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Riyadh: The fact that he still has a newspaper to edit is proof enough to Khalaf Al Harbi that the ceiling of freedom in Saudi Arabia is rising. His mischievous tabloid Shams, Arabic for Sun, has endured suspension, the arrest of one of its journalists and the carping of hardliners who say it embodies the Westernised future they fear Saudi Arabia will face if liberals get their way. But with a daily print-run of nearly 70,000, and recent permission to print inside the kingdom instead of in neighbouring Bahrain, Al Harbi says the paper for young people aims to set a new standard following a turbulent first six months. "Boldness is one of the basic tools of a journalist. You have to try to enter all the sensitive areas and you have to try to go over the line," he said in an interview.
"Fear of the free press is based on an illusion. Countries that have a free press have discovered that there's no problem, that the press can be responsible, because in the end the press is patriotic and loves its country." Shams, which is owned by a grandson of Crown Prince Sultan, has certainly put its money where its mouth is. Trying to break the mould of Saudi Arabia's sometimes drab print media, it avoided hiring experienced journalists. "We preferred to have a team without previous journalistic experience. The rules of work on the other papers are a bit traditional, and we wanted to be different," Al Harbi said. When King Abdullah came to power last year, he promised progress on a range of political, social and economic reforms. The appearance of Saudi Arabia's first tabloid last December has been seen as another sign of slow, but inevitable, change. The paper has published sensational features about forced marriage for young girls, premarital relationships, unemployment among women, an official ban on school sports for girls and arbitrary detention by police. And it managed to survive its most daring act of all - publishing some of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) that provoked a global outcry among Muslims earlier this year. The paper was shut down after running the caricatures, but the Ministry of Information, seen as a progressive force in Saudi Arabia under Minister Eyad Madani, allowed it to return a few weeks later, under its new editor Al Harbi, a short-story author. "We had the right permissions [to publish the cartoons] but it was a crisis and people were very excitable, so it would have been wiser not to have got into it," Al Harbi said. The paper said at the time it had clerical approval to publish the cartoons so that the Saudi public could judge for itself how much of an insult they were to Islam. Two months later, one of the paper's journalists was arrested over an Internet article criticising the school of Islam followed by Saudi clerics, known as Wahhabism. The journalist was later released. "We're not against them but we believe that their role needs some order and clarification. People have the right to know their rights," said Al Harbi, who describes himself as a liberal. "On Internet sites we're accused of being troublemakers, of being outside the boundaries of custom and tradition, of moving towards the way of the West or Westernisation." Al Harbi sees a domestic market for tabloids, a success in other Arab countries, because of Saudi Arabia's huge young population - 60 per cent of 17 million Saudis are thought to be under 21. The traditional crop of broadsheets, packed with text-heavy articles and semi-official communiques about those in power, leave many cold. Major dailies claim print-runs of more than 200,000 copies, but the true figure could be half that. "The biggest press market in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia," said Al Harbi, referring to an expected Saudi gross domestic product in 2006 of at least $350 billion. "It will take us a few years to grow but there's no limit. The market is big." The Internet, where Saudis express opinions that the country's culture and closed political system cannot tolerate in public, presents one of the biggest challenges for Saudi Arabia's print media. "The press is like your daily bread, you can't do without it. But the Internet has raised the bar of freedom, so papers have to try to push for more freedom too," Al Harbi said. "The Saudi press has progressed a lot but not enough yet for the modern world."
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