RIYADH, Saudi ArabiaA 23-year-old Saudi columnist fled the country on Wednesday night, his associates said, after tweets on the human nature of the Prophet Muhammad touched off a campaign in which prominent clerics and thousands of their followers used Twitter, YouTube, email and fax to demand the man's execution.
The campaign against the writer, Hamza Kashgari, stunned many Saudis with the speed, number, and intensity of messages calling for his death.
"Your duty is to defend our religion against those atheists and not let it pass by with no punishmentyou must write in the papers, in the Internet, and write the government, and not be silenced," cleric Nasser al-Omar urged the public in a video posted on YouTube.
Mr. Omar appeared in the video shuddering with sobs in outrage at what he said was Mr. Kashgari's insult to the Prophet Muhammad.
One tweet offered to give 10,000 riyals ($2,666) to Mr. Kashgari's killer. Another posted an image of Mr. Kashgari's house taken off Google Earth. "Dead man walking!" another jeered.
The furor, kicked off by Mr. Kashgari's tweets over the weekend, sparked 30,000 tweets in one 24-hour period, according to a Saudi blogger who cited an Arabic Twitter tracker.
Saudi newspapers reported King Abdullah had ordered the arrest of Mr. Kashgari and an investigation for possible blasphemy, though the reports couldn't be confirmed. The Saudi information minister said via Twitter that Mr. Kashgari would be banned from writing for newspapers or magazines.
Government officials didn't respond to requests to comment on Mr. Kashgari's case or whereabouts.
Some Saudis saw the campaign as a show of strength by the country's religious conservatives, who have sustained perceived rebuffs recently, including King Abdullah's appointment of a more moderate head of the country's religious police and a government push to get women into jobs.
"The most serious thing about this was their ability to organize," said Abdullah Hamadaddin, another analyst, based in the coastal city of Jeddah. "You're talking about two days, and they mobilized thousands of people."
Others viewed the fatwa-by-Twitter as a sign of more deeply ingrained divisions in the conservative kingdom.
"It's going crazy, this level of intolerance. I think it has reached a disease-level in Saudi Arabia,'' said political commentator Jamal Khashoggi, one of many who used argument and Quranic verses to appeal for forgiveness for Mr. Kashgari during the Twitter campaign. "It is a culture of hate."
The uproar began around late Saturday, the birth date of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Kashgariwho was raised in a religiously conservative householdpondered in a series of tweets how he would act if he met the prophet "man-to-man."
Mr. Kashgari had been a columnist for the Jeddah-based al-Bilad daily. He had drawn the attention of Saudi conservatives before, when he appearedin shorts, rather than robes worn by most Saudi men herein photographs of a hotel convention attended by women with their hair uncovered.
Readers reacted to Mr. Kashgari's tweets, declaring he had cursed the prophet. Some obtained fatwasessentially, a cleric's religious judgment on a question posed to himand posted them on Twitter.
Is cursing the prophet "punishable by death?" one such post asked.
"Yes,'' a cleric answered, "Even if he repents and retracts."
At least one popular cleric tried to stem the rising anger. "I see a man at the beginning of his life and he has a slip and I ask Allah to forgive him for it, and help him stay on the right path," read a tweet attributed to cleric Salman al-Odah.
By Monday morning, Mr. Kashgari had deleted his controversial tweets, apologized and appealed for forgiveness, before going offline.
Messrs. Khashoggi, Hamidaddin and other tweeters who appealed for calm and forgiveness for Mr. Kashgari said they received tweeted warnings that their writing was being watched.
Saudi newspapers reported receiving numerous emails and online postings demanding punishment for Mr. Kashgari.
Saudi Arabia has a low user rate for Twitterless than 1% of the country's 27 million Saudis and expatriates as of early 2011, according to the Dubai School of Government.
Clerics dominate the list of most-followed tweeters in the kingdom. Religious conservatives in the past have responded suspiciously to new media, only to learn to harness it effectively to draw followers and spread their messages, via chat-rooms, YouTube and other means.
Grand Mufti Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh last month urged Muslims to avoid Twitter, calling it "full of lies."
Saudi Arabia's royal family takes its role as steward of the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam with extreme gravity.
This month, King Abdullah pardoned a Saudi man, after a long prison sentence, who had been convicted of slandering the prophet and sentenced to death.
An Australian man convicted of committing blasphemy while visiting Saudi Arabia was released from prison last month after being lashed 75 times.
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