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Saudi sisters flee father and brothers who beat them: “I was like a prisoner”

Feb 25, 2019 12:00 pm By Robert Spencer

“They were like my jailer, like my prison officer. I was like a prisoner. It was basically modern day slavery. You can’t go out of the house unless someone is with us. Sometimes we will stay for months without even seeing the sun.”

This is not some extremist abuse. Islamic law forbids women to leave the house without permission of a male guardian.

“‘I was like a prisoner’: Saudi sisters trapped in Hong Kong recall beatings,” by Anne Marie Roantree, Reuters, February 23, 2019:

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Two sisters from Saudi Arabia who fled the conservative kingdom and have been hiding out in Hong Kong for nearly six months said they did so to escape beatings at the hands of their brothers and father.

The pair, who say they have renounced their Muslim faith, arrived in the Chinese territory from Sri Lanka in September. They say they were prevented from boarding a connecting flight to Australia and were intercepted at the airport by diplomats from Saudi Arabia.

Reuters could not independently verify their story….

Every decision had to be approved by the men in their house, from the clothes they wore to the hairstyle they chose – even the times when they woke and went to sleep, the sisters told Reuters.

“They were like my jailer, like my prison officer. I was like a prisoner,” said the younger sister, Rawan, referring to two brothers aged 24 and 25 as well as her father.

“It was basically modern day slavery. You can’t go out of the house unless someone is with us. Sometimes we will stay for months without even seeing the sun,” the elder sister, Reem, said….

Reem and Rawan said their 10-year-old brother was also encouraged to beat them.

“They brainwashed him,” Rawan said, referring to her older brothers. Although he was only a child, she said she feared her younger brother would become like her older siblings.

The family includes two other sisters, aged five and 12. Reem said she and her sister feel terrible about leaving them, although they “hope their family will get a lesson from this and it might help to change their lives for the better.”

Reem and Rawan decided to escape while on a family holiday in Sri Lanka in September. They had secretly saved around $5,000 since 2016, some of it accumulated by scrimping on items they were given money to buy.

The timing of their escape was carefully planned to coincide with Rawan’s 18th birthday so she could apply for a visitor’s visa to Australia without her parents’ approval.

But what was supposed to be a two-hour stopover in Hong Kong has turned into nearly six months and the sisters are now living in fear that they will be forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia.

They have said they have renounced Islam – a crime punishable by death under the Saudi system of sharia, or Islamic law, although the punishment has not been carried out in recent memory….

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Filed Under: Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Sharia, women's rights in Islam Tagged With: Rawan, Reem


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 12:25 pm

    Factually correct. Saudi women are kept sometimes for years as prisoners in their own homes. They watch TV all day and never meet a friend. A Saudi doctor (I can’t recall) spoke of doing house-calls for many women like this.

    In Mohammed’s ‘farewell sermon’, he declared ‘WOMEN ARE YOUR PRISONERS’. Another version says, ‘WOMEN ARE YOUR HOUSE PETS … DOMESTIC ANIMALS’.

  2. Barbara says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 12:49 pm

    These two are refuges. They need help. At their ages they should be free to go where they want.

  3. Terry Gain says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 12:53 pm

    “Reuters could not independently verify their story….”

    …. which is entirely consistent with Islamic Law as applied in Saudi Arabia.

    The Left will be along momentarily to support the liberation of these women

  4. revereridesagain says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 12:54 pm

    ‘They have said they have renounced Islam – a crime punishable by death under the Saudi system of sharia, or Islamic law, although the punishment has not been carried out in recent memory….’

    How does Reuters know this? Are they privy to what goes on in every household in Saudi Arabia and would automatically be notified should an “honor” murder be carried out against a family member who had renounced Islam? Or would they prefer not to know?

    • keith Oades says

      Feb 25, 2019 at 4:52 pm

      The Saudi’s don’t kill anyone. They are peace loving, misunderstood people.

  5. Peter Buckley says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 12:55 pm

    “The pair, who say they have renounced their Muslim faith…….”

    Be honest. There are millions of “muslims” in the world who aren’t in fact muslims at all. One of the funniest things is when some delusional claims there are “x million muslims in (wherever)…”.

    Nope. Don’t kid yourself. If it’s a muslim, it’s just wishful thinking. If it’s a non-muslim, it’s simply politically-correct received wisdom, without a shred of evidence.

  6. Billy Chickens says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 12:59 pm

    Slavery still exists. But it exists in Islam so that’s OK.

  7. Mirren10 says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 1:04 pm

    ”If it’s a muslim, it’s just wishful thinking.”

    ??

    What do you mean by this ? Are you suggesting there are no pious practicing muslims ?

    • Terry Gain says

      Feb 25, 2019 at 1:48 pm

      How can you be pious and an adherent of an oppressive, totalitarian, supremacist and evil ideology.

      • gravenimage says

        Feb 25, 2019 at 5:43 pm

        There are indeed those who are very devout in their adherence to Islam–including all Jihadists.

    • Peter Buckley says

      Feb 25, 2019 at 2:18 pm

      No. I mean they are inflating the figures, consciously or unconsciously (but probably the former).

      If you know what they admit privately to each other, you get a completely different picture:

      • Giacomo Latta says

        Feb 26, 2019 at 11:44 am

        So how incredibly sad. Better go ”back home” then!

  8. Jayell says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 1:54 pm

    Haven’t the father and brothers got anything more constructive to do with their time than waste it on monitoring and ttempting to cintrol these females? Or did Allah give them all that oil money so that they can just sit on their backsides all day and play a game of concentraton camps with their own relatives? Does it make them feel ‘big’ or something, or stave off the boredom when there aren’t any dissident journalists to gruesomely eliminate in some twisted islamic version of a real-life ‘James Bond’ game? Are they really that stupid or are they perhaps suffering from the same sort of paranoid psychosis as Western feminists such as the last UK Solicitor General who twisted the rules of jurisprudence to suit her own delusions of sexist omnipotence and hasn’t yet been hauled over the coals for her multitudinous acts of maliicious incompetence?

    • Michael Copeland says

      Feb 26, 2019 at 4:05 am

      The Bronze Age desert tribal mindset may offer a clue.
      Male supremacism is assured by the humiliation of others.

      “The Western mind is hopelessly handicapped for comprehending Islamic ideology. To make any headway there is a need to part company with many basic assumptions and replace them with unfamiliar foreign ones, involving a large effort of imagination.”
      https://gatesofvienna.net/2014/10/the-mindset-need/

      • Prabh says

        Feb 26, 2019 at 12:32 pm

        from
        https://gatesofvienna.net/2014/10/the-mindset-need/
        No private conscience is permitted in Islam. There is no separation of mosque and state: mosque is part of state. Islam, with its thousands of detailed rules, remains today a total system of conduct: “no one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private”, wrote the famous twentieth-century scholar Maulana Maududi, “the Islamic State bears a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states”.

        ****
        True Greatness in any field cannot be achieved in the absence of privacy, secrecy and confidentiality. The surveillance state that is current day North America is a horrible dystopia but mohamadanism is infinitely worse.

  9. Ashley says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 2:45 pm

    The timing of their escape was carefully planned to coincide with Rawan’s 18th birthday so she could apply for a visitor’s visa to Australia without her parents’ approval.
    ______________________

    Where’s the mother? No mention of her…

    • Anjuli Pandavar says

      Feb 25, 2019 at 5:44 pm

      Her ten-year-old son did not give her permission to get involved.

      • gravenimage says

        Feb 25, 2019 at 6:04 pm

        This is true.

        When Ali Hirsi Ali’s father left the family in Saudi Arabia, her mother had to take her 10-year-old son with her as a “guardian” whenever she left the house.

        He soon found that he could not only stay out all hours whether his mother liked it or not, but that he could leave his mother and sisters trapped in the house for days at a time if he felt like it. So perverse.

  10. Ashley says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 2:56 pm

    These girls are in grave danger…

    https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/02/23/exclusive-stranded-saudi-sisters-fear-safety-hong-kong-clock-ticks-hopes-asylum/

  11. gravenimage says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 5:26 pm

    Saudi sisters flee father and brothers who beat them: “I was like a prisoner”
    …………………

    So glad they got out.

    And I have heard before about Infidel nations that allow Saudi “diplomats” to go after women who have fled the country. Why is this allowed?

  12. Anjuli Pandavar says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 5:50 pm

    All Western embassies and consulates around the world should be on standby to offer automatic asylum to any Saudi woman or girl who makes it to there. Let’s start with that exceedingly-modest humanitarian gesture.

    • Heidi says

      Feb 26, 2019 at 2:49 am

      all Western “politicians” should cut the economic ties to Saudi Arabia but, as Vespasian said “Money doesn’t stink”.

      • gravenimage says

        Feb 26, 2019 at 7:26 pm

        Yes–these Muslim thugs are no allies of ours.

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