Saudi authorities have banned hundreds of books, including works by renowned Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, as part of a crackdown on publications deemed threatening to the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia clamped down on dissent following the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, from which it has been largely spared, and has adopted an increasingly confrontational stance towards the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups it has long viewed as a threat to its security.
The local Okaz daily reported Sunday that organisers at the Riyadh International Book Fair had confiscated “more than 10,000 copies of 420 books” during the exhibition.
Local news website Sabq.org reported that members of the kingdom’s religious police had protested at “blasphemous passages” in works by the late Darwish, widely considered one of the greatest Arab poets, pressing organisers to withdraw all his books from the fair, which ended Friday.
The religious police frequently intervene to enforce the kingdom’s strict conservative values, but the move to ban so many works was seen as unprecedented.
Similar action was taken against works by Iraq’s most famous modern poet, Badr Shaker Al Sayyab, and another Iraqi poet, Abdul Wahab Al Bayati, as well as those by Palestinian poet Muin Bseiso.
The fair’s organising committee also banned a book entitled “When will the Saudi Woman Drive a Car?” by Abdullah Al Alami, the Saudi Gazette daily reported.
Other banned books include “The History of Hijab” and “Feminism in Islam.”
Activist Aziza Yousef said the crackdown had offered “free advertising to those whose books were banned” as many “rushed to download these works from the Internet.”
Organisers also banned all books by Azmi Bishara, a former Arab Israeli MP who left the Jewish state in 2007 and is now close to authorities in Qatar, where he is based, Sabq.org reported.
The ban comes amid escalating tensions between Qatar and three other Gulf Arab monarchies — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain — who pulled their envoys from Doha earlier this month, accusing it of interfering in their internal affairs.