April 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.