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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The Washington Post runs an article today about a collision between US and Saudi Arabian intelligence gathering through the monitoring of extremist websites. The Saudis and the CIA set up a site to attract extremists and monitored it to learn the who, where, how, when of potential attacks. The US military saw the site as working against military interests in Iraq and leading directly to the deaths of US soldiers there. The military won the policy argument and the site was shut down—but without informing the Saudis or getting their input.
The article discusses the utility of shutting down sites and whether it serves much of a purpose when it can be re-established via mirror sites in a matter of hours. Interesting reading…
Dismantling of Saudi-CIA Web site illustrates need for clearer cyberwar policies
Ellen NakashimaBy early 2008, top U.S. military officials had become convinced that extremists planning attacks on American forces in Iraq were making use of a Web site set up by the Saudi government and the CIA to uncover terrorist plots in the kingdom.
“We knew we were going to be forced to shut this thing down,” recalled one former civilian official, describing tense internal discussions in which military commanders argued that the site was putting Americans at risk. “CIA resented that,” the former official said.
Elite U.S. military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled the online forum. Although some Saudi officials had been informed in advance about the Pentagon’s plan, several key princes were “absolutely furious” at the loss of an intelligence-gathering tool, according to another former U.S. official.
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Five Americans, all from the N. Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, were arrested last December in Pakistan. The Pakistani government alleges that they were in the country plotting terrorist attacks and disbursing funds to terrorist organizations. The five say there were headed to Afghanistan for humanitarian efforts. They have now been charged under Pakistani law and will face trial there.
I know nothing about this case other than what has been published by the media—very sketchy stories—and interest groups. In other words, not much at all. I suspect that this case will take some time to play out in the Pakistani courts and, perhaps, in US courts at a future date.
Pakistan charges 5 Northern Virginia men
in alleged terrorism plot
Jerry Markon, Karin Brulliard and Mohammed RizwanAuthorities in Pakistan filed terrorism charges Wednesday against five Northern Virginia men and, for the first time, outlined an extensive plot that included plans to fight U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and possibly an attack in the United States.
The men, who lived and grew up in the Alexandria area, were arrested in Pakistan in December. They were each charged with five counts in a special anti-terror court, three of which carry a possible life prison term. Prosecutors say they were in the planning stages of attacks against a Pakistani nuclear plant and an air base and other targets in Afghanistan and “territories of the United States.” Defense lawyers said that referred to attacks inside the United States, though the government presented no evidence of such a plot.
Ever since the men were arrested at a time of growing concern about homegrown terrorists, there have been questions about whether they are hardened jihadists, as described by Pakistani police, or humanitarians who left the United States to help other Muslims, as they say.
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Arab News carries an Associated Press article on the matter:
The Saudi Minister of Justice, in a meeting of the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce & Industry, announced that female attorneys would be restricted in their court appearances to dealing only with women and on family cases. Apparently, criminal law is outside the boundaries. Why this is to be is not stated in this Arab News article.
I suspect that the argument will include the expense and difficulty in constructing the ’separate but equal’ facilities required by Saudi Arabia’s peculiar institutions. I suspect, too, that male attorneys don’t want the competition, especially from very intelligent women.
So yes, we see another half-step taken in social reform in the Kingdom. No great gesture yet that signals irrefutably that women are an equal part of Saudi society. Still, the half-step is better than no-step. It gives women more than they had last year, but not nearly what they deserve.
Women lawyers to handle family disputes: Al-Eissa
MD RASOOLDEEN | ARAB NEWSRIYADH: Justice Minister Mohammed Al-Eissa said on Tuesday that women lawyers will only be allowed to appear in court to defend women and deal with family cases.
“The Ministry of Justice will allow women lawyers to only take up cases involving family disputes, including divorce and child custody, subject to the implementation of a new bill,” the minister announced at a meeting held at the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry (RCCI).
He explained that women lawyers will not be permitted to participate in other court proceedings.
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Here I thought that innovation (bida) was scorned in Saudi religious circles, but no. According to a Saudi religious scholar, as reported in Arab News, the ‘mingling of sexes’ during Haj and Umrah, in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, should be fixed through engineering. Somehow, the ancient practice of men and women praying together has become unacceptable—for this guy at least. He wants women-only floors constructed in the Grand Mosque to ’save’ women from those ferocious men who want nothing more than to maul them during prayer.
I’m sorry, but this professor needs to lose his position at Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University. His expansive view of what constitutes un-Islamic behavior is incredible. I don’t know his own, particular family situation, but I’m glad I’m not a part of it.
Scholar calls for new women-only floors in Grand Mosque
JEDDAH: A professor of Islamic jurisprudence at Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh has called 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.
“Mingling of sexes is not allowed in the Grand Mosque and outside the mosque according to the Shariah,” Dr. Yousuf Al-Ahmed told Arab News.
“There are two types of mingling of sexes; mingling that takes place casually in the passages and at the Jamrat in Mina; and permanent mingling that takes place during tawaf causing congestion and harm to women,” Al-Ahmed told Arab News.
Al-Ahmed called for the building of separate floors for women after demolishing the expansions carried out during the Ottoman era and the rule of King Saud, adding that it would create more room for the increasing number of pilgrims who come for Haj and Umrah.
“This engineering solution will give women privacy and keep them away from cameras that project them and show them on satellite channels. Is it not the right of women not to battle with men during tawaf? Is it not their right to have one or two floors to perform tawaf and what is wrong in reconstructing the mosque for this purpose,” he asked.
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It’s not only women who come in for abuse from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Saudi Arabia. Men, too, find themselves on the receiving end of criticism and more from the religious police. Saudi Gazette reports on the case of a man who was bothered because the vice cops didn’t like his trousers. He, in turn, has filed his own legal complaint…
‘Wrong trousers’ man gets bail
MADINA – The Commission for Investigation and Prosecution (CIP) has released on bail a man who was arrested by the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the Hai’a) last Saturday for wearing trousers “deemed immoral”.
Al-Watan Arabic daily reported Tuesday that investigations are continuing into the incident, and the Hai’a has been asked to urgently provide their version of events which led to Muhammad Sultan accusing them of “assault” and “unlawful detention inside a restaurant” after he was stopped on Sultana Street in Madina and handed over to the police who in turn passed him on to the CIP.
His release on bail, Al-Watan said, will continue until “investigations into the two disputing parties are concluded”.
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The Commission is sending out a questionnaire asking the public how it views its actions. Depending on how this survey is conducted, it might be an interesting read.