Ruling on writers is denounced

More than 100 Arab rights groups and intellectuals in the Middle East condemned a Saudi religious edict calling for the death of two writers for apostasy, saying “clerics of darkness” were practicing intellectual terrorism.

Sheik Abdul-Rahman Barrak, one of Saudi Arabia’s most revered clerics, said in a rare religious ruling last month that two newspaper columnists should be put to death if they did not renounce their “heretical articles” in public.

The two had questioned the Sunni Muslim view in Saudi Arabia that Christians and Jews should be considered unbelievers, which Barrak said implied Muslims were free to follow other religions.