Saudi woman beats up morality policeman who quizzed her in public

It has not been a good week for Saudi Arabia’s morality police, defenders of the kingdom’s strict Islamic values and the scourge of young men and women who dare to meet in public out of wedlock.

The zealous, all-male volunteer force from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice patrols shopping malls, harassing unescorted women and arresting others for not wearing suitably modest dress, their religious authority unchallenged. They have even been known to ban florists from selling red flowers before Valentine’s Day.

(Times Online) This week, however, two separate reports emerged of Saudi women not just fighting back but besting the intimidating guardians of public morality.

The first case occurred in the eastern city of al-Mubarraz, when a member of the Mutaween, as the volunteer force is known, stopped a young couple in an amusement park and asked them to explain what their relationship was, since it is illegal for women not accompanied by a male relative to go out in public, let alone fraternise with another man.

According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the young man was so frightened by the officer’s questioning that he passed out — but his female companion, incensed at the intrusion, started hitting the morality policeman in the face so hard that he had to be taken to hospital.

Just as the Mutaween were dusting themselves off after that public humiliation, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Syrian-born Saudi woman had gone one step farther. After meeting a man in a public area in the province of Hail, she was spotted by religious policemen in a patrol car — at which point she whipped out a gun and started shooting at them, giving her male friend time to escape.

A local spokesman for the religious police, Sheik Mutlak al-Nabet, said the unnamed woman’s outraged husband had asked for his wife to be punished and stripped of her Saudi nationality, despite the face that she had lived there for many years.

Such illegal meetings can result in whipping and imprisonment, although the authorities have tried in recent years to curb the more intrusive activities of the Mutaween, a group of about 5,000 volunteers set up decades ago in the deeply conservative country. The officers are not supposed to interrogate those they detain; rather, they are expected to hand them over to the real police for questioning.

In 2007, a Saudi newspaper reported that attacks on the religious enforcers — including shootings and stabbings — had increased, as a more modern, assertive society started to rebel against their smothering presence. Nevertheless, the officers have continued their work, jailing a 37-year-old American businesswoman, a married mother of three, for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh in 2008.

Women in Saudi Arabia have, however, fought back, occasionally taking members of the religious police to court for harassment. “People are so fed up with these religious police, and now they have to pay the price for the humiliation they put people through for years and years,” said Wajiha Huwaidar, an activist. “This is just the beginning. There will be more resistance.”