Janet Kuypers
(Based on an AP report by Donna Abu-Nasr, relayed by the editor of cc&d)
This is kind of cool, I get to report on a story I read and want to share with you. I read an AP article in the Naples Daily News on 09/09/06 that in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, the religious police (the Muttawa) now have additional bans to worry about. Normally they’re worrying about making sure woman are appropriately covered, making sure unmarried men and women do not mix in the streets, and making sure men regularly attend Mosque prayers religiously, but now a new ban is in place: a ban on the sale of cats and dogs.
You see, the Muttawa are given leeway “to enforce any laws they deem necessary to uphold social order,” and so they decided to bam the same of cats and dogs because young people have been purchasing their pets and “parading them in public” (which Donna Abu-Nasr describes now as a “fashion statement,” and these pet owners are now using their pets as a “status symbol”).
Keeping pets is not historically common, but in the past people have kept dogs for hunting and guarding.
Now, apparently conservative Muslims don’t think dogs are good (the AP article said “Muslims despise dogs as unclean”). But the cat ban confuses people, because (well, other than my personal opinion that they’re adorable and don’t clobber all over you like a dog would...) the Islamic tradition says that Prophet Muhammad loved cats — and I quote Donna Abu-Nasr, Muhammad “even let a cat drink from his absolutions water before washing himself for prayer.”
Now, according to reports, no one knows if the Muttawa planned to confiscate purchased pets, is people who already owned dogs and cats would still be allowed to walk in public with their pets (“What’s the point of dragging a dog behind you?” Aleetha al-Jihani wrote in a letter to Al-Madina newspaper. This is blind emulation of the infidels”). And since pet stores can’t sell cats and dogs, no one knows if this means that pet owners could sell puppies or kittens born form their pets.
And if things like terrorism and unemployment are so common in the area, you have to wonder why they are watching over little details from Western civilization — when they already have things like “fast food, shorts, jeans and pop music that have become more common” in the area.
Iran’s Shiite clerics even have religious police who harass people who go outside with their dogs. And yeah, it confuses me — as well as a lot of other people — that the ban for cats also exists, “since there’s no scorn for them as there is for dogs in Islamic traditions.”
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