Word: riyadh
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...bright side, the Saudis told Rice that they might be willing to attend a U.S.-sponsored summit this fall between Israel and so-called "moderate" Arab leaders. Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain and Morocco may also be invited. Saudi participation in talks with the State of Israel, which Riyadh has yet to recognize, would certainly mark a diplomatic breakthrough. But the Saudis made clear that they will show up only if the summit is aimed at discussing the "core issues" that stand in the way of a settlement. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal described these issues as the creation...
Saudi sources have told Time of numerous other instances of disturbingly routine abuse. One involved a female Shi'ite Muslim student at King Saud University in Riyadh who was allegedly badly beaten last year for being in the company of a Sunni Muslim boy. Because Wahhabi doctrine regards Shi'ites as infidels, they have frequent run-ins with the mutaween over their religious practices. Non-Wahhabi Sunnis also regularly run afoul of the mutaween, who - in accordance with Wahhabi doctrine - bar them from celebrating the Prophet Muhammad's birthday or performing certain rites during burials...
...religious police have raided Westerners' home churches (formal churches are forbidden in the Kingdom) to break up Christian services. Foreign residents complain of other incidents in which they have been singled out, including the case of a 25-year-old Mongolian woman who was accosted at a glitzy Riyadh shopping mall. Although the woman was clad in an abaya, a full-length black gown, a gesticulating mutawwa seemed bothered that her face and ankles were not covered, too. He shoved her into a taxi, pawed her robe open and denounced her as a Filipina gahbah (Filipina prostitute). She was interrogated...
...officials told Time of a more notorious incident, which occurred in 2003 when Jeanna Abercrombie Wynn-Stanley, then the U.S. consul general in Jidda, incurred the wrath of the religious police while waiting to enter a restaurant in Riyadh. Conservatively dressed, but not in the standard attire of Saudi women, Wynn-Stanley was harangued by a mutawwa, so she pulled out her Saudi-issued diplomatic identity card. The mutawwa's response was to throw it on the ground and grind it into the pavement with the sole of his shoe, a gesture considered a grave insult in Arab custom...
...necessarily by the mutaween, however. While commission officials have proved increasingly willing to give statements to the Saudi press and have even acknowledged that individual commission members can make mistakes, they repeatedly turned down Time's requests for interviews. Contacted at the organization's headquarters in Riyadh, the commission's director general Sheikh Ibrahim al-Ghaith and his public-relations officer cheerfully offered a gift of a handful of books in Arabic, including an official history of the commission, a collection of Saudi fatwas (religious rulings) and an Islamic calendar. But al-Ghaith declined to comment on the case...