Category Archives: Injustice

I was pretty busy this past two months. But no matter how busy I get I cannot pass up a PVPV commission headline and these two months were full of those. First let me update you on the guy, AttaAllah Al Rasheedi,  who was stabbed twice by a PVPV member for not ordering his wife to cover her eyes. Seventeen days after he was admitted to the hospital he was taken into custody and imprisoned for 28 days. Outrageous I know but not unexpected especially coming from the same people who wanted to imprison and whip a rape victim. It turns out that the unnamed PVPV  member, 20 days after the incident obtained a medical report that states that his nose was broken and thus the case has now changed from assault to altercation, conveniently removing Al Rasheedi from his previous victim stance. And so now the judge after releasing him gave him the parting gift of a sentence of 30 lashes across the back for “strolling amid women” regardless of the fact that it was not a gender segregated mall and that he was accompanying his wife. Al Rasheedi is a soldier in the National Guard and obviously his training has had an influence on his spirit because the guy just won’t back down. Now he is appealing the 30 lashes ruling and he plans to take to court the sheikhs who spoke badly about his character in their Friday sermons. He also plans to object to his 28 day imprisonment.

On the other hand, the likelihood of his success is not promising. The Qatif girl could not get anything from our courts and her only salvation was a royal pardon from the King himself. No PVPV member was charged for the 2007 murder of Sulaiman Al Huraisy, a 28 year old man accused by the PVPV of making and selling alcohol. He was taken to one of their centers for questioning and then beaten. According to the postmortem he lost his right eye, he had a 6 cm break in his skull and he had no traces of alcohol in his system. His family tried to appeal the case too.

Even PVPV members aren’t immune once they step out of the ultra-conservative mold. Shiekh Dr. Ahmed Al Ghamdi, the head of the Makkah PVPV division is hated by the ultra conservative community because he says that women can uncover their faces and there is no gender segregation in Islam. They tried to get him removed but couldn’t. So instead they decided to marginalize him by not inviting him to their meetings, and showing his sons no mercy. One of his sons was involved in what was originally reported as defending his house when a group of men tried to break in to “mingle” with Al Ghamdi’s wife and daughters. However the whole incident magically changed into an altercation about car parking and Al Gamdi’s son was sentenced with 50 lashes. It’s also been going around that the same son or another was fired from his position in the PVPV.   Then the Al Ghamdi tribe issued a statement that they are innocent of Dr. Al Ghamdi and his unGodly opinions.

Finally last week, it was reported that a barefoot young woman was seen running across a major street in Riyadh while being chased by two PVPV cruisers. According to the PVPV they had spotted her in a taxi flirting and exposing herself. Note that “exposing herself” does not necessarily mean nudity according to their standards because to them even regular clothes without an abaya is exposure. They did not elaborate on what it was that she was doing or what she exposed except that it was immoral. Eye witnesses say that she was running crying and begging people in their cars to help her. Eventually the PVPV caught her and took her to a holding center for women and girls until her family picked her up from there a few hours later.

And if you would like to read a first hand account of a PVPV incident, I highly recommend this post from fellow blogger Omaima Al Najjar.

For all their trouble the PVPV were rewarded with a whole fleet of new cruisers, six hundred in Riyadh alone. And these cruisers are all linked to a control center and are all outfitted with what looks like a scanner/printer/fax machine. Don’t ask me what a patrol car would need those for! They are very proud of their high tech new look and equipment and posted these photos on their website at this link:

*PVPV stands for Commission for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue

These past few weeks it seems like a day doesn’t pass without a new muttawa blooper coming out. I call them bloopers because the muttawas always have an excuse even if it’s only an oops. These bloopers are becoming more and more frequent. It might be because of more press freedom or because average people are not putting up with it anymore. Whatever it is, muttawa bloopers are definitely not a new concept. An online Saudi newspaper recently published photos of 84 year old documents pertaining to citizens complaining about false arrests and harassment by PVPV members!

You don’t need to go back in time to witness how bad the PVPV can behave. One man in Madina has threatened that he will sue the PVPV for stopping him for two hours on a main street. He had his wife and his mother-in-law in the car with him. A few members of the PVPV were cruising around and apparently decided that the guy looked suspicious so they stopped him even though it is illegal for them to stop people without having an accompanying police officer. The guy refused to neither open his door nor give them evidence as to how the two women are related to him until the police arrived. And so he says that he will sue them for 2 million riyals for stopping him on baseless grounds for two hours and tainting his reputation.

Another man, Mohammed Sultan, also had his wife and mother-in-law in the car with him. He had stopped at a restaurant to pick up some breakfast when a couple of PVPV members demanded that he provide them with his identification papers. He says that he insisted that the police be present and when he started to call the police on his cell phone, they beat him up. Half an hour later the police arrived after the PVPV members called them themselves. They had made such a big deal in their call that five police cars arrived at the scene. The poor guy was taken in and the PVPV pair claimed that they stopped him because he was wearing his pants low (rapper style), even though witnesses at the scene say that Sultan acted and was dressed respectfully.

But the craziest and scariest bloopers are those that happen when a woman is unlucky enough to collide with the PVPV. A couple of days ago, an unrelated young Saudi couple were caught during their rendezvous. The PVPV member directed the police officer to take the young man into custody while he took the girl in his personal car! He disappeared with her in his custudy for an hour and a half and when finally the PVPV member brought the girl in, she informed the officials he had taken her to an isolated area to lecture and advise her. What’s funny is that the PVPV member committed the exact same “crime” of khilwa (spending time alone with an unrelated woman) that he was accusing the couple of.

On a more serious note, last week a young woman was caught by PVPV members in Tabuk because she was trying to get to Jeddah without her guardian’s approval. They illegally took her to the PVPV center without reporting the issue to the police and then locked the doors to the building. The young woman claims that they beat her and were insisting that she had something hidden in her clothes. She also says that they were trying to tie her up when help came. Luckily it was prayer time in a mosque nearby and men there heard her screams and called the police when they found the building locked. The PVPV spokesperson, Mohammed al Zobaidi, gives a completely different account of the events. He claims the woman’s injuries were self-inflected because she probably thought that that was a way out and that it was the PVPV who called the police and not the people at the mosque.

I’m not the only one noticing the increasing frequency of muttawa blooper coverage, at a recent PVPV conference which last few papers I attended, most of the speakers commented on this bad publicity. Unfortunately they did not think of it as an opportunity to reflect on their practices but rather faulted the media. Some even thought the ministry of information should punish editors who allow negative PVPV articles. And this might be why an unidentified someone took it upon himself to shoot at the liberal Watan newspaper building in Abha. Some people never change.

Heavy rains in Jeddah the past couple of days have claimed 78 lives and still counting. Heavy rains led to flooding because of how the city is managed. Millions go into its infrastructure for digging sewers and putting in pipelines and paving roads but by the time the money finally trickles down to the purchase of material and hiring contractors, it doesn’t cover the costs anymore. For the past few years the people of Jeddah have been complaining and grumbling about it. This just might be a blessing in disguise with the Hajj spotlight on the area it might be enough of an embarrassment that something actually gets done. I propose that the king hand over the Jeddah municipality to ARAMCO as he did with KAUST when it became apparent that officials were skimming the budget.