An Arabic online newspaper reported recently that a Jeddah husband and father set his wife on fire in front of their two children because she had the telephone numbers of other men in her handbag.
Saudi online news websites are notorious for running phony stories with sensational angles, so readers must take these reports with a grain of salt. But this article attracted my attention not because of the murder, but the comments left by readers applauding the man's actions. Whether the article was true or not is of no matter, but the public's reaction to murder is a telling sign that Saudi society is in crisis.
The story goes that the husband took his wife and two young children to a mall. He dropped them off and drove away while his family went inside. Sometime later the wife called her husband and asked to be picked up. He returned, but once she got into the car he asked her for her handbag. He rifled around inside and found slips of paper with telephone numbers on them.
Now back in the old good days before there was Bluetooth and social media, lonely guys without a shred of dignity or social etiquette would throw bits of paper at women with their phone numbers written on them. They would hope for a date, as if any woman would find this undignified manner of communication appropriate.
So apparently, in this part of Jeddah men and women don't have up-to-date communication technology and must resort to the quaint 20th century practice of throwing paper scraps at each other. Anyway, the husband finds these telephone numbers and beats her in the car in front of the kids. He then drives to the home of a friend who has alcohol, demands it, drinks it, and then pours the rest on his wife and sets her on fire. All this in the car and in front of the kids who were screaming in the backseat.
He then drives his barely alive wife to south Jeddah, where he pulls her out and finishes the job by beating her to death. Pretty horrific.
These kinds of tragedies are not uncommon in any society and Saudis can't claim the higher ground by arguing it never happens here.
It does happen here and the evidence is the comments section below the article. Here, men took the time to applaud the husband for being a man and preserving his honor by murdering his wayward wife. The woman got what she deserved and it does not matter that her children witnessed the killing. It was the woman who was depraved for accepting the telephone numbers of strange men in a mall and not her husband who thinks that he is entirely within his rights to set the mother of his children on fire and then beat her.
This special brand of cruelty and depravity endorsed by some men point to a troubling trend in Saudi society that men can treat their wives as property and do as they please with impunity. Saudi law authorities have made considerable strides in combating domestic abuse over the past three years or so, but we have also seen that enforcement is still weak. Often — and I acknowledge that this is based only on anecdotal evidence — police still do not react to domestic violence complaints unless it comes directly from the victim. Historically victims do not file complaints against their abusers for fear of retribution and for economic reasons.
Some men believe that murder is perfectly acceptable in Islam if a woman compromises his masculinity and dignity. They are aware that society's gatekeepers, the government, are powerless to stop them if they chose to maim or kill.
There are laws worldwide that make it a criminal offense to support terrorists with online statements or speech in a public forum. When individuals publicly support wanton murder on a domestic level they encourage people to carry out such acts. The online newspaper should be held accountable. Websites that publish these comments should at the very least moderate them. If they don't perhaps the Ministry of Information should suspend publication.
