Turki al-Hamad

Turki al-Hamad (Arabic: تركي الحمد, Turki al-Ḥamad; born 10 March 1952) 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 (Phantoms of the Deserted Alley)—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 crisis. 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."^[1]

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.^[2] He continues nevertheless to live in Riyadh, calling the fatwas "more of a nuisance than anything else," according to the Daily Star.^[1]