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Arab rights groups, figures slam Saudi death fatwa
RIYADH (Reuters) - A group of over 100 Arab rights groups and intellectuals on Tuesday condemned a Saudi religious edict calling for the death of two writers for apostasy, saying "clerics of darkness" were practicing intellectual terrorism.
Sheikh Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, one of Saudi Arabia's most revered clerics, said in a rare religious ruling last month that two newspaper columnists should be put to death if they did not renounce their "heretical articles" in public.
The two had questioned the Sunni Muslim view in Saudi Arabia that Christians and Jews should be considered unbelievers, which Barrak said implied Muslims were free to follow other religions.
Barrak was backed by a group of 20 Saudi clerics. None of them speak for the Saudi government, which is represented by the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al al-Sheikh.
Liberal reformers in Saudi Arabia are engaged in a battle with religious hardliners over the direction of the country, a key U.S. ally and the world's biggest oil exporter.
"All we can see in this fatwa is intellectual terrorism which sees 'Islam' as its exclusive monopoly and only sees in the 'other' blood which can be shed freely," said the statement sent to Reuters.
"It is incumbent upon Saudi and Arab intellectuals and those in official and unofficial institutions to stand up to this," it said, citing the attempted murder of Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz in 1994 by Islamists angry over his work.
The statement was signed by more than 100 Arab rights groups and intellectual figures from across the region, some of them seen as Islamist thinkers such as Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi and Lebanese academic Radwan al-Sayyed.
It said religious scholars who branded other Muslims as infidels were "clerics of darkness, fooled through their arrogance and inflated by their status into thinking that they speak in the name of God."
Rights groups have accused Saudi Arabia's strict school of Sunni Islam, often termed Wahhabism, of a xenophobic attitude which demonizes other religions.
Barrak, who is thought to be around 75, is viewed by Islamists as the leading independent authority of "Wahhabism".
(Reporting by Andrew Hammond)
