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Details have emerged in the death of a young Saudi woman who was beaten and then shot to death by her father in Saudi Arabia after he caught her chatting online on the popular website, Facebook.

Facebook, or as it’s called by the Saudis, Faceless, has over 30,000 users. Saudi women use nicnames and instead of posting their photo put up comic book images or drawings.

Facebook has emerged as a portal for Saudi women to be able to chat with persons online from all over the world but at the same time they’ve found “insulting” or “mocking” comments posted to them by Islamic extremists who browse the webpages.

Saudi engineers “investigated” the use of Facebook and found that some Saudi women had put their photo online, which is strictly forbidden in a culture that relies on Islamic or “Sharia” law. The engineers said that this lead to the women “behaving badly” by taking a further step in acquiring web-cams, instant messaging and mobile phones.

Renowned Islamic preacher Sheikh Ali al-Maliki warned that Facebook had lead to “strife” and that “Facebook was a “door to lust” and that both men and women had “spent more on the internet and mobile phones than food”. al-Maliki is behind a proposal to ban Facebook.

Facebook calls itself a “social utility” that “connects you with the people around you”. It was created in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg as a hobby along with financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Popular at Harvard it soon spread to other universities, Stanford and Yale. By 2005 Zuckerman and two other fellow Harvard students, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, had dropped out of school to run Facebook full time. They acquired the domain name, Facebook, for $200,000. Popular with students it’s estimated that Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the United States.

A mere three years after Facebook was founded it has reached across the globe with an estimated 30,000 uses in Saudi Arabia. The young woman who was caught using Facebook by her father, beat, then shot her last August in Riyadh after he came into the room and found her chatting online with a man.

So while Facebook has enabled many Saudis to connect to people across the world through sites such as Facebook there still remains the strict adherence in Saudi society to Sharia law. Women are forbidden to have contact with males who are not their husbands, fathers or brothers. This means over the internet, by phone, or out in public. The father may claim his daughter brought shame to the family through her actions while clerics are calling for the banning of sites such as Facebook because they lead to the corrupting of young Saudi men and women’s morals.

By LBG

Image - Saudi Woman
Source - Arab Media & Society - Al-Arabiya: “Preacher demands blocking of Facebook due to Saudi women access…”
Source - Telegraph - Saudi woman killed for chatting on Facebook
Source - Facebook
Source - Facebook, The Complete Biography

Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.