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| The kingdom’s religious police prevent women from driving and require them to be covered from head to foot in black.– AFP (File Photo) |
RIYADH:
Saudi Arabia will curb the powers of its religious police charged with ensuring
compliance with Islamic morality but often accused of abuses, a newspaper
report said on Wednesday.
“The new
system will set a mechanism for the field work of the committee’s men which
hands over some of their specialisations to other state bodies, such as arrests
and interrogations,” Al-Hayat daily quoted religious police chief Sheikh
Abdullatiff Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh as saying.
Agents of
the body known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of
Vice will also be banned from carrying out “searches without prior approval
from the governor,” he said.
Okaz daily
also reported that the religious police agents will be prohibited from
“standing at the entrances of shopping malls to prevent the entry of any
person,” referring to attempts by agents to ban women who do not comply with
the Islamic dress code and unmarried couples from entering malls.
Relatively
moderate Sheikh, appointed in January as the new chief of the religious police,
has raised hopes that a more lenient force will ease draconian social
constraints in the Islamic country.
Two weeks
into his post, Sheikh banned volunteers from serving in the commission which
enforces the kingdom’s strict Islamic rules.
In April he
went further, prohibiting the religious police from “harassing people” and
threatening “decisive measures against violators.”
In June,
Sheikh came out strongly against one of his men who ordered a woman to leave a
mall because she was wearing nail polish.
The woman
had defied the orders as she filmed her argument with the policeman and posted it
on YouTube.
The
kingdom’s religious police prevent women from driving, require them to be
covered from head to foot in black, ban public entertainment and force all
businesses, from supermarkets to petrol stations, to close for prayers five
times a day.
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