Major cultural figures and arts organisations have joined forces to condemn the sentencing to death of artist and poet Ashraf Fayadh by a Saudi court for allegedly renouncing to Islam, The Guardian reports. Fayadh was first arrested in May 2014 and sentenced to four years in prison and 800 lashes for the same charges of apostasy, based on a book of his poetry and a complaint lodged by a man who accused him of making blasphemous remarks during an argument in a cafe in the conservative city of Abha. After his appeal was dismissed, Fayadh was retried last week and condemned to death with 30 days to appeal the ruling.
Amnesty International launched an urgent action on Tuesday to call for the overturn of the sentence, and has since then been joined by cultural figures including Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern, British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and historian Simon Schama and more than a dozen organisations artists, writers, musicians and freedom of expression, such as Index on Censorship, literary association PEN International and the International Association of Art Critics. According to The New York Times, this ruling follows a series of harsh punishments handed down by Saudi courts in the past year, leading to the highest recorded number of executions in the kingdom since 1995.
Although of Palestinian origin, Fayadh grew up in Saudi Arabia and has become a strong advocate of the Saudi art scene internationally, notably through his work with the British-Saudi art platform Edge of Arabia and the Rhizoma show he cocurated at the Venice Biennale in 2013.
25 November 2015.
