Saudi sheikh pays the price for standing up to religious police

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Saudi sheikh pays the price for standing up to religious police

Many in Saudi Arabia privately agree with cleric who questions tenets of Wahhabism

For most of his adult life, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi worked among the bearded enforcers of Saudi Arabia. He was a dedicated employee of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice known abroad as the religious police serving with the frontline troops protecting the Islamic kingdom from Westernisation, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic practices.

Some of that resembled ordinary police work: busting drug dealers and bootleggers in a country where alcohol is banned. But the men of The Commission, as Saudis call it, spent most of their time maintaining the puritanical public norms that set Saudi Arabia apart not only from the West, but from most of the Muslim world.

A key offence was ikhtilat, or unauthorised mixing between men and women. The kingdoms clerics warn that it could lead to fornication, adultery, broken homes, children born of unmarried couples and full-blown societal collapse. For years, al-Ghamdi stuck with the programme and was eventually put in charge of the commission for the region of Mecca, Islams holiest city.

Then he had a reckoning and began to question the rules. So he turned to the Koran and the stories of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, considered the exemplars of Islamic conduct. What he found was striking and life altering: There had been plenty of mixing among the first generation of Muslims, and no one had seemed to

mind.

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http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/middle-east/saudi-sheikh-pays-the-price-for-standing-up-to-religious-police-1.2718015