Saudi Arabia: Double Standards

In my search just now for a picture, I found this cartoon instead. Since it goes along with the double-and-weird-to-me-standards issue of this post, I decided to use it.



Please note that I am not picking on Saudi Arabia with my recent posts about children and veiled women and rape and homosexuality over there, but I was reading a book that dealt with this country thus why Saudi has been mentioned lately. Hopefully, these issues are rare and my writing about it only brings to attention a very small problem in that part of the world.

Here is my final excerpt from The Consequences of Love by Sulaiman Addonia.

Remembering how at age fifteen he was raped by his kafeel (his sponsor), Eritrean-born Naser recalls . . .

I couldn't go the religious police; not after what happened to one of the kafeel's wife's servants, a Filipino woman who had lived a few blocks down from us.

She had been deported back to the Philippines with her two young children when she reported sexual abuse to the religious police. That had been a year before and I had seen her and her children being dragged out of her house by three religious policemen. She screamed that she was the victim of a rape committed by the Blessed Bader Ibn Abd-Allah. But a policeman smacked her on the face, yelling, "We don't want whores like you coming to this blessed country."

"Classic," whispered our Saudi neighbor who lived on the second floor, and who was standing next to me. "I am sure the kafeel fabricated a lie against her to the religious police to hide his ugly crime and now she is the one being sent back home."

"Shouldn't the Sharia law bring justice in this country?" I protested.

He sighed and said, "The law, son, is only applied to the poor and to foreigners, not to the rich or to the royal family." (pg. 79)

Another lesson Naser learned from an older man:

I recalled what Mr. Quiet had told me when the religious policemen strode past us in the shopping mall looking for illicit love. "If two unmarried lovers get caught," he said, "then the man will be flogged but will live a full life. He will say I am sorry, ya Allah forgive me, and that's his ticket to a happy and a normal life. But the woman, she will find out that once the pain of the lashes subsides, she will endure a greater pain. She will be shamed forever. No man will touch her, no man will want to be her husband, and she will live like a dog with rabies, because if a bullet didn't kill her, then the pain of loneliness and rejection will." (pg. 167)

Where do you see double or weird-to-you standards applied? I know they are not only in Saudi Arabia! If you are like me, you have them in your own life. Right? ;-)