Princess: Stepping Out of the Shadows, стр. 73

14 February

. A leading human-rights group appeals to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah to stop the execution of a woman accused of witchcraft and performing supernatural acts.

19 May

. Teacher Matrook al-Faleh is arrested at King Saud University in Riyadh after he publicly criticized conditions in a prison where two other human-rights activists are serving jail terms.

24 May

. Saudi authorities behead a local man convicted of armed robbery and raping a woman. The execution brings the number of people beheaded in 2008 to fifty-five.

20 June

. Religious police arrest twenty-one allegedly homosexual men and confiscate large amounts of alcohol at a gathering of young men at a rest house in Qatif.

8 July

. A human-rights group says domestic workers in Saudi Arabia often suffer abuse that in some cases

amounts to slavery, as well as sexual violence and lashings for spurious allegations of theft or witchcraft.

30 July

. The country’s Islamic religious police ban the sale of dogs and cats as pets. They also ban owners from walking their pets in public because men use cats and dogs to make passes at women.

11 September

. Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan, Saudi Arabia’s top judiciary official, issues a religious decree saying it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV networks who broadcast immoral content. He later adjusts his comments, saying owners who broadcast immoral content should be brought to trial and sentenced to death if other penalties do not deter them.

November

. A US diplomatic cable says donors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates send an estimated $100 million annually to radical Islamic schools in Pakistan that back militancy.

10 December

. The European Commission awards the first Chaillot Prize to the Al-Nahda Philanthropic Society for Women, a Saudi charity that helps divorced and underprivileged women.

2009

14 January

. Saudi Arabia’s most senior cleric is quoted as saying it is permissible for ten-year-old girls to marry. He adds that anyone who thinks ten-year-old girls are too young to marry is doing those girls an injustice.

14 February

. King Abdullah dismisses Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan. King Abdullah also appoints Nora al-Fayez as deputy minister of women’s education, the first female in the history of Saudi Arabia to hold a ministerial post.

3 March

. Khamisa Sawadi, a seventy-five-year-old widow, is sentenced to forty lashes and four months

in jail for talking with two young men who are not close relatives.

22 March

. A group of Saudi clerics urges the kingdom’s new information minister to ban women from appearing on TV.

27 March

. King Abdullah appoints his half-brother, Prince Naif, as his second deputy prime minister.

30 April

. An eight-year-old girl divorces her middle-aged husband after her father forces her to marry him in exchange for $13,000. Saudi Arabia permits such child marriages.

29 May

. A man is beheaded and crucified for slaying an eleven-year-old boy and his father.

6 June

. The Saudi film

Menahi

is screened in Riyadh more than thirty years after the government began shutting down cinemas. No women were allowed, only men and children, including girls up to ten.

15 July

. Saudi citizen Mazen Abdul-Jawad appears on Lebanon’s LBC satellite TV station’s

Bold Red Line

programme and shocks Saudis by publicly confessing to sexual exploits. More than 200 Saudi Arabians file legal complaints against Abdul-Jawad, dubbed a ‘sex braggart’ by the media, and many Saudis say he should be severely punished. Abdul-Jawad is convicted by a Saudi court in October 2009 and sentenced to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes.

9 August

. Italian news agencies report that burglars have stolen jewels and cash worth 11 million euros from the hotel room of a Saudi princess in Sardinia, sparking a diplomatic incident.

27 August

. A suicide bomber targets the assistant interior minister Prince Mohammed bin Naif and

blows himself up just before going into a gathering of well-wishers for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in Jeddah. His target, Prince Mohammed, is only slightly wounded.

23 September

. A new multi-billion-dollar co-ed university opens outside the coastal city of Jeddah. The King Abdullah Science and Technology University, or KAUST, boasts state-of-the-art labs, at the time the world’s 14th fastest supercomputer and one of the biggest endowments worldwide.

24 October

. Rozanna al-Yami, aged twenty-two, is tried and convicted for her involvement in the

Bold Red Line

programme featuring Abdul-Jawad. She is sentenced to sixty lashes and is thought to be the first female Saudi journalist to be given such a punishment. King Abdullah waived the flogging sentence, the second such pardon in a high-profile case by the monarch in recent years. He ordered al-Yami’s case to be referred to a committee in the ministry.

9 November

. A Lebanese psychic, Ali Sibat, who made predictions on a satellite TV channel from his home in Beirut, is sentenced to death for practising witchcraft. When he travelled to Medina for a pilgrimage in May 2008, he was arrested and threatened with beheading. The following year a three-judge panel said that there was not enough evidence that Sibat’s actions had harmed others. They ordered the case to be retried in a Medina court and recommended that the sentence be commuted and that Sibat be deported.

2010

19 January

. A thirteen-year-old girl is sentenced to a ninety-lash flogging and two months in prison as punishment for assaulting a teacher who tried to take the girl’s mobile phone away from her.

11 February

. Religious police launch a nationwide crackdown on shops selling items that are red, as they say the colour alludes to the banned celebration of Valentine’s Day.

6 March

. The Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association says that Saudi security officers stormed a book stall at the Riyadh International Book Fair and confiscated all work by Abdellah al-Hamid, a well-known reformer and critic of the royal family.

20 April

. When a member of Saudi’s ‘religious police’, Ahmed bin Qassin al-Ghamidi, suggests that men and women should be allowed to mingle freely, the head of the powerful religious police has him fired.

10 June

. After a Saudi man kisses a woman in