“SILENCE is golden,” wrote a Saudi columnist recently in a local paper. She was writing about the case of the high school teacher — Muhammad Al-Harbi — sentenced to three years in prison and 750 lashes for charges that included mocking bearded religious men, closing the windows of his classroom during the call to prayer and preventing students from performing ablutions. The case has attracted a great deal of attention and has become a hot subject for discussion in cyberspace and in the newspapers. But some 10 days after the sentence, many questions still hang over the case and the discussion rages on.
During a discussion with my colleagues, one of them said, “We have to be careful before siding with the teacher or with the court. There might be details that we are not aware of and those details may be the basis of the sentence; we should not get too emotional without being sure we have all the facts.”
He was surely right and his comments actually concentrated my thoughts on several points. First, if people are lacking details, it would be only fair if they had access to the whole truth. Some will no doubt say that access to the whole truth is the exclusive right of the court but when a case has moved into the public forum, it is only fair that the public should know the facts. If they do not, they will surely make judgments and form opinions based on what they do know. If there is a strong case against the teacher, then the court should release the details so that the public has the necessary information to form its opinion.
On the other hand, if the court remains silent, then the public has every right to assume that all has been told and that they may then form their opinions based on what they have been told. At present, the public is overwhelmingly on the side of the teacher. What is very surprising and puzzling is the deafening official silence from the Ministry of Education, which seems to have detached itself from the case. Even stranger is the silence from the National Human Rights Society, which is not doing what people hoped it would do: Getting involved in a case which touches so many sensitive nerves and issues in our country.
Trying to consider the case as objectively as possible from far away, I think this is another example of how people in Saudi Arabia need a cause to rally behind. During a recent roundtable discussion with American and Arab scholars in the United States, the views varied on the concept of citizenship from the US to the Arab world and even in the Arab world, the concept of good citizenship meant different things in one country from another.
When it came to Saudi Arabia, I said what I believed to be true — that the Saudi people feel connected to their country through their society, and that their main concerns are with social issues. As an example, I explained how when the country went through the first municipal elections earlier this year, the public’s response was disappointing to many observers who expected this historic step towards greater participation in the nation’s political life to be embraced more enthusiastically by citizens.
Considering that the Saudi public had so little experience in participating in the nation’s political life, I was not surprised.
If we look at social issues, when it is a case of helping someone in trouble, we Saudis rally to the cause as admirably as anyone else. In the case of the Khamis Mushayt girl who received a death sentence for killing a man who attempted to rape her, people’s sympathy and efforts reflected a high level of commitment to a cause they believed in. And now, Muhammad Al-Harbi’s case is also showing that maybe our concept of being a good citizen is defined by what we consider fair and right. Without clarifications in the Al-Harbi case, however, it is normal for each of us to feel worried about what our children are being taught and what kind of people are spending hours every day with our children in the country’s schools.
When a teacher gets a jail sentence because he mocks men with long beards, we have moved into a situation in which people will be imprisoned and lashed for any thought they might have which is even slightly different from what certain people tell us is right. To punish a teacher for following the Ministry of Education rules that students must pray during a prayer break and not during the lesson is itself unfair. To complain against a teacher for using Saudi newspaper articles in an effort to explain the need of fighting terrorism is yet another example of unfairness. The teacher — and the articles — criticized a man whom the government had identified as a terrorist and who was on the government’s list of wanted men. How can that be a basis for any complaint?
Going beyond this, to make outward appearances as important as the inward spirit of religion itself is a serious problem that we have failed to deal with for at least the last 20 years. How little do we change? People are still attacked and ridiculed for simply voicing an opinion, and in the Al-Harbi case, for daring to talk less than seriously about a man’s outward appearance. What is it about bearded men that makes them untouchable and beyond criticism? Some people think that a beard is necessary for a Muslim man while others think not. The result is that some men have beards and some do not. It is a matter of personal choice and personal freedom and it is every man’s right to decide for himself. This is perfectly clear and straightforward but when the presence or absence of a beard becomes a religious matter, then that means we have moved into some very murky areas and some even murkier interpretations.
And in the Al-Harbi case, we don’t express our differing opinions peacefully but angrily and confrontationally. The result is that Al-Harbi was taken to court for allegedly mocking bearded men even though he himself has one. He is reportedly a model patriotic teacher who felt it his duty to teach students about the dangers of terrorism and fanatical thought, yet he has been sentenced to imprisonment and a public lashing. For what?
The country has long suffered from extremist thought and there is an official campaign against terrorism. Under those circumstances, how is it possible to imprison a teacher for supporting the government’s campaign and doing what the government must wish every teacher would do?
What kind of conclusion are students going to draw from this unsavory incident? Perhaps they will conclude that what newspapers tell them is false or perhaps that they should keep their opinions to themselves.
