A growing number of Saudis are finding a new way of expressing themselves by writing on the Internet in weblogs, or blogs.
Farah Aziz is one of them. A 21-year-old translation student at King Saud University in Riyadh, she started blogging in January 2005 and found she liked it because of her love of writing.
“I love blogging because it helps me to express myself and I like to write in English,” said Farah in an interview.
Writing about her daily life and her often funny fights with male family members, Farah is part of a new generation of 20-something bloggers who have found an escape in blogging from a restrictive culture, which has been both liberating and exhilarating.
Farah has written about everything from Saudi Arabia’s performance at the World Cup to the sorry state of the King Saud University campus, which she documented by posting pictures on her blog (http://farahssowaleef.blogspot.com/) of piles of broken chairs, desks and abandoned textbooks.
But not all Saudi women have had an easy time blogging. Jo, a 23-year-old blogger (http://www.classic-diva.blogspot.com/) in the Eastern Province, said that she was stopped from using the Internet at home for several months after her conservative brothers grew suspicious about why she was spending so much time online.
“I’ve been blogging since April 2005. It’s a way to vent out my frustrations and to write,” said Jo in a phone interview. “My family knows that I have a site, but they don’t have a concept of what blogging is.”
Jo was forced to sneak out of her house to use the Internet at the house of friends or at a local Starbucks, and still has limited access to the Internet at home.
The Internet was late in coming to Saudi Arabia, arriving here only in late 1999. In 2001, according to King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology statistics, there were only 690,000 people online out of a total population of around 24 million. Today, according to KACST, 13 percent of the population is online, or 3.1 million people.
Although there are no official statistics on the number of blogs run by Saudis, a website called saudiblogs.org run by Ahmed Al-Omran already has 300 blogs in its directory, both in English and Arabic, with eight to 10 new blogs being added every month.
Al-Omran, a 22-year-old pharmacy student at KSU, and who blogs under the name Saudi Jeans (http://saudijeans.blogspot.com/), writes about everything from his favorite soft-drinks to Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah’s recent visit to his hometown of Ahsa. But he told Arab News that the conservative and intolerant line taken by some of the other Saudi bloggers sometimes disappointed him.
Blogging since May 2004, Al-Omran said he thought that the blogosphere would be different from the Saudi Internet chatrooms which he found were filled with extremist viewpoints.
“I don’t understand these people who think everything is a threat to their religion,” he said in a phone interview. “We are not used to speaking out our minds — not like in Kuwait, Lebanon and Bahrain where people are not afraid to speak out.”
In one of his blog entries a few months ago, Al-Omran wrote about an encounter with the co-founder of the Official Community of Saudi Arabian Bloggers (OCSAB) (http://www.ocsab.com/), Muhammed Al-Mussaed.
“A few days ago, he called me pretending to be a reporter for Al-Riyadh newspaper. He gave me a false name, and asked me for an interview, which I agreed to do. We decided to meet in a nearby coffee shop, and only when I met and he gave me his business card I discovered that he was lying,” wrote Al-Omran.
Al-Mussaed admitted in an interview with Arab News that he had used deception to meet Al-Omran, but claims he thought it was the only way that he would be able to meet him.
Al-Omran talked to Al-Mussaed for two hours, but soon realized that they were never going to see eye-to-eye on most issues.
“I feel that OCSAB is excluding so many people with their rules. I don’t see how they can build a community that way,” said Al-Omran.
Al-Mussaed, a 22-year-old Riyadh law student, who blogs under the name Green Tea (http://www.g-tea.com/), says that his group only accepts blogs that are mainly in Arabic, respect Islam and which are not diaries. He says his group aims to spread the culture of blogging among Saudis.
“We held our first meeting in Riyadh in April, and then had another one in Jeddah,” he said in an interview. “We are now planning our next one for the Eastern Province but are waiting for permission from the Ministry of Culture and Information.”
The group now has 50 members, 12 of them women.
Farah was the first to draw attention to the conservative nature of OCSAB when she translated their membership requirements from Arabic into English and posted them on her blog.
Yet Farah admitted that OSCAB’s aim to spread the culture of blogging among Saudis was working, though perhaps not to her liking.
“I’ve seen many new Saudi blogs in Arabic. But too many of them are either about poetry, which is getting to be old, or are extremist ones,” said Farah.
Jo believes that this signals a battle that has already started between liberal and conservative bloggers in the Kingdom.
“We have this clash going on between us liberals and the conservatives in the blogosphere. I think that OCSAB is trying to scare us,” said Jo.
Al-Mussaed denies trying to censor any blog and says that if KACST blocks a blog in the Kingdom it is because it violated some of the country’s regulations.
But both Farah and Al-Omran are happy with the online community they have built so far, and are confident that it will attract more open-minded Saudis in the future.
