Justice in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia practises a severe and joyless form of Islam named after an 18th Century Islamic teacher, Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab who developed a harsh and extreme interpretation of Islam. He met a tribal chief in 1744, Muhammad Ibn Saud who accepted Wahhabism and together they created what is now the modern Saudi religious doctrine of an austre form of Islam. There is no room of humanity or caprice, music or relaxed happiness in Sunni Wahhabism.This is the strictured form of Islam that is rightfully named Islamism, and it has spread relentlessly throughout the world, thanks to the generosity of Saudi Arabia's oil-derived riches, setting up madrasses, religious schools of single-minded training in the Wahhab school of Islam. Sheikh ul-Islam Wahhab insisted that all Muslims who disagreed with his view of Islam were apostates, justifying jihad.
His religious descendants, exemplified by al-Qaeda and all its offshoot terrorist Islamist jihadists from the Middle East to the Maghreb, Europe to North America, Pakistan to China, battle their noble cause on behalf of true Islam giving no quarter in their determination to bring authentic Islamism, true to its foundation, to the triumph of world domination. There is no God but Allah and there is no religion but Islam.
Their victims are claimed not only among the infidels, Christians and Jews and Hindus and followers of other false faiths, but most notably among the huge populations of moderate Muslims. And Saudi Arabia has the distinction of being the crucible from whence came this world scourge. This is a country where the very idea of modern Saudi women having rights equal to men is an outright insult to God.
Where men and women can be arrested and face severe punishment if, non-related, they are seen in one another's public company - or private, for that matter. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, like its counterpart in Shia Iran, represents religious police whose duties are to enforce dress codes, prayer times, and strict segregation of the sexes.
Women must adhere to a strict dress code, and there is a ban on women behind the wheel of a vehicle. Women must also have a male relative's permission to do many things, among them travel. Women can be arrested if they're caught driving a vehicle. Men can be arrested if they approach a woman unrelated to them.
In a notorious case in 2007 a 19-year-old woman was gang-raped and sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison for being in the presence of an unrelated male. Seven Saudis, seeing the woman in public with a male thought it perfectly logical to gang-rape her, after abducting both the woman and the man she was with. She was given her sentence, and the rapists theirs, 10 months to five years in prison.
Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz eventually pardoned her after a public outcry. Those same religious police have now arrested a 75-year-old widow originally from Syria, living near Riyadh. She had asked a young man whom she had breast-fed when he was a baby - and under Islamic traditions he was considered to be as a son to her - to deliver five loaves of bread to her house.
The result is that the 24-year-old Fahd and a friend Hadian who accompanied him, have been arrested and sentenced to four months in prison and 40 lashes and six months and 60 lashes respectively. Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi, the elderly woman, was sentenced to 40 lashes, four months in prison and deportation for having welcomed two unrelated men to her house.
The religious police and Fahd's father, who had accused Khamisa Sawadi of corruption gave testimony against the trio, occasioning the court to pronounce its Wahhabist-sharia sentencing.
"There is no god but Alláh, Muhammad is the Messenger of Alláh, Alí is the Friend of Alláh. The Successor of the Messenger of Alláh And his first Caliph."
Labels: Middle East, Religion, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, March 11, 2009
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