Free to contact work with fellow Shi'ites in neighbouring Iran and develop links with the powerful Shi'ites of Lebanon and even with the more precariously-placed Shi'ites in the Gulf Arab coutnries, the rise of the Shi'ites in Iraq has been nothig less than a seismic shift in the region's potical landscape. Numerous Arab leaders have shown their concern with comments suggesting a crescent of Shi'ite power was developing across the region from Lebanon to Iran (as Jordan's King Abdullah has said) or that Arab Shi'ites real loyalties are to Iran (according to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak).

Qaradawi's intervention is of equal import. He is one of the most influential of Sunni religious figures, a former Muslim Brotherhood sheikh in Egypt who settled in Qatar where Al-Jazeera television gave him a weekly television show. His opinions generally reflect the mainstream of Islamist thinking, veering neither into the rigid obsessions of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism nor appearing to compromise principles for the sake of a modernity that suits the West.

In an interview with the Egyptian paper Al-Masry Al-Youm (in Arabic) on Sept. 9, he was asked which was more worrisome, Wahhabism or Shi'ism. He offered a brief, yet tart, crticism of Saudi Islam, then launched into the "danger of Shi'ism" discourse, which has centred mainly on unsubstantiated claims of Shi'ism's spread in Syria. "They are Muslims but they have innovated (new ideas into Islam) and their danger is their attempt to invade Sunni society, and they are ready for it since they have billions in wealth and cadres trained to proselytize Shi'ism in Sunni countries," he said. "Unfortunately, I have recently found Egyptian Shi'ites. Ten years ago they wouldn't have succeeded in getting one. ... Now they are in the newspapers, on television and come out openly with their Shi'ite beliefs. Shi'ites hide their beliefs and that's what we have to watch out for. We have to protect Sunni societies from the Shi'ite invasion."

UPDATE: Here's a Qaradawi interview in English on Shi'ites from Asharq Al-Alawsat.

Governments are worried about Shi'ism for political reasons, because Iran and Hizbollah are championing resistance to Western hegemony, while the Sunni Arab governments have been about accommodating Western power ever since Egypt signed the Camp David accords and since Saudi Arabia came into existence. Shi'ism has a certain revolutionary chic that is attractive to many Arabs today. Shi'ism's central principle of venerating the family of the Prophet has an innocent-sounding air to most as well, although in points of theology it involves some radical breaks with Sunni thinking.

Saudi Shi'ite clerics were furious about Qaradawi's comments since they instantly bring alive an argument they have been trying desperately to counter in order to ensure a better place for themselves as a persecuted minority in Saudi Arabia (here's one cleric responding in Arabic on the Saudi Shi'ite website Rasid.com). Interestingly, though, Saudi media have for once been sympathetic to them, even highlighting Sheikh Hassan al-Saffar's response on the front page of al-Watan on Saudi National Day, Sept. 23. "Saffar differs with Qaradawi and rejects criticising his status," the headline read.

The Al-Riyadh newspaper carried a frontpage article apologising to Shi'ites for having publicising Qaradawi's comments, which fly in the face of King Abdullah's policy of promoting dialogue among Islamic sects and moderation. "Sectarian Islam, or the Islam of one faith?" al-Riyadh asked in a frontpage editorial on Sept. 24, also marking National Day.

One could not conclude, however, that the Saudi leadership is trying to distance itself from Sunni radicalism while Egypt encourages it. The calculations are too complicated. Saudi Arabia has led the regional mobilisation against Iran and Shi'ism of recent years, taking Egypt along with it. It has also sought to improve its Shi'ite minority's status. Both are strategies that aim to secure the stability of the country from external enemies, like Iran, or friends, like the United States after 9/11, who occasionally entertain the idea of reordering the polities of the Arabian peninsula.

What's more, these owners are in fact Saudi royals and their friends. The main culprit is MBC1, owned by a brother-in-law of former King Fahd, but others include billionaire playboy prince Alwaleed bin Talal, dubbed by the religious right in Saudi Arabia "the shameless prince" (al-amir al-majin). The clerics in Saudi Arabia have enormous influence and they are worried that liberals in government and their royal allies are plotting to caste them aside and secularise the country.

It is unlikely that Alwaleed or the family of Fahd's sister are worried about the attacks. They live in a world apart of palaces, servants, private planes and cruise ships in France and probably no one could get near them if they tried. The clerics were careful to talk about a legal process in any case. In fact, one of them, Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan, said specifically that he wasn't calling for vigilantes to take the law into their own hands.

For Saudi clerics, the process is all, since they have the unique privilege in the Islamic world of sitting as judges in the Sharia court system. That is the very definition of the Islamic state in their eyes. It's not the first time the religious establishment has condemned liberals in any case. Even Osama bin Laden singled out Labour Minister Ghazi Algosaibi -- a poet, former ambassador to London and confidante of the king -- in a taped message from his hideout on 2006 attacking a liberal "fifth column" at home. But Algosaibi and other punching bags of the Islamists survived.

Interestingly, most Saudis would probably say Lohaidan and co. have a point. Everyone complains about cheap jokes and sexual innuendoes in some Saudi comedy shows on TV after sunset during Ramadan. Most would say that the "sorcery" channels on Arab satellites are wrong. But it's a vague tut-tut of disapproval delivered in the knowledge that the clerics' ability to stand up to the temporal power of the Al Sauds has always been limited despite their loud bark (the most notable modern example being the way they were forced to sanction the presence of US troops on Saudi soil to eject Iraqi troops from Kuwait). People will nod in agreement that "immodest" and "immoral" television must stop, but not fully compute the fact that for the clerical puritans "sorcery" includes horoscopes that so many follow and the romantic soap operas from Turkey that their wives are hooked on.

A popular Arabic saying has it that "the dogs bark but the desert caravan rolls on." It is a notable shift in the socio- political landscape of Saudi Arabia that this is how a significant portion of the population now view the once all-powerful clerics.

Regarding those romantic Turkish soap operas -- they're a hit across the Arab world. Riyadh staffer Farah al-Sweel wrote about the hit series "Noor" a few months ago. The Algerian daily Le Quotidien d'Oran recently ran a story about its effect there, including warnings by imams not to watch such immoral fare.

Part of the attraction for female viewers seems to be the heartthrob leading man, Kivanc Tatlitug. Here he is in a scene, dubbed into Arabic, where he visits his wife Noor in hospital.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89SPdLJawX0[/youtube]

But for the average citizen, this perfect world can be suffocating. Just getting into a shopping mall for a single young man is a wonder unless you happen in to be in the one of the liberalised enclaves like Jeddah or Khobar. Getting to know nembers of the opposite sex can be difficult unless you move among the affluent sectors of society or have the chance to infiltrate the world of foreigners.

 Or you can get away for a weekend break.

 Every Wednesday night literally thousands of Saudis clog up the narrow causeway to freedom that joins the Eastern Province to
the island state of Bahrain. The atmosphere is joyous and triumphant because once you've gone through the six checkpoints
of various types, it's a quick ride into what appears, in that incredible liberating moment, to be paradise. With the social rules out the window, people make the most of it. Families head to the cinema and cafes, bars and nightclubs are heaving with unrelated men and women who actually "mix" i.e. they inhabit the same physical space in a public place.

Indeed, Saudis don't only head to Bahrain to mix and match with women and alcohol, they also flock to Dubai, Beirut and Cairo. Those are the favourite haunts in the vicinity. If you've more time on your hands you head east to Malaysia or Indonesia -- "you can spend only 3,000 riyals ($800) on accommodation, food, drinks and women in one month!" someone enthused the other day -- or West to Morocco and the resort of Agadir, a royal favourite.

But like gas trapped in an enclosed space, Saudis can tend to explode. Bahrain has some 24-hour bars and a recent weekend trip was a warning sign of what can happen to anyone bottled up for too long. The air was smoky and the beer was flowing, and the night was getting more raucous as it hurtled on to dawn. An endless flow of Morrocan prostitutes were on tap and pimps were hawking around for potential customers.

Then a fight broke out downstairs. My colleague saw the hotel staff grab plastic potplants and anything they could get their hands on to assail a thin young man in a white dishdasha who ran past me on the stairs covered in blood. We completed our way to the ground level where two security guards lay groaning on the floor, the victims of the young guy who had fled upstairs to hide. We gingerly stepped our way through the spats of blood and made a quick exit from what bore a considerable resemblance to the bar of intergalactic detritus that featured in the first Star Wars film.

We searched the papers and Internet the next day for any reference to the bizarre incident the night before but there was no mention of it, as if it didn't happen. Heading back over the causeway to Saudi Arabia, land of authentic values, suddenly Utopia didn't seem half as nutty as the place we were leaving.

There are a number of book chains around the country and invariably the religion section has the largest number of Arabic books, alongside educational materials on medicine, business, computers and foreign language books on various subjects. But the Saudi novel remains controversial.

Riyadh has one bookstore known for its focus on modern literature and it's there that Saudis in the know will head for a particular work. I eventually found the shop the other day, it's called innocuously al-Kitab (The Book) and an array of novels that many aficionados might never have even heard about by famous Saudi writers were laid out sinfully on neat shelves. The novels of Turki al-Hamad, the liberal probably most despised by Islamists, were there. Another irritant for Islamists, Abdo Khal, had titles there I didn't know existed.

Tony Calderbank, a noted translator of Arabic novels into English, says most of the quality works that come his way are passed to him personally by the authors themselves -- getting a hold of them is too troublesome.

The shop assistant said they often have problems with the religious police who remove certain novels in particular, like Siba al-Harz's racy, and acclaimed, al-Akharoun (The Others) about lesbian schoolgirls, but they leave the foreign language stuff -- which is far more racy -- alone.

Normally it's in Dubai, Beirut or Cairo that you can find Saudi novels; I came across al-Akharoun in Dubai. A colleague dropped a pleasant surprise this week when she revealed she got a copy at the Riyadh Book Fair this year -- an event which in itself has enraged many of the religious right.

With the rampant success of the Internet in Saudi Arabia as a means for young people to flout the suffocating morality rules of society through direct online contact, with the anonymity that allows if desired, book-buying has decreased in recent years, the assistant in al-Kitab said.  And yet the number of novels being put out by Saudis is increasing every year.
   
It seems to me the cracks are slowly appearing in the walls of isolation that have been slammed down left, right and centre in every avenue of Saudi cultural, political and social life. They have been appearing since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 -- in which 15 Saudis were among the 19 Arabs who carried out the attacks -- forced some in government to take a long hard look at what the country had become.

   
But the Islamists will never give up the fight to maintain their privileges and control they have over society.

One of the main factors driving this excitement has been a recent spate of incidents reported in the Saudi media where Saudi police have caught women behind the wheel. In the most recent case, a young woman in Riyadh died when she crashed the car, a tragedy one paper presented as evidence that the reform should not happen at all.

What's interesting about these incidents is that they give the impression of some kind of spontaneous mass movement of  women determined to drive - unlike the last major effort in 1990 which was highly organised but a great failure.

Then, a group of 45 women famously drove through central Riyadh in what was at that time a much more closed society and paranoid regime. American troops had flooded into the country and an army of journalists had followed, and the powerful clerical establishment was bristling at having been forced by King Fahd to accept the foreign troops and their mission to fight the Iraqis in occupied Kuwait. The authorities were in no mood to put up with a publicity stunt by uppity educated women, who were arrested and removed from jobs.

Eighteen years on, things are different.

"Driving has become an individual movement, women are starting to move," said rights activist Wajeha Al-Huwaider, who a few months back posted a video of herself on YouTube driving a car around the Aramco Compound in Dhahran -- one private area where women can drive with impunity. "I think they will do it, and if the king wants to make a real change he should start with women's status," she said.

[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=54pRJkJ6B6E&feature=email[/youtube]

Internet sites have touted possible details of a royal decree that would set a minimum age of 30 for women drivers and specific times when they can hit the roads such as from 8 am to 8 pm, with an extension to 11 pm on weekends. The ubiquitous "male guardian" -- the bane of life in Saudi Arabia for women -- may also have to be present. Another factor that could drive reform are rising living costs. Over the past year inflation has shot up to around 10 percent, cutting into ordinary Saudis lifestyles. Families have to employ male drivers if they want their women to be able to move around at all and that costs them at least $300 a month.

Whether liberals or conservatives like it not, the issue of women driving has become a litmus test for reform. Many liberals like to pooh-pooh the question as trivial compared to the grander goals: political reform, elections to the currently fang-less quasi-parliament, the Shura Assembly, persuading the government to allow women to become ministers, ambassadors or sit in the Shura Assembly.

Whether the king is prepared to challenge the clerics is really the big question. His recent experience with an interfaith dialogue among Muslims, Christians and Jews could be read either way. The senior, most influential clerics failed to turn up in Madrid for the conference, showing a clear lack of interest in parleying with the infidel. That could embolden the king to push on with another initiative that they don't like -- girls in cars -- or it could act as a warning sign against pushing them too far.

But one report in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot went to the nub of the matter -- will Jewish rabbis be able to visit the bastion of Sunni Islam and home to Islam's two holiest sites? That would be big news. As the Israeli daily reported it, the Saudi grand mufti, the official government spokesperson on religious affairs, had begun sending out feelers to Israeli rabbis to attend some meeting in Riyadh at an unspecified date.

Well, the report made it into English and led to the mufti, Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al al-Sheikh, issuing a carefully-worded denial. "The mufti clarified that what was published in some newspapers and news agencies saying that he had called on a group of Israeli religious scholars to take part in a religious reconciliation conference in Riyadh is devoid of any truth and has no basis," the Saudi royal-owned paper Asharq al-Awsat reported on its front page on Wednesday. "He said: 'I hope everyone will check facts before reporting things'."

The report did not reject the idea of such a dialogue, which the mufti would hardly oppose since he is a representative of a government that now officially wants to hold an interfaith conference. All he did was say that, up to this point, he had not asked any Israelis to come to anything. So he might in the future, but we'll have to wait and see on that.

In an indication of the diametrically opposed constituences the mufti must consider, Islamists commenting on web sites were exultant that he had refuted the reports. "We all know that the Jews are people of lies and slander. So it's no surprise they would claim the mufti did such a thing. Therefore, we have to be careful about what the newspapers and agencies are saying," one user on Saha.net wrote. "It is well-known that the mufti rejects dialogues of religion since he has said before in sermons that they are empty and amount to concessions," another said.

Meanwhile, Saudi dailies with liberal leanings are trumpeting the positive attention the king has won for Saudi Arabia abroad. "CNN describes the king as a history-maker," al-Watan said on Wednesday in a front-page headline, adding: "Global support for the king's initiative for a dialogue of religions."

The king is seen in Saudi Arabia as a reformer but one who has been outmaneuvered by the powerful religious establishment and their allies in the royal family. The interfaith conference call may be a kind of trial balloon launched to see what kind of reaction it gets in a country where liberals and religious conservatives are engaged in an ideological struggle for the future of Saudi Arabia.

What they noticed in Ertürk's comments was the degree to which she seemed to accept the official argument that Saudi society had "special characteristics" -- khususiyya in Arabic -- that constituted a valid frame of reference for assessing the country's rights record. Khususiyya is a well-worn term that anyone who tries to criticise Saudi values hears in response. It's used elsewhere in the Arab world as well, either by religious figures facing down liberal trends in society or governments opposing calls for political reform. Reformers throughout the Arab world see the term as a kind of a blanket "cultural exclusiveness" argument that seeks to shut down all serious discussion of political or religious change. It was once mocked by Saudi liberals themselves in the popular television comedy show Tash Ma Tash.

International pressure over Saudi women's rights has been growing. Ertürk's visit was part of an effort by Riyadh to persuade outsiders the situation was improving. She was able to announce that officials had promised to allow a couple forced to divorce by a religious court to live together again. There apparently was no movement on other issues such as the ban on women driving cars, which has become a kind of litmus test of reform in the country.

Ertürk tried to play down the importance of the ban and implied that allowing women to get behind the wheel would simply be tokenism. "The driving issue has become a characterising symbol for this country. No doubt it is important because it deprives or limits women's freedom of movement," she said. "I don't know what will happen with the driving issue, I haven't discussed it, it didn't come up in our discussions, I don't have a sense of how soon this will be resolved. If the ban on driving is going to continue, I think there is a need to provide transportation possibilities for people to get around, especially those who cannot afford to have a car and a driver. Whatever the preferred norm is in a country, the obligation of the state is to provide alternatives."

And khususiyya? Ertürk said she saw patriarchal norms, values and law around the world. "It is this aspect that characterises societies across civilisation and across countries that we should try to understand and see how deviations from this norm have occurred historically, and how Saudi Arabia within its own realities can deviate to the advantage of rights and rights of women," she said. Even Sweden, she argued, had some way to go in securing equality and justice for women. The women journalists listening to this could only dream.

A Turkish sociology professor, Ertürk clearly understood the cultural minefields inherent when trying to apply global rights standards in different contexts around the world. But her argument that the state should provide more transport if it would not let women drive missed the point. Islamic clerics in Saudi Arabia do not want to see the driving ban undermined by an alternative world of women's taxi, bus, monorail or beach buggy services that can bring women into sinful contact with men. They firmly believe that women should be at home raising children and not out on Main Street tempting men with their charms.

The leading state-appointed cleric in Saudi Arabia, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh, has already attacked the committee's report on women's rights as disrespectful and "spiteful for our religion and country". In a Friday sermon in a Riyadh mosque, he defended the rules segregating women from unrelated men by arguing that allowing men and women to mix was to turn them into no more than animals.

Liberals throughout the Arab world say they have found to their cost that they get nowhere with conservative political or religious authorities by accepting their frame of reference for discussion or playing it diplomatically in the hope of a concession.