As the location of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, destinations of millions of pilgrims annually Saudi Arabia has exceptional security concerns. The worries fall both on protecting borders against miscreants entering the country and people who choose to stay in the country after their pilgrimage visas have expired. In order to better control the situation, the Saudi government is imposing new identification requirements including finger-printing and retinal scans of all who enter the country.
This article from the UAE’s Khaleej Times notes that some pilgrims are complaining about delays that process has introduced. It notes that some are refusing to be finger-printed—thus causing the delays—but also that training and staffing at the borders could be improved. The utility of the system is dependent on how the computer systems behind it all function, of course, and that isn’t yet known. Time will tell, however, as pilgrims to this year’s Umrah and Haj (the ‘Lesser’ and ‘Greater’ Pilgrimages) are identified.
Saudi to fingerprint all Hajis from this year
Asma HamidABU DHABI — From this Haj season, all pilgrims entering the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will be photographed and fingerprinted.
Haj and Umrah contractors in Abu Dhabi fear that the new system will cause delays for pilgrims, especially for those travelling by land, and hope that the Saudi authorities will be able to put in place an efficient and quick screening process.
The system, which officially started in July last year to screen all visitors and expatriates residing in the country, will now be used to screen over a million pilgrims entering the country via land and air, according to an announcement made by a senior Saudi official on Saturday.
Brigadier General Zaid Al Turaifi, Director of Saudi Arabia’s Passport Institute in Riyadh, announced that the institute is currently training its personnel in the system, which will be implemented at both King Abdulaziz Airport in Jeddah and Prince Muhammad bin Abdulaziz Airport in Al Madina Al Munawara.
After a person is fingerprinted, all relevant information, including the person’s full name, employer, and the validity of his or her residency permit or visa, is stored in a database. The Saudi government hopes this will prevent people from staying in the country illegally after their visas expire, and help track down criminals.
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The Washington Post has this Reuters piece on Saudi Arabia’s opening its stock market to foreign investors. They cannot buy Saudi stocks directly, but must act through intermediaries, but they can access the market and the market can access foreign cash.
This is yet another step in economic liberalization brought about through Saudi accession to the World Trade Agreement in 2005.
Morgan Stanley says in first Saudi swap agreement
RIYADH (Reuters) – U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley
said on Monday its Saudi unit has signed the kingdom’s first swap agreement, a vehicle that allows foreigners to buy into listed stocks through intermediaries. “Interest from international investors … is very high, and we expect to see a lot more interest in these swap transactions from investors around the world,” Craig Niven, a managing director at Morgan Stanley, said in a statement.
Saudi Arabia decided last week to allow foreigners to buy shares listed on its stock market, the Arab world’s largest, through licensed intermediaries, a major step toward opening the largest Arab bourse to foreign capital.
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Two very interesting op-eds from two American newspapers, both noted for their conservative bent.
The New York Sun and The Washington Times run pieces on Random House publisher’s shameful stopping of the distribution of a book, The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Aisha, the young wife of the Prophet. Both pieces decry that cowardice of the publisher—and don’t have much good to say about Denise Spellberg, a professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas, whose critique and further actions caused the halt.
I find The Sun‘s piece more interesting in that it looks at another novel, The Red Tent, which may have strayed from religious orthodoxy, but nevertheless made readers think about religion seriously. The Washington Times‘s piece is more political in its orientation. It argues that allowing one religious group (any one) to start defining the limits of what can or cannot be published is to start down a dangerous road. More, this is a decision that has already been resolved in the US, or so it seems to have been resolved. This action by Random House is a U-turn.
Without having read the book, I cannot comment on its specifics. I can say that no matter the specifics, freedom to think about religious figures as human beings should not be infringed. To do so gives inordinate power to the most closed-minded person, abrogating the responsibility of publishers to at least maintain, if not extend freedom of thought and expression. As for Prof. Spellberg, her acts strongly suggest she find a line of work for which she’s better suited… is the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice hiring?
The New York Sun:
The Washington Times:
Arab News carries this piece on the efforts of the Saudi Human Rights Commission to stop child marriages in the Kingdom. It also notes recent media arguments against child marriage and the Grand Mufti’s condemnation of it. Public awareness seems to be the most important next step.
HRC seeks end to child marriages
Mohammed Rasooldeen I Arab NewsRIYADH: The Saudi Human Rights Commission (HRC) has called on government agencies to take necessary steps to end the practice of child marriages by adopting a clear and unambiguous position on such weddings.
The condemnation comes in the wake of several cases across the Kingdom in which young girls have been married to elderly men, mainly for monetary reasons such as the settlement of debts or to receive generous dowries.
“Such marriages violate human rights by depriving a girl of her childhood,” said Turki Al-Sudairy, president of the Human Rights Commission. He added that such weddings are prohibited by a number of international conventions and by reputed global organizations concerned with children’s rights.
“Child marriages should be considered to be the same as forced marriages since valid consent has not been obtained from the bride who is also under aged,” Al-Sudairy said, adding that this could lead to severe health complications, since the girl is not psychologically, physically and sexually mature to enter wedlock.
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Interesting bit in the International Herald-Tribune. Someone claiming to be a prophet is surely committing blasphemy and apostasy under Shariah law. A four-year jail sentence is far less than an execution, of course, which again asks the question of what Saudi law (insofar as it is codified) would demand in the case of one converting from Islam to another religion. It does not appear to be the death penalty.
UPDATE: In a comment, a reader notes that the name of the man convicted here appears to be Christian. It does indeed. As a Christian, he would not fall under apostasy rules, instead, his words would be considered blasphemy.
Saudi: Lebanese jailed for claiming prophethood
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP): A Saudi religious court has convicted a Lebanese man of claiming to be a prophet and sentenced him to four years imprisonment.
A judicial official in the city of Medina’s court says Lebanese national Tony Nassar was found guilty of claiming prophethood.
Such claims are deemed blasphemous in the conservative kingdom.
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An interesting couple of articles appear that look at the way in which Al-Qaeda is shifting into criminal activity to finance its terrorist activities.
The first was in yesterday’s The Washington Post and provides a broad overview of the phenomenon:
The second, from The Los Angeles Times, focuses on the case of one individual in Morocco:
Do read both pieces.
One thought that comes out of reading them is that efforts to control terrorism financing through the international banking system seem to have been successful. But it is also clear that as Al-Qaeda changes its methods of operations, large sums of money are no longer required. The amounts that are needed can be raised through simple criminal enterprise.
This is not unlike what happened in N. Ireland when peace started to break out. No longer were the ‘hard men’ getting funding from donors who shared their ideological goals. As a result, they descended into drug trafficking, bank robbery, and street muggings to raise the funds to continue their terroristic activities.
Good piece in The Washington Post about how efforts to nationalize labor in the Gulf States, and beyond, run into difficulties. The article points out that young nationals are looking for jobs, but don’t want private sector jobs, instead preferring government jobs. Employers are hesitant to hire locals because of the higher costs and lower quality they associate with them. Ahmed Al-Omran, Saudi Jeans, makes an appearance.
I was a bit surprised to see that Syrian youths are now avoiding private sector jobs. It certainly wasn’t always that way as Syrians tended to be quite entrepreneurial and willing to take jobs that they could later develop into their own businesses.
Gulf States Try to Steer Jobs to Citizens
Ellen KnickmeyerMUSCAT, Oman — Coffee shop manager Lalit Jadeja groaned as white-robed Omani officials swooped down on his Filipina cashier at one of the largest shopping malls in this Persian Gulf kingdom. It was the Omanization squad.
Why, the officials demanded, was a foreigner instead of an Omani citizen working the cash register?
The officials were enforcers of Oman’s campaign to put its young citizens in jobs occupied mostly by cheaper foreign workers. Similar programs, costing millions of dollars, are being tested across the oil-rich Gulf region, where many are concerned that frustrated young people are susceptible to radical ideology.
But economists and other analysts say the programs have made little difference so far. In some cases, as in hiring quotas for citizens, government efforts have angered employers who say the campaigns have fostered a sense of job entitlement among local young people.
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Arab News runs an interesting piece that calls for laws—or at least publishing standards—to control the use of deeply unsettling photographs in the media. The article mixes a couple of different issues together, though: privacy and decency. Saudi cultural standards toward privacy seem to apply to Saudis before they do to expats and others, but there are some standards based on the concept of tash’hir. The standards when it comes to publishing gruesome photos, though, seems to rely on the decisions of editors.
This is an issue that has been of particular interest to me. In my various work assignments, I’ve noticed that there are very different standards in the East and West toward showing the photos of the dead and the mutilated. Daily newspapers in Asia contain pictures that would never, under any circumstance, be put into Western newspapers. Pictures like the two-page spread printed in a Indian newspaper, which showed the bodies and partial bodies of people savaged by tigers, are a good example.
And then there are the photos of children killed in situations with highly political context. Pictures of dead Palestinian children are not rare in Saudi (or other Arab) media. But you don’t see pictures of dead Israeli children.
That is not, I repeat not, because the media is being one-sided intentionally. The fact is that most Western cultures—and I include Israel in this regard—do not like to see bodies of the dead used for political or other purposes. In part, this may be due to squeamishness. In larger part, it is because both Christianity and Judaism call for respect for the deceases, including their mortal remains. For this reason, Israel—again as an example—does not permit news photographers to take pictures of the bodies and body parts that remain after a suicide bombing. As a result, though, if you were to judge solely on the basis of how many photos you saw, it would appear that only Palestinian children died in this conflict.
What is being shown is true, there’s no disputing that. But what is not being shown is also true. Due to reasons entirely beyond politics, the story ends up unbalanced and untrue.
While this article discusses the impact that gruesome photos might have on children, it is not only children being affected. No parent can calmly see the image of a child mutilated in an attack or even a traffic accident. The effect is not at a rational level, but at the emotional level, far stronger and far less open to explanations.
Privacy laws on publication of photos needed
Fatima Sidiya I Arab NewsJEDDAH: The news that a Syrian man beheaded his 15-month-old nephew in a Jeddah supermarket in March shocked many, but for some the tragic events were made worse when Saudi newspapers published gruesome photos of the decapitated boy.
For a group of Saudi bloggers, the publication of those pictures was beyond the pale; they initiated a letter-writing campaign to one of the papers that had published the photo. The young woman who started this campaign did not want her name published (her blog address is: http://entropymax.wordpress.com/). She said the complaints have gone unanswered.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “we have received neither reply nor acknowledgment that the letters have been received. A fellow blogger also sent the letter to a number of Saudi newspaper editors and columnists, but has not received responses either.”
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There’s not much detail in this brief piece from Saudi Gazette, but it appears that Saudi university professors will be receiving pay raises ranging from 20% to 70%. That will be thoroughly welcomed, but will add to the pressure of across-the-board raises in other sectors.
University teachers to get more salary
RIYADH – Saudi university teachers across the Kingdom are expected to receive a pay hike making them highest paid employees in the public sector.
The new scales include an increase of 20 to 30 percent in the salaries plus offering other perks and incentives, Al-Hayat said Saturday.
The revised salary scale extends the retirement age of university teachers to 70 years and offers them a chance to double their salaries through incentives guaranteed to them for their research units, patenting their invention and other academic activities.
Professors with rare specializations will be given additional allowance between 20 to 40 percent, besides incentives for those who work in remote areas.
Arab News has two interesting pieces on dawa—the invitation to join Islam or to improve one’s performance within it. Both pieces caution that being heavy handed about it is, at best, counter-productive.
The first focuses on the relatively recent phenomenon of women taking up the duty to teach their sister how to behave properly. These women, not part of any government organization, believe it is their duty to set their sisters right on matters like how an abaya is to be worn or what constitutes modest dress. The article notes that some recipients of this advice feel that their privacy is being infringed and that those who offer the advice should be better mannered. Others welcome the suggestions and pamphlets the women hand out.
The second piece looks at how dawa in Saudi Arabia seems to be fixated on the negative, with fire-and-brimstone lectures warning of the penalties of straying from the path. Where is the aspect of mercy that underlies Islam, some ask in dismay. In general, according to the article, many find that the Saudi approach to Islam strips it of the joy it might have, the humility it must have.
Both pieces are worth reading.
The Saudi ulema has spoken: The moon must be seen by human eyes in order to start the recognition of a month. In choosing tradition over technology, the ulema again demonstrates that it is anti-modernist. But is that a surprise?
‘Fasting begins only after moon sighted’
MAKKAH: The Saudi Council of Senior Scholars has rejected the demand that the beginning and end of lunar months should be determined on the basis of astronomical calculations.
“Shariah does not accept astronomical calculations based on mathematical computing as the basis for the beginning and ending of Ramadan,” said Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh, grand mufti of Saudi Arabia and chairman of the council.
“If anyone doubts our moon-sighting, fasting and feasting, it betrays his weak faith and defective perception,” the grand mufti, who is head of the Administration of Research in Religious Sciences and Fatwa said. He cited a Hadith of the Prophet (peace be upon him) which says, “You start fasting when you see (the moon) and stop it when you sight (the next moon) and when it is hidden by clouds, complete (30 days of) fasting.”
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Saudi Gazette also reports on the story: Sighting of moon a must, Ulema board
The Times of India, among other media, picks up this AP story by Donna Abu-Nasr on how the winds of change seem to be affecting Saudi attitudes toward women’s driving. The instances she sites have been covered here earlier, but she does make the point that the government has not (yet) objected to various petitions to permit women to drive.
Saudi ban on women drivers may be eroding
RIYADH: When Ruwaida al-Habis’ father and two brothers were badly burned in a fire, she had no choice but to break Saudi Arabia’s ban on women drivers to get them to a clinic.
Using the driving skills her father taught her on the family farm, al-Habis managed to reach the clinic’s emergency entrance without a hitch.
“When I pulled up, a crowd of people surrounded the car and stared as if they were seeing extraterrestrial beings,” the 20-year-old university student said. “Instead of focusing on the burn victims, the nurses kept repeating, ‘You drove them here?”’
Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that bans all women, Saudi and foreign, from driving. The prohibition forces families to hire live-in drivers, and women who cannot afford the $300-$400 a month for a driver must rely on male relatives to drive them to work, school, shopping or the doctor.
But there are signs support for the ban is eroding. Al-Habis’ story was first published in one of the biggest Saudi newspapers, Al-Riyadh, which even called her “brave.” Her father, Hamad al-Habis, praised his daughter’s action.
“Why should it even be an issue?” said Hamad al-Habis in his hospital bed. “My daughter took the right decision at the right time.”
Al-Habis is one of several women whose driving has made headlines. It is not clear whether the reports are a sign that more women are driving or that newspapers are just more willing to report about them. But in either case, it suggests the long-unquestioned nature of the ban is eroding.
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