In Osama bin Laden’s April 23 tape, he called for the killing of prominent Arab reformers, including a Saudi author, Turki Al-Hamad. This was not the first time threats were made against Mr. Al-Hamad. Saudi religious figures have issued four fatwas calling for his death. He told the British Broadcasting Corporation’s “Hardtalk” in 2004 that his family members, too, have received death threats by phone and e-mail. Official Al Qaeda communiques have also threatened “the apostate.”

Mr. Al-Hamad is best known for a trilogy of coming-of-age novels considered dismissive of prominent Islamic works. First came “Adama,” named after a neighborhood in Damman, Saudi Arabia. Following its 1998 release, the book quickly sold 20,000 copies before being condemned as “heretical” and banned in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The London publishing house Saqi Books, which translates Mr. Al-Hamad’s writings, hailed it as “the most explosive novel to emerge in the Middle East in years.”

On the dust jacket of his second novel, “Shumaisi,” named for a quarter of Riyadh, Mr. Al-Hamad wrote: “Where I live there are three taboos: religion, politics, and sex. It is forbidden to speak about these. I wrote this … to get things moving.” His third novel, “Karadib,” named after a prison in Jeddah, also focused on social taboos of conservative Middle Easterners.

In the summer of 2005, Mr. Al-Hamad released a novel loosely based on the attacks of September 11, 2001, and four of the hijackers titled, “The Winds of Paradise.” The New York Times quoted him as saying, “I wrote the latest book just to say that the problem is not from outside [Saudi Arabia], the problem is from ourselves – if we don’t change ourselves, nothing will change.”

In a 2003 supplement from the Saudi English daily Arab News about September 11, 2001, Mr. Al-Hamad wrote that the attacks have “not incited any crucial questions among Arabs.” He called the response “mostly a mixture of justifications and excuses,” which, he added, “try as usual for the Arabs to blame the others and to exonerate themselves.”

Mr. Al-Hamad is an outspoken critic of Saudi government curricula, universities, and summer camps, and he has connected the September 11 attacks to the Saudi educational system. On August 25, 2004, Mr. Al-Hamad appeared on Al-Arabiya TV, saying, “We must be wary even of official [Saudi] institutions, such as summer camps, [and] Koran memorization schools.”

Of the September 11 suicide bombers, he said, “When you study their biographies … they are graduates of official institutions, universities, official centers, and so on … I say, pay attention to what’s happening inside these summer camps, inside these universities, and colleges … A politicized religious ideology is being indoctrinated into the students.”

In 1995 at the age of 45, Mr. Al-Hamad retired from King Saud University. In interviews, he said officials were censoring what he could teach, and that he could better influence young Saudis by writing novels. Mr. Al-Hamad told the New York Times in 2005: “The first thing [to bring democracy] is that you have to use the educational system to spread different values, human values.” He also decried the fact that students quote Islamist religious figures such as Sheik Ibn Taymiyyah to explain scientific theories.

In an interview with Germany’s Qantara.de, Dialogue With the Islamic World, in August 2004, Mr. Al-Hamad again discussed the Saudi curriculum: “Certain values must be spread by our education system, for example tolerance, getting along with others as human beings, as other races, or as ‘nonbelievers.’ There are values that must be planted inside the minds of young children if we are to have a new society. If we continue teaching our children hatred and intolerance, then these ills will grow and a climate for terrorism will be created,” he said.

Turki Al-Hamad, Ahmad Al-Baghdadi, and other Arab reformists mentioned in this series are not alone in the fight against Al Qaeda and the ideology of hate. Others whom Osama bin Laden and his followers view as “apostates” are emerging as a rival force.

As an Arab reformist who now resides in America, Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi, explained on May 1 to the Arabic Web site Mid East Transparent, “The forces of oppression and darkness draw back every day while the forces of light and enlightenment advance every day. However, they advance slowly … since the forces of darkness perform daily barbaric acts of terror and publicized these acts on the various media channels, and consequently they spread more quickly than the forces of light that have no weapons except words, and no sword but the sword of dialogue.”

Mr. Stalinsky is the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.