1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think

by Raif Badawi, Lawrence M. Krauss (Foreword by), Constantin Schreiber (Editor), Ahmad Danny Ramadan (Translator)

Overview

"Raif Badawi's is an important voice for all of us to hear"— Salman Rushdie

Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian blogger, shared his thoughts on politics, religion, and liberalism online. He was sentenced to 1,000 lashes, ten years in prison, and a fine of 1 million Saudi Riyal, over a quarter of a million U.S. dollars. This politically topical polemic gathers together Badawi’s pivotal texts. He expresses his opinions on life in an autocratic-Islamic state under the Sharia and his perception of freedom of expression, human and civil rights, tolerance and the necessary separation of state and religion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771642095
Publisher:	Greystone Books
Publication date:	08/15/2015
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	4.00(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Raif Badawi is a Saudi Arabian writer and activist and the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals. He was arrested in 2012 on a charge of insulting Islam through electronic channels and brought to court on several charges including apostasy. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in 2013, then resentenced to 1,000 lashes and ten years in prison plus a fine in 2014. The lashes were to be carried out over 20 weeks. He has been imprisoned since 2012 and was publicly punished for expressing his opinions with 50 lashes on the 9th January 2015 on the square in front of the Al-Dschafali mosque in Jeddah.

Constantin Schreiber is a lawyer and a journalist. He speaks fluent Arabic and was a correspondent for Deutsche Welle in Dubai between 2006 and early 2009. Subsequently he worked for the German Foreign Office in Berlin, responsible for media projects in the Arab world.

Ahmad Danny Ramadan is an author and a journalist with bylines appearing in the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy. He is also the Community Outreach Coordinator at QMUNITY - BC's Queer Resource Centre. His debut novel, The Clothesline Swing, will be published by Harbour Publishing in May 2017.

Lawrence M. Krauss is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist and a bestselling author of many books, including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. He is a vocal advocate of the importance of science and reason as opposed to religion and superstition.

Editorial Reviews

04/18/2016
This collection of 15 of Badawi's previously published articles was compiled and edited by Constantin Schreiber with help from Badawi's wife after Saudi blogger Badawi was arrested in 2012, fined, and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for his writings. The quick but content-rich essays offer insight into the Saudi Arabian Islamic context on separation of church and state, religious extremism, the marriage of religious and secular ideologies, gender politics, and arguments for intellectualism, all rendered in political, social, and theological terms. Collected, they function as a larger exploration of the most fundamental discussions of personal and state freedoms in Saudi Arabia. That central thesis makes this book necessary reading for anyone who wants to better understand a state that many Western countries consider an ally. Badawi's introspections about his own views and Saudi Arabia's, on primarily moral and ideological grounds, are an earnest if not always nuanced approach to engaging the reality of a country at war with itself, body and soul. The book stands as cultural commentary both in its questioning, nuanced or otherwise, and in the circumstances of its author's imprisonment and torture. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

“Raif Badawi's is an important voice for all of us to hear, mild, nuanced, but clear. His examination of his culture is perceptive and rigorous. Of course he must be saved from the dreadful sentence against him and the appalling conditions of his imprisonment. But he must also be read, so that we understand the struggle within Islam between suffocating orthodoxy and free expression, and make sure we find ourselves on the right side of that struggle.” —Salman Rushdie

“Badawi writes for his generation, and for all those interested in changing the Arab and Islamic world for the better.” —Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Heretic and Infidel

"Badawi’s writings are refreshing ...This slim but fascinating and informative volume clearly brings home the consequences of our benign neglect of the Saudi totalitarian situation." —Library Journal

From the Publisher