Saudi Arabia's War on Witchcraft

Saudi Arabia has a specially trained unit of anti-witchcraft police to track down and punish sorcerers; in 2012 they arrested 215 people. For anyone who has read about the awful witch persecutions of Renaissance Europe, Ryan Jacobs' story in the Atlantic has a chilling familiarity:

According to a director of the religious police's witchcraft division in Riyadh, the unit provides confidentiality to informants. "We deal with sorcerers in a special way. No one should think that we mention the name of whomever files a report about sorcery," Sheikh Adel Faqih told the Saudi Gazette. . . .

The ability to defend against the charges seems to depend on the caprice of the particular judge assigned to the case. In the 2006 case of Fawza Falih, who was sentenced to death on charges of "'witchcraft, recourse to jinn, and slaughter of animals," she was provided no opportunity to question the testimonies of her witnesses, was barred from the room when "evidence" was presented, and her legal representation was not permitted to enter court. After appeals by Human Rights Watch, her execution was delayed, but she died in prison as a result of poor health.

It was the "special way" courts dealt with accused witches that made the European trials so horrific. Since they were assumed to have the devil by their sides rendering magical aid, witches could be treated much worse than other defendants. And who would testify in court if he had to face a powerful witch who could curse him with her eyes? For these and other reasons witchcraft was the "exceptional crime," and the ordinary rules of evidence and procedure could be suspended in the trials of witches.

In Saudi Arabia most of the accused are domestic servants or other workers from Africa and Indonesia. Some of these people practice religions, or versions of Islam, that the Saudi state regards as sorcery. The campaign against witchcraft seems to be in part a way of dealing with the threat these foreigners pose to Saudi society:

By 2011, the unit had created a total of nine witchcraft-fighting bureaus in cities across the country, according to Arab News, and had "achieved remarkable success" in processing 586 cases of magical crime, the majority of which were foreign domestic workers from Africa and Indonesia. Then, last year, the government announced that it was expanding its battle against magic further, scapegoating witches as the source of both religious and social instability in the country. The move would mean new training courses for its agents, a more powerful infrastructural backbone capable of passing intelligence across provinces, and more raids.

And as in Renaissance Europe, there is often a burlesque element to these cases, which mock the accusers more than the accused:

The sorceress was naked. The sight of her bare flesh startled the prudish officers of Saudi Arabia's infamous religious police, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), which had barged into her room in what was supposed to be a routine raid of a magical hideout in the western desert city of Madinah's Al-Seeh neighborhood. They paused in shock, and to let her dress. The woman -- still unclothed -- managed to slip out of the window of her apartment and flee. According to the 2006 account of the Saudi Okaz newspaper, which has been described as the Arabic equivalent of the New York Post, she "flew like a bird." A frantic pursuit ensued. The unit found their suspect after she had fallen through the unsturdy roof of an adjacent house and onto the ground next to a bed of dozing children.

It bothers me some times that we treat the Saudi government as our friends despite their religious agenda, which is diametrically opposed to everything I believe in.