With the king’s permission, the debate is hotting up
LIKE all police forces, Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, better known as the Mutaween, performs a range of tasks. Armed with long beards and short sticks, its agents are most notorious for two particular jobs: enforcing the separation of sexes in public places and herding people into mosques at prayer times. 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.
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