Saudi women The head of Saudi\'s religious police has blasted one of his men who ordered a woman to leave a mall because she was wearing nail polish, a local daily reported on Monday. “The world is manufacturing airplanes and we are still telling a woman ‘leave the mall because you’ve got nail polish on your fingers’,” local daily al-Watan quoted Sheikh Abdullatiff Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh as saying.
The woman had defied the orders as she filmed her argument with the policeman and posted it on YouTube, in a video that has attracted more than a million-and-a-half hits thus far.
“I was very disappointed by what I have seen. The matter has been exaggerated and negatively exploited,” Sheikh Abdullatiff, head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, was quoted by AFP as saying.
“The way the member of the commission behaved was not right, even if the girl had gone too far. He should have offered her advice and left instead of arguing with her and escalating,” he said.
The three-and-a-half minute video posted on May 23 shows members of the notorious commission telling the woman to “get out of here (the mall).”
But she refuses to comply, saying: “I’m staying and I want to know what you’re going to do about [it].
“It’s none of your business if I wear nail polish,” the unidentified woman, who is not seen on tape, is heard shouting at bearded men from the feared religious force.
“You are not in charge of me,” she defiantly shouts back, referring to new constraints imposed earlier this year on the religious police banning them from harassing Saudi women over their behavior and attire.
“The government has banned you from coming after us,” she told the men, adding “you are only supposed to provide advice and nothing more.”
The woman filmed the incident herself and posted it on YouTube. At one point during the video, she cautions the religious police that she has already posted the exchange online.
It is not clear if the woman was eventually forced to leave the mall.
The Saudi press heavily criticised the religious police after the release of the video being referred to as the one with “the Manicured Woman” which has been viewed more than 1,664,000 times on YouTube.
It earned only about 2775 “likes” while the number of “dislikes” reached almost 8400.
Reaction to it on social media was equally polarising with some Twitter users calling her a hero for standing up to the police and others arguing that she behaved improperly and that posting the video online was not the correct way to address the issue.
The incident also attracted international media attention with reports in CNN and France 24 to name two large outlets.
Sheikh said that any member of the religious police “who abuses citizens or attacks them has no place in the commission.”
In January, Saudi King Abdullah appointed al-Sheikh, a moderate, to head the religious police raising hopes that a more lenient force will ease draconian social constraints in the Islamic country.
Two weeks into his post, al-Sheikh banned volunteers from serving in the commission which enforces the kingdom’s strict Islamic rules.
And in April he went further prohibiting the religious police from “harassing people” and threatening “decisive measures against violators.”
The religious police prevent women from driving, require them to be covered from head to foot in black, ban public entertainment, and force all commerce, from supermarkets to petrol stations, to come to a halt at prayer times, five times a day.