Members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice recently raided shops in Riyadh which sell satellite television receivers. They confiscated all receivers which, according to them, could be used to receive pornography. The committee members, however, allowed the sale of a receiver which happened to be the same as the one used to receive the Islamic channel, Al-Majd. The committee said its members had conducted inspection visits, not raids, to shops which sell receivers and had only confiscated those that could be used to receive pornographic material. Everybody knows that receivers can receive all kinds of material, thus making it available to all. As far as I know, manufacturers have not yet made receivers which bar channels transmitting pornography.
This is a matter which concerns everybody and not just a single individual given the implications it could have on all. By banning receivers, the committee has, in my opinion, denied all citizens and expatriates in the Kingdom the opportunity to watch their national television channels, including the Saudi Arabian Channel One, Channel Two, the Sports Channel and Al-Ekhbariya news channel. All of these come into our homes on the kind of open receivers the members of the committee confiscated. This is a serious matter. We have never heard of a government body banning transmission of the country’s national television stations and so cutting off a vital means of communication between the government and its citizens.
The committee may not be alone in bearing the responsibility for the confiscations since the committee is a government agency working under certain rules and regulations. The committee says that the rules on which it based their action call for preventing the sale of pictures, books, records, films and other material deemed unlawful according to Shariah and that their action was done in cooperation with other relevant authorities.
The “relevant authorities” must mean the Ministry of Culture and Information and the words “in cooperation with” certainly implies the committee acted in coordination with the ministry. It seems that the two together agreed to ban the sale of all receivers with the exception of the one that transmits the particular satellite channel I mentioned. The question is: Does the ministry condone such acts by the committee? If the answer is yes, then I have to submit to what the ministry decides since it is the only body authorized by the government to formulate the country’s information strategy.
