July 22 by Stephen Suleyman Schwartz
Executive Director, Center for Islamic Pluralism
Abdullah encouraged a positive vision of the Saudi future by, among other actions, creating a department of women’s education, headedby a woman. He had supported an interfaith meeting between representatives of all the world religions in Madrid last year, and although it accomplished nothing important, it represented a breakthrough in that Muslims had never before sat down with representatives of the Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, and Shinto communities, on an equal footing.
Finally and most importantly, Abdullah had taken steps to curb the notorious mutawiyin, usually mislabeled a “religious police” by foreign observers, and to make them accountable for their frequent abuse of ordinary people. In reality, the mutawiyin are not a police agency, but a paramilitary body similar to the Iranian Basij who spy on citizens in totalitarian countries like Cuba and China.
The mutawiyin patrol the Saudi streets to enforce the rigid pseudo-moralistic habits prescribed by Wahhabism, the Saudi state religion. They accost couples they suspect of being unmarried; they arrest women who drive vehicles, and beat, with leather-covered sticks, women who allow a thin margin of the abaya, a garment covering the whole body, to slip, exposing an ankle; they harass vendors of allegedly heretical or subversive books; they raid homes where they suspect liquor is consumed; they walk the streets of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, preventing Shia and Sufi pilgrims from engaging in prayers of which the Wahhabis disapprove… and they kill people.
Limiting the activities of the mutawiyin, and even abolishing the institution altogether, was long seen by progressive Saudis and forward-looking Muslims around the world as a necessary first step for the kingdom to become something approximating a rationally-governed state.
Although few reform-minded Saudis imagined the country could suddenly leap from the reactionary utopia of Wahhabism to Western democracy, many hoped that Saudi Arabia could become more like the zone that Saudis call “the crescent of normality” - those countries from Kuwait to Yemen in which non-Wahhabi Muslims, as well as Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist expatriates and immigrant workers (and in Bahrain and Yemen, a few Jews) where people are allowed religious freedom; women are prominent in various professions, dress as they wish, and can drive cars; and other freedoms can be taken for granted.
But in March 2009 the Saudi clock began running backward. Prince Nayef bin Abd Al-Aziz, half brother of Abdullah and interior minister, became second deputy prime minister. Read more here ...
Source: Hudson New York
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