RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is your country. This is your country on Islam.

A leading Saudi Arabian “self-help” writer has urged his 97,000+ Twitter followers to sexually molest working women in the nation’s grocery stores. Using the hashtag #harass_female_cashiers, Abdullah Mohammed Daoud reportedly called for the move as a means to press for Saudi women to stay at home and protect their chastity.

And using Muslim logic, there’s no better way to protect female chastity than through sexual abuse. Either that or an honor killing.

But surely this horrible behavior can’t be based on Islam? Yes, yes it can.

Daoud’s tweet, which was translated and picked up by Gulf News, was apparently “justified” by a homily about a 7th century Islamic warrior who did not want his wife to leave home to visit the mosque.

The paper writes: “Daoud claimed that Al Zubair hid in the dark one night and molested his wife on the street. The wife rushed home and decided against ever going out of her house again, saying ‘there is no safer place than home and the world out there is corrupt’.”

If you ever wanted to read some Muslim versions of O’Henry stories, Al Zubair is apparently your guy for that. I hear Al Jazeera is thinking of making that into a sitcom.

But let’s be fair here. Abdullah Mohammed Daoud is just a writer. He’s not a Muslim religious authority. No Muslim cleric would distort say that Islam in any way supports molesting strange women to get them to quit work.

But wait…

Sheikh Khalid Ebrahim Al Saqabi, a conservative cleric, endorsed Al Dawood’s calls and said a law proposed by the government against sexual harassment in newly mixed workplaces was “only meant to encourage consensual debauchery”.

Which is very different from what Sheikh Khalid Ebrahim Al Saqabi is doing. He’s encouraging non-consensual debauchery, which apparently Islam thinks is just great.