Saudi Arabia's Flip-Flop Cleric

Saudi Arabia is currently in an intellectual battle between the ultra-conservative Wahhabi fanatical clerics who insist on dogmatic and unfounded restrictions, most famously sex segregation in the kingdom, and the liberal reformers.

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The clerics adhere to an extreme interpretation of Islam exclusive to Saudi Arabia. The kingdom's official doctrine is Wahhabi - an ideology founded by a 19th zealot named Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab. And the kingdom was founded as a marriage between the House of Saud and the House of Al-Shaikh (the descendents of Ibn Wahhab).

Since then the clerics have been allowed to enforce their extremism as long as they are subservient to the corrupt and decadent royal family (which regals in many of the sins which are off-limits) to normal Saudis.

So obscurantist are the clerics that women in the kingdom are prohibited from drive all due to the clerics' obsession with unrelated sexes intermixing. But all this does not mean that normal Saudis are not resisting.

In 1991, the women of Saudi Arabia famously took to the streets in cars demanding the right to drive. That effort at reform was crushed.

But Saudis Arabia is now reopening the debate on female driving and a whole host of liberal reform:

Many Saudi observers took note earlier this month when one of the kingdom’s best-selling dailies, Al-Riyadh, devoted a long article to exploring how to implement a lifting of the driving ban. One expert, for instance, proposed testing liberalised driving laws in one city at a time. Another suggested that before Saudi women can get licences the public could be conditioned by allowing female foreign residents, including household servants, to drive. This would answer the common complaint, voiced even by conservatives, that the driving ban risks increasing the bigger danger of Saudi women mixing with unrelated men who may not even be Muslims.

Other people interviewed simply said the ban was a silly anachronism and should be dropped forthwith.

And of the interesting things about this is that in the past those who uttered such views were effectively marginalized, and while such intimidation efforts exists it appears that the kingdom is resisting the backward clerics and pushing back, and it is the extremists whom are being marginalized:

How shocking, then, that one of its most senior officers is challenging both missions. Ahmed al-Ghamdi, who is the head of the vice squad in the holy city of Mecca, argues that there is no Muslim prohibition against innocently mixing the sexes and that, since the five daily prayers can be performed anywhere, by individuals as well as in groups, there is no need to force shops to close at prayer times.

Since Mr Ghamdi started airing such views in newspaper columns and television debates last November, rumours of his impending dismissal have abounded. Such expectations rose earlier this month, when the kingdom’s most senior cleric, the Grand Mufti, told Mr Ghamdi to keep his opinions to himself, saying that anyone who questioned the need for communal prayers was leading Muslims to hell. Few were surprised when, on April 25th, the state news agency announced his replacement. Yet just two hours later the item was removed, apparently after some senior princes had intervened. Mr Ghamdi remains in office, unrepentant. [...]

[But] Saudi Arabia’s conservatives are not so cowed. One elderly cleric recently issued a fatwa on his website, decreeing that anyone who advocated mixing sexes was an enemy of Islam and should be killed. But the website was quietly shut down. King Abdullah has said nothing about the fatwa. But he did invite cameras to record a cosy private meeting between himself and Sheikha Mozah, the elegantly dressed and unveiled wife of the emir of Qatar.

About time.

Source: The Economist.