“These stories convey what it is like to be an innocent civilian (a wife, a servant, a woman), living in a country where barbaric interpersonal violence is normative. Once I picked it up, I literally could not put it down.”
—Phyllis Chesler, emerita professor of psychology and women's studies
at City University of New York, lecturer, and author of Women and Madness, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman and The Death of Feminism
“In
Veiled Atrocities, Sami Alrabaa gives us an extraordinarily effective way of understanding the crimes committed by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Each heart-wrenching short story Alrabaa shares with us conveys, like few authors have been able to do, the ongoing humanitarian crisis of oppression in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Readers of
Veiled Atrocities will finally begin to understand the human dimension and consequences of what radical Islamists have done in the name of Islam and continue to do to women, minorities, reformers and all those with the courage to take on the horrific oppression. Radical Islamists, police and monarchs are suffocating the Saudi population.”
—M. Zuhdi Jasser, MD, founder & president,
American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD)
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” (
muttawas) 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.
Binding:
Paperback275 pages
ISBN: 978-1-61614-159-2
Author Bio:
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.
