Sometimes, the opacity of the Saudi media can be frustrating. Sometimes, it can cause more damage than a straight-up, factual report. This story carried by Saudi Gazette/Okaz is an example. Of course, no names are used in the article—it alleges moral turpitude on the part of a government official and a woman and her daughters. The details of exactly what the official is being accused of are left to the readers’ imaginations. Not good for the miscreant; not good for the women involved. People do have a tendency to think the worst, so I guess that it’s best that at least the women’s names aren’t provided. This is not helpful, though, to understanding just what’s going on in the Kingdom and how it deals with corrupt officials.
Official jailed for ‘exploitation’ of woman and daughters
Hussein HazzaziJEDDAH – The Jeddah Summary Court sentenced a public servant Sunday to six months in prison and 150 lashes on charges of “fraud and deception” related to his “immoral exploitation” of a poor woman and her daughters.
The details of the official’s immoral behavior have not been disclosed.
The official will receive an additional 80 lashes for insulting the plaintiff in court. The man, however, said he intends to appeal the verdict because he is “innocent.”
The police arrested the man following a report from the 45-year-old woman, to the Al-Jamea’ Police Station, accusing him of “exploiting the fact he was a government official to deceive her poor family.”
The police at the time referred the case to the Bureau of Investigation and Prosecution that turned it over to the Summary Court.
The woman, who lives with her four children, said she has been suffering financially since her husband died and his family took all their belongings.
“He got close to the family promising that he would help us and expedite complicated government procedures, but he deceived us,” the woman said, without disclosing more details of the “immoral exploitation” she had been subjected to.
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Saudi Gazette/Okaz run a piece on the Saudi Ministry of Education’s plan to reform education in the Kingdom. Plans are good, but it will take three years to turn those plans into reality, the Minister says.
What’s interesting in this piece is what’s not explicitly said. The Minister talks about the ‘Science & Sport’ project the Ministry is launching. The project will be undertaken in cooperation with Bahrain, which has an existing program. The Bahrain program focuses heavily on women’s sports, something that is anathema to many Saudis for a variety of ill-founded reasons. Is this a back door within the Saudi system to make sports part of the curriculum in primary and secondary schools? I do believe it is!
Minister seeks ‘3 years to turn ideas into reality’
Abdullah Abeedallah Al-GhamdiRIYADH – Prince Faisal Bin Abdullah, Minister of Education, has asked for three years in order to “turn our ideas and visions for education development into reality”.
Speaking at the launch of a sports and science project in Riyadh on Sunday, Prince Faisal said he had been “looking forward to this day since taking office”.
“Science and sport currently form the basis of academic advancement,” he said. “We have gone through 3,000 years of agricultural revolution, 300 of industrial revolution, and now 30 years of the knowledge revolution.”
Prince Faisal added that the leadership of King Abdullah was striving to raise levels to make Saudis globally competitive.
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Arab News runs this piece about how many Saudis still believe that a woman’s place is in the home, preferably pregnant. Despite government efforts to educate women—and it’s a successful effort, with over 60% of university students being women—many families think anything beyond a high school diploma is wasted effort. It’s sad to see women’s lives limited by the age of 19 when their families oppose education in favor of marriage.
Women should be partners in shaping future
LAURA BASHRAHEEL | ARAB NEWSBut society denies them education thinking they are only meant to take care of husbands and kids
JEDDAH: In spite of educational reforms and improvements in the role of women in Saudi society, many old-fashioned families continue to feel women are only suited to become wives and mothers.
History was made last year with the appointment, by royal decree, of a Saudi woman, Nora Al-Fayez, as deputy education minister for girls’ affairs.
Despite women being recognized in the field of education, some families still feel their womenfolk should only busy themselves with household chores and raising children.
Sanaa Hamad, 26, was forced to drop out of university in Jeddah by her brother during her final exams. “I suffered immense psychological pain after he killed off my dreams of getting a degree,” she said.
Hamad’s parents encouraged her to go to university. She had exhibited herself as a bright student at high school and so selected biochemistry as her major. Some of her relatives, however, disapproved of this and tried convincing her father not to allow her to continue with her education, saying it was unbefitting for a young woman.
“My father supported me and ignored our relatives. Then my brother suddenly decided I shouldn’t continue with my education and that I should marry a cousin. He said women are only good for marriage and for looking after children,” she said.
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The Saudi-US Relations Information Service (SUSRIS), a part of the National Council on US-Arab Relations (NCUSAR), offers up two interviews on US-Saudi relations. The first is by former US Ambassador to the Kingdom, Charles Freeman.
In this conversation, Freeman focuses on Iran, China, and the seemingly growing realization in the USG that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to US security. It also explores what sort of leverage Saudi Arabia might exert on China due to its high level of oil exports to China.
The United States, Saudi Arabia, China, Iran and Israel
– “An Interesting Moment”Editor’s Note:
“Something new” and “significant” is how Ambassador Charles Freeman, Jr., described some of the recent developments in the Middle East affecting the United States and its relationships in the region. In our exclusive interview with Freeman, a distinguished career diplomat who served in America’s Foreign Service during Desert Storm as U.S.Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and former President of the Middle East Policy Council, we asked about the critical issues including US-Saudi cooperation in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, high level U.S. officials’ visits to the Kingdom, relations with China including questions about its position on UN sanctions, American credibility in the region and the fallout in the Middle East from American-Israeli discord over continuing construction of settlements in occupied territories and the peace process impasse.
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The second conversation is with Jon Alterman, of the Center for International & Strategic Studies (CSIS). The interview actually took place last June, but is still relevant. The focus is US-Saudi-Iranian relations.
Quiet in the Kingdom, Reacting to Turmoil in Iran
Editor’s Note:
As the post-presidential election strife and government crackdown in Iran continue through a second week we took a look at the reaction to and impact of the turmoil on Saudi and American interests in the Gulf. We turned to Dr. Jon Alterman, Director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. for his perspectives. Here for your consideration is the SUSRIS exclusive interview conducted by phone with Dr. Alterman on June 23, 2009. We invite your attention to the comprehensive bank of links covering US-Saudi-Iranian issues that follows the interview.
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Child marriage is a problem in parts of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Arab News carries an Associated Press report that Yemen has had to roll back its law setting 17 as a minimum age for a woman to marry and that the clerics are the major force behind it. It’s not Saudi news, but from Yemen. It doesn’t directly affect Saudi practices, but it provides armament and argument for the Saudis who think child marriage is just peachy, if not actually a religious obligation.
But Saudi Arabia is not Yemen. The country as a whole is not caught in a vice of crushing poverty, though there are assuredly poor Saudis. Yemen did not start public education until around 1964 and girls were not the beneficiaries. Even now, Yemeni girls outside of the major cities face a hard time getting any education and have only a 30% literacy rate. The excuse of necessity for early marriages simply does not exist in Saudi Arabia.
That doesn’t stop some Saudis, however, from ‘finding’ religious authority for early marriages. These will be bucked by Yemeni intransigence.
Top Yemeni religious leaders oppose ban on child marriages
SANAA (AP): Some of Yemen’s most influential Islamic leaders, including one the US says mentored Osama Bin Laden, have declared supporters of a ban on child brides to be apostates. The religious decree, issued Sunday, deeply imperils efforts to salvage legislation that would make it illegal for those under the age of 17 to marry.
The religious decree, issued Sunday, deeply imperils efforts to salvage legislation that would make it illegal for those under the age of 17 to marry.
The practice is widespread in Yemen and has been particularly hard to discourage in part because of the country’s gripping poverty — bride-prices in the hundreds of dollars are especially difficult for poor families to pass up.
More than a quarter of Yemen’s women marry before age 15, according to a report last year by the Social Affairs Ministry. Tribal custom also plays a role, including the belief that a young bride can be shaped into an obedient wife, bear more children and be kept away from temptation.
A February 2009 law set the minimum age for marriage at 17, but it was repealed and sent back to parliament’s constitutional committee for review after some lawmakers called it un-Islamic. The committee is expected to make a final decision on the legislation next month.
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So, Saudis celebrate Mothers Day! Has anyone informed the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice? I don’t recall Mothers Day being mentioned in the Quran, or any hadith establishing a day on which mothers are to be honored. Could this be a fiendish import from the West? Some commenters to this Arab News article point out that mothers should be honored every day. I think that rather goes without saying, whether one is a Muslim or not. But picking a day for special, and quasi-public honoring of one’s mother isn’t a bad thing at all.
Now if only certain sectors of Saudi society could apply this to Valentine’s Day…
A day mothers get spoiled by daughters
RIMA AL-MUKHTAR | ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: Mother’s Day is celebrated on varying days across the world to honor mothers and motherhood; it is a day when children show their love and respect for their mothers. It is also celebrated by some in the Kingdom.
“To me, Mother’s Day is a day when I’m spoiled by my children with breakfast in bed, gifts and family gatherings,” said stay-at-home-mother Hanan Mohammed.
Some Saudis celebrate Mother’s Day with cakes and simple family gatherings, while others buy their mothers gifts. “My children don’t buy me anything, but they always bake a cake and we spend the day watching TV and playing games. We finally take a family photograph to make the day one to remember,” said Nadia Siraj, a stay-at-home-mother.
“I couldn’t ask for more. Family time is exactly what I want,” she added.
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Saudi Gazette translates a piece from it’s Arabic sister-paper Okaz arguing that it’s time for Saudi Arabia to abandon the hijri calendar for all but religious purposes. By insisting on using a calendar that doesn’t mesh at all well with the surrounding world, Saudi Arabia puts itself and its citizens at a disadvantage. The hijri calendar is, of course, a social construct whose use is not a religious requirement. That calendar did not exist at the time of Islam’s formation other than as a social construct of pre-Islamic society. Continuing to use it for official and business purposes leads to confusion when Saudis interact with the rest of the world. It also leads to problems for individual Saudis who find that different documents have dates translated in different ways, making them a year older or a year younger than they actually are. For some reason, immigration and security officials around the world like individuals to have just one birth date.
VIEW FROM THE ARABIC PRESS
Hani NaqshabandiMANY years ago my grandmother had an old clock that followed an unusual time schedule, or at least that’s what I thought when I was a small child in her care. The sundown call to prayer was, at 12 o’clock, Isha (night prayers) at half past one, and dawn at 10 o’clock. Outside the house it left me baffled, as everything else followed a completely different time to that of my grandmother.
When I asked her about this she said that her clock followed “Arab time” – known in those days as “Zawali” – a different schedule to the one everyone knows today, and it seemed that a lot of the women of my grandmother’s age in the area followed this same time system that had been passed down through the years.
And so it remained until our contact with the outside world grew, and the house I lived in grew and opened up to a world running on the other time system we all know today.
If my grandmother was alive today, she would have to reset her clock, or become locked in her own special time zone.
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While the US seems to take a turn toward nationalized medicine, Saudi Arabia is moving to privatize its national airline, Saudia (formally, Saudi Arabian Airlines). Saudi Gazette reports that agreement was reached on a number of facets to move control of the airline out of government hands and into the private sector. The intent is to improve performance, including profitability. An example of the waste that might be avoided through privatization is the ‘video show on the corporation’s achievements’ that was presented to the Crown Prince. Might not a simple printed statement have sufficed?
Crown Prince oversees Saudia’s privatization agreements
RIYADH – A number of agreements were signed Sunday to assist in the privatization of Saudi Airlines.
The ceremony was attended by Crown Prince Sultan, Deputy Premier, Minister of Defense and Aviation, Inspector-General and the Chairman of Saudi Arabian Airlines.
The agreements were signed with a number of national companies and banks. The privatization program was recently approved by the Supreme Economic Council.
Director General of Saudi Airlines, Eng. Khaled Al-Mulhim, said that the agreements were the result of feasibility studies.
The plan is to ensure that Saudi Airlines improve its operational performance, enhance its services, and work towards a comprehensive restructuring of its strategic units.
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Arab News’s coverage is here:
Now, I find this interesting…
A Saudi cleric and legal advisor, Sheikh Saleh Al-Luhaidan, issued a fatwa saying it was permissible for Saudi women to work as maids. That is, there is no religious barrier preventing them from doing so. Government policy supports their taking such work as well.
But Saudi society looks down on domestic work as ‘unfitting’ for a Saudi woman. So, these people are arguing that social constructs—aversion to housework, concepts of ‘dignity’, etc.—outweigh religious judgment.
If social views are more important than religious rulings, does that apply across the board? Or does it come into effect only when the social views are more conservative than the religious view? Do these critics really want to go down that avenue?
I’m afraid the academics and lawyers interviewed in this Arab News are fools. They delude themselves into believing that their personal preferences and views of propriety are more compelling than a religious view that condones honest work while permitting poor Saudi women to earn an income. Nice.
Also nice, Saudi society seems to have no difficulty with other Arab, Muslim women working in domestic jobs. But somehow, that kind of work is just to ‘yucky’ for Saudi women, the precious flowers that they are.
Academics, lawyers reject fatwa allowing Saudi women
to work as maids
MUHAMMAD AL-SULAMI | ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: Saudi academics and lawyers have rejected the fatwa of legal adviser Saleh bin Saad Al-Laheedan allowing Saudi women to work as maids, saying such work is humiliating for them.
They said Saudi people in general opposed the idea when Labor Minister Ghazi Al-Gosaibi issued a decision two years ago allowing Saudi women to work as house managers and servants.
Speaking to Islamonline.net, Suhaila Zainul Abideen, a member of the National Society for Human Rights, expressed her surprise at Al-Laheedan’s fatwa or religious edict. She strongly opposed the idea of Saudi women working as maids.
She said the state is responsible for taking care of women if they are in need of financial assistance. “Where is social insurance?” she asked. She also wondered why scholars were not applying the principle of preventing the reason (Sadd Al-Dharai) in this issue in the same way that it is applied in other issues such as women driving and mingling with the opposite sex.
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Well, that didn’t take long! After the genius professor at Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University offered up the inane suggestion that special floors be built in the Grand Mosque in Mecca to ‘protect’ female worshipers—two days ago, that was—he’s smacked down by a judge today. Arab News reports that Dr. Isa Al-Ghaith, a judge at the Riyadh Summary Court says that the irresponsible comments by the professor go even beyond worst fears of extremism.
The judge is calling for immediate steps to be taken to thwart this new and dangerous attempt to foist and extremist interpretation of Islam on the country.
Judge rejects calls for women-only floors in Grand Mosque
JEDDAH: A judge at Riyadh Summary Court has ridiculed calls for the construction of extra floors just for women at the Grand Mosque in Makkah in order to prevent them from mingling with men during tawaf (circling of the Holy Kaaba) and prayers.“Such opinions must be totally rejected. The issuers of such fatwas must be stopped and re-educated,” said Dr. Isa Al-Ghaith, a judge at Riyadh Summary Court.
Al-Ghaith said this while commenting on the remarks of Yousuf Al-Ahmed, a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Al-Watan newspaper reported.
Al-Ahmed told a TV channel that mixing between men and women during Tawaf around the Kaaba was against Islam, and that the expansions carried out during the Ottoman era and the rule of King Saud should be demolished, adding that it would create more room for the increasing number of pilgrims who come for Haj and Umrah.
“I could not believe this when I was told about it. I did not expect matters to reach this level. This means that we have reached a dangerous stage that has not even been anticipated by the majority of pessimists,” said Al-Ghaith, while calling for urgent steps to protect the religion and the Kingdom from this dangerous thought.
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Arab News translates a piece from the Arabic daily Al-Watan in which the writer points out another absurdity in the Saudi court system. Some judges, it seems, don’t accept government-issued ID cards issued to women and still insist that a male relative of the woman come in person to make the identification. Sometimes, even that’s not enough and they insist on multiple male witnesses!
If nothing else, legal reforms in Saudi Arabia need to address the issue of judges exerting more power than they should hold. That may require re-education; that may require firing some judges as examples. It’s something that needs to be done, however, if the Saudi judicial system is to be something more than a joke.
Perhaps the judge can be charged with blasphemy! Here, he’s defaming Shariah law by making it the butt of unfunny jokes!
In courts, women bring men by the busloads
TURKI AL-DAKHEEL | AL-WATAN“Bring a man to identify you.” This is the sentence a judge usually says to any woman standing before him.
The identifier is a man who goes to the judge to vouch for the woman standing in court.
He will tell the judge who she is and will answer all other questions about her identity.
A woman lawyer said she used her identity card to identify herself and said that she was ready to unveil her face to show the judge that she was the same woman in the picture.
She said the judge threw away the card, which was issued by the Interior Ministry, because he did not accept female identity cards. In other words, a government department does not recognize the work of another government department! Is this not a double standard?
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Arab News reports that an unnamed Saudi writer has been charged with blasphemy for comments he made about a hadith on a television program. The complaint was filed, not by the government, but by individuals who believed the writer went too far. The paper, naturally, doesn’t reprint what the writer said in order to avoid the same complaint being leveled against itself.
The issue raises an interesting question, though. According to Wikipedia, Blasphemy is irreverence[1] toward holy personages, religious artifacts, customs, and beliefs. So, how does criticizing what someone said about the Prophet on the basis of hearsay, scores if not hundreds of years after His death, add up to defaming religion? At most, it calls into question the accuracy of what someone was told by someone else. To me, this comes very close to the Islamic concept of shirk, in that it raises the writer of the hadith and the hadith itself to the level of an inerrant God.
The facts of the article go a long way to explaining how and why reforming Islam is going to be a difficult task: People will allege blasphemy whenever a criticism or even critique is made. In many Islamic countries, blasphemy is a very serious allegation with very serious consequences.
Saudi writer charged with blasphemy
MUHAMMAD HUMAIDAN | ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: The Summary Court in Jeddah is expected to look into complaints raised by a number of people against a Saudi writer for allegedly insulting Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). The Saudi writer had allegedly described a Hadith of the Prophet as barbaric, during a program on Al-Hurra Channel, which is presented by Nadeen Al-Badr.
Sources told Arab News that the court had sent a copy of the lawsuit filed against the man to Justice Minister Muhammad Al-Eissa in order to seek his opinion on the issue.
The plaintiffs have presented audio and visual evidence to prove their argument. They want the court to give the writer a strong punishment in accordance with the Shariah law.
The Saudi plaintiffs said the writer’s action would not be accepted by any Muslim who is proud of his religion. They said such actions would not be tolerated in the land of the Two Holy Mosques.
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