Shaikh ‘Abdul-Rahman bin Nasir al-Barrak (Arabic: عبد الرحمن بن ناصر البراك, born 1933 or 1934[1]) is a senior Saudi cleric, close to the royal family. Born in the town of Al Bukayriah in the Al-Qassim Province, al-Barrak lost his father at an early age and was stricken with blindness at the age of 9. After two years of religious studies under Sheikh Ibn Baz, he joined the faculty at Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University around the time of its founding in the early 1950s, working in the Theology Department and in the College of Sharia Law.
In 1994, al-Barrak and other Saudi clerics were mentioned by name and praised by Osama bin Laden for opposing then-Grand Mufti Ibn Baz in his Open Letter to Shaykh Bin Baz on the Invalidity of his Fatwa on Peace with the Jews.
Al-Barrak has drawn attention for issuing controversial fatwas, or religious edicts. One such fatwa called for strict gender segregation.[2] The fatwa states, "Whoever allows this mixing ... allows forbidden things, and whoever allows them is an infidel and this means defection from Islam ... Either he retracts or he must be killed ... because he disavows and does not observe the Sharia."
In March 2008, al-Barrak issued a fatwa that two writers for the newspaper Al-Riyadh, Abdullah bin Bejad al-Otaibi and Yousef Aba al-Khail, should be tried for apostasy for their "heretical articles" regarding the categorization of "unbelievers" and put to death if they did not repent.[3]