Saudi Arabia's Men of Virtue

The big local story in Saudi Arabia this summer has been the growing pressure on the religious police, officially known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The commission acts as the conservative Kingdom's morality police, enforcing a strict Wahhabi code of behavior--and is notorious for excesses that terrorize Saudi men and women alike. Commission members are known for effectively abducting women who are deemed to be showing too much skin from beneath their full-length black abaya gowns in public. Such women will then disappear for hours or even days to a commission office for interrogation. If you are unlucky enough to be the male driver of a woman accused of exhibiting loose morals--women, you'll remember, are forbidden from driving in Saudi Arabia-- you may get beat up in the course of the woman's arrest.

(Saudi women driving is an issue for another day; but for what it's worth, the head-to-toe abaya is not itself an impediment to navigating a motor vehicle. In Cairo, I see women in the totally enveloping attire--even wearing black gloves, in the summer-winding their way through traffic, often with a couple kids in the back seat. Women in abayas drive everywhere else in the Gulf, too. In Saudi Arabia, there's a fatwa, or religious ruling, by the Wahhabi sheikhs against women driving.)

There's been growing public anger toward the commission particularly since 2002, when 15 Saudi girls died in a school fire in Mecca. Commission members were widely blamed for the deaths after allegedly barring the girls from exiting the building for the safety of the street because the students were not wearing their abayas. In the emergency, they had not had the chance to go back to their lockers and put them on.

Sp the commission has increasingly been on the defensive against an angry public. A Saudi woman friend tells me that in her experience, the religious police have backed off considerably from harassing women in the last year or so. But a full-blown scandal erupted in May involving the alleged beating death of a Riyadh man while in the commission's custody. Saudi newspapers and websites have been filled with articles and blogs both attacking and praising the commission and its work.

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has been notoriously easy on the commission, which is part of the Kingdom's powerful Wahhabi establishment. But this week, the Arab News reported, Naif's ministry ordered the commission to strictly abide by the regulations governing the commission and hand anyone accused of morality offenses immediately over to regular police officers. It seems that cold-blooded murder is too much, if that is what it was, even for the normally sacrosanct religious police.

Saudi journalist Raid Qusti has reported extensively on the commission; read his report on the latest developments in the Arab News.

--By Scott MacLeod/Riyadh