For the Saudi Gazette
Last Thursday I went with my Saudi wife to the Riyadh International Book Fair. I moved to Riyadh from the UK three years ago and each year I have visited the book fair. My wife is an Assistant Professor and I am a teacher. We both agreed that the fair has improved in its content of books that promote a more multicultural understanding of Saudi society and the wider global community.
It was great to see men, women and families attending the event who have a thirst for reading and learning.
The only sour point for me was the few incidents I saw in which members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the Hai’a) behaved badly and disrupted the event. I have read of other incidents written in this newspaper and I have experienced one of my own.
I came across the Hai’a personally a few weeks ago on my first ever visit to Madina with my wife. My wife and I went in by separate entrances to pray in the Prophet’s Mosque. After prayer I had arranged to meet my wife outside the ladies entrance. When I arrived she was very upset and surrounded by members of the Hai’a and a couple of ladies who supervise inside of the mosque.
My wife is very petite and she was surrounded by three very large, long bearded Hai’a staffers. She was being accused of being a “troublemaker” and of “causing trouble”! What this “trouble” was had not been made clear.
I started to speak to my wife and tried to walk her away from the bullying Hai’a staff, but they physically grabbed hold of me. I know little Arabic to remonstrate with them and tried to release myself. My wife tried to translate but they showed her little respect. By this time my wife was very upset and what is worse is that these so-called Religious Police were behaving more like vigilantes in such a holy place. We were then accused of not being married. By this time a group of onlookers watched as my wife tried to explain our relationship.
More Hai’a staff arrived and this was becoming ridiculous. We are not teenagers but mature professional people who had arrived only a few hours earlier on a flight from Riyadh to Madina.
The Hai’a members then started to shout angrily asking for our marriage certificate. Luckily I had put the certificate in my suitcase so that I could show it at the hotel reception should they need it.
They demanded to see our iqamas. As we had only just been married a few months before I had not registered the marriage on my iqama and because I am a foreigner married to a Saudi I was told that I could not register the marriage on my iqama. We tried to explain this to them but they refused to listen to any rational explanation.
My wife explained to the aggressive Hai’a staffers that I would go and get the marriage certificate, which was a few kilometers away in our hotel room. However, they kept hold of me and demanded that my tearful wife walk to the hotel. Here we were outside the Prophet’s Mosque and were being treated so shamelessly by a bunch of thugs.
The Hai’a staff members during this time made several attempts to drag me into one of their security cars which I constantly resisted as I was innocent of all the things they were stupidly accusing me and my wife of.
My wife returned still in tears an hour later with the marriage certificate. The Hai’a staffers inspected the certificate and found that we were telling the truth.
They passed back our marriage certificate. Gave not one word of apology not even an explanation of the so-called “trouble” my wife had caused. They got back into their security cars and drove away!
Unbelievable is all I can say in the way they treated “guests” at the Prophet’s Mosque in Madina.
As a postscript to all of this, my wife and I were on our way to Yanbu via Medina to announce to her parents that she was pregnant and expecting our first child. God forbid if he/she turns out to be one of those unintelligent beings who are given the highest responsibility to “protect” the people visiting the holy mosque.
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