Word: mutawain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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During Ramadan, the month-long Islamic fasting period that followed the war, vigilante members of the religious police, the mutawain, stepped up their harassment of Saudi and foreign women who displayed too much skin in violation of dress codes. Women appearing in public without veils, or without wearing head-to-toe abayas, have been abused and occasionally assaulted by the cane- wielding morals squads...
...vigilantes, mostly semi-educated young men bitterly opposed to Western values, have broken into compounds in Riyadh and Jidda to threaten and arrest Westerners drinking home-brewed liquor in defiance of the ban on alcohol. A women's tennis tournament in Riyadh was halted when the mutawain learned of it. The government advised an oil-company executive to cancel a party because members of both sexes were invited. Wives of Western businessmen and diplomats are fearful of leaving their villas in the evening unless accompanied by their husbands. To do otherwise in the atmosphere of intimidation created by the mutawain...
...curb the excesses of the fanatics, the King appointed a religious moderate, Abdul Rahman al-Said, to head the mutawain, officially known as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Al-Said, a former dean of Islamic studies at Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Islamic University, received an $18 million budget increase and instructions to rid the mutawain of zealous volunteers. But harassment of Saudis and foreigners by the mutawain continues, underscoring how difficult it will be for al-Said to gain control of the organization and its durable network of faculty and student supporters...
When the police arrived to arrest the women, they first had to step in to protect them from furious members of the mutawain, the country's religious police, who demanded that the women be jailed immediately. King Fahd deftly defused the dispute by declaring that a committee of religious scholars should investigate before any action was taken. The governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman Bin Abdel-Aziz, assembled a commission that rapidly decided that the women hadn't actually committed a crime. The committee found there was no specific prohibition in the Koran on driving. In fact, during the time...
MINISTRY OF MORALS. Women in Saudi Arabia who drive cars or show too much leg are routinely persecuted by the mutawain, the country's dreaded "morals police." Now non-Muslim women are rejoicing at a rumor that a U.S. servicewoman pulled her 9-mm sidearm on a mutawain zealot who tried to stop her from driving a military vehicle near the Dhahran air base. The mutawain officer has reportedly been suspended...
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