No Right to Flirt in Saudi Arabia

For once, it’s the men who are bearing the brunt of Saudi sex police activities.

Yesterday, some 57 men were apparently arrested for “flirting” outside a mall in Mecca, according to an Associated Press report in the International Herald and Tribune.

What strikes me about this story, in the light of recent bad press for Saudi Arabia, is just how much the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” has been in the news lately.  Everyone in the West knows that Islam advocates “jihad.”  Most can tell you that there is a difference between “Shi’ite” and “Sunni,” even if they don’t know what it is, and now most Westerners know of “dhimmi” as well, but given that the Saudi religious police is so active, and that foreigners like American businesswoman Yara surely won’t be able to keep themselves out of trouble in the kingdom’s Starbucks and MacDonalds eateries, how long will it be before “muttawa” (which means “enforcer,” and which is Saudi slang for an officer of the religious police) becomes another Islamic watchword.

I’ll be looking specifically at Saudi Arabia in Lecture 8 of my series on The Islamist Entanglement.  (Individual lectures in the series are available for only $20!)