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Safar al-Hawali: what Wikipedia removed

Safar al-Hawali is a Saudi scholar who led the Sahwah movement opposing US troops in Saudi Arabia and was later imprisoned for opposing the Saudi government. Through 2010 the opening said his name is sometimes associated with either Osama bin Laden and terrorism. Today’s opening covers his activism and 2018 detention without that association, though terror survives five times elsewhere in the article. A reader today does not learn that al-Hawali’s name has been associated with Osama bin Laden and terrorism.

The word “terror” appeared 1 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 2010. Today the opening carries none; the body carries 5. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.

The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot

Section titled “The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot”
word20052010201520206 October 20232025
terror010000

Counts are of the opening paragraph only, the part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote.

What was taken out

Section titled “What was taken out”
  • The opening’s introductory sentence was reworded with expanded name transliteration; no fact was lost.
  • The claim that al-Hawali’s name is sometimes associated with Osama bin Laden and terrorism was dropped from the opening paragraph.

How it opened then, and now

Section titled “How it opened then, and now”

2005 (revision 17650844):

Safar Al-Hawali is a Saudi Islamic scholar who lives in Makkah . He was born in 1950. He received his doctorate in Islamic theology from Umm al-Qura University, Makkah in 1986. During the 1990s, he was arrested for a period of time by the Saudi authorities for his criticism of the government.

2025 (revision 1294391781):

Saudi Arabian scholar (born 1950) Safar bin Abd al-Rahman al-Hawali al-Ghamdi ( Arabic : سفر بن عبدالرحمن الحوالي الغامدي ) (born 1950) is a scholar who lives in Mecca . He came to prominence in 1991, as a leader of the Sahwah movement which opposed the presence of US troops on the Arabian Peninsula . In 1993, al-Hawali and Salman al-Ouda were leaders in creating the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights , a group that opposed the Saudi government, for which both were imprisoned from 1994 to 1999. In July 2018, he was detained by the Saudi authorities, along with his four sons and brother, for writing a 3,000-page book titled Muslims and Western Civilisation . The book is said to in…

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