Rap and Metal on Planet Islam

The booming voice of pent-up Middle Eastern anger

James M. Dorsey from the December 2010 issue of Reason Magazine

Nabyl Guennouni, 30, is a heavy metal singer and band manager in Morocco. He also sits on a jury that selects rising talents to perform at Casablanca’s annual L’Boulevard des Jeunes Musiciens, a six-day extravaganza in two soccer stadiums that has become North Africa’s largest underground music festival, with some 160,000 visitors each year. This marks a dramatic change for Guennouni. When he and 13 other black-shirted, baseball-capped, middle-class headbangers tried to organize a music festival seven years ago, the police dragged them from their homes and charged them with wooing young Moroccans into Satanism, with a bonus count of promoting prostitution. Morocco’s legal system allows a maximum sentence of three years for such attempts to convert Muslims to another faith.

Egged on by conservative Islamist politicians, who six months earlier had doubled their number of seats in parliament, prosecutors produced as evidence against Guennouni fake skeletons and skulls, plaster cobras, a latex brain, T-shirts depicting the devil, and “a collection of diabolical CDs,” which they described as “un-Islamic” and “objects that breach morality.” In cross-examination, the government attorneys asked the defendants such questions as, “Why do you cut the throats of cats and drink their blood?” Al Attajdid, a conservative daily, depicted the musicians as part of a movement that “encourages all forms of delinquency, alcohol and licentiousness which are ignored by the authorities.” One of the trial judges maintained that “normal people go to concerts wearing suits and ties” and that it was “suspicious” that some of the musicians’ lyrics had been penned in English.

During the trial, some of the defendants recited sections of the Koran to prove they were good Muslims. It didn’t work. In a verdict that divided the nation, Guennouni was sentenced to one month in jail; the others received sentences ranging from six months to a year. Outside the courthouse, protesters organized concerts, waged an Internet campaign, and criticized King Muhammad VI for presiding over a travesty of justice.

Yet as dark as that moment was for Casablancan rockers, the trial was a turning point that set Morocco on a path to becoming one of the Arab world’s more liberal societies when it comes to accepting alternative lifestyles. A month after the sentencing, prosecutors, unnerved by the degree of popular support the musicians had attracted, urged an appeals court to overturn the verdicts. The appeals court acquitted 11 of the defendants and reduced the sentences of three others. The decision constituted a rare example of successful civic protest in the Arab world.

Weeks after the appeals court decision, Casablanca was rocked by a series of Islamist suicide bombings that killed 45 people. Musicians responded with a Metal Against Terrorism concert that boosted what Moroccans call Al Nayda, the Awakening, a movement for greater cultural freedom that is topped every year by the L’Boulevard festival. “We needed to channel the aspirations and frustrations of young people in Morocco,’ ” Guennouni tells me. “Al Nayda is a community of spirit,” adds Mohammed “Momo” Merhar, co-founder of the festival. “Moroccan youth was holding its breath for 40 years. A wind of freedom is blowing now, and creativity is exploding.”

Today L’Boulevard attracts metal, rap, and jazz performers from around the globe. King Muhammad donated $250,000 to the event last year. Marie Korpe, executive director of Freemuse, a Copenhagen-based organization funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency that advocates freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide, notes that “as musicians push the boundaries of acceptable musical performance in their countries, it is clear that, wittingly or not, they are helping to open their cultures and potentially their political systems.”

With L’Boulevard, Morocco is doing something new in a part of the world where repression and censorship are the norm. The cultural awakening nonetheless operates within a narrow band in a country where human rights groups, independent media outlets, and critical artists continue to live a precarious existence. Moroccan radio stations, acting on government instructions, recently boycotted a collection of rap songs that was appropriately titled Forbidden on the Radio. Invincible Voice (I-Voice), a Beirut-based Palestinian duo that fuses hip-hop with classical Arab music, was forced to cancel an Arab world tour when Morocco and other Arab countries denied them visas. Yasin Qasem, a 21-year-old freelance sound engineer and half of I-Voice, was subsequently denied entry to lead a sound engineering workshop in Casablanca. Qasem and his partner, TNT, a.k.a. Mohammed Turk, a 20-year-old construction foreman whose songs lament the sorry state of political, cultural, and economic affairs in the Arab world, finally obtained visas for the United Arab Emirates to finish production of their upcoming album, only to be declined entry when they landed at the Dubai airport.

Across a swath of land stretching from Morocco’s Atlantic coast to the Persian Gulf, underground musicians are playing a continuous game of cat and mouse with authorities to evade harassment and arrest. Musicians in Iran endure forced haircuts, beatings in jail, and threats to their families. Egypt bans heavy metal from radio and television. Earlier this year, Islamist police stormed a crowded auditorium in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, where the hip-hop musicians B Boy Gaza had just started performing. “The show is over,” the officers announced before confiscating equipment and arresting six musicians, who were eventually released after signing a pledge not to hold further performances without police permission. The rapping Emirati brothers Salem and Abdullah Dahman have had their music banned in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia because their lyrics contrast the Arab world’s multiple problems with the glorious Muslim past. Last summer, police in the Saudi capital Riyadh broke up a metal concert in a residential compound attended by 500 mostly Saudi fans.

Civilian and religious authorities across the Middle East and North Africa have accused heavy metal musicians of threatening public order, undermining Islam, and performing the devil’s music. Metalheads are also singled out because of their music’s highly charged and often politically, socially, and sexually suggestive lyrics. As a result, their music flourishes mostly in underground clubs, basements, and private homes, and only occasionally on stage when a regime decides that banning a public performance is not worth the political risk.

Underground musicians pose a challenge to Middle Eastern and North African regimes because they often reflect in their lyrics pent-up anger and frustration about unemployment, corruption, and police tyranny. “We play heavy metal ’cause our lives are heavy metal,” says Reda Zine, one of the founders of the Moroccan headbanger scene.

With the growing realization that the region’s authoritarian regimes and controlled economies are unable to offer opportunity to their predominantly young populations, metal and rap have been elevated as channels to express discontent. Their role is enhanced by the Internet and other technologies for mass distribution that make government control difficult and allow musicians and their fans to carve out autonomous spaces that shield them from intrusion by censors and other cultural scolds.

In a recent report for Freemuse, Mark LeVine argues that music plays a role in the Middle East and North Africa similar to the role rock played in the velvet revolutions that toppled regimes in Eastern Europe. LeVine has a good vantage point for studying the subject: He is both a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California at Irvine and a musician who has performed with the likes of Mick Jagger and Albert Collins. The struggle and success of underground music, he says, “reminds us of a past, and offers a model for the future, in which artists—if inadvertently at first—helped topple a seemingly impregnable system of rule.” LeVine describes underground musical communities as “avatars of change or struggles for greater social and political openness,” saying “they point out cracks in the facade of conformity that is crucial to keeping authoritarian or hierarchical and inegalitarian political systems in power.”

Nowhere is that more evident than in Iran, where all rock music is forced underground. Musicians risk harassment and imprisonment by a regime that frowns on all music and routinely tortures dissidents. In May 2009, a heavy metal concert in Shiraz was raided by an Islamist militia that arrested some 100 people on charges of consuming alcohol and worshiping the devil. Musicians are forced into exile or onto the Internet to carve out creative spaces of their own.

Coming under particular scrutiny are Iranian underground musicians who replicate American accents, indulge in obscene lyrics, and use female singers—all viewed as symbols of Western decadence by the authorities. Most CD shop owners refuse to sell underground music, fearing raids, imprisonment, and hefty fines. Concerts in private gatherings are often canceled because of threats from neighborhood vigilantes. Kalameh, an Iranian rapper, recently uploaded one of his latest songs to YouTube in response to the regime’s crackdown on the country’s reform movement: “This nation says No / Says NO to autocracy / Says NO to censorship / Says NO to sedition / Says NO to beating and killing / Says NO to injustice / Says NO to democracy / This constant pain of mine, emanates from being a human / Because one night, they stole my light of hope / If I stay silent, if I stay still / Who is gonna right? Who is gonna say? / If I leave it that way?”

Yet hip-hop’s lyrical style and heavy metal’s pounding beat may be natural fits in a world where poetry is a popular art form and praying often involves rhythm and bobbing. Some Muslim religious figures, particularly practitioners of more mystical forms of Islam, recognize an affinity with metal, even though some of the genre’s most popular forms in the region are its most extreme. “I don’t like heavy metal,” a Shiite cleric in Baghdad told LeVine. “Not because it’s irreligious or against Islam; but because I prefer other styles of music. But you know what? When we get together and pray loudly, with the drums beating fiercely, chanting and pumping our arms in the air, we’re doing heavy metal too.” Cyril Yarboudi of Lebanon’s Oath to Vanquish agrees. “You can practice your religion; you can go pray in a mosque and listen to metal,” he says. “What’s the problem?”

In a 1997 crackdown that put its stamp on much of the heavy metal scene in the Middle East and North Africa, police in Cairo arrested 100 heavy metal fans. The arrests followed publication of a photo from a metal concert allegedly showing someone carrying an upside-down cross. One newspaper reported that the house raided by the police was “filled with tattooed, devil-worshiping youths holding orgies, skinning cats, and writing their names in rats’ blood on the palace’s walls.”

Muslim and Christian clerics were up in arms. Cartoons in newspapers depicted scruffy, marijuana-smoking musicians with T-shirts emblazed with the Star of David who play guitar while being seduced by scantily dressed blond women. The musicians’ critics portrayed them as Zionist agents subverting Muslim society and blamed their emergence on a government that, in their view, was in cahoots with the Zionists in allowing Western culture to undermine Egypt’s social and religious values. Interestingly, this criticism was expressed by many in the underground music community as well. A broad segment of Egyptians, cutting across political, ideological, religious, and social fault lines, accuses the government of failing to effectively support the Palestinians, acquiescing in the Israeli control of Palestinian territories, and supporting unpopular U.S. policies in the region.

Emotions peaked when Sheikh Nasr Farid, Egypt’s mufti at the time, demanded that those arrested repent or face the death penalty for apostasy. In response, intimidated musicians and fans destroyed their guitars and shaved off their beards to avoid the worst. A decade later, many Egyptian musicians remain reluctant to publicly discuss their music or lyrics, even though government policy has become somewhat more relaxed. (The regime of President Hosni Mubarak is currently more concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood and dissident bloggers than it is about underground music.)

“You can’t get arrested for being a metalhead so easily now,” an Egyptian heavy metal fan tells me. “They can still stop you in the streets, or stop your car if you listen to very loud heavy music. But when it comes to arresting they can’t now unless you have some sort of drugs on you. It’s not that the law is more liberal now. Rather, it’s because the whole media is not so interested to know about us anymore.”

Morocco’s bow to popular pressure and Egypt’s recent shift of focus highlight a lesson most Arab regimes have yet to learn: The velvet glove is often more effective than the baton. The more mainstream underground music becomes and the less censorship it endures, the less socially and politically potent it may become.

But as long as there is discontent to be expressed, there will be musicians eager to channel it. Even if metal and hip-hop lose their bite, LeVine predicts, the “cultural avant-garde of youth culture will naturally search for other genres of music to express the anger, anxieties, and despair that originally made the music so powerful.”

U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy Boomerangs in Yemen, Somalia

By James M. Dorsey

World Politics Review

U.S. and European efforts to stabilize Yemen and Somalia are boomeranging. Rather than weakening militants in both countries, Western counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies are fueling radicalism and turning wide swathes of the population against the West.

With little real effort to economically and politically stabilize the two countries, U.S. military and security support for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the embattled head of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG), Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, exacerbates local fault lines and strengthens deep-seated anti-Americanism.

The backfiring of Western policies is compounded by a one-size-fits-all approach and a failure to address local grievances. To be sure, the Saleh and Ahmed governments are as much a part of the problem as they are part of the solution. This, and differences between the goals of Western nations and those of their regional allies, complicates efforts to embed security and military policy within initiatives to improve the population's economic lot and enhance good governance. Nonetheless, the incentive to get the policy right is compelling: Together Yemen and Somalia control key oil-export routes through the Gulf of Aden; mounting instability in both countries threatens regional stability in the oil-rich gulf and surrounding resource-rich African nations.

Western policy assumes that ungoverned spaces fuel instability and provide oxygen to al-Qaida's Yemeni affiliate, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and to al-Shabab in Somalia, rather than viewing both countries as territories with alternative power structures that, if properly engaged, could potentially further Western interests and undermine support for the militants. A recent Chatham House report (.pdf) concludes that "no amount of international support can compensate for the TFG's lack of internal legitimacy," a shortcoming clearly illustrated by the desertion of TFG military recruits to al-Shabab. By contrast, the emergence of stable forms of local government in Somalia based on reconciliation among clans calls into question assumptions that a lack of central-government control in Yemen must necessarily result in tribal safe havens for AQAP.

Western policy assumptions also fail to adequately distinguish between AQAP's global ambitions, which were demonstrated by the failed Christmas 2009 bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner, with al-Shabab's continued focus on regional, rather than Western targets. For instance, al-Shabab's twin attacks in June on soccer fans in Kampala, which killed 74 people, were aimed to persuade Uganda to withdraw its troops from the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia. Western policymakers also see Somali refugees as potential jihadist recruits, ignoring the fact that most of those who have fled the country did so to escape the Islamists.

The Obama administration earlier this year took a step toward expanding its regional focus beyond piracy to address the emergence of lucrative networks engaged in human trafficking as well as the smuggling of arms, drugs and fuel. To move against these networks, which often operate with the connivance of government and security officials, the administration imposed sanctions on Yemeni and Somali arms merchants with close government ties, coupled with increased efforts to strengthen the coast-guard capabilities of Yemen and Somaliland, a self-declared republic in northwest Somalia. Yet, such actions are likely to have limited effect as long as they fail to similarly align the interests of the Yemeni navy, controlled by the Defense Ministry, and the coast guard, reporting to the interior minister. They must also guarantee that these forces are complemented by an effective customs service and ensure that Somaliland anti-piracy efforts move beyond targeting only those activities that threaten the interests of government ministers.

The threat posed by misguided Western policy extends beyond the borders of Yemen and Somalia into their extensive diaspora communities. Yemenis and Somalis increasingly see the U.S. and Europe as aggressors seeking to exclude domestic actors, rather than enhancing their ability to resolve local issues and build a system that provides greater accountability. The Somali community in the United States is proving to be a fertile al-Shabab recruiting ground, while Somali-Americans constitute the largest contingent of U.S. nationals suspected of joining al-Qaida affiliates. Britain's MI5 Director-General Jonathan Evans warned last year that terrorist plots hatched in Somalia and Yemen pose an increasing threat to U.K. security.

Increasingly, Yemen and Somalia demonstrate the need for finding and supporting creative measures that involve the private sector and civic groups in efforts to deradicalize individuals and groups. Such measures do exist. One campaign backed by FIFA, soccer's world body, and local Somali businessmen has shown success at luring child soldiers away from the jihadists with a program whose slogan is "Put down the gun, pick up the ball."

Another key to a successful policy is to align Western interests and those of regional allies. In Yemen, a division of labor between the U.S. and the U.K. has emerged, whereby Washington focuses on security and London on economic issues. However, Saudi Arabia, Yemen's single largest donor, has no clear Yemen policy and simply wants to keep the country afloat. In their new book, "Yemen On the Brink," the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Marina Ottaway and Christopher Boucek caution, "Without strong pressure to address the systemic challenges facing the country, it is extremely doubtful that the Yemeni government will make any serious efforts to curb corruption, improve governance or address political grievances, which are directed against the government itself. As long as donors remain divided, there can be no such pressure on the government of Yemen."

International donors have already begun to use badly needed foreign assistance as leverage to force the Yemeni government to address the issues fueling radicalism. At a meeting earlier this year, they demanded that Yemen clearly explain how aid will be managed before monies are transferred. But such aid must also be coherently designed and integrated if it is to provide a perspective of change to significant chunks of the population and, with it, an alternative to militant Islam.

Balkans Become Breeding Ground For Militant Islam

Southeastern Europe is emerging as the latest breeding ground for homegrown Islamist militants in the West as a result of missionary work by Saudi-inspired Wahhabis, followers of the strict, puritan interpretation of Islam adopted by oil-rich Saudi Arabia and violently promoted by Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and jihadists in Somalia.

Muslim charities, many of them with Saudi funding or Wahhabist leanings, have been active in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia and EU member Bulgaria since the wars in former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s. A recent music online video featuring a group of Macedonians praising Bin Laden in Albanian has focused attention on what Muslim authorities in the region and intelligence agencies say is an alarming trend that threatens not only fragile stability in the region but could produce a pool of terrorists with easy access to the rest of Europe. Similar songs have also emerged in Bosnian.

Beyond building a large number of mosques across southeastern Europe, Wahhabis have also founded a string of schools that lie beyond the control of local authorities. Concern about the rise of militant Islam in southeastern Europe also focuses attention on the broader impact of Saudi-funded Wahhabi missionary work. While Saudi King Abdullah has been seeking to gradually reform Wahhabi practice in the kingdom, militants often exploit its ascetic version of Islam to create a feeding ground for radical Islam.

Analysts say unregulated Wahhabi schools in Bulgaria have produced some 3,000 graduates in the last 20 years. The threat posed by the Wahhabis has become a major bone of contention in the tense relations between Muslims and Serbs in Bosnia, which so far has been successful in neutralizing Wahhabi influence by controlling the appointment of imams in mosques and teachers at Islamic educational institutions.

A Serbian court last year sentenced 12 militants from the tense region of Sandzak to prison for planning terrorist attacks, including an attack on the US embassy in Belgrade. Moderates and Wahhabis are battling for control of Macedonia’s Islamic Religious Community, one of the country’s major Islamic organizations.

Whither Turkey?

In the discussion Whither Turkey? much is made of Turkey’s move east as opposed to its continued integration into the West through EU membership. The notion that Turkey is turning East at the expense of the West disregards a host of factors.

Turkey’s expanding influence in the Middle East and the broader Islamic world enhances rather than weakens its interest in EU membership. Turkey has always and still positions itself as a bridge between East and West. Turkey also sees itself as a model for the Islamic world. Those positions would be strengthened by EU membership giving Turkey a much firmer foot in both worlds and highlighting its role as a bridge and a successful model.

Beyond the fact that the EU remains Turkey’s largest trading partner and the fact that Turkey has a large ethnic community in Europe, Turkish business has quietly made major acquisitions in Europe and are in sectors like electronics leading original equipment manufacturers (OEM) for the European market.

Moreover, this weekend’s referendum may increase self-confidence among Turkey’s governing Islamist elite, but secularists and Islamists alike have always seen EU membership as the ultimate guarantor of their worldviews: secularists believe it will ensure continued separation of state and mosque, Islamists see the EU as the road towards greater freedom of religion.

Constitutional change in Turkey does not replace the EU’s guarantor role; it may well however toughen the negotiating stance of a more self-confident Turkish government on the back of a significant victory in rolling back the influence of the military. Ultimately, the expanded focus of Turkish foreign policy reflects a greater reality in Turkey’s neck of the woods: states no longer neatly fit into pro- and anti-Western boxes but pursue policies, some of which are in line with US and European policies and some that are not.

It’s a reality the United States and the European Union needed to adjust to; recognizing that Turkey remains staunchly embedded in the West with its NATO and Council of Europe membership and EU membership applications would be an important step towards that adjustment.

Release of Spanish Hostages: Questions and Insights

This week’s release of two Spanish hostages by an Al Qaeda affiliate in North Africa raises questions about the steadfastness of the refusal by Western nations to negotiate with terrorists. It also constitutes a victory for the group’s Algerian faction focused more on kidnapping of foreigners as a business than on achieving political goals.

In a statement to Spanish newspaper El Pais, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an Al Qaeda affiliate that operates primarily in Algeria, Mauritainia, Mali and Niger suggested that Spain had met its demand for payment of a $5 million ransom for the hostages. The Spanish government has declined to comment on whether it had cut a deal with the militants. The hostages were kidnapped in Mauritania in November while riding in a convoy delivering supplies to poor villages.

It became apparent that the two hostages, Albert Vilalta and Roque Pascual, were about to be released after Mauritania last week threw the jihadists a bone by extraditing to Mali a key Malian AQIM operative, Omar Sid'Ahmed Ould Hamma. Hamma had been convicted to 12 years in prison for kidnapping the two Spaniards as well as Alicia Gomez, a third Spaniard who was released in March. His release had been part of AQIM’s demands.

Spain's ransom payment and Hamma's release would not be the first time European and West African authorities have entered into negotiations with AQIM. Mali released four Islamists earlier this year in an apparent swap for French hostage Pierre Camatte, freed by AQIM in February. The release soured its relations with Algeria, Mauritania and Niger who accused Mali of being soft on terrorism.

The group, which grew out of the Salafist movement in Algeria and has since shifted south into the vast and lawless Sahel, also killed British captive Edwin Dyer last year after London refused to give in to its demands.


Analysts and Malian officials say Hamma’s release was as much designed to achieve the release of the remaining hostages as it was to deepen divisions within the Al Qaeda affiliate and complicate its relations with allied rebel Tuareg tribesmen. The Tuareg accuse the Malian government of failing to implement a 2008 agreement that was supposed to end their tribal insurgency and grant the Tuareg greater rights.

Relations between Al Qaeda and the Tuareg became strained last month when an AQIM commander, Abdelhamid (Hamidu) Abu Zaid, accused the Tuareg of assisting a French-Mauritainian attack that last month failed to liberate 78-year old French hostage Michel Germaneau and killed six jihadists. Abu Zaid charged that the Tuareg had pinpointed the whereabouts of the AQIM operatives. In retaliation, Abu Zaid abducted and killed Mirzag Ag El Housseini, a Tuareg customs officer whose brother is senior commander in the Malian army. In a statement, AQIM’s leader in Mauritania, Abu Anas al-Shanqiti, warned that his group would retaliate against the “traitorous apostates, children and agents of Christian France” who had cooperated in the raid. The French Foreign Ministry says its forces are “fully mobilized” to counter “threats uttered by assassins.”

Abu Zaid had been urging the commander of AQIM’s wing in Algeria, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, under whose control the Spaniards were, to execute them in retaliation for the French-Mauritanian raid. Mali had been quietly negotiating the release of the Spanish hostages with Belmokhtar. Malian officials say that the extradition of Hamma enabled Belmokhtar to cut a deal and claim political success. Hamma’s extradition contrasts starkly with Mauritania’s participation in the French-led raid and its past refusal to negotiate with the jihadists.

In its statement, AQIM said the release of the hostages demonstrated to France that "it was possible to deal rationally with the Mujahedeen (Islamic fighters). It was possible to avoid the aggravation, irritation and anger that led to the killing of their national."

 Saudi Legal Reform Put To The Test

A spate of recent religious opinions and court rulings ranging from the bizarre to endorsement of mutilation issued by prominent Saudi sheikhs and judges highlight the difficulties King Abdullah is encountering in clamping down on fatwas and his efforts to reform and codify the kingdom’s largely unwritten Islamic legal regulations that govern the kingdom’s criminal, civil and family courts. To be fair, few, if any, of the more outrageous Saudi legal opinions and rulings have recently been put into practice.

In the latest ruling sparking international concern, Saudi judge Sheikh Saud Al-Yousef this month ordered a man to be paralyzed in retribution for injuries he allegedly caused with a meat cleaver during a fight two years ago. Applying the principle of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ the judge ruled that the man should be injured at the same place on his spinal cord to cause identical crippling damage to what he inflicted on his victim 22-year-old Abdul-Aziz al-Mitairy. The man was originally sentenced to seven months in prison by a court in the northwestern town of Tabuk, but his victim subsequently petitioned the court to impose an equivalent punishment on his attacker in accordance with principle of qisas, retribution, embedded in Islamic law. Past Saudi applications of qisas have involved eye-gouging, tooth extraction, and death in cases involving murder. Two Saudi hospitals, including Riyadh’s prestigious King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, rejected on ethical grounds the judge’s request that they implement his ruling.

In a statement condemning the ruling, Amnesty International said another hospital had advised the judge that it was medically possible to administer to the perpetrator an injury identical to the one that he caused. “Under international human rights law, the use of this sentence would constitute a violation of the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” the statement quoted Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa Acting Director Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui. Sahraoui suggested the court imprison, fine or flog the condemned man.

In an apparent effort to counter international criticism, the judge and a senior Saudi official attempted to downplay the judge's request. The official told CNN that paralysis was never considered as a punishment in the case. Al Riyadh newspaper quoted the judge as saying that "The proceedings in this case are still pending and no verdict had been issued in that regards." Al-Yousef said the court had queried a number of hospitals and other authorities about surgical paralysis in order to convince the plaintiff about the impossibility of carrying out such a medical procedure."The plaintiff was demanding punishment of the attacker, and the judicial ruling in this case only includes the plaintiff's eligibility for blood money," he said.

Earlier this month, Saudi authorities pulled the plug on the daily radio program of Sheikh Abdel Mohsen Obeikan, a cleric and royal court adviser who earlier this year earned notoriety by decreeing that women could give men breast milk to avoid illicit gender mixing. Saudi Arabia bans women from mixin with men who are no their guardians defined as their husband or first line relatives such as father or brothers. The decision followed a controversial royal decree by Abdullah authorizing only members of the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars to issue fatwas in a bid to put a halt to religious rulings that embarrass the kingdom.

The Tabuk judge ordered the mutilation after Abdullah issued his decree. Among other rulings this year, Sheikh Yousuf Ahmad, a lecturer at the Imam Mohammad bin Saud University in Riyadh, suggested that only Muslim maids could work in Saudi homes. He also called for the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam's holiest site and the world's largest mosque, to be demolished and rebuilt to ensure segregation between the sexes in the shrine. Saudi clergy are debating women’s right to engage in competitive sports with the kingdom under increased pressure from the International Olympic Committee to ease restrictions.

Abdullah recently won a major victory when the kingdom’s top religious body endorsed his proposed codification of Saudi law needed to meet World Trade Organization and human rights standards, encourage foreign investment, standardize legal practice and grant courts enforcement powers. Lawyers and analysts caution however that codification may take several years given conservative fears that it could undermine Saudi Arabia’s puritan interpretation of Islamic law as well as the independence of judges by making them adhere to written rules and regulations.

Testing the Saudi winds of reform, Suliman al-Reshoudi, a 73-year old former judge imprisoned without trial for the past three years ago on vague allegations related to his legal support of democracy advocates, has opened a court case to force the Interior Ministry and security services to either formally charge or release him. The case, the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia, is based on a yet to be tested legal offering protection to detainees introduced after Al-Reshoudi’s arrest in 2007.