Saudi Arabia: Religious police hit back over woman held in cafe

RIYADH - Saudi Arabia’s religious police hit back on Tuesday at critics of their arrest of a businesswoman in a Starbucks cafe for mixing with a male colleague, threatening to sue a journalist.

The powerful Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or religious police, charged the Saudi woman was making ‘suspicious gestures’ while in the man’s company and broke the law on several counts, in a statement published in the local press.

The commission ‘reserves the right of its members ... to claim their legal right from columnist Abdullah Al Alami who accused them of abduction,’ it said.

The religious police, commonly known as Muttawa, said Alami, a columnist for the daily Al Watan, had also accused them of strip-searching the woman, ‘which is no less reprehensible than ... the crime of kidnapping’.

The businesswoman, a 40-year-old financial consultant, was quoted in the English-language daily Arab News on February 5 as saying she was detained and strip-searched by the Muttawa the previous day.

She had been sitting in a Starbucks coffee shop with an unrelated man, an activity which is taboo in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia.

The woman, named only as Yara, said she was holding a business meeting with the man in a branch of Starbucks in Riyadh, in a section reserved for families.

Yara, a mother of three, said she was taken to a Riyadh prison, strip-searched and forced to sign a confession to having been caught alone with an unrelated man.

She said the Muttawa released her several hours later after her husband intervened. The man with whom Yara had coffee, an unnamed Syrian financial analyst, was also arrested.

Newspapers said the man was released the next day.

In its statement, the 5,000-strong religious police accused Yara of violating both the law and Islamic tenets by flying unaccompanied from Jeddah to Riyadh and sitting alone with an unrelated man in a public place in a section reserved for families.

The religious police said its members went to the coffee shop after receiving information that the woman did not have her head covered and was wearing make-up and making ‘suspicious gestures’ while in the man’s company.

A UN expert on women’s rights said last week at the end of a visit to Saudi Arabia that she had heard accounts of serious discrimination against women and abuses by the Muttawa.

‘The Muttawa are said to be responsible for serious human rights abuses in harassing, threatening and arresting women who ‘deviate from accepted norms’,’ said Yakin Erturk, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women, citing Yara’s arrest during her visit.

Women in Saudi Arabia, which applies a rigorous doctrine of Islam known as Wahhabism, face a host of constraints, including a ban on driving.

They are forced to cover from head to toe in public, and can not mix with men other than relatives or travel without written permission from their male guardian.

(AFP)