because I don’t think of hijab as a religious symbol. A crescent is a religious symbol; hijab is just a piece of clothes. Millions of Muslim women out there do not wear hijab; does that make them non-Muslims? I think deciding what someone wants to wear is a personal matter, so why the French government interferes in such a personal choice?

I found this article through the Google Ads on my sidebar. F. Gregory Gause III thinks he might be able to help Saudi Arabia to reform “without handing it to extremists.” He made some good points; however, I don’t think the U.S. would be happy with oil prices around $30 per barrel. They will always look for the good ol’ days of the cheap oil.

Reem Al-Saleh wrote a great column at today’s Asharq Al-Awsat about the effect of freedom in our culture. She says “when I heard about the first conference of the Saudi intelligentsia, I wanted to publish a column composed of only one word: ‘Freedom’.” “When Yousef Al-Muhaimeed told me about his new novel Al-Qaroura, I involuntarily sent him an email asking him if it would be available in Riyadh, because if it would be available in Riyadh it will not be worth reading it!” She added.

She also cannot believe that we can trust Ghazi Al-Gosaibi to be responsible for our energy (he was the minister of water and electricity) and the future of our kids (the ministry of labour) but when it comes to his creative, we kick all that out of the country!

She is right. Why do we import everything from every part in the world, but in the same time we have to go to Beirut and London to read a book by one of our compatriots?

The U.S. Department of State released its “International Religious Freedom Report” on 15/9/2004. The report considered Saudi Arabia as “country of particular concern” for violations of religious freedom.

Immediately after the report published, many Saudi columnists were ready to deny almost everything, and then tell us that there’s no such country that provide complete freedom and “nobody’s perfect.” People like Tareq Al-Humaid wrote that everything is OK, and if there is anything wrong, Saudis will work it out, and they don’t need any American report to do so!

I know it has been more than three weeks since the publishing of the report, but I wanted to read the report myself form the Department of State website before commenting. Here’s the part about Saudi Arabia.

Freedom of religion does not exist. Freedom of religion is not recognized or protected under the country’s laws, and basic religious freedoms are denied to all but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam (…) Muslims who do not adhere to the officially sanctioned Salafi (commonly called “Wahhabi”) tradition can face severe repercussions at the hands of Mutawwa’in (religious police). Members of the Shi’a minority continue to face political and economic discrimination, including limited employment opportunities, little representation in official institutions, and restrictions on the practice of their faith and on the building of mosques and community centers.

This is all completely true, and I don’t know how some writers dared to deny anything from it. I am Saudi and I live in Saudi Arabia. I see this everyday and this exactly how it is going on here. Why some people can’t just admit it and try to suggest solution the problem instead of this bullshit?

With only 300 publishers from 14 countries, Riyadh Book Fair was nothing compared to other book fairs in the region such as Bahrain’s Book Fair, especially that the organizers labeled it as an “International” event. The publishers came mainly from Arab World plus some other countries, and for the first time in years, there was one Iraqi publisher.

Some books, such as the Saudi minister of labour Ghazi Al-Gosaibi’s novel Abu-Shallakh Al-Bermai, went out of stock very quickly, while many, many other books will return home with the same dust they came with.

The extremist Islamists were present in the book fair by plenty of publishers, but I did not dare to go and look at their area. Mainly because I’m not interested in reading titles about how the rest of the world will be burnt in hell, and basically because I was wearing my beloved Italian jeans.

I could not get the banned books I told you about, but I purchased another new banned book by the same author. The name of the book is Min Huna Yabda At-Taghier (Change Starts from Here). I knew it is banned because the salesperson was hiding it, and when I took it he did not write down the name of the book in the invoice, and instead he wrote “Special Offer”!

In addition to that, I purchased four other books; Mudun Takul Al-Ushb (Cities That Eat Grass) by Abdu Khal, Awwal Al-Jasad Akher Al-Bahr (The Beginning of the Body, the End of the Sea) by Adoneece, Al-Qaroura (The Bottle) by Yousef Al-Muhaimeed, and last but not least, the Arabic edition of Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.

If you missed this fair, you didn’t miss much. But It was something nice to break the daily routine of this boring university. However, because no important authors attended, and no new books released, one could say the book fair itself was boring!