A Saudi court in Jeddah has ordered the permanent closure of a liberal website for publishing what was perceived as “anti-Islamic content”, Al Arabiya reported on Sunday, citing the Saudi news website Sabq. According to Sabq, a number of Saudis had demanded the closure of the Saudi Liberal Network for posting stories and comments
A 75-year-old Jesuit priest was beaten and shot dead by armed men in Homs, Syria on Monday, after he had insisted on staying in the war-torn country to help the poor and feed the hundreds starving in the beleaguered city. Father Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch national who had worked in Syria since
Saudi Arabia has introduced a series of new laws which define atheists as terrorists, The Independent reported on Tuesday, citing Human Rights Watch. In a string of royal decrees and an overarching new piece of legislation to deal with terrorism generally, the Saudi King Abdullah has clamped down on all forms of political dissent
Hamas is taking another step towards the full implementation of strict Islamic Sharia law in Gaza, and is planning to introduce a penalty of lashes for certain criminal offenses. Nafez Al-Madhoun, the secretary of Hamas’s parliament in Gaza, said on Tuesday that the government is working on passing a new law pertaining to lashes.
We have all been taught at school that the Earth revolves around the sun, but, according to a senior Saudi cleric, we’ve been misled. In fact, Saleh Al-Fawzan, a member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, recently claimed in a televised interview that not only does the Earth not revolve around the sun,
Islamist rebels in eastern Syria have ordered women to put on the Islamic veil, warning that anyone not doing so would be held to account, Reuters reports. According to the report, an organization calling itself the Islamic Law Council of Deir al-Zor said in a statement released Wednesday that women have until Saturday to
Muslim clerics have issued a religious ruling (“fatwa”) forbidding any Muslim from traveling to Mars. The ruling, published in the UAE's Khaleej Times, says that space travel in general, and to Mars specifically, is too dangerous. “Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam,”
A Muslim cleric was Tuesday charged in Australia with conducting an illegal marriage between a 26-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl. It follows the arrest of a Lebanese national -- the "husband" -- last week on child sex offences. Police said the imam, reportedly Pakistan-born, was arrested in Sydney on Monday afternoon by
In the latest alarming evidence of child soldiers being used by Syrian rebel forces, an Islamist brigade linked to Al Qaeda released footage of a four year old it claimed as its youngest recruit. In the video (below), the child - who can barely hold the AK-47 rifle he is firing - lets off
The Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has executed dozens of rival Islamists over the last two days, activists told Reuters on Sunday. The executions took place as the group recaptured most territory it had lost in the northeastern Syrian province of Raqqa, according to the activists. One of the
