Hello, Hamza Kashgari

And good bye Hamza Kashgari.  Unfortunately, we're gonna have to put Hamza on the backburner of the blog, not because he's boring us (he's anything but!), but because there aren't as many updates on his situation at the moment. <-- Scroll down to the bottom for some EXTREME Hamza News! But seriously, read the whole thing.

Until I can find more updated and verifiable sources on his story, I'll instead be focusing on Hana Shalabi and others like her who are hunger striking in the Middle East and are using Twitter to gain media attention.  (our twitter protest for hana yesterday got her trending twice for a few minutes! let's see if we can do the same thing for alkhawaja.) 

I would suggest tweeting for his freedom, but he may be safer in jail at the moment.  Saudi Arabia is still angry with him for his Prophet Mohammad tweets.

Right now, the most up to date articles about him are just explaining how he's still repenting and deleting the tweets and much of the same thing.  I'm reading through all of them and finding that I've already posted about those updates.  It's a tad bit depressing.

Anyway.  Onto his most recent article.

Hoping that enough time has passed for me to mention the content of his tweets without angering anyone, I'm finding that they aren't as horrible as I previously thought.  I mean, I still wouldn't tweet them out and if anyone tweeted similar about God or Jesus (i'm catholic), I'd still be pretty pissed.  But basically his tweets are just saying that he loves some aspects of Mohammad and doesn't love others.

What he wrote isn't as bad as it was made to sound.  It's bad, but after learning more about his controversy I personally don't think he needs to be executed for this.

OH SNAP.  This just in (i'm constantly researching while i'm blogging.  legit, i know.) but apparently Hamza Kashgari's gonna be released! The writer of the Saudi Jeans blog wrote a few days ago that Kashgari's gonna be released after a court in Riyadh accepted his apology and repentance.  Saudi Jeans wasn't able to confirm this with Kashgari's lawyer, but did receive confirmation from a friend of a friend.  This website Sabq also confirmed the news.  Sabq is also entirely in Arabic and when I translated the article it was a little confusing, but kudos to Hamza! No executions for him!

Hopefully Kashagari will actually be freed and won't have to return to prison.  Seriously, though, this is awesome news! Oh and I found out that he was being released via Twitter.  Thank you, social media!

We'll still be saying good bye to Hamza Kashgari for now, but I'll still keep my eye on him just in case he does something that needs to be noted.  Aw.  I miss him already

And now, Leslie bids you adieu.
@see_you_sLATER
Comment, tweet at me, or link us out please! Your opinions matter.

Articles used:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/life/When+poet+tweets+deemed+blasphemy/6245538/story.html
http://sabq.org/lSdfde
http://saudijeans.org/2012/03/07/free-hamza-kashgari/