And I agree with you that it is embarrassing to arrest someone on a book fair because he ask for the autograph of a female writer, but they were in fact breaking (a very lousy) law. By not arresting them, the police officer was probably not only not doing his job, but also breaking the law himself. And as history shows there are unfortunately many people who don’t have the courage to take that risk.

However, maybe there are police officers who find this law as ridiculous as we do, and do ignore it, but that wouldn’t be in the news.

I’m sorry for going on about this – I do agree with you of course on the basic issue, but the ‘feminist dialogue’ between different cultures really interests me, because it questions issues that seem obvious to us.

Beldel’s novel is not sold widely in Dubai. It is still very difficult to sell books about “controversial” topics like homosexuality in that part of the world (although books about Holocaust denial and Jews drinking the blood of children are widely available and sell quite briskly).

From The Bookseller.com, a trade publication of the publishing industry:

Isobel Abulhoul, director, has now issued the following statement: “I have lived in Dubai for forty years. Based on my knowledge of who would appeal to the book-reading community in the Middle East, and having read 150 pages of Bedell’s manuscript I knew that her work could offend certain cultural sensitivities. I did not believe that it was in the festival’s long term interests to acquiesce to her publisher’s (Penguin) request to launch the book at the first festival of this nature in the Middle East.”

Whether or not the publisher wanted the book to launch at the festival is hardly the issue. “Launching” doesn’t actually mean much more than a cocktail party and a marketing push. The fact remains; the author was disinvited because the conference organizer–who is herself a bookseller–was worried about “certain cultural sensitivities.”

Given that, I think Atwood took the right stand, and I wish others had followed her. Penguin itself is familiar with this kind of cultural showdown–for years it provided protection for its employees after publishing Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and refused to pull the book from the market even after three foreign publishers were brutally attacked and one murdered by Islamic extremists.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/21/atwood-dubai-literature-festival

But from any perspective, arresting male writers for trying to speak to a female write is ridiculous and embarrassing to a country that’s ostensibly trying to have a cultural event like a book fair. A book fair is nothing at all like having sex or undressing before cameras. You’re comparing apples with oranges. I think we can all agree that a free press, uncensored, and free exchange of ideas between male and female writers and professionals is absolutely necessary for a modern society, and that is still lacking in much of the Arab world.

I think what I want to say has to do with your sentence “…so we know not to hope for too much”. Although I feel almost uncomfortable to say it, I do think that in a way Saudi Arabia should indeed be happy with the fact that women writers are ‘allowed at all’. From the point where we’re coming from it’s unbelievable that such things happen, but I think that in a culture where tradition and thought are dominated by a rigid (religious) ideology, what we perceive as (too) minor developments are experienced by many insiders as important changes.

So although I do think these acts should be protested against, judging another, for us difficult to understand culture, from our western perspective should be done carefully. And with our culture where young women feel the need to undress in front of cameras and to have sex because they think it’s ‘normal’, not because they want to, I can imagine that such conservative countries don’t find us very inspiring examples.

But yeah, anytime a religion or a government is promoting virtue you can be sure that their promotional efforts will largely consist of oppressing women.