Saudi Arabia: An Apartheid State

I showed in my earlier "Islamic gender apartheid creates sexually dysfunctional societies" article that how Saudi gender apartheid is likely to make otherwise heterosexual people desperate enough to turn to lesbian and gay sex.

Gender is not the only apartheid exercised in Saudi Arabia. The other major apartheid exercised in Saudi Arabia is the exclusion of non-Muslim from Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam.

You can see here in this article about a Sri Lankan Christian, who was arrested for being in Mecca, and sent to a Sharia law court to be tried. You can also see the bizarre "Muslims only" road sign, warning non-Muslims to stay away from Mecca and Medina.

Even during the apartheid-era South Africa, black people could go to white areas with written permission, because many of them worked there as factory workers, servants, and gardeners. But non-Muslims are strictly barred from visiting parts of Saudi Arabia. Continued Saudi apartheid is, thus, worse than South Africa's racial apartheid in some respects.

For example, gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia forces women to walk around like mobile post-boxes, they are banned from driving cars, and are legally classified as the property of male guardians (their father or husband). Such horrible oppression of the women, whether Black or White, never occurred in apartheid-era South Africa.

Saudi gender apartheid is as bad as South Africa's racial apartheid in another respect that Saudi women must get the permission of male guardians to leave the country. In apartheid-era South Africa, non-whites needed government permission to go abroad (Nelson Mandela was jailed in 1962 for travelling to London without a permit).

If the US President John F. Kennedy had not pressurised Saudi Arabia to abolish slavery in 1962, slavery will continue to be practised there and black people will continue to be enslaved. This is because, as I explained in an earlier article, Islamic law approves slavery, Prophet Muhammad owned many slaves, including black Africans, and the Sharia-guided Muslim governments of Northern Sudan, Mauritania, and Niger unofficially continue to practise back slavery.

And one must mind the fact that the Arab occupiers of Africa, who had been in the profession of enslaving and selling black people for making a living from the early days of Islam, were extremely angry against the British for forcing them to ban slavery in the 19th century, as this BBC article explains. Like some apartheid-era servants were not paid at all by the whites, the situation is just as bad in today’s apartheid state of Saudi Arabia, as this Guardian article says: "Asian domestic workers in Saudi Arabia face routine human rights abuses that in some cases amount to slavery..."

Note the word "routine" in this quotation, which suggests that Saudi employers of Asian maids and servants are nearly as racist as the apartheid-era South African white employers of non-white servants.

So, it’s ridiculous that Malcolm X – the deputy leader until March 1964 of the racist black American Muslims, the Ku Klux Klan of black America, who famously made a deal with the KKK to divide the US into all-white and all-black areas and amusingly believed that white people were a "race of devils" that was created by a black African scientist, named Yakub – upon visiting Mecca on Hajj pilgrimage in April 1964 assumed that Saudi Arabia was the centre of a civilisation that was not racist towards black people. He was certainly lucky that one of those "white devils", John F. Kennedy, had ensured only two years earlier that Malcolm would not have to see shackled black Africans being sold in the slave-markets of Mecca.

Similarly lucky was legendary boxer and Black American Muslim Muhammad Ali – who called white people devils, and made other racist remarks in a December 1968 ITV interview (available in "Frost on Friday" DVD of old David Frost interviews) – that when he made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1972, he was deprived, thanks to white devil JF Kennedy, of seeing his black African brethren being sold in Saudi slave-markets.

Even until recently, black Africans – Muslim, Christian, and animist – in Southern Sudan or Darfur were captured and enslaved by Arab soldiers of the Sudanese government and government-supported Arab militia, and sold them to slavery.