Quotes of the Day

Authors get used to criticism, but for Saudi Arabian novelist Turki al-Hamad, the critics could be deadly. Since the 1998 publication of Adama, the first installment of his sweeping coming-of-age trilogy, al-Hamad's work has been condemned as heretical and banned in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. He has earned four fatwas and numerous death threats. Yet he continues to write, and find readers; he has sold some 20,000 copies of the Arabic edition of his trilogy. Last November, Shumaisi, the second novel in the trilogy, was published in English by Saqi Books to impressive reviews. His goal, he said in a phone interview from his Riyadh home, is simple, if ambitious: he seeks to reveal "the real picture of Saudi society — what's going on underneath."

It's not hard to see either the appeal of al-Hamad's work, or the reason the authorities dislike it. The novels provide an insider's view of the early 1970s — just before oil made Saudi Arabia immensely wealthy — and the foundations of today's secretive and closed society. Adama, which appeared in translation last year, begins the story of Hisham al-Abir, a voracious teenage consumer of banned books. Entranced by Gamel Abdel-Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism, in the late 1960s al-Abir joins a Baathist cell in his sleepy hometown, Dammam, in the country's oil-rich eastern province. His activity is illegal, because clandestine political organizations threaten King Faisal's fragile kingdom. When the underground organization is discovered and his comrades are arrested, he is overlooked and attends university in Riyadh. There, under the tutelage of a cousin wise to big-city ways, he has his first sexual encounters, with a teenage prostitute and later with a married woman.

In a society where men and women officially have limited contact, that's dangerous territory. Yet al-Hamad insists he is merely reporting a widely known truth. Despite Saudi Arabia's strict Wahhabi Sunni Islam, he says, in unsupervised moments together young men and women do exactly what their society most fears. "Contradiction is the name of the game here. What I describe in Shumaisi is still happening. Just because your religion tells you not to do this or that doesn't mean you don't do it," he says.

Even so, al-Hamad's biggest offenses seem to have been philosophical. Three of the fatwas against al-Hamad were issued by Saudi religious clerics after the 2000 publication of his third novel, Karadib, in which the by-then-imprisoned al-Abir muses that God and the Devil are interchangeable. That's heretical in Saudi theocracy, and he was denounced as an infidel. Although the fatwas were, according to the author, "unofficial," the country's religious police threatened him by e-mail and through family members. In June, al-Hamad's name appeared in an al-Qaeda statement as an apostate who should be arrested and tried. Despite all of that, al-Hamad still lives and publishes in Riyadh. After the first fatwa in 1999, he turned to Crown Prince Abdullah, who offered him bodyguards for protection.

Al-Hamad, a 52-year-old political analyst, academic and liberal reformer, came to fiction writing fairly late. His decision to continue writing in the face of opposition is partly motivated by a desire to reach young Saudis, who he believes have become less open-minded than his own generation due to a mixture of wealth and fundamentalism. He explains, "About 70% of the Saudi population are under 30. They grew up in a different society. Maybe they behave Western in their eating and dressing habits, but inside they have the idea that we are different."

Al-Hamad is not optimistic about the chances for political progress in his country. In 2003, a petition he signed calling on the Saudi government for basic reforms was ignored. Religious authorities still constrict public debate about fundamentalism. In the absence of social and political reforms, the author believes that culture must become the catalyst for change. He is just finishing a novel about 9/11 and the lives of four hijackers. "The starting point is the mind itself," he says. "The spirit of initiative is cultural. In the Arab world in general, ordinary people are waiting. Governments are the same."

• MALU HALASA
• Fatwas and death threats won't stop Saudi novelist Turki al-Hamad from writing — or his fans from buying