Saudis begin to show wear and tear of life under feared religious police

Saudis begin to show wear and tear of life under feared religious police
By DONNA ABU-NASR

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - The diners were just getting ready for dessert when a squad of robed, bearded men suddenly bore down on their restaurant table.

They were the muttawa, the religious police who enforce Saudi Arabia's strict Islamic code, and they were sure they had uncovered an offense to God: 10 Arabs and Westerners at the same table, wives seated next to men other than their husbands.

"They wanted to know who the host of the decadent party was," one of the diners, a woman, recalled a few days later, speaking on condition of anonymity. "One said he would kill his wife if he saw her sitting next to another man."

Finally, after lengthy lectures and deliberation, they made the men sit on one side of the table and the women on the other, she said.

This was no isolated incident. The religious police are as much part of life here as the regular police, though much more powerful. What's different is that after years of silently putting up with their strictures, some Saudis are beginning to speak out.

The muttawa are the shock troops of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, whose mission includes ensuring women are covered in black, the sexes do not mix in public, shops close five times a day for prayers and men go to the mosque and worship.

Saudis do not reject those duties. But many say the muttawa have exploited their broad mandate to interfere in the minutest details of people's lives.

These Saudis wonder, for instance, why a man is penalized for sporting a funky haircut, why women are banned from cassette, CD and video stores, why a female college student carrying an ad for the movie "Titanic" is accused of possessing pornographic material, why a man cannot take his fiancee to a restaurant without risking imprisonment.

"The muttawa speak a hieroglyphic language that we don't understand," Dawood al-Shirian, regional director of the daily Al Hayat newspaper, said in an interview.

The muttawa, whose office is near a U.S.-style strip mall with fast food outlets, refused an Associated Press request for an interview. Through the Information Ministry they said they don't talk to women, not even on the phone. Neither would they answer written questions.

Until recently, most criticism of the muttawa was leveled in private. But the floodgates were opened by eyewitness accounts of the muttawa stopping girls from fleeing a March 11 fire at their school in the holy city of Mecca because they were not covered in their mandatory black cloaks called abayas. Fifteen girls perished.

Newspapers, especially the bolder Al Watan daily, published unprecedented attacks on the muttawa. Saudi officials came out in force to defend the police, an investigation cleared them of blame, and editors were scolded for crossing a red line.

The criticism has ceased, but intermittent challenges to the muttawa's authority continue to appear, mostly as letters from readers.

The ruling Al Saud family is clearly in a bind. With the shock of discovering a preponderance of Saudis among the hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks has come growing internal and external pressure, mostly from the United States, to rein in the religious establishment. But to do so could stir up more fundamentalist fervor.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam and its king is the guardian of the faith's two holiest shrines, so it cannot afford to have its Islamic credentials put into question.

The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice holds the rank of Cabinet minister, and muttawa members are supposed to be graduates in Islamic law.

The muttawa don't wear uniforms or badges, but are recognizable by their austere robes and headdress. They mostly patrol in GMC sports utility vehicles, sometimes unmarked, usually accompanied by a uniformed policeman. They sometimes are armed with sticks.

Although the muttawa presence on the streets has gradually decreased in recent years, they remain powerful. Saudis who have had encounters with the muttawa say the men don't always respect the rules.

According to their guidelines, some of which were published recently in Al Watan, the muttawa cannot search people "unless they have been caught in a major crime."

But many wonder who determines what a "big crime" is, especially when a new tale of muttawa excess makes the rounds - such as the woman who was recently caught dining at a restaurant with her fiance, and was taken to a detention center and strip-searched. Only married couples may dine out together.

Then there are rulings that seem arbitrary and illogical. Take the maiden in the Starbucks logo, for instance.

When the Seattle-based coffeeshop chain opened its first stores in the kingdom in September 2000, it had to delete the woman and leave only her crown. The muttawa were vigilant about ensuring she didn't appear on any of Starbucks' products and forced at least one store to change its staff's aprons because the woman was depicted on them.

However, a few weeks ago, the muttawa decided it was OK to have the woman in the logo, and she is back on display.

At prayer time the muttawa patrol the streets with bullhorns, or enter shopping malls and bang on the floor with sticks, to remind men to get to the mosques.

Women aren't obligated to attend prayers, and some restaurants allow female diners to remain at their tables after rolling down the shutters for the 30-minute prayer period. But that can be risky. A coffeeshop manager who failed to shoo out his female customers was jailed for two days, according to employees of the shop.

Another duty that obsesses the muttawa is women's dress. The religious police are the only men in the kingdom who are permitted to look a woman up and down - albeit from a distance - and to be present at some women's functions.

The muttawa insist that the abayas are black and a woman's head is entirely covered. They carry out spot checks at malls and bookstores and outside lingerie stores, women's universities and beauty salons to ensure the cloaks are not transparent, embroidered or ornamented.

In an unusual public outburst, a woman named Jawaher Ahmed al-Jaber wrote in a letter published in Al Watan that there was nothing in Islamic law to support the rules on abayas.

"They attack women with harsh words, like, 'You sinner, don't you fear punishment in the hereafter? Cover your head properly or we'll take you in the GMC,"' she said.

"If a woman tries to explain she is doing nothing contrary to Islamic teachings, they say, 'How dare you argue when your voice should not be heard by anyone outside your family?"'

The results of muttawa rules jar with the modern shopping centers, fancy cars and technological gadgetry that are everywhere in the kingdom.

For instance, the new Kingdom Mall in Riyadh has a women-only floor, with no-entry signs showing a man's head with a red slash through it. When prayer time comes around, storekeepers in the mall have to lock their doors and some hand over the key to a male colleague, sometimes trapping saleswomen and shoppers inside.

One evening inside the Saks Fifth Avenue store on that floor, two Saudi women shoppers shook the shutters, begging to be let out. But the female saleswoman didn't have the key.

Another woman looking for her mother at a mall during prayer was heard saying to a friend: "I wonder where she's imprisoned."

For Saudis not yet bold enough to write protests to the newspapers, there are more subtle ways of showing defiance.

More and more women are wearing abayas with glittering red, blue or silver sequins on the cuffs or a jeans pocket sewn on the back.

Youths choose Arabic love songs as ringing tones on their cell phones, defying a muttawa ban on music in public.

And young men and women circumvent the muttawa ban on mixing by spending hours chatting on the phone or the Internet.

One woman, insisting on anonymity, described doing the unthinkable. Stopped by the muttawa for riding in her car dressed in a non-hooded abaya, she demanded the policeman's name.

She said that when he wouldn't respond, she grabbed him by the sleeve of his robe and yelled at him. She said he fled to his car, shocked that a woman had touched him, and shouted back over his shoulder: "A thousand devils are hovering around you!"

The muttawa are the shock troops of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice...

We have a "muttawa" here in America yearning to be set free upon the unwashed masses. Yes, I'm talking about do-good liberals. If they have their way, smokers will be taken out and shot. Restaurants will be forbidden to serve butter, meats, and other animal products. Alcohol will be banned. Guns will be illegal. Anybody disagreeing with them will be locked away for "hate speech." And so on.

As the article points out, these are the same bastards that forced more than a dozen children to die in a fire just because they were female and not wearing "proper" attire while trying to flee a burning building.

We are currently trying to build a coalition within Iraq to overthrow their oppressive government. Perhaps we should be pursuing similar endeavors in Saudi Arabia.

We are currently trying to build a coalition within Iraq to overthrow their oppressive government. Perhaps we should be pursuing similar endeavors in Saudi Arabia.

It seems more and more the battle will not be truly won until Islam is defeated.

"Why all this oppression, injustice and tyranny?" wrote al-Jaber.

Because you and your country have rejected Christ and you worship a satanic religion.

I was thinking the same thing as you when I read this. The liberals want this for America, too. I don't mean that they will enforce strict Islamic code, they'll enforce strict liberal PC code. Anybody who thinks that this isn't true should take a look right now at what happens to people who are labeled "racist", "pro-big business", "anti-environmental", and in many cases "conservative". The do-gooder liberal isn't as powerful as Saudi's religious police, but their gaining power all the time and they are finding more and more ways to abuse the legal system to harass people.

we dom't reject christ. in fact we believe him to be one the greastests prophets, unlike most other faiths. we just dont consider him to be god or the son of god. that would go against the most fundemental rule of islam. i.e. not to associate partners with the almighty.

This is nothing that a burst from an M-16 to the center of mass won't fix. Rumor, and I do mean rumor, has it that exactly that happened to one of these robed SS types back during Desert Shield/Storm. He is supposed to have come after a female sky cop with a whip. She was supposedly wearing a T shirt and BDU pants, as was armed with the aforementioned M-16. Since they won't listen to women, he ignored the "Halt" order, and she took the appropriate action. But as I said, that's only rumor, but I would be quite pleased to find that it really happened.

"Saudis begin to show wear and tear of life under feared religious police"

Isaiah 19
4 And the Egyptians I will give
Into the hand of a cruel master,
And a fierce king will rule over them,"
Says the Lord, the LORD of hosts.

"We are currently trying to build a coalition within Iraq to overthrow their oppressive government. Perhaps we should be pursuing similar endeavors in Saudi Arabia."

The overthrow of Saddam and the emergence of a reform regime in Iraq could provide the same impetus to the mideast that the Poles provided for the breakup of the Soviet empire. Iran already has dissendent rumblings, and the Saudi royals know that should Iraq and Iran join the modern world, their tenure will either end or be severely curtailed. The sooner we get it on with Iraq, the better for all.

The contrasts in Islam are amazing. The Turkish women here on campus don't even cover their heads and wear tank tops. Yet some Islamic professors won't even let their wives take the kids to school because they aren't allowed to leave the apartment. Then I see women driving to Walmart in full gear, with just the eyes showing.

I beg to differ. Iraq hasn't been 'normal' since the 60's, although it is surprisingly lax on the rules regarding women. When Saddam falls, the only options are a Western-backed puppet gov't or a cleric-ruled gov't (like Iran). Saudi Arabia will never be 'normal' either. The Al Sa'uds came to power with the help of the Wahabbists which spawn the mutawwas. They are the strictest of all sects of Islam. The Sunni Saudis will never break their relationship with the wahabbists. If the Al Sa'uds go, a cleric form of gov't will rule the homeland of Islam. Since the Iranian revolution, the ME gov'ts have led a constant internal struggle to keep the same revolutions from happening in their own countries.

"Finally, after lengthy lectures and deliberation, they made the men sit on one side of the table and the women on the other, she said."

Now you've got all the ones with beards on one side and all the moustaches on the other. --Snorri

Muslims reject the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. If you reject this, you reject Christ.

One can believe Christ existed and still reject him. Jews believe Christ existed, but they reject him.

No.

You do in fact reject Christ. He said, "I am the Truth, and the Life, and the Way. No one comes before the Father but by me."

The "one the greastests prophets" is a clear rejection of who He is. Christ was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. You can't have it both ways.

Christ said that one day, there will be those who claim they were with him, but He will say: "Away from me! I never knew you."

He died for all of us. You included. The choice is yours.

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