Daawa camps in Saudi Arabia

via The News :

Something failing to receive attention in Pakistan amid the Lal Masjid crisis was the announcement in Riyadh in the beginning of this month of a decision to restrict the work of "Daawa" summer camps in the country.

Saudi Arabia's top Arabic newspaper Ash-Sharq al Awsat said that the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowments, Daawa and Guidance was "in the final stages of preparing for the process of monitoring the kingdom's religious Daawa camps." All religious camps to be established from this year will be under the direct control of the ministry and the local authorities.

The objective is to put an end to "the exploitation of these camps by agenda-driven individuals," it said, giving as its source a top official of the ministry. The development follows the announcement last month of three members of Saudi Arabia's feared religious police, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, being put on trial. They are accused of involvement in the death of a man in their custody.

The Saudi government is also investigating an incident in which an Indonesian maid jumped to her death from a fourth-floor apartment raided by the religious police, the beating of a university student accused of having "inappropriate photos" in his mobile phone, and the arrest of two brothers allegedly possessing alcohol. "The commission has taken in the roles of policeman, judge and jury," as a woman columnist wrote in the Jeddah newspaper Arab News.

A statement by the Saudi interior ministry on April 27 indicates the seriousness of the extremist situation in that country. In the previous nine months the authorities had arrested 172 men belonging to at least seven jihadi cells. Saudi Arabia, which saw the bloody seizure of the Kaaba complex in Mecca by armed fanatics in 1979, has at long last begun to deal with its own "Lal Masjid."