They don't just enforce the non-consumption of illicit products or engaging in illicit sex, which of course Western governments have had a long history of doing (though with the benefit of elected legislatures to lobby and amend legislation in the 20th century, and no religious vice squad given free rein, the comparison to Saudi is a bit facile). They also enforce strict gender segregation and stop women from going about their business alone. I'm all for breaking down silly American stereotypes about Arabs and particularly Saudis as a wholly different sort of moral species but the equivalence really doesn't hold here.

There are ridiculous puritans in America, sure, but the mutawaa and "Hayaa" (their Jeddah / Hejaz wing) go beyond the pale. As an example, I have a Turkish friend who drove for a year in Saudi before getting his license (requiring sitting through a month-long course, given in Arabic - which he didnt understand - and paying off insurance and other officials) - he got away with it by having his wife sitting in the front seat next to him everywhere he drove.

As soon as they stopped him at any checkpoint, they would just glance at his wife sitting next to him in an abaya, niqab-less, and panicking, just wave him past. When some Saudis told me it was out of respect to women ("She's not their family member"), frankly that's BS. I think fear is the better word, these police panic because they feel sexually threatened... Saudi Arabia is not the only country where, in private, women can dominate men through sexual manipulation, but the way in which this plays out in daily life is disturbing.

I'm very much an admirer of much of Arab culture, and especially the Hijaz - as a muslim - but the Nejdi attitudes in the Jazeera are just wrong, and frankly perverse... seeing women as sexual objects and nothing else is the flip-side of Western pornography, which helps to explain the rampant corruption and consumption of satellite pornography.

The point of my post is whether or not putting them on trial is a sign of subjecting them to some legal and political limitations. Not an equivalence thing, hence the wiscracks on arresting people for flirting and shimmying and being within six feet of unrelated vaginas (or penises). (The last part is a caution against excessive self-righteousness only --- although I didn't also get into laws, only removed in my lifetime, against people of different colors mixing or getting married in the USA, enforced on millions of people and occasionally with killer dogs).

Matthew, point taken - but the fact that Saudis have no voting rights (and women don't even have the right to vote in those extremely nominal local elections that one hears talk of) rather dilutes that efficacy of "legal and political limitations" on the mutawwa, no? Clearly this is a sign of social resistance and the ruling family must still be sensitive to public opinion but it's not like anyone can vote in the equivalent of civil rights legislation.

The good old CPVPV aka CPVPV3

An associate recently in Riyadh said the muttawa have essentially been banned from public places and will only be re-allowed out on the streets for Ramadan. She also said there are Saudi women openly walking around - in Riyadh - uncovered. Abaya but no hijab, from what I gathered.

This is only anecdotal but it's interesting nonetheless. Arab News recently ran a damning editorial on the abuses of power by the muttawa which, like all such editorials in Arab News, must have been sanctioned (if not actually contributed) by someone on high.