Saudi Arabia's Men of Virtue (2)

For more on the Saudi religious police, check out my dispatch from Riyadh in this week's magazine. I spent an evening with Mohammed al-Huraisi, the father of a man who is alleged to have been beaten to death at a local HQ of the mutaween two months ago.

As the result of that case and others, there is a growing public backlash against the religious police. One of the interesting and important things about it is that the backlash is not coming just from the minority of liberal, Westernized Saudis but from the majority of ordinary, conservative, religious, middle-class folks. To some Saudis, a woman called Umm Faisal has become something of a folk heroine for standing up to the mutaween. An administrative body fined a religious policeman for mistreating her in an incident four years ago. But rather than let it go, she is suing the religious police for compensation as a means of recovering her honor. She is so conservative, she won't meet with journalists or even her own lawyer. But the lawyer, Abdul Rahman al-Lahem, one of the Kingdom's brave human righst activists, told me when I met him in Riyadh: "She is stubborn. The public was in desperate need for a lady like Umm Faisal to stand tall and say: 'This is not right. '"

Mohammed al-Huraisi, holding a photo of his deceased son, Salman

The problem many Saudi critics have is not with Islam or even with the religious police per se, but with the license that the mutaween have been given to interfere in the smallest details of everyday life and to effectively act as though they are above the law. It is insignificant, obviously, compared to the more serious allegation of deaths in custody, but the furor over Valentine's Day in Saudi Arabia illustrates the excesses. The Kingdom's religious sheikhs have outlawed Valentine's Day as a pagan celebration, as is their right. But to have the religious police going around the country accosting sellers and buyers of red roses on Feb. 14 is an unjustifiable intrusion into personal privacy. Even in neighboring Kuwait Valentine's Day is widely observed, so surely on that occasion Saudis should be able to buy a flower and do whatever they want with it. As the Saudi novelist Rajaa Alsanea put it to me in my recent interview with her, it's as if love is considered a sin in Saudi Arabia. What people have in their hearts should be their business, no matter what faith they belong to.

Many Saudis are deeply disappointed that after all his nods toward reform, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud has done next to nothing about curbing the religious police. They are aghast at how one of his brothers, Prince Naif, the powerful minister of Interior, can make the statement that I cited in my story this week, that critics of the religious police were "fishing for any mistakes ... and trying to magnify them." If Saudi Arabia is to have any future, they say, the Saudi royal family has to show some better leadership where the rights of its people are concerned. Abdullah has warned Saudis against excusing or appeasing terrorists; many Saudis say that he needs to warn those in authority against abusing the rights of Saudis. The royal family and the Saudi religious establishment should show more confidence in the Saudi people and their religion; the desire to send a Cupid's Arrow doesn't mean that Saudis are tempted to abandon Islam for Christianity.

By the way, Human Rights Watch issued a statement earlier this week on the deaths of al-Huraisi and another Saudi from Tabuk.

--By Scott MacLeod