SAUDI ARABIA: 'Vice' crackdown at malls

Saudi Arabia's religious police ordered the arrest of 57 young men last week for "flirting" with members of the opposite sex while hanging out at shopping malls.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, often called the mutaween by locals, accused the young men of "wearing indecent clothes and playing loud music and dancing to it to attract girls' attention," according to the Saudi Gazette, an English-language daily published in the kingdom.

The young men's defenders said they were just trying to "have fun" without "imposing themselves" on women.

The mutaween are often at the center of Saudi Arabia's controversies over sex, morality and women's rights. This month they banned florists from selling red roses on Valentine's Day. According to Agence France-Presse, a leading Saudi cleric seven years ago declared the celebration of love "a pagan Christian holiday."

One blogger, Intlxpatr at Here, There and Everywhere, who wrote that he or she had once lived in Saudi Arabia, wondered what the arrests might have looked like:

I remember the mutaween were NOT police, but sometimes they took on the prerogatives of the police. So I have to wonder, like, who made the arrest in the malls? Was it the police? Was it the mutaween hitting the boys with their little sticks?

— Borzou Daragahi in Baghdad

Photo: File picture shows young men at a Starbucks in a shopping mall in the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia. BILAL QABALAN /Agence France-Presse