Have you heard about the 23-year-old Saudi journalist who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Muhammad? It went something like this: He loved Muhammad, he hated Muhammad, he couldn’t understand Muhammad, he wasn’t going to pray for Muhammad. If this isn’t exactly a disquisition on faith and doubt a la “The Brothers Karamazov,” remember, we’re just talking Twitter.

The journalist received so many mostly white-hot angry tweets from co-religionists condemning his Islamic law-breaking “blasphemy” (30,000 in 24 hours!) that he apologized and fled the country. He hoped to seek asylum in New Zealand but was captured in Malaysia by Saudi agents who returned him to “the Kingdom.” There, according to Shariah (Islamic law), he now faces the death penalty for “blasphemy.”

If you haven’t heard of this young man, whose name is Hamza Kashgari, it could be because you’re watching too much Fox News. As of this writing, almost a week after the Kashgari story broke, I haven’t found a single story about it at the Fox News website. (You try: www.foxnews.com.) Meanwhile, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC and CNN have all reported the Kashgari story, clueing in their viewers on how far totalitarian Islam, Saudi style, will go to exert its control over the human spirit. But not Fox.

Say — you don’t suppose the fact that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns the second-largest block of stock (7 percent) in News Corp., Fox News’ parent company, not to mention a new $300 million stake in Twitter (almost 4 percent), has anything to do with Fox’s silence on this Saudi black eye of a story? After all, it was Saudi dictator King Abdullah — Alwaleed’s uncle — whom press accounts credit with ordering the tweeting journalist’s hot pursuit and imprisonment. And it is Saudi Arabia’s adherence to Islamic limits on free speech that is driving Kashgari’s ordeal.