Miscellanea Agnostica

I’ve blogged before about Saudi Wahhabist clerics’ inability and unwillingness to face modernity or to accept the existence of women. Their immaturity and misogyny reached a new high recently when they demanded that women be removed from Saudi Arabia’s broadcast media, as Agence France-Presse reports:

Hardline Saudi clerics have called on the government to ban women from appearing on television and to prohibit their images in print media, which they called a sign of growing “deviant thought.” …

“There should be no Saudi woman on television, in any case,” they said.

“There is no doubt that this is religiously impermissible.”

Now, I understand Muslims find their religious principles from the Qur’an and the Hadith, but to my knowledge, they were written centuries ago … so I have no idea how they address radio and television … but these guys can apparently justify their position anyway:

The clerics, including justice officials and academics from a conservative Islamic university, cited several cabinet-endorsed orders and policies from years past which they said supported their argument.

So that’s how they did it; they elevated “several cabinet-endorsed orders and policies from years past” to the level of the Qur’an and the Hadith. That makes sense, I guess … to them, if no one else.

Perhaps they’d all be better off if they just grew up and accepted that about half the human population is made up of women and concede — finally! — that they exist.