Here’s an Arab News article that sadly causes me to raise an eyebrow. It reports that the police and the religious police will join forces during Haj to keep things moving along. That, of course, is an honorable goal. The problem comes in when you reflect upon some prior behavior by the religious police—or perhaps, just ‘wannabes’, who have tried to get pilgrims to follow rituals proscribed by the Hanbali school and its Wahhabi interpreters. The fact is that different schools of Sunni Islam, not to mention the various Shi’a groups, have different ideas about how to perform the various steps of the pilgrimage. To correctly perform Haj, one of the five ‘pillars of Islam’, they need to do it in the manner in which they were taught; to do otherwise is to invalidate their actions. Some of the religious police, on the other hand, think that variations in what they have learned is an act of blasphemy and could serve to invalidate, or at least disrupt, the Haj of others.

If the joint force focuses on thing like ensuring that wheelchairs don’t block access, then fine. If this is a wedge to enforce a particular set of rituals that please only the religious police, however, then there’s going to be a problem.

Vice cops, Grand Mosque security join forces
Muhammad Humaidan | Arab News

JEDDAH: The Grand Mosque Security Forces and the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, in a meeting in Makkah on Saturday, reached an agreement to work jointly to stop crimes and moral violations in the precincts of the Grand Mosque.

Khaled Al-Subaei, chief of the commission’s branch in Makkah, met Col. Yahya Al-Zahrani, commander of the Grand Mosque security, and stressed the need for strong cooperation between the two organizations to put an end to violations committed by some people at the Grand Mosque.

“The major problems the commission wants an immediate solution to include those caused by mentally ill people, violations by wheelchair pushers and those who obstruct the work of the mosque employees,” Al-Subaei said in a statement to Arab News after the meeting.
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