[عربي سعودي]

US-based Middle East expert and author Daniel Pipes says it is wrong to presume that all academics would follow their donor's line merely to keep the stream of funds rolling.

"Academics have a distinct point of view and are not about to be bought and change their point of view for any sum of money," he tells Inquirer. "But they are willing to shape their work and their views. So you can't buy them but you can rent them. So someone who might have been inclined to ask tough questions will do something else. It's subtle. It's not like the Saudis come to town to buy up academics who grovel before them, as was the case with Griffith University."

Last month, Britain's MI5 director-general Jonathan Evans reportedly told his Government that the Saudi Government's multimillion-dollar donations to universities, along with other funds from Muslim organisations in countries such as Pakistan, had led to a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses".

His warning came just days after the Higher Education Funding Council for England held a special meeting to confront fears that Saudi donations were unduly influencing universities. Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies revealed that eight British universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, received more than $US465 million from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995, mainly to fund Islamic study centres.

In 2005, a prominent Saudi businessman, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, was reported by The Washington Post to have donated $20million to Georgetown and Harvard universities in the US for the study of Islam and the Muslim world to promote interfaith dialogue and understanding.

At Scotland Yard, a security expert cautions that one of Islam's five pillars - Zakat - requires Muslims to give alms and that charity is considered virtuous and essential.

But Emerson, best-selling author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, says Saudi Arabia should be allowed to bankroll religious initiatives in the West only when it becomes open to the idea of religious reciprocity. "I think there should be a law requiring religious reciprocity for funding coming from regimes that restrict religious freedom on their soil," he says. "Saudi Arabia does not allow the practice of any other religion, bars the operations of churches, confiscates Bibles ... As such, there should be laws passed by Western governments prohibiting Saudi donations to universities until and unless Saudi Arabia operates a pluralistic religious environment.

"Absent such laws, I believe that universities should be required to register as foreign registered agents - a law we have in the US - that designates the Saudi donors and their recipients as agents of a foreign power.

"That would certainly stigmatise the grant giving and give pause before a university accepts such money."

The most recent insight into the nature of Saudi society came with the release this month of the Human Rights Watch report Perpetual Minors, about the status imposed on women by Riyadh's doctrinaire interpretation of Sura 4, verse 34 of the Koran: "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women because God has given the one more (strength) than the other and because they support them from their means."

The report outlines how adult Saudi women generally must obtain permission from a male guardian to work, travel, study or marry, while being denied the right to make even the most trivial decisions on behalf of their children and being segregated from men under laws enforced by the Orwellian-sounding Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (the religious police).

In 2004, the UN ranked Saudi Arabia 77th of 78 countries for gender empowerment, defined as the ability of women to take part in economic and political life, ahead of Yemen. Australia was eighth, Norway first.

While Saudi Arabia exports its Wahhabi version of Islam to the world, Saudi society groans under the weight of its internal contradictions. The first class of female law students will graduate from King Abdul Aziz University this year, but the Saudi Ministry of Justice prohibits female lawyers from practising. Judges consider women to be lacking in reason and faith, and have refused to allow them to speak in the courtroom because their voices are shameful.

A Saudi labour code, which came into force in 2006, states that all Saudi workers have the right to work without discrimination, but also specifies "women shall work in all fields suitable to their nature".

Literacy among Saudi women and girls over the age of 15 has risen sharply, according to UN reports, from 16.4 per cent in 1970 to 83.3 per cent in 2005 and Saudi women make up 58 per cent of university graduates (most at teachers colleges), but education is dependent on the permission of male guardians, universities are segregated, and women are excluded from disciplines such as engineering, architecture or political science.

Last year, a 19-year-old gang-rape victim was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months' jail for being in a car with an unrelated man when she was attacked by seven men. In 2002, a fire at an elementary school in Mecca resulted in 15 schoolgirls being burned alive because the religious police refused to let them out of the school without headscarfs.

At the University of Melbourne, Richard Pennell, al-Tajir lecturer in Middle Eastern history, describes Saudi society as opaque rather than transparent.

"It doesn't allow research into its social structure by disinterested people; it doesn't allow disinterested comment about its inner workings; its legal system is closed; it is not a particularly easy society to deal with, partly because it is so stressed," he says. "There are so many things under the surface that are threatening to the regime."

But Pennell is sympathetic to the idea of an educational bridge between Western secular societies and Islamic societies. "We should be taking money from a variety of sources because that is how we get a variety of ideas," he says. "Provided you've got the mechanisms in place so that you don't sing to their tune, I don't think you've got a problem."


http://www.anorak.co.uk/twitterings/183592.html

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-28737,00.html