Turki al-Hamad

Al-Hamad was arrested December 24, 2012 after a series of tweets on religion and other topics. The arrest was ordered by Saudi Interior Minister Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, however the charges against al-Hamad were not announced. He was freed in 2013.

The next three were issued after the publication of the third in the trilogy, Karadib, in which the main character wonders whether God and the devil are the same thing, and which the clerics regarded as heresy. As a result, he was threatened by the mutaween by e-mail, and accused of apostasy by al-Qaeda. [4] One fatwa was withdrawn in 2003 by Sheikh Ali Al-Khudair, a well-known Saudi scholar. [5] Karadib will be published in English in 2006.

Al-Hamad's latest novel, The Winds of Paradise, is about the September 11, 2001 attacks and was published in Arabic in 2005. It has been described as a "thinly disguised sketch of the lives of four of the hijackers." [6]

After the first of four fatwas was issued in 1999, Crown Prince Abdullah, who succeeded to the throne of Saudi Arabia in August 2005, offered al-Hamad bodyguards for his protection.

Turki al-Hamad (Arabic: تركي الحمد ‎, Turki al-Ḥamad) is a Saudi Arabian political analyst, journalist, and novelist, best known for his trilogy about the coming-of-age of Hisham al-Abir, a Saudi Arabian teenager, the first installment of which, Adama, was published in 1998. Although banned in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, the Arabic edition of the trilogy — called in Arabic Atyaf al-Aziqah al-Mahjurah (Phantoms of the Deserted Alley) — has sold 20,000 copies.

Al-Hamad was born in Jordan to a family of merchants that originated from Buraidah, Al-Qassim Region in Saudi Arabia. The family moved when he was a child to Dammam in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. He later moved to the United States, where he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, later returning to Riyadh to teach political science. He retired in 1995 to take up writing full-time.

The novels explore the issues of sexuality, underground political movements, scientific truth, rationalism, and religious freedom against the backdrop of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a volatile period in Saudi Arabia, sandwiched between the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 oil crisis. Hamad is quoted on the cover of one of his novels: "Where I live there are three taboos: religion, politics and sex. It is forbidden to speak about these. I wrote this trilogy to get things moving." [1]