I’m on the front page of Arab News today for a story on Saudi bloggers. The story is not available online for readers inside Saudi Arabia, so if you were interested in reading it you should get the printed edition. The story is written by fellow blogger Rasheed, and several other
bloggers are mentioned there.

During a recent interview, I was asked the following question: “You are calling for more freedoms, what are these freedoms?” I said, all kinds of freedoms; let’s start with personal freedom. “So anyone becomes free to choose, and to speak his mind,” I added. After living for 22 years in this land, I have come to the conclusion that the word freedom is nearly meaningless here. I find it difficult to understand how someone can be so threatened by the ideas of others, but to feel threatened by the mere appearance of others is really beyond my comprehension. I mean, how can a pair of jeans, an expressive t-shirt, or a weird haircut be dangerous for a religion, society or culture?

I’m on ZavineOnline.com homepage. Yay!

In what Al Hayat newspaper described as a “first of its kind” decision, Shoura Council have decided to vote against the expansion of the Committee to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice (aka the Religious Police). The Islamic committee at the Shoura Council has put a report of the performance of CPVPV during the last year, and introduced four recommendations for the council, which voted against three of these recommendations and only approved one of them.

The only approved recommendation was to create more jobs for graduates of the higher institute to promote virtue and prevent vice, which was opened recently. I don’t understand this: why to open this institute when there is no jobs to its students? The three rejected recommendations were: 1) increasing salaries of field workers (whatever that means) by 20%, 2) opening new centers for the committee in all parts of the Kingdom, starting with 20 new centers every year, and 3) supporting the R&D department with SR 5m. This comes after a recent move by the government to limit the power of the religious police.

Khaled Batarfi: What is it like to be a Saudi woman?

If you have been following this blog for a long time, then you probably have noticed that I don’t link to Arabic content that much anymore. I used to link to plenty of Arabic pages in the past, but since more than half of my readers can’t read Arabic I decided to stop linking to Arabic content except when the link is too good not to share. Still, I follow many Arabic websites on daily basis and find a lot of stuff that’s worth reading, so I’ve been thinking of some way to share this stuff with those who can read Arabic.

I don’t usually use del.icio.us for my bookmarks management, but I think the ultimate social bookmarking tool can serve my purpose here very well. I have been bookmarking Arabic pages that I think worth reading with a certain tag so you can find them easily in one page. You can find the this page here, with my comments and notes under every link, and it will be updated about several times a day. You can also subscribe to the page’s feed.

UPI: “Saudi women have been appointed as advisers to the rubber stamp Consultative Council, reflecting a bid by the Muslim conservative kingdom to introduce change.”