I know it’s Christmas, but I’m going to have to bring you down. Maybe you can cheer yourself with the knowledge that something like this will almost certainly never happen to you or anyone you know.

In summary: the host of a TV show has been sentenced to death for sorcery, because he would occasionally predict the future for his callers. And where was he sentenced? Funland, of course, colloquially known as Saudi Arabia.

And it’s not even as if he was arrested as soon as he started predicting the future. It wasn’t until he went on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia that he was recognised, arrested, put on trial and convicted for doing wrong in the eyes of Allah. Ignoring, of course, the fact that he was dedicated enough to his faith to go on a pilgrimage.

Now, I am a little conflicted by this. The convicted man – Ali Hussain Sibat – said he’d consulted spirits in order to tell people their future. Clearly, that’s a tightly wound package of nads, and I’m all in favour of such a practice being discouraged or forbidden or at the very least fiercely contested and questioned. Sylvia Brown is ample proof that lying like this, whether consciously or through a genuinely deluded belief in your own psychic ability, can damage lives.

But execution for it? There’s a few wee problems. Maybe you’ve already spotted them.

a) Murdering someone for practicing magic or sorcery or witchcraft is just a tad excessive in the year of our lord 2009. Maybe a swift kick in the balls, or in the ladygap, would be more appropriate.

b) It’s sort of hypocritical to murder someone for belief in the supernatural when your entire religion is based around assumption OF the supernatural in the form of a pissed-off deity, who apparently can and has performed miracles. It’s just a little too arbitrary a system of punishment for my liking. But that goes without saying in a country under Sharia law. Anything could happen! It’s an adventure!

If I had iron balls and maybe an armoured car, I’d love to go to Saudi Arabia and stroll around reading Harry Potter. However, I’d also love not to be brutally murdered for association with the supernatural. Funny, isn’t it, that reading the Qur’an – a book which is believed to be the direct word of Allah, infallible, permanent, beautiful, divine, miraculous and predating all modern science by over a millenia – would be laudable, but reading a fictitious fairy tale (spot any similarities?) would get me trounced upside the face.

Islam. What a fun-loving barrel of chodeholers.

Anyway, reason’s greetings and all that. Stay safe.