Targu Jiu

 

The freedom of religion in danger – Saudi Arabia

 

The wahhabism is a variant of Islamism created in the middle of the 18th century by Muhammed Ibn al-Wahhab and adopted by the Saudi royal family after 1744. It is based on a puritan interpretation, rigid and militant of the Koran. Accepted as a unique legislative source, sharia, the Moslem law, forbids the saints’ worshipping and doesn’t accept any other religion. After the official creation of the state in 1932 it became the official religion in Saudi Arabia. As a keeper and a defender of the Islamic saint towns of Mecca and Medina, the Saudi state strictly applies the faith stipulations, all the other religions are forbidden, there are no other cult buildings, the religious literature of other faiths is forbidden too, the people suspected of gospelling or conversion actions are threatened or punished in prison or expelled.

 

The religious restrictions are applied especially to young people and women: there are different restaurants for women and for men, and women are not allowed to share the same table, women are not allowed to drive or to get in a car with a man who is not one of her relatives, a woman can get a passport only with his husband’s  approval in her husband’s presence, his father is her tutor, they must wear the Arab veil all the time and, what’s more, in 2008, considering that the exposure is too much, the imam Mohamed al Habdan proposed the replacing of the two-eyed veil with a one-eyed veil; using the internet and the mobile phone is restricted, and in 2010 there were some measures in order to forbidden Saint Valentine’s Day.

A “religious police” named “the Commission for defending the virtues and for preventing the vice” was created to apply and control the respecting of the religious restrictions. Its actions are extremely active and tough, the prisons being full of religious opponents, common people found guilty. The case in 2006 is representative, a 19-year old girl, “the girl from Qatif”, firstly condemned at 90 whip strokes because she had been in a car with a man who was not her relative, then beaten and violated by “the religious police”. Despite the international protests the Saudi Supreme Courts pronounced in November 2007 a harsher punishment: 6 months of prison and 200 whip strokes. The international community reacted, the European Parliament adopting, on the 13^th of December 2007 “The Resolution regarding the women’s rights in Saudi Arabia”, but such cases continued. In 2009 Rajaa al Sanea’s book, “The girl’s from Riad” which tells about the interdiction of the religious freedom in Saudi Arabia.

From the Saudi political and religious authorities there are only promises and formal papers regarding the manifestation of the religious freedom. In 2004 the king Abdulazis approved to organize “The National Association of the Human Rights”, signed a treatment which stipulates the religious freedom and in 2007, after meeting the Pope, he promised to build a Christian church. Everything was formal aiming to obtain privileges in relation with the occidental states.

 

 

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