COMMENT: "Saudi reform is on agenda at last: Despite opposition from clerics, the hear of Saudi Arabia's religious police is steering the kingdom in the right direction," by Fahad Faruqui, The Guardian, 20 April 2010.

The lay of the bad land:

Prior to the days of Bluetooth, men and women thievishly exchanged contact information on a piece of paper or just whispered their phone number to each other.

Technology has given the cat-and-mouse game between the religious police and testosterone-driven locals a new twist. Despite the ban on gender mixing, most men and women in Saudi Arabia connect via Bluetooth, while maintaining proper distance.

But the religious police have no qualms about snatching someone's mobile phone to check for any sly activity, which can result in the phone being confiscated.

A naturalised Saudi woman expressed her dismay about strict segregation laws, saying that it does more harm than good. Nearly 95% of her free time is spent on Facebook, chatting or surfing the internet - which is the only window to the outer world for many Saudi women. When I asked this unmarried Saudi from Jeddah, who does not wish to be named, about sexual harassment in the kingdom, she bluntly replied: "We have a lot of sexual harassment here [in Saudi Arabia], but it's just never mentioned in the newspapers."

Known facets of sexual harassment in the kingdom are intentionally brushing against women and lustfully eyeing them - common in other countries where social interaction with the opposite sex is restricted (as Khaled Diab discussed recently in connection with Egypt).

In Saudi, though, there is another tier to sexual harassment that can cause physical and emotional injury to a woman.

In a society where there have been cases of honour killings, a woman can be entrapped into performing sexual favours. The woman from Jeddah said: "Due to frustration here of no activities, girls and guys tend to meet online, or in the mall or through friends.

Then [they] find a place to have sex either willingly or are forced to have sex; otherwise the guy threats [sic] them that he will tell her parents."

Rape cases are rarely filed in Saudi Arabia.

Now the good news:

Last December, Sheikh Ahmed al-Ghamdi, the head of religious police of Mecca, approved co-education in Saudi Arabia. This is unheard of in the realm of Saudi hardline thinking.

Had to be done to cover the activities of the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology, which is coeducational.

Even better is the ending of the piece:

Ghamdi has recently made another bold declaration, that Islam does not forbid gender mixing and that it's only natural for opposite sexes to mingle. Until now, it was hard to imagine that lifting the ban on gender mixing would even be possible. But Ghamdi's views are gaining support from prominent Muslim scholars who can steer the kingdom in the opposite direction. And the good news is that it seems to be in line with King Abdullah's vision.

Slow but steady, because the only way this works is on a generational scale.

[thanks to WPR's Media Roundup]