Saudi woman Beats up virtue cop

Saudi woman Beats up virtue cop:

Incident follows a wave of challenges to religious authority.


When a Saudi religious police strolled about an amusement park in eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples socialize illegally, he probably was not expecting much opposition.

But when he was a young 20-something couple approached together meandering through the park, he received an unprecedented pertussis.

A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai'a, asked the couple to affirm their identity and their relationship to each other, because it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women mixing.

For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed after questioning by the agent.

According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman would then be adopted in the religious police, punching him repeatedly and left him to be taken to the hospital with bruises on his body and face.

"To find resistance of a woman means a lot," Al-Wajiha Huwaidar, a Saudi women's rights activist, told the media line news agency. "People are fed up with these religious police, and now they pay the price for the humiliation they put people through years and years. This is just the beginning and there will be more resistance."

"The media and the Internet, people have much power and freedom to express their anger," she said. "The Hai'a if a militia, but now they do something it all over the Internet. This gives them a terrible reputation and gives people the power to respond."

Neither the police nor the religious Eastern Province police have a statement on the incident, and the names of the couple and the date of the incident were not disclosed, but on Monday the incident was about the Saudi media.

Should the woman be charged, a term she could face jail and lashings for assaulting a representative of a government agency.

Saudi law does not permit women in public places without a male guardian. Women are not allowed to drive, inheritance, divorce or custody of children, and can not deal with independent men.

Officials from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are charged with the enforcement of such laws but it was not an easy year for the religious police of Saudi Arabia.

The decision last year by the Saudi King Abdullah to the kingdom's first co-educational institution open, no religious police on campus, has led to a national crisis for the conservative religious Saudi Arabia authorities, with the new university becoming a cultural proxy war or not men and women should be allowed the public to mix.

A high spiritual Saudi openly criticized the gender mixing at the university and was summarily dismissed by the king.

That was in December followed by a surprise announcement by Sheikh Ahmed Al-Ghamdi, head of the Saudi religious police Commission in Mecca, who published an article against segregation, leading to threats on his life and rumors that he was or would be dismissed.

In the meantime, the Saudi government to do everything just the image of the religious police to improve, notably by firing the director of the National Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice earlier this year. The new director Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Humain then announced a number of training programs and a special unit for handling complaints against the religious police.

Last month, however, were members of the religious police in the northern province of Tabuk charged with assaulting a young woman as she tried to visit her son, in a move that an unprecedented challenge to the authority of the religious police.

"There is a kind of change takes place," Nadya Khalife, the Middle East, women's rights researcher for Human Rights Watch, told The Media Line. "There is clearly a shift in attitudes regarding male guardianship law and related issues''. There are more women to speak out, there are changes within the government, there is a mixed college, King was photographed with women, they want women able to work in the courts and there are changes within the Department of Justice. So you can witness a kind of change unfold, but it is not clear what is happening and it's not something that's going to happen overnight .