Saudi Arabia – Where the Shariah is a Mockery By Asiff Hussein

The execution of young Rizana Nafeek by the Saudi Authorities for no fault of hers once again exposes the sad state of justice in the Kingdom which purports to follow Islamic Shariah. The poor girl, after languishing as many as seven years in jail, without even being given an opportunity to see her destitute parents or siblings she had left behind in Sri Lanka for all those years, was dragged out of her miserable cell to the chopping block and beheaded a few days back.

The execution was for the alleged murder of the four month old infant of her employer Mrs Naif Jizin Khalaf Al-Otaibi who had been entrusted to her care. The charge put forward by the girl’s child’s mother was that Rizana had deliberately strangled the infant while the facts speak otherwise. Let us see what Rizana had to say about the incident in an affidavit which was published in the Asian Tribune.

When I was feeding the infant, I noticed that the milk was oozing through the mouth and nose of the infant. I stroke the throat of the infant gently. As the infant was seen having its eyelids closed, I thought that it was snoozing. The madam came home at about 1.30 p.m. and after having seen the infant, she assaulted me with slippers and hands and took the infant away. Blood oozed from my nose. Thereafter police came and took me into their custody. I was assaulted at the police station too. They assaulted me with belt and coerced me for a statement stating that I had strangled the infant. They intimidated me that I would have been killed in the event I was adamant not to give a statement to the effect that I strangled the infant and electrocuted, I would be killed. In these circumstances, I under duress placed my signature on the written paper they gave to me. They took me to another place and asked a question, As I was virtually in a state with loss of memory and in fear and frightened mood, I had happened to tell them that I strangled the infant. In the name of Allah, I swear and aver that I never strangled the infant. I hereby place my signature after having read this statement.

The Asian Tribune based on Rizana’s affidavit revealed that the likely cause of death could have been a complication the infant was having. According to the affidavit Rizana noticed "milk was oozing through the mouth and nose of the infant." The paper consulted a Swedish medical expert who stated that: "There could have been a 'Stop' anywhere between the oral cavity and Esophagus. When there is a 'Stop', the milk will not go into the stomach, but will ooze out". 

Strangely, no forensic enquiry was ever conducted into the death of the infant. Obviously there was no evidence to suggest any wrong doing on the part of Rizana. The entire charge of murder was based on the evidence given by the child’s mother, a vindictive capricious woman who even seven years later was not willing to forgive the girl, insisting that she be killed for the death of her infant. The fact is that in Saudi Arabia, the words of a Saudi citizen count even more than the life of a Non-Saudi.

There exists ample evidence for Saudi brutality in obtaining false confessions as alleged by Rizana.  The very look of these ruffians is sufficient to instill fear in weak people. Al Jazirah recently reported that a Bangladeshi man died of fright after being arrested by the Mutawwa, Saudi Arabia's religious police for washing a car instead of praying. An Arabic daily said the man "convulsed in fear after he was arrested, leading to a drop in his blood pressure and causing his death". If a man could feel like this when these barbarians approached him, how would a young girl, all alone, feel when scum like this interrogated her, beating her with a belt and threatening her with death if she did not confess to the killing.

It is strange that the mother of the child was not charged with criminal neglect of her child. Not only had she failed to breast feed the infant as ordained in the Qur’an, but delegated the task of bottle feeding it with animal milk to an inexperienced girl who was still a teenager at the time. Infant care is very serious business and can never be taken lightly. A mother should know this better than any other.

The woman’s Otaibi clan is well known for its arrogance and holier than thou attitude. In 1979, a Bedouin preacher Juhayman Al-Otaibi led the infamous siege on the Holy City of Mecca with five hundred extremists, killing hundreds of Muslims simply because he and his fellow extremists did not like the idea of television or women working. Juhayman propped up his brother- in-law Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, as the Mahdi. Most of the rebels were Saudis from the Oteiba tribe, which had actually helped King Abdul Aziz, founder of Saudi Arabia, to seize control of the Arabian Peninsula in 1902. Although Juhayman was beheaded by the authorities, his ideas lived on and were embraced by the Saudi religious police or Mutawwa who recently allowed 15 schoolgirls in Mecca burn to death when their school caught fire, preventing their escape from the burning building because they were not clad in their abayas.

More recently a member of the Otaibi clan, a sergeant in Saudi Arabia's air force was charged with raping a teenage boy in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve. Mazen al-Otaibi, who was in the US for training at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, pulled the boy into a room at the Circus Circus hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, a well known gambling den, and raped him. A-Otaibi faces a series of charges such as sexual assault of a minor, felony, coercion, and first degree kidnapping that could get him decades in state prison.

Saudi arrogance

However to suppose that it is only the politically favoured bedouin clans that are arrogant is to understate the facts. As any visitor to Saudi Arabia knows, arrogance is imbued in these ignorant sons of the desert from their childhood, an attitude typical of the newly rich without a sound education. The discovery of oil in the Saudi desert ensured that. A close friend of mine, a journalist of repute who had been there calls them “Bedouin racists”. How true. 

Take the case of Fatima Al-Timani, a Saudi Arabian woman who was forcibly divorced from her husband by a court in 2005 at the request of her half-brothers. Fatima’s half-brothers asked a court to annul the marriage citing her husband’s low tribal background despite the fact that their father had approved of the union. The judge agreed, even though the couple had been married for over two years and had two children. Following the ruling, the couple was arrested in Jeddah. Fatima and her children spent nine months in a women’s prison in Dammam after refusing to go back to her family. In January 2007, Riyadh’s Appeals Court upheld the judge’s decision to divorce the couple and Fatima was moved to a women’s shelter in the city.

Here’s a country ostensibly adhering to the Shariah, not only preventing its women from exercising their right of choosing a partner which was conceded over 1400 years ago by Islam (such as when our beloved Prophet gave Khansa bint Khidam and Subai’a al-Aslamiyya the right to choose their partners), but also recognizing the inequality of man (a jahilliyah trait which Islam abrogated completely as evident in the final Sermon of our beloved Prophet).

The arrogance no doubt starts with the royal family itself. Take the case of Saudi prince, Saud Bin Abdulaziz Bin Nasir al Saud, a grandson of King Abdullah, who, fuelled by champagne and cocktails murdered his male servant, 32-year-old Bandar Abdullah Abdulaziz by beating and strangling him after the pair had returned from a Valentine's Day night out at a London Hotel, all this as the sadistic culmination of a lengthy period of sexual violence towards the poor man. The court heard the prince had ordered gay escorts in London and had frequently looked at websites for gay massage parlours and escort agencies. Witnesses had told the court that Bandar – an orphan who was adopted into the family of a low-ranking civil servant in Jeddah – was treated "like a slave". A post-mortem found Abdulaziz had suffered chipped teeth, heavy blows to the head, injuries to the brain and ears and severe neck injuries consistent with strangulation by hand.

The British Judge at London's Old Bailey who ordered him to serve a minimum of 20 years, David Bean told Saud as he sentenced him "It is very unusual for a prince to be in the dock on a murder charge. No one in this country is above the law. It would be wrong for me to sentence you either more severely or more leniently because of your membership of the Saudi royal family”. Saud – whose mother is a daughter of Saudi Arabia's king – had attempted to claim diplomatic immunity when he was arrested following the discovery of his servant's body in their shared suite at the luxury Landmark hotel.

It is fortunate that the Prince was in the UK when he was arrested and sentenced. Had he been in the Kingdom, he would have simply got away with it, just as a kinsman of his did some years earlier when he ruthlessly machine gunned a young teenager for having an argument with his brother. The murderer reportedly told the father of the victim to forgive him on the grounds that if he forgave him God would save him from hell. The father relented and forgave the prince. He received the blood money paid by the Royal family as compensation for his son and went his way. It’s a pity poor Rizana was not given such an opportunity despite the fact that the infant in her care had accidentally died in her arms, and was not killed in the deliberate barbarous fashion that innocent youth was by that spoilt prince. Rizana in her affidavit swore by Allah that she had not strangled the infant. The rich prince invoked the fear of hellfire to get away.  That is the difference between Prince and Pauper in the ‘Land of Islam” where “The Shariah reigns Supreme”.