Writing for an Arab Newspaper: Like Hopscotch in a Minefield

From January 2004 until early this year I played my game of hopscotch in a weekly column on the opinion pages of Asharq al-Awsat, the London-based, Saudi-owned newspaper that is read across the Arab world.

And then I stepped on a mine. Without warning or notice, fewer and fewer of my columns made it into print. Then my articles stopped appearing altogether. I had been banned.

Nobody tells you that you're banned from an Arab paper - especially a paper that is supposedly the liberal home of writers banned from other papers, which is how Asharq al-Awsat portrays itself

Another Egyptian journalist told me he'd been "lucky": The editor of a newspaper he used to write for actually confessed to him that the Egyptian regime had called the Saudi prince who publishes the paper and requested that my friend be banned.

That is probably what happened in my case. Since Egypt's parliamentary elections last year, which left President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party in firm control of the legislature, the Egyptian regime has been settling scores with opponents ...

I had ... devoted many of my weekly Asharq al-Awsat columns to it.

At the end of my stay, just before I left Egypt to return to New York, I was summoned to State Security because of an article I wrote criticizing the fraud and violence in the parliamentary elections. The summons was intended as a "we are watching you" warning.

The trouble with Asharq al-Awsat, beyond its disturbing acquiescence to Arab regimes, is that it claimed a liberalism that was patently false.

Few newspapers in the Arab world are truly independent. Most are state- controlled or state-owned, or owned by persons very close to the state; Asharq al-Awsat is published by a nephew of the Saudi king.

It is gratifying to know that Arab regimes and compliant newspapers consider some of us annoying enough to ban ...