Safar al-Hawali

In July 2018 he was detained by the Saudi authorities, along with his four sons and brother, for writing a 3,000-page book titled Muslims and Western Civilisation. The book is said to include "attacks on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and the ruling Saudi royal family over their ties to Israel."

Al-Hawali was named as a "theologian of terror" in an October 2004 petition to the UN signed by 2,500 Muslim intellectuals calling for a treaty to ban the religious incitement to violence.

Hawali was invited to the First Meeting of the Saudi National Meeting For Intellectual Dialogue held in June 2003 but declined to attend in protest against the inclusion of `deviants` at the meeting—namely non-Wahhabi religious leaders of the Sunni and Shia Muslim communities of Saudi Arabia. Al-Hawali did, however, condemned al-Qaeda's May 2003 attacks in Riyadh.

After September 11, 2001, al-Hawali wrote an open letter to President Bush.

In the year 2000, he wrote a treatise on the Second Intifada, entitled The Day of Wrath. He argued that the Biblical prophecies used by Christian fundamentalists to support the state of Israel actually predict its destruction. The treatise was subsequently translated into Hebrew by the Anti-Zionist Neturei Karta group.

In September 1994, two leaders of the Committee, Salman al-Ouda and Safar al-Hawali were arrested together with a large number of their followers in the city of Burayda, Qasim region. Moreover, Sheikh Abd al-Aziz Ibn Baz issued a fatwa, that unless al-Quda and al-Hawali repented their former conduct, they would be banned from lecturing, meetings and cassette-recording. In 1999, he and two other scholars were arrested, but were then released without any charge. Hawali has since parted ways with Salman al-Ouda.

Safar al-Hawali was one of the leaders of The Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR) that was a Saudi dissident group created in 1993 and was the first ever opposition organization in the Kingdom openly challenging the monarchy, accusing the government and senior ulama of not doing enough to protect the legitimate Islamic rights of the Muslims.

Like many Saudis, American libertarian politicians and anti war activists, and indigenous religious communities of the Middle East, former veteran of the Afghan Soviet war Osama bin Laden, and another preacher Salman al-Ouda, al-Hawali opposed the presence of US troops on the Arabian peninsula. In 1991, al-Hawali delivered a sermon stating: "What is happening in the [Persian] Gulf is part of a larger Western design to dominate the whole Arab and Muslim world." Bin Laden is said to often cite al-Hawali and al-Oada "to justify his own pronouncements against the United States."

Safar al-Hawali Alghamdi received his doctorate in Islamic theology from Umm al-Qura University, Mecca in 1986. During the 1990s, he was arrested for a period of time by the Saudi authorities for his criticism of the government when he distributed sermons on cassette tapes to incite militants to overthrow the government. Along with another preacher Salman al-Ouda, al-Hawali is said to have led the Sahwa movement (Awakening movement) in Saudi Arabia, a form of Qutbism.

Safar bin Abdul-Rahman al-Hawali al-Ghamdi (Arabic: سفر بن عبدالرحمن الحوالي الغامدي ‎) (born 1950) is a scholar who lives in Mecca. He came to prominence in 1991, as a leader of the Sahwah movement which opposed the presence of US troops on the Arabian peninsula. In 1993, al-Hawali and Salman al-Ouda were leaders in creating the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, a group that opposed the Saudi government, for which both were imprisoned from 1994 to 1999.