Killing the scholar as Ramadan begins

On one side stands the coronavirus, like an extremely effective teacher who shakes all humanity at once, brings people to themselves, and makes them question the meaning of their lives and of their existence in the world.

On the other side, if this effective teacher, this reminder, this warning is not enough, there is on top of it the month of Ramadan, which comes round routinely every year and reminds and teaches us, drawing us in, kneading us, sanctifying us, purifying us and making us live it, our existence in this world and our relationship and our rights with God, with the cosmos, with the world, with other people, together with all their meanings.

And on top of that, the memory of the land in which they find themselves, which has made the human being safe by sanctifying him in his life and dignity, a memory reaching back to the first human being and full of a thousand and one lessons, soaked into its air, its water, its trees and its stones...

Unfortunately, none of these teaches anything, none of them says anything, when a person does not listen and does not want to see.

On the first day of the month of Ramadan, which began in the days when we are being tried with the plague of the coronavirus, Dr. Abdullah al-Hamid, one of the many important Islamic scholars held in prison in the holy land, who was also struggling for human rights and for human dignity, lost his life in the dungeon because of medical neglect that was applied openly and deliberately.

Al-Hamid, who had been in prison without interruption since 2012, was known for his reformist character and at the same time for an extremely colorful intellectual personality. Known as a good poet, a good writer and for his likable personality, al-Hamid was not kept in prison for any radical opposition to the system or for any organizing. He was saying that the administration in Saudi Arabia must be subjected to reform, and, what is more, that this could be achieved not by bringing down the system and overthrowing the House of Saud, but by some arrangements within the system, with the Dynasty still in place. In saying that this could be achieved by giving more weight to the Islamic principle of Shura, he was in fact calling for the kind of reform that the late Jamal Khashoggi demanded when he was not yet a dissident.

In fact, Khashoggi, in a television interview he gave only two weeks before he was murdered in the Saudi Arabian Consulate General in Istanbul, when speaking of the detainees in Saudi Arabia, specifically mentioned the name of Muhammad al-Hamid himself and said that he could not understand the grounds for his being held in prison and that he thought exactly along the same lines as him.

Granted, as Khashoggi also said in the same talk and later in many other venues, the offenses of the scholars and intellectuals now held in Saudi Arabian dungeons under harsh conditions, without medical aid, are even less than this. Selman al-Awdah, Awad al-Qarni, Ali al-Omari and others, who made young people and new generations love Islam with the books they wrote, the likable face of Islam. The grounds for their being in prison are not that they opposed the administration, still less that they rebelled or incited rebellion. Perhaps they have a crime of a peculiarity that will be recorded in the history of crime: they kept silent; that is, when the crown prince's practices in Qatar and Yemen, together with other senseless practices, came to light, these scholars kept silent. They did not raise their voices. Their silence was counted as evidence of their opposition and they were thrown in prison. Yet what was expected of them was to applaud these practices and to praise them in exaggerated sentences, distorting verses and hadiths.

Khashoggi had protested this situation as follows: "Can you imagine? Everywhere in the world freedom of thought is the freedom to say what you think; in Saudi Arabia there is no freedom to remain silent. You are blamed not for what you say but for what you do not say."

Al-Hamid, for his part, had said the following in response to the government's reaction to such a modest call for reform: "When you imprison and kill those who call for reform with such peaceful discourse, you open the way to revolutionary change, it is no loss for me."

At a time when the Crown Prince is trying to sell "Moderate Islam," the religious bigotry and fanaticism he tries to pin on these scholars by shutting them in dungeons is not at all the kind that could stick to these names. Selman al-Awdah, among others, as we have written before, was a name that stood out with the fatwas he issued against the Wahhabi formalism and extremism of Saudi Arabia even in the period when it was under their influence. In the periods when women's driving was restricted, he explained in a quite ironic style that this ban was nonsense, reminding that in the Age of Bliss no woman was prevented from riding a camel. In the period when young people were being drawn, through intelligence machinations, to so-called Jihad in Afghanistan, he explained that this was not Jihad. Jihad was seeking knowledge, training oneself, improving one's homeland, serving people.

If you think about it, all of these scholars today point to the road map that Arabs need in order to shake themselves, to be revived, to get out of the vise in which they are floundering. Imprisoning and killing their scholars who are struggling to revive them, what a wretched way. How little this differs from what the people who killed their prophets did.

What kind of jahiliyya is it to try to silence a call that gives you life, to try to kill the one who makes the call.