Safar al-Hawali

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 include "attacks on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and the ruling Saudi royal family over their ties to Israel."