How the Mutawas (Morality Police) Keep the Saudi Society Clean from Vice

With Muslim "scholars" getting a Ministry of Islam what can we expect? The Religious Police? Forced namaadhu? all female schoolchildren and government employees to wear the burugaa? Compulsory clitoris cutting?
Read below to have an idea of what happens in the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia as many of these mullahs were "educated" there.

Four months ago Salaman Al Huraisi, a 28-year old hotel security guard was tortured to death in the headquarters of the Saudi Commission for the Protection of Virtue and Suppression of Vice. Its 10.000 men are known as the “Mutawas” (pious men). Maher Al Hamizi, the lawyer of the Huraisi family said, an autopsy has shown that Salman’s skull was split open and his eyes were dislodged from their sockets. After midnight of a humid hot day, a GMC loaded with Mutawas stormed into Al Huraisi’s house in a poor area of Riyadh. While shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) they broke down the house’s doors and tore personal belongings looking for alcohol. His alleged crime: he drank beer.

Human Rights Watch reported, Sina, 25-years old Mongolian girl, who was shopping in a glitzy Riyadh mall was spotted by two Mutawas. They canned her and shoved her into their GMC because she did not cover her face. They denounced her as Filipina Gahba (Filipina whore), drove her to their office where they raped her and sent her to prison.

Muhammed Sadeeq, a Bangladeshi, told Spiegel On-Line, his brother Ahmed died after being hauled into a local Commission headquarters for being in a car with a woman who was not his close relative. The Mutawas did not believe that Ahmed was employed as the family’s driver. Ahmed was a diabetic. The Mutawas refused to allow him get his medication.

Recently, a former colleague of mine at King Saud University told me on the phone, his neighbor Ameera, a young Saudi woman endured a harrowing evening at the hands of some Mutawas after arriving in her car to pick up her children from an amusement park. Because she was laughing with her driver, the Mutawas accused her of indecency. They ejected her driver, drove Umm Ali outside Riyadh, crushed her car and dashed off.

George who is now living in the USA and years back he used to work for a big restaurant in Riyadh told me, “One day, it was difficult to push out our customers before Asr-prayers. We were 2 or 3 minutes late. All of a sudden a squad of Mutawas stormed into the restaurant and arrested all of us, 13 employees, and drove us to their headquarters. There, we had to wash and pray. Although I’m Christian I prayed like a Muslim, I knew how to do it, I just followed what the others did. As one of the Mutawas saw my Saudi-issued identity card, he shouted, ‘hold on! You’re damned ‘Nassrani’ (Christian). Have you formally converted?’ I said, ‘Sort of.’ He said, ‘No, no, you have to do it formally.’ That meant I had to do all my Iqama (residency) paper work all over again und use a Muslim name. I had to replace ‘George’ with ‘Mohammed’.”

“Marcus, a Filipino, who arrived for the first time in Saudi Arabia, was arrested by two Mutawas as he was leaving Riyadh Airport. His alleged crime: he was carrying a cross around his neck. He was accused of proselytizing. The man has been in prison for three years now.” Said Helene Berger from Amnesty International/Germany.

Even diplomats are not spared by the Mutawas. In March 2006, Ingrid Krueger, then the German press attaché at the German Embassy experienced the wrath of the morality police while entering a restaurant in Riyadh. She was conservatively dressed but she did not have her Abaya (Islamic robe) on. As she was harangued by a Mutawa, she pulled out her Saudi-issued diplomatic identity card. The Mutawa threw the card on the ground and grind it into the pavement with the sole of his shoes. Some Saudis who happened to be in the restaurant managed eventually to convince the Mutawas that what they did was wrong and the pit dogs left.

Sheikh Ibraheem Al Ghaith, the director of the Commission for the Protection of Virtue and Suppression of Vice, on a minister salary, told the reporter of the German newspaper Die Welt “The women’s body in holy Saudi Arabia must be covered from head to toe lest it drives society into Vice.” Al Ghaith declined to comment on the above cases and victims of similar ones. He simply said, “We are acting in accordance with the Shari’a. This is the law of God. The Commission is doing a great job. My people have corrected the un-Islamic behavior of over a million people last year.” Before saying good bye, Al Ghaith “gave the reporter a bunch of publications in Arabic: A collection of Fatwas (religious rulings) and an Islamic calendar.

The Mutawas, whom some Saudis derisively refer to as the “Talibans”, are notorious for committing excesses in their zeal for enforcing a puritan brand of Islam. The Mutawas, typically, beefy men in short robes with untrimmed bushes of beards springing from their chins, patrol in squads the Kingdom’s streets and shopping malls, day and night. They can shopkeepers for not shutting down their shops in time for prayer, and severely rebuke women and even little girls for allowing flesh to show from under their Abayas (mandatory black gowns). They make sure that the Saudi society is strictly segregated: From university campuses, restaurants, to kindergartens. The genders live corralled existence.

The public backlash against the Mutawas is growing, not only among liberal Saudis but also among ordinary, conservative, religious, middle class folks. A former colleague at King Saud University said, “Saudis are religious and traditionalists by nature. They have no problem with the Commission per se. The problem is the license that the Mutawas have to interfere in the smallest details of everyday life and to effectively act as though they were above the law.”

by Sami Alrabaa