JEDDAH, 11 March 2008 — The recent action by the Makkah branch of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice against a local professor and the court verdict sentencing him for being in the company of an unrelated woman have provoked heated public discussions. Wherever I go, I hear people criticizing the charges against him and the sentencing. The charges have been described as false and the sentencing as unfair. These reactions are because people believe that the professor was framed by some unscrupulous commission members.
According to press reports, Abdullah Al-Sanusi, the lawyer representing the professor, accused the members of the commission of fabricating the case in order to take revenge. A number of the commission members were the professor’s students and knew that he used to criticize the harsh way commission members sometimes dealt with suspects. The commission members were also hostile to the professor because they failed their final exams, Al-Sanusi said.
The commission members chained him and took him to the police station on the charge of committing khulwa. (Khulwa is being alone with an unrelated person of the opposite sex.) At the same time, the Investigations and Prosecutions Board refused to proceed with the case for lack of any evidence.
The board pointed out that the professor was found with the woman not alone, but in a public place. Undeterred by the view of the board, the commission members took the case to the commission’s head office. It was the commission’s president general who referred the case to a legal court, which issued the final verdict of jail term and lashes.
However, the commission dismissed the lawyer’s charge that the professor was framed as baseless. The commission said it acted on concrete evidence after receiving a complaint from the woman involved. She complained that the academic had harassed her and that she had recorded some of his harassing conversations, the commission said.
However, Khaled Al-Hussaini, a writer in Al-Madinah newspaper, wrote on Feb. 27 that he found several contradictions in the verdict after reading its full text. At one point in the full text, it states that the professor told the woman, who requested a meeting with him, that he could not meet her alone and that she should bring her brother with her.
The professor went to the meeting on the assumption that she would be with her brother. When he entered the café, she called him and when he asked about the brother, she said he would arrive shortly. But when he was about to take his seat, the commission members entered the room and arrested him.
The text also pointed out that the professor said he was handcuffed and the commission members kicked him. The full text also recorded the statement of the commission members who appeared as witnesses before the public prosecutor. “We received a telephone call from a man of high moral standards that someone was committing the crime of khulwa with a woman who was not related to him at a cafe. They were behaving in a suspicious manner and the woman entered by one door while the man entered through another,” the commission members told the prosecutor.
In the article, Al-Hussaini pointed out discrepancies in the text.
After receiving the commission’s report, the Investigations and Prosecutions Board made the usual investigations but could not find any previous charges against the professor, according to the full text. But later, the verdict contradicts itself by saying that the court sentenced him considering his previous record. The court admitted that the suspect was free from any charge of khulwa in the past but still the verdict said the sentence was based on his previous behavior!
Another important point raised by Al-Hussaini is how “the man of high moral standards” knew that the woman was not related to the professor. And how could he see the illegal relations since the two commission members maintained that the professor sat in a place hidden from their sight?
Another question Al-Hussaini asked was about the recorded telephone conversation between the woman and the professor. He wanted to know why the public prosecutor or the judge had not listened to it and taken it as evidence. The defense lawyer requested the judge to listen to the recording because it was totally different from statements made by commission members.
Al-Hussaini also wondered why the woman was not asked to give evidence in the court. Without the woman’s clarification, how could her statement have been taken since it was the basis on which the verdict was issued?
I would like to point out that religious establishments in the Kingdom insist that ikhtilat (mingling of men and women publicly) is unlawful. On the other hand, what is prohibited by Shariah is khulwa that means a man and woman meeting in a secluded place so that no one else can view them. The religious establishments mix up two obviously different situations and punish those men and women sitting together in public places as though they were committing unlawful khulwa. Ikhtilat is just a man and woman meeting in a public place, say traveling in a bus or car, or in a hospital, or shopping place or work place. If we are serious about banning ikhtilat, the jails in the Kingdom would not hold all those who commit it and foreign laborers would have to be recruited to carry out the lashings.
I believe that the charge of khulwa against the professor is wrong on the basis of Shariah because he was not meeting her in a secret place but in an open and public restaurant.
On the other hand, the woman who induced him to come to the restaurant has shown some evil motive. Therefore she should have been summoned to give an explanation on the matter.
If the lawyer’s contention that some commission members were motivated by a desire for revenge is true, there is a likelihood of them colluding with the woman in order to trap the professor.
I would also like to add that handcuffing and kicking a professor publicly on a charge not supported by Shariah shows that the commission members had a strong desire to humiliate him. A well-known professor is not likely to run away like ordinary criminals. The sentence is a mistaken ijtihad (deduction within the parameters of religious law) because it amounts to equalizing khulwah — which is prohibited — with ikhtilat that is not prohibited by Shariah.
This issue indicates that some religious establishments in the Kingdom have erroneous religious conceptions. Consequently some citizens are punished for sins they are not guilty of. The officials who undertake actions based on misconceptions should be punished in order to guarantee the good reputation of the judiciary in the Kingdom.
The situation also calls for checking the tendency of some religious establishments to trespass regulations. It is high time we laid down new regulations defining religious establishments’ areas of authority so that there is no misuse or abuse of law.
