Kunwar Khuldune Shahid in the Spectator:
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia executed a Bangladeshi man and woman over an ‘indecent act’ inside a mosque in Mecca. While the Saudi interior ministry hasn’t specified the ‘indecency’, and some reports suggest that the two had kissed within the parameters of the Islamic worship place, the kingdom mentioned ‘adultery’ as the offence in its prisoner list sent to the Bangladeshi consular general. Nonetheless, for any extent of ‘indecency’ to be deemed a crime worthy of capital punishment is a barbaric affront to humanity.
Such grotesque disregard for human life, however, isn’t new for Saudi Arabia and the numerous other Muslim-majority states that incorporate Islamic sharia in their penal codes, with savage penalties for thought crimes and expressions of physical affection. Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites, last year topped its highest-ever recorded tally by executing 356 people – second only to Iran’s 2,159 – mostly for non-violent offences, including dissent.
The Bangladeshi duo were sentenced to death by triggering ta’zir, one of three main categories of punishments upheld by Islamic law. As per sharia, ta’zir transgressions, the punishments for which are not explicitly stated in the Quran or Sunnah, are left at the discretion of the qadi, or the sharia court judge. A common ta’zir crime cited in the Quran is ‘lewdness’, used across Islamic history to severely penalise sexually ‘deviant’ acts, including homosexuality, which is still a capital crime in over ten Muslim-majority states….
Where global superstars are naturally exempt from the macabre sharia clauses in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom also grossly discriminates against non-Arab communities, with a majority of punishments meted out to foreign nationals. Workers from across the Muslim world, often in low-paying jobs, are vulnerable to arbitrary crackdowns and widescale abuses of labour rights. Instead of protecting their citizens, the Muslim states largely remain subservient to Saudi Arabia, which has maintained its stranglehold over the Sunni half of the Muslim world (and the Islamic holy sites) with petro-dollars.
Bangladesh’s response to the killing of its citizens has been to profess ignorance and to issue a subdued request for Saudi Arabia to share legal details of the case. Suffice to say, should the kingdom offer the formality of a response, Bangladesh, like most Muslim states, would accept the sharia ruling, which brazenly tramples the sacrosanctity of human life under the intangible ‘sanctity of the mosque’. And in its deafening silence, Bangladesh would be joined by the rest of the Muslim world, where violent protests frequently erupt over sacrilegious cartoons and foreign wars.
Indeed, Muslim protesters, including in the West, are trigger-happy when it comes to unleashing any rage directed against non-Muslim entities. There is deafening silence, however, when Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE, Syria or others massacre hundreds of thousands, or when jihadist groups such as Isis use Islamic scriptures to carry out some of the worst crimes against humanity. But there is uproar galore against Israel, with protesters in the West camouflaging it in a deceitful shroud of ‘human rights’, which only seem to matter when it’s non-Muslims behind their ostensible breach.
The most outrageous example of these double standards was surely the (ongoing) cultural genocide of the Muslim Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang. Not a peep from Muslim countries – even from neighbouring Pakistan – as over a million Uighurs were held in “re-education camps”, and all traces of any Muslim culture were brutally erased. Nothing. They didn’t care.
It is self-preservation that necessitates the al-Saud family’s enforcement of sharia. Any dissension would pave the way for dissidence against the royal family’s absolutist rule over the kingdom. A totalitarian regime is best sustained by a totalitarian ideology, especially when its adherents around the world are willing to accept, if not endorse, pretty much any act of violence committed in its name.
This article in Malaysia’s Star is a little confusing, but says that the two Bangladeshis had been held in detention since August 2023 in connection with separate allegations – the man under cybercrime laws, and the woman for adultery. Whatever the truth here, it seems highly unlikely that they committed some kind of sex act in a mosque. The Saudis just make this stuff up. The two had been working as cleaners, in keeping with the low status of foreign workers generally in Saudi Arabia, and were executed because their lives meant nothing to their keepers.
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