This story from Saudi Gazette/Okaz, if reported accurately, has to stand as the idiocy of the day.
A man takes in the abandoned children who were the responsibility of their uncle, who moved away. Two of the children are teenage girls. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice charge him with khulwa, illicit seclusion with members of the opposite sex, a sin and a crime in Saudi Arabia, and are set to jail him for a month.
It may help the man’s case that he had been asking for help from the Ministry of Social Affairs—responsible for family and child services—for about a year beforehand. It might help, too, if the Saudi government established a minimum age for marriage so that these girls would have been considered too young to establish a state of khulwa.
Hai’a charges man helping desolate kids with ‘khilwa’
Abdul Kareem Al-Murabba’MAKKAH – The former neighbor of two homeless girls and their brother who he took into his home while attempting to find them suitable care through official channels has described his dismay at facing a month in prison after the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Hai’a) charged him with khilwa, or illegal seclusion with non-related members of the opposite sex.
“It is ironic that I now face a month in prison after the Hai’a arrested me for being in illicit seclusion with the girls,” said the former neighbor of the 13 and 14-year-old girls and their nine-year-old brother. “The case is still being looked into by a court in Makkah.”
The children had been living on the street after being abandoned by the uncle in whose custody they had been placed following their father’s imprisonment and their mother’s remarriage, until their former neighbor saw their plight and took them into his home with his own family while the Ministry of Social Affairs resolved the issue.
He has now spent nearly a year trying to resolve the situation through the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Committee for the Care of Prisoners, and Makkah’s Social Protection Home.
An official from Makkah Social Affairs, which has taken up the case, said the children had been subjected to violence by their uncle, and that an application for urgent shelter had been submitted to the Ministry of Social Affairs. – Okaz/SG
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June:29:2009 - 07:56
There’s something weirdly fascinating about the fact that those guys can really think only of sex…
There seems to be no combination of unlikely people, no situation/disaster/charity whatever, which does not (in their eyes) seems to have the posibillity to place a sexual nature to it.
I wonder, is that an established mental disorder?
Or is it confined to those places where they take segregation into insane extremes?
June:29:2009 - 07:56
Some Saudis do seem to view the world only through the lens of sexuality. Everything around them radiates sex, in their minds, and as they see sex as a sin/crime, they’re awfully wrought about it. In the West, this would suggest the need for serious psychological counseling.
June:29:2009 - 07:56
Anyway, thanks John for providing me with a blogpost.
And a Danish Cartoon
June:29:2009 - 07:56
I had the same reaction- honest to God I think they are all totally obsessed with sex and in need of psychiatric treatment. It is the lense through which they live and observe life. I think they are all a bunch of perverts.
June:29:2009 - 07:56
Fabulous cartoon! I particularly love the roller skates, enabling them to get to the scene of the sin rapidly. Not as good as a Batmobile or being able to fly, perhaps, but quite good.
June:29:2009 - 07:56
May the kind neighbour be declared innocent ! actually he deserves much more than that, he should be praised for what he has been doing; he is human, simply human, is he an exception ? I’m sure there must me many human people in KSA as well but why is the system itself not human ?
June:29:2009 - 07:56
They keep stabbing themselves repeatedly over and over with the most ridiculous cases. They are writing the tombstone of their establishment.