The Tweet Smell of Blasphemy

A columnist for the Jeddah-based Al Bilad newspaper, Hamza Kashgari, was detained Thursday by Malaysian police after fleeing to the country from Saudi Arabia to escape execution after he insulted the Prophet Muhammad:

Mr. Kashgari’s tweets incited outrage in the conservative Islamic country, where many regarded them as blasphemous, and reportedly prompted the king to call for his arrest. Blasphemy is a crime punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.

More than 13,000 people have joined a Facebook page titled “The Saudi People Demand the Execution of Hamza Kashgari.”

According to The Daily Beast, a friend of Mr. Kashgari, who asked not to be named, accompanied him to the airport and witnessed his detention.

“We were just watching him, waiting for him to pass the immigration checkpoint. Once he submitted his passport, they asked him to step away for a few minutes,” The Daily Beast quoted the friend as saying. “And suddenly these two people without uniforms just arrested him.”

An official from Malaysia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who refused to be identified, said Mr. Kashgari would likely be repatriated to Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Kashgari would be sent back “because he is on the watch list of Saudi Arabia,” the official said.

Some reports have suggested that Mr. Kashgari wanted to seek asylum abroad. But the foreign affairs official said Malaysia does not grant asylum out of respect for the laws of other countries. “It’s not our practice to grant political asylum,” the official said, adding that the ministry had contacted the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur.

The official said Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country, had good diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia.

What was it that was so horrible for him to earn the ire of puritanical Islamists and calls for execution? What was his crime? He twittered:

In one Twitter post, which has since been deleted but was published by Agence France-Presse, Mr. Kashgari wrote to the Prophet: “I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don’t understand about you. I will not pray for you.”