On Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah granted women the right to vote and run in the next set of municipal elections, scheduled for 2015. That’s good news. But not as good as you might think.
Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most sex-segregated place on earth, a country where women can do little without a male chaperon and are not …
A woman, beheaded by the sword thousands of miles from home. This, at last, proved too much for Indonesia. For years, this Southeast Asian nation has been sending its citizens to work in Saudi Arabia and, for years, migrant workers there complained of poor working conditions, abuse and violence. But the surprise execution of Ruyati …
Anywhere else in the world, a hip-hop song about going to the mall would be laughed off the airways. In Saudi Arabia, it gets banned. Mamno3 al Shabab (“guys not allowed,” in the transliterated lingo of international texting, which uses numbers like 3 for sounds that don’t exist in English), one of the latest hits the latest single …
Maha al Qatani settles herself in the driver’s seat, adjusts her headscarf, and with a quick prayer turns the key in the ignition. “I’m not nervous,” she says, even if the uneven tenor of her voice betrays tension. “When we lived in the U.S. I always drove my kids to school.” But this is Saudi Arabia, the only country in …
Jeb Boone reports for TIME on the tense situation in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a. As Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh recovers in Saudi Arabia from an attack on his home, many ordinary Yemenis celebrate his (at least temporary) departure. But, as Boone reports, a climate of fear and uncertainty remains suspended over the city and …
If a group of Saudi activists get their way, this Friday June 17 will mark the start of Women2Drive, a campaign to get the country’s women behind the wheel. The call to action came after the arrest and detention Manal al-Sharif, a 32-year-old tech specialist, who last month posted a YouTube video of herself driving a car. Saudi …
With NATO ever more confident of, and explicit about, deposing Muammar Gaddafi and the Libyan leader losing even some of his longest-standing supporters in Africa, the question increasingly becomes not whether he will go but, assuming he survives, where. Here’s five possible retirement homes for the 69-year-old.
1. Zimbabwe. Even if …
The situation in Yemen took another dramatic turn this weekend, when President Ali Abdullah Saleh left Yemen for Saudi Arabia, sparking both joy and confusion on the streets. In this excellent Bloggingheads video Princeton’s Bernard Haykel and Charles Schmits of Towson University explain the roots of the …
With the Obama administration’s feeble attempts having failed, the task of brokering a peaceful end to Yemen’s civil war has fallen to Saudi Arabia. Wires are reporting that Riyadh has got the warring sides—President Ali Abdallah Saleh and the Ahmar clan—to agree a truce after days of bloodshed.
Reuters is reporting that Saleh …
It’s easy to overlook the killing of a single person in violence-plagued Pakistan, not least in Karachi, a seaside metropolis ever in danger of boiling over into sectarian bloodshed. But the murder of a Saudi diplomat by unknown assailants ought to raise eyebrows. Saudi Arabia’s tangled, pervasive influence in Pakistan has been well …
Those who see the Bahraini uprising in the context of a larger contest for Middle Eastern supremacy between Iran and Saudi Arabia with desultory U.S. involvement are missing the potentially crucial role played by a fourth player: Iraq.
A little background, first. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi holy city of Najaf has …
Because what’s Obama going to do, after all – impose sanctions and stop importing oil? Saudi Arabia’s decision to send troops to Bahrain to help the monarchs next door crush a democratic rebellion is a barely disguised slap in the face to the Obama Administration, and further evidence of Washington’s diminished influence over Middle East …