RIYADH (Reuters) - A group of over 100 Arab rights groups and intellectuals on Tuesday condemned a Saudi religious edict calling for the death of two writers for apostasy, saying "clerics of darkness" were practicing intellectual terrorism.
Sheikh Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, one of Saudi Arabia's most revered clerics, said in a rare religious ruling last month that two newspaper columnists should be put to death if they did not renounce their "heretical articles" in public.
Liberal reformers in Saudi Arabia are engaged in a battle with religious hardliners over the direction of the country, a key U.S. ally and the world's biggest oil exporter.
"All we can see in this fatwa is intellectual terrorism which sees 'Islam' as its exclusive monopoly and only sees in the 'other' blood which can be shed freely," said the statement sent to Reuters.
It said religious scholars who branded other Muslims as infidels were "clerics of darkness, fooled through their arrogance and inflated by their status into thinking that they speak in the name of God."
Rights groups have accused Saudi Arabia's strict school of Sunni Islam, often termed Wahhabism, of a xenophobic attitude which demonizes other religions.
*applauds*
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