Religious Police

With the girls finally in school full time (& loving it!) I am finally free to get out of the compound on a regular basis, without needing him indoors to take me, as I can use the shopping bus which goes into town every week day morning. I went on the bus yesterday, it goes somewhere different in town everyday, always goes to one of the 4 main supermarkets and also goes to a selection of different shopping centres and souks. The shopping centres are pretty much like the ones at home, they have food courts, a selection of shops and invariably a Starbucks or two. Your feel very safe in these malls which are light, airy, and full of high street names familiar in the UK. Yesterday for instance I did a bit of shopping in Body Shop, Accessorize and Zara. The Souk however are a different matter. There are different Souks around town specialising in different shops. There is a gold souk, a computer souk, the main souk (which has a selection of all sorts) and the one I was in yesterday which is great for handbags, abayas, cheap shoes, in fact mainly women's stuff. The souks are generally a series of lock-up shops all undercover, a bit like a covered market in the UK, but generally alot dirtier. You can pick up some real bargains in these places. The Ladies on the shopping bus however tend to stick together like glue in these places, you tend to get stared at an awful lot more and I have heard of some instances of minor problems of being ripped off, propositioned by Arabs etc, and so I am alot more aware of my surroundings etc whilst in the souks. Yesterday, in the Souk, I had my first experience of a Muttawa (the Saudi Religious Police) It is the Muttawa's job to go around enforcing Sharia law as defined by the government, specifically by the "Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice"(CPVPV) - great name for a committee I think! The Muttawa are usually accompanied by a police escort. They have the power to arrest unrelated males and females caught socializing, anyone engaged in homosexual behavior or prostitution. It is also their job to enforce Islamic dress-codes and store closures during the prayer time. Yesterday's first meeting with one of them to be honest was quite funny. This Muttawa guy started shouting at us telling us to cover our heads. Most of us western women here do not cover our heads here when we are out about shopping. We would however if we had to go somewhere where we need to be particularly respectful, such a police station. Anyway this guy started yelling at us, his only problem was that because we had not covered our heads he wouldn't look at us, he was ranting away whilst looking almost in the opposite direction to where we were standing, so to begin with we had absolutely no idea who he was talking to. We were all staring up & down the souk wondering who it was that he was shouting at, when it dawned on us that infact we were the subject of his rant. Anyway, as we are not Muslim, there is no requirement to cover up, so we ignored him and after about 5 minutes he shut up and wondered off, presumably to find some other incident of "vice" to prevent. Luckily we were in a group of 6, if we had been in a smaller group I am sure that we wouldn't have had the balls to ignore him. I believe that in some places in Saudi the Muttawa can be particularly harsh, but I suppose we are quite lucky in the big scale of things to live in a relatively tolerant part of the Kingdom.