The unedifying plight of Hamza Kashgari

For the magazine this week I’ve written about the plight of the young Saudi journalist Hamza Kashgari, who faces a possible death penalty for having ‘tweeted’ something about that bloke Muhammad. His comments were wholly anodyne, but now a sort of maniacal combination of fundamentalist Islam and Twitter has done for him — and he will soon be charged with both blasphemy and apostasy, for which the penalty is death. When the furore kicked off he fled to Malaysia where the authorities put him on a plane back to Riyadh, out of cowardice and cravenness towards their Saudi investors.

There’s a Facebook campaign called Free Hamza Kashgari, which I don’t suppose will accomplish much but may give the chap the intimation that he is not entirely alone.