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Sor­cery plays a huge role in Harry Pot­ter nov­els and sub­se­quent block­busters. It even did well for Disney’s Aladdin sto­ry­books and ani­mated movies. So imag­ine get­ting the death penalty for own­ing a book on magic, try­ing to learn it or believ­ing in psy­chic medi­ums like John Edward or James Van Praagh. This alone would indict mil­lions of peo­ple around the world. And yet this is exactly what is occur­ring in Saudi Ara­bia right now. 

Hear­ing about reli­gious police – Mutawa’een –  in Saudi Ara­bia arrest­ing cit­i­zens who believe in the super­nat­ural, prac­tice magic, pray less than five times a day or don’t cover their hair as proper Mus­lim women should was a huge dis­ap­point­ment. I cringed at the thought.

Then when I read that Saudi Mutawa’een arrested Ali Hus­sain Sibat — a  Lebanese TV show host who pre­dicts the future in Ara­bic from Beirut via satel­lite TV — while he was vis­it­ing holy cities on pil­grim­age, my mind drifted. I could not imag­ine the hor­ror this 46 year old, father of five was going through. For a moment, I thought I had inad­ver­tently time trav­eled into the Salem Witch trials.

Then I read that his cap­tors offered to release him once he con­fessed on-air at a Saudi tele­vi­sion sta­tion only to have the Saudi legal sys­tem try him and sen­tence him to death. Real­ity abruptly sank in. This was beyond sick.

Con­sider the sim­i­lar­i­ties. Back in late 1600’s, it was a com­mon prac­tice to accuse peo­ple of sor­cery, test their faith (e.g., bru­tally tor­ture), fine (or con­fis­cate their pos­ses­sions), try them and soon after hang or burn them at the stake. But like most witch hunts, there is always an ulte­rior motive. In Salem, many women accused of “witch­craft” and sen­tenced to death were either unmar­ried or recently wid­owed land-owning women. The law at the time granted land with no legal heir back to the pre­vi­ous owner upon the owner’s death. This made witch hunt­ing a way to acquire lucra­tive prop­erty with lit­tle effort.

This brings up the arti­cle that I found in today’s Saudi Gazette. The online paper dis­cusses how Saudi cit­i­zens can report heretics with­out any recourse. Gee, this sounds a tad like the way the Roman Catholic Church encour­aged cit­i­zens to report sus­pected heretics dur­ing the Inqui­si­tion. Or even when Ger­man Nazis encour­aged towns­peo­ple to report on Jews dur­ing the Holocaust.

Get a load of what the direc­tor of the Hai’a branch of sor­cery in Riyadh, Sheikh Adel Faqih said:

“We deal with sor­cer­ers in a spe­cial way. No one should think that we men­tion the name of whomever files a report about sor­cery. We pro­tect the iden­tity of infor­mants. We merely receive the infor­ma­tion and thank the indi­vid­ual for his help with­out involv­ing him in any kind of confrontation.”

Faqih also said that they do not arrest a sor­cerer sim­ply because some­one has filed a report against him.

The Gazette goes on to describe more of Faqih’s meth­ods of iden­ti­fy­ing sor­cer­ers. Some have to do with ask­ing for the name of a patient or a patient’s mother or if he’s (notice the gen­der bias here) seek­ing to buy an ani­mal with cer­tain fea­tures. One com­ment goes as far as sug­gest­ing if he asks for a sheep to be killed with­out men­tion­ing Allah’s name and asks to stain the body with the animal’s blood or if he asks for sim­i­lar unusual things.

Wow. All of it’s unusual, espe­cially since we’re only 8 days from 2010.

Hmmm. Sounds eerily like Catholic monks scout­ing for heretics that can’t cross them­selves prop­erly or Judaiz­ers that refuse to eat ham. His­tory is replete with exam­ples of groups that develop flawed pro­to­cols to iden­tify dis­be­liev­ers or groups that don’t make the cut. This, like all the ones before it, is a recipe for disaster.

Last July, a north­ern Saudi city sen­tenced another man to death in rela­tion to “sor­cery.” The Mutawa’een raided his home and found walls cov­ered in 100,000 words of graf­fiti includ­ing dis­torted verses of Quran. Next to noth­ing is known about the trial but the court con­victed him of “apos­tasy” rather than sorcery.

These cases gar­nered a strong reac­tion from Amnesty Inter­na­tional UK Direc­tor Kate Allen who stated,

“Saudi Ara­bia already has an appalling record of exe­cut­ing peo­ple after bogus tri­als, but these cases are a dis­turb­ing new twist”

Hav­ing an anti-sorcery patrol in Saudia Ara­bia today like the monks that scouted for heretics in the Inqui­si­tion is ironic. All reli­gions require their fol­low­ers to believe in the super­nat­ural. But sen­tenc­ing peo­ple to death in 2009 for prac­tic­ing magic, pre­dict­ing horo­scopes or writ­ing graf­fiti on their own walls only shows that the ONLY super­nat­ural Islam allows is its own teachings.   

So if you’re not a fan of the Criss Angel Mind­f­reak tele­vi­sion series or you’re annoyed by yet another heav­ily pro­moted David Blaine stunt, don’t get your hopes up. Saudi Ara­bia is prob­a­bly the last place on earth either will perform.

Photo credit: Annie Liebovitz

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