Die verschleierten Greuel

24.02.2010

Veiled Atrocities

Wahre Geschichten aus Saudi-Arabien

Soeben erschienen Februar 2010

Prometheus Books

Current Events /Islamic Studies

Sami Alrabaa

A deaf-mute woman waiting for her brother to pick her up in front of shop window is arrested by two members of the Saudi “morality police” (mutawas) on suspicion of prostitution. They report their allegation to the governor of Riyadh, who accepts it without question and passes sentence. The next Friday she is stoned to death in public.

A German woman married to a Saudi man makes the mistake of taking a taxi downtown without a male escort. For her “crime” she is arrested, raped, and thrown into prison. Later her German-Saudi baby son is taken away and she is deported to Cyprus without passport and money.
A Syrian truck driver is accused of stealing the truck he is driving. As a consequence, both of his hands are amputated.

Are these incredible but true incidents merely aberrations, the result of a few power-crazed officials acting outrageously outside the reach of a generally law-abiding society?
Unfortunately, they are all too common in the theocratic police state that is contemporary Saudi Arabia. As author Sami Alrabaa vividly recounts in this shocking expose, in the wealthy Saudi oil kingdom there is no such thing as secular law or modern courts. Instead, Saudi princes create the laws, based on Sharia, Islamic law derived from the Koran and Hadith, and the muttawas act as judges, enforcers, and executioners.

             Alrabaa lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for many years. A fluent speaker of Arabic, he was told about the many appalling incidents reported in this book by victims and their friends and relatives. He cross-checked all the accounts here given through multiple interviews. Amazingly, in some cases, the actual victimizers themselves openly, often with condescending and smug contempt, corroborated the events.
           This revealing portrait of intolerance and social oppression presents an image that foreign reporters never see in the carefully controlled Saudi kingdom.

Sami Alrabaa is a professor of anthropology and sociology at a German university. For five years he worked in Saudi Arabia at King Saud University as the deputy chair of the Department of European Languages and Translation.

265 pages · ISBN 978-1-61614-159-2· Paperback: $19 · World Rights

Alrabaa gives the forgotten victims of the Saudi Arabian torture regime a face and a voice that deserves to be heard. He ist wll cquainted with the exact wording of the hate message of Western societies and knows the way facts tend to be played down by the media which would rather support the apologiosts an euophemists of the sharia than take a stand against the terror of this theocrcy. Gunild Feigenwinter