Word: saudi
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When Baghdad was absolutely certain that Iraq had won the soccer championship against Saudi Arabia in faraway Jakarta, the celebrations began with a sustained blast of AK-47 fire. The happy sound could never be confused with a real gun-battle: few gun-battles, even in Iraq, are that fierce and sustained. Soon the popping of rifle fire was joined by the thudding sound of machine guns - the kind of heavy weapons bolted onto trucks or mounted on rooftops...
...fact that the mutaween have long acted with this kind of impunity makes many Saudis skeptical that the ruling al-Saud clan will hold them accountable to the rule of law. Such a move would entail taking on the overall religious establishment, which controls the mosques, the judiciary and various education departments as well as the morality police. That would be difficult to do, says Saudi political analyst and author Mai Yamani, because the religious establishment, led by the descendants of the founder of Wahhabism, is effectively a partner in ruling Saudi Arabia. Yet Yamani is encouraged by the escalating...
Though the Saudi economy is dependent on their skills, foreigners are not above the scrutiny of the mutaween, either. The 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...
...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...