Bloggers push Arab activism to the fore

DUBAI: Blogs are giving rise to a new breed of Arab activism as ordinary residents increasingly use them to press for more political rights and civil liberties in conservative Gulf states.

Typical was a recent posting by a 33-year-old Saudi man. "Are we destined to just listen to the news of all the big changes around the world as we await a good deed from our king?" he questioned in his weblog, or blog.

And in one notable case, blogs in Kuwait were used to rally broad support last month for street demonstrations in favour of election law reforms.

The bloggers write in Arabic, English or a mixture of both. They are eager to set themselves apart from both newspaper and web columnists writing for established sites as well as the hugely popular Internet bulletin boards that often have a militant Islamic bent.

There are now about 1,000 Gulf Arab bloggers, up five times from 2004, according to Haitham Sabbah, a Bahrain-based blogger and Middle East editor for Global Voices, a programme launched last year by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in the US that tracks and collects blogs worldwide.

Popular Saudi blogs by women include "Farah's Sowaleef", "A Thought in the Kingdom of Lunacy", and "Saudi Eve". They are peppered with sharp-tongued criticism of their male-dominated Muslim society and logs of rare escapades from an environment that demands obedience and modesty.

"I wore my leopard-printed heels and strategically placed a flower in my hair," read an April posting on "Saudi Eve", which has been censored by authorities since early June.

A Kuwaiti woman's blog, "Jewaira's Boudoir", breaches the region's taboos by posting episodes of a fictional erotic tale.   

"The Religious Policeman", a blog written by an unnamed Saudi man living in Britain, is on a mission to expose what he regards as the hypocrisy of the kingdom's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the so-called religious police charged with enforcing the country's strict Islamic moral code.   

"The religious police epitomise what is wrong with my country," a December posting read.   

His blog cannot be accessed in Saudi Arabia. Authorities there, like other Gulf governments, censor everything deemed offensive to religious and moral values or threatening to security.   

Saudi officials briefly blocked most Saudi blogs last year, and a group of bloggers led by Raed al-Saeed, a 21-year-old university student who blogs in Arabic under the name "Falsafat bidun Salfa" (Philosophies without a tale), formed in March a blogging community that practices self-censorship by not criticising government policies, institutions or religious figures.   

In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has the region's second biggest weblog community, an Emirati male blogger writing in Arabic was censored one week after launching "The Land of Sands" in 2004.   

But he has found a way to circumvent the Internet servers of Etisalat, the state telecommunications monopoly, and continues posting his writings in which he attacks clerics and charges their influence is rising in the UAE. 

 "They follow a systematic plan to penetrate the government, media, schools and the laws. They are 'Islamising' our world, mind and life," he told AFP in an email interview.   

"Civil liberties and freedoms are definitely restricted... some emirates turn a blind eye on personal freedom in places like Dubai for business reasons only," he said, referring to the thriving commercial center and most tolerant member of the UAE federation.   

In the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain, a small but successful blogging community includes former political prisoners, one of whom has led an online campaign calling for a boycott of the country's dominant telecommunications company Batelco for what he deems excessive tariffs.   

In Kuwait, one of the only two Gulf countries along with Bahrain with an elected parliament, bloggers helped unleash a "virtual" campaign for election reform in April that spilled onto the streets in a Ukraine-type "orange" revolution.   

Three university student bloggers translated a call by pro-reform MPs to cut the country's electoral districts to five to fight corruption into a catchy campaign with a distinctive "5 for Kuwait" orange logo.    Bloggers spread the word online, and in a rare instance in the history of the oil-rich emirate, hundreds of young people waving orange banners demonstrated outside the seat of government on May 5.   

The campaign escalated into further protests. A bitter standoff between parliament and the government forced the country's emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah, to dissolve parliament on May 21, setting new elections for June 29.   

But Kuwaiti blogger Ziad al-Duaij believes the dissolution simply postponed further confrontation.   

"It was the easy way out, instead of discussing and seeing what better way to resolve this crisis," said Duaij, 41, who began blogging in March 2003 at the start of the US invasion against Iraq, which was launched from Kuwait.