2013 8_13 Saudi Arabia's War on Witchcraft - The Atlantic

7/25/2019 2013 8_13 Saudi Arabia's War on Witchcraft - The Atlantic

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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 wassupposed 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.

Saudi Arabia's War on

WitchcraftA special unit of the religious police pursues magical crime

aggressively, and the convicted face death sentences.

R Y A N J A C O B S | A U G 1 9 , 2 0 1 3 | G L O B A L

Members of the religious police attend a training course. The Saudi authorities have a unit dedicated specifically to

hunting witches

Ali Jarekji / Reuters

di Arabia's War on Witchcraft - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/saudi-arabi...

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The woman -- still unclothed -- managed to slip out of the windowof her

apartment and flee. According to the 2006 accountof the Saudi Okaz

newspaper, which has been describedas the Arabic equivalent of theNew York

Post, she "flew like a bird." A frantic pursuit ensued. The unit found their

suspect after she had fallenthrough the unsturdy roof of an adjacent house and

onto the ground next to a bed of dozing children.

They covered her body, arrested her, and claimed to uncover key evidence

indicating that witchcraft had indeed been practiced, including incense,

talismans, and videos about magic. In theAl Arabiyareport, a senior Islamic

cleric lamented that the incident had occurred in a city of such sacred history.

The prophet Muhammad is buried there, and it is considered the second most

holy location in Islam, second to Mecca. The cleric didn't doubt the details of

the incident. "Some magicians may ride a broom and fly in the air with the

help of the jinn [supernatural beings]," he said.

The fate of this sorceress is not readily apparent, but her plight is common.

Judging from the punishments of others accused of practicing witchcraft in

Saudi Arabia before and since, the consequences were almost certainly

severe.

In 2007, Egyptian pharmacist Mustafa Ibrahim was beheaded in Riyadh after

his conviction on charges of "practicing magic and sorcery as well as adultery

and desecration of the Holy Quran." The charges of "magic and sorcery" are

not euphemisms for some other kind of egregious crime he committed; they

alone were enough to qualify him for a death sentence. He first came to the

attention of the religious authorities when members of a mosque in the

northern town of Arar voiced concerns over the placement of the holy book in

the restroom. After being accused of disrupting a man's marriage through

spellwork, and the discoveryof "books on black magic, a candle with an

incantation 'to summon devils,' and 'foul-smelling herbs,'" the case -- and

eventually his life -- were swallowed by the black hole of the discretionary

Saudi court system.

The campaign of persecution has shown no signs of fizzling. In May, two Asian


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maids were sentencedto 1,000 lashings and 10 years in prison after their

bosses claimed that they had suffered from their magic. Just a few weeks ago,

Saudi newspapers began running the image of an Indonesian maid being

pursuedon accusations that she produced a spell that made her male boss's

family subject to fainting and epileptic fits. "I swear that we do not want to hurt

her but to stop her evil acts against us and others," the man told the news site

Emirates 24/7.

According to Adam Coogle, a Jordan-based Middle East researcher for Human

Rights Watch who monitors Saudi Arabia, the relentless witch hunts reveal the

hollowness of the country's long-standing promises about liberalizing its

justice system.

In a country where public observance of any religion besides Islam is strictly

forbidden, foreign domestic workers who bring unfamiliar traditional religious

or folk customs from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Africa, or elsewhere can make

especially vulnerable and easy targets. "If they see these [folk practices or

items] they immediately assume they're some kind of sorcery or witchcraft,"

he said.

The Saudi government's obsession with the criminalization of the dark arts

reached a new level in 2009, when it created and formalized a special "Anti-

Witchcraft Unit" to educate the public about the evils of sorcery, investigate

alleged witches, neutralize their cursed paraphernalia, and disarm their

spells. Saudi citizens are also urged to use a hotline on the CPVPV website to

report any magical misdeeds to local officials, according to theJerusalem Post.

According to a director of the religious police's witchcraft division in Riyadh,

the unit providesconfidentiality 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. In 2009

alone, at least 118 peoplewere charged with "practicing magic" or "using the

book of Allah in a derogatory manner" in the province of Makkah, the

country's most populous region.


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Faqih also claimed that the process of arresting someone for crimes of magic

involved more than just receiving a tip from a neighbor or employer. A formal

investigation would be pursued, and "information must be collected before an

arrest can be made." What sort of information do they need? The answer was

unsurprisingly vague and innocuous: if the suspect sought to purchase "an

animal with certain features." For example, "he asks for a sheep to be killed

without mentioning Allah's name and asks to stain the body with the animal's

blood or if he asks for similar unusual things."

By 2011, the unit had created a total of ninewitchcraft-fighting bureaus in

cities across the country, according to Arab News, and had "achieved

remarkable success" in processing at least 586 cases of magical crime, themajority of which were foreign domestic workers from Africa and Indonesia.

Then, last year, the government announcedthat 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. The force booked 215 sorcerers

in 2012.

***

The most aggressive pursuit of witches tends to be in the interior of the

Arabian peninsula, a parcel of the country that hosts the capital city Riyadh

and many of the most dedicated followers of Salafism, the ultra-conservative

school of Sunni Islam that the government enforcesthroughout the country inits religious courts.

Wresting the country's criminal proceedings from the grip of one of the

strictest strains of Islam would involve more than just the development of a

more progressive outlook; it would require cosmic revisions in Saudi history

and religious identity.

The Saudi government and many of its citizens subscribe to the 18th-century

teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a revivalist Islamic scholar who


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called for a return to literal interpretations of the Quran, and for the

abandonment of folk rituals that had developed around the worship of Islamic

shrines and grave sites. Accordingto historian Vladmir Borisovich Lutsky:

He sharply criticised such superstitious survivals as fetishism and

totemism, which, to him, were indistinguishable from idolatry.

Formally all the Arabs were Moslems. But, in reality, there existed

many local tribal religions in Arabia. Each Arab tribe, each village

had its fetish, its beliefs and rites. The variety of religious forms that

stemmed from the primitive level of social development and the

lack of cohesion between the countries of Arabia were seriousobstacles to political unity. Abd el-Wahhab set up against this

religious polymorphism a single doctrine called tauhid (unity)...

....

The Wahhabis fought against the survivals of local tribal cults. They

destroyed the tombs of the saints, and forbade magic fortune-

telling. But at the same time their teachings were directed against

official Islam.

Under Wahhabi doctrine, magic is seen as a serious affront to the pure and

exclusive relationship one is supposed to share with Allah.

But belief in the supernatural and magic is actually quite common in Muslim

culture. According to the Quran, thejinnare demonic supernatural beingsthatwere created out of fire at the same time as man. Some believe thatjinnhave

the power to cause harm, and it is not uncommon for the possessed to visit

faith healers or sorcerers tasked with ridding the evil.

Accordingto the Pew Research Center's Religion and Public Life Project:

In most of the countries surveyed, roughly half or more Muslims

affirm thatjinnexist and that the evil eye is real. Belief in sorcery is


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somewhat less common: half or more Muslims in nine of the

countries included in the study say they believe in witchcraft.

Accusations ofjinnworship and witchcraft once even touchedthe

administration of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when his

advisers and aides were arrested on charges of black magic. Ahmadinejad

denied the charges, but a sorcerer well-known among the ruling class claimed

that he met with the President at least twice and gathered intelligence for him

on "Jinn who work for Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, and for the U.S.

Central Intelligence Agency," according to the Wall Street Journal.

According to the Pew survey, the majority of

Muslims agree that Islam restricts making

contact withjinnor using magic. But

Wahhabism is particularly opposed to this

notion, according to Muhammad Husayn

Ibrahimi's analysisof the sect:

Based on some verses of the Qur'an,

Shaykh Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab,

Ibn Taymiyyah and the contemporary

Wahhabis regard seeking help from other

than God or asking for their intercession

{shafa'ah} as an act of polytheism. Theirmain proof is the phrase, "other than

God" in verse 18 of Surah Yunus. The

Wahhabis regard the prophets, saints,

idols, thejinn, and the dead as the most

vivid manifestations of this verse.

This might explain why Saudis, many of whom are devout Wahhabi


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practitioners, are so fierce when it comes to the pursuit of witches.

***

The courts are controlled by judges -- commonly religious clerics -- who have

unlimited latitude to interpret and define the content of witchcraft crime, thedetails of which are not articulated in a spare, barely existent penal code. They

can also mete out capital punishments as they see fit. Saudi Arabia ranks third

behind China and Iran for its number of executions. Evidence in these cases is

limitedto witness testimony and the presentation of the "magical" items

discovered in the possession of the accused.

The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia did not respond to requests for comment

on the specifics of its dealings with witchcraft crime.

The ability to defend against the charges seems to depend on the caprice of the

particular judge assigned to the case. In the 2006 caseof Fawza Falih, who

was sentenced to death on charges of "'witchcraft, recourse tojinn, 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 diedin

prison as a result of poor health.

The police can also use questionable tactics. In 2008, a well-known Lebanese

television personality, Ali Hussain Sibat, who made a living by telling callers'

fortunes and instructing them on other superstitious matters, was lured into an

undercover sting operationwhile making a religious pilgrimage to Mecca.

According to theNew York Times, he was arrested shortly after the police

recorded conversations he held about providing a magical elixir to a woman

that would force her husband to separate from his second wife. His death

sentence was later stayed after outcry from international human rights

organizations.

Belief in magic is so widespread that it is often invoked as a defense in Sharia

courts. "If there's an employer dispute -- say the migrant domestic worker


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claims she wasn't paid her wages or her conditions are unlivable -- a lot of

times what happens unfortunately is the defendant makes counterclaims

against the domestic worker," Coogle said. "And a lot of times they'll make

counterclaims of sorcery, witchcraft, and that sort of thing."

Domestic workers, many of whom who are not fluent in Arabic, face significant

challenges in defending themselves against these charges, according to

Coogle. Sometimes, he says, "they don't even know what's happening." "I

think that there are cases where the authorities will provide translation, but

I'm told the translation isn't always available and isn't always reliable." Many

don't have the resources to hire a lawyer, so they are often representing

themselves, unless a human rights organization takes on their case.

Even then, they must face a religious cleric who serves simultaneously as a

judge and a prosecutor and can often introduce new charges or modify existing

ones during the course of the proceedings. "When you have a situation that's

so arbitrary and left to the discretion of a judge, women without the means to

defend themselves can sort of be left alone," he said. Though some of the

cases receive international attention, Coogle expects that many don't make

headlines at all. "Given the isolation of these individuals," he said, "I just

expect that a lot happens that we don't know about."

A B O U T T H E A U T H O R

RYAN JACOBSis a former producer for TheAtlantic.com.

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2013 8_13 Saudi Arabia's War on Witchcraft - The Atlantic