JEDDAH, 21 May 2007 — The Riyadh Municipality in conjunction with the Riyadh Literary Club had announced plans to organize a 10-day cultural festival this spring to spread a message of tolerance and culture among local citizens.

However, the event has not been held yet and it does seem that it will not be taking place in the near future.

“I can’t say exactly when it’s going to take place. It’s being looked at by the Ministry of Culture right now. But I can guess it’s going to be delayed till the beginning of the school year in September or even later,” said Saad Al-Baziea, president of the Riyadh Literary Club.

Al-Baziea added that the municipality asked the Riyadh Literary Club to help organize events for the cultural festival. The club developed a list of activities that included poetry, fiction and critique readings, and contacted a number of Arab writers to host the events.

“We provided the municipality with a detailed and rich schedule; we also made arrangements with invited guests and speakers to make sure the timings fit them well. It’s going to be hard now to rearrange the whole thing,” said Al-Baziea.

He said that the trouble of putting the event together, which included contacting dramatists, moviemakers, photographers and painters, has to be gone through again. He also added that interference from the Ministry of Culture had caused the delay.

“I understood from municipality officials that the Ministry of Culture asked them to send them a copy of the program to look at. I thought, as the club follows the ministry, we are part of them automatically and that whatever we do is under their umbrella. I’m not sure what’s going on,” said the head of the Literary Club.

Deputy Minister of Cultural Affairs Abdul Aziz Al-Sebail said that “it’s normal procedure” for cultural matters to be transferred to the ministry by the municipality.

“We are not interfering in the set schedule, we are only giving our final approval,” he said, adding that the club’s official reference is the ministry and so it had to be looked at by them. However, he failed to give a specific timing for the cultural days. “Probably after the summer,” Al-Sebail said.

If the event got ahead as announced after sorting the bureaucratic hurdles, the festival, which includes staging of many Saudi plays, would send out a message that cultural events now have official support.

In November, an angry mob in Riyadh disrupted the showing of a Saudi play “A Moderate Without Moderation,” which condemned both liberalism and religiosity in their extreme forms.

The play was being shown at the auditorium of Yamama College, a private higher education institution.

During the third showing, a group of hard-liners jumped on stage and began destroying the set. A fight erupted between the hard-liners and people who had come to watch the play. Police were called to end the fight. Some playgoers said they were stuck in the auditorium until early morning as police investigated the incident.