HARSH LAWS ASIDE, EDUCATION IS KING
THE day before we arrived in Saudi Arabia, they had beheaded a rapist and two murderers, bringing to 38 the number of death sentences carried out in the kingdom this year.
When one reads about such developments from a distance, they leave one cold: they mean nothing at all.
But being here in the country where such sentences are meted out, I was bound to sit back and listen when they told me that in this country, drug trafficking, rape, murder, apostasy (the denunciation of one’s faith) are punishable by death under the Gulf kingdom’s strict version of Islamic sharia law.
As if fate wanted to emphasise the lesson to me, on that same day, I learned that a Saudi woman who had fallen victim to a violent gangrape had been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail after being found guilty of speaking to the media about the crime and indecency.
The Shia woman, 19 years old back in 2006, was in the car of a student friend when two men got into the vehicle and drove them to a secluded area, where she was raped by seven men.
She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man, because the Saudi law dictates that a male family member must accompany a woman at all times in public.
The rapists were sentenced to prison terms up to five years, light considering the fact that they could have faced the death penalty.
In this country, the law is everywhere. The other day our driver, a local lad, got a message from the Religious Police to stop driving with a strange woman after he had been spotted driving with one of my colleagues.
The Religious Police are always on the prowl, pouncing on people who are not heeding the call to prayer. When they pray – which happens five times a day – everything shuts down. When a local person is seen by the cops moving about during prayer time he has to explain himself: “Why aren’t you doing your [prayer]? ”
While I have been shocked by what, to the South African mind, would seem to be human rights violations, I have been impressed by the Saudis’ steadfastness. When you come here, you abide by their rules. Even as a westerner, you are made to don the flowing black robe, called the and you cover your head if you are a woman. Foreign men get away lightly – we are not obliged to wear the local robes.
Saudi women even cover their faces. You can only guess what they look like without those masks on – or how their teeth gleam as they sink daintily into a piece of steak. Those masks set a man’s imagination on fire: what does she look like behind that mask? Wish I could see her lips. How about her legs?
There ’ s a part of me that wishes we could be as rich as the Arabs, and inform foreigners how to dress when they visit South Africa. As a Zulu man, I would insist on foreign women doing
(which is a man’s right to ask a woman to perform an