Turki al-Hamad

Who is Turki al-Hamad?

Turki al-Hamad is a Saudi Arabian political analyst, journalist, and novelist, best known for his trilogy about the coming-of-age of Hisham al-Abir, a Saudi Arabian teenager, the first installment of which, Adama, was published in 1998. Although banned in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, the Arabic edition of the trilogy — called in Arabic Atyaf al-Aziqah al-Mahjurah — has sold 20,000 copies.

The novels explore the issues of sexuality, underground political movements, scientific truth, rationalism, and religious freedom against the backdrop of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a volatile period in Saudi Arabia, sandwiched between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 oil boom. Hamad is quoted on the cover of one of his novels: "Where I live there are three taboos: religion, politics and sex. It is forbidden to speak about these. I wrote this trilogy to get things moving."

As a result of his work, four fatwas have been issued against him by the country's religious clerics, and he has been named as an apostate in a statement by al-Qaeda. He continues nevertheless to live in Riyadh, calling the fatwas "more of a nuisance than anything else," according to the Daily Star.