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Saudi Scepticism in action? Witch beheaded.

Soapy Sam

Penultimate Amazing
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16150381

There are several ways to look at this story.

A superstitious religious court executes poor lady (Shock! Horror!).
A self-proclaimed psychic healer gets a sharp lesson in political reality.
A barbaric system shoots itself in the foot.
etc.

Choose one.

I just wonder how many Slyvias there would be if the USA took the biblical exhortation about not suffering a witch to live more seriously.
 
Soapy Sam said:
A self-proclaimed psychic healer gets a sharp lesson in political reality.
Click to expand...

I'd actually have to go with this one. Don't get me wrong, I actually oppose the death penalty under any circumstances and think killing someone over something so minor is utterly insane. However, ignoring the death penalty end of things and looking at it instead as "Person convicted under law X and punished according to the law", it turns out that law X is actually a lot less silly than the headlines about witchcraft might suggest.

Here's what she was actually convicted for:
had tricked people into giving her money, claiming that she could cure their illnesses.
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She's a con artist. She took people's money by lying to them that she could cure them by magic. While I don't think she should have been killed for that, that's absolutely the sort of thing that people should be prosecuted for.

It's also worth bearing in mind that, again aside from the death penalty part, it's not actually particularly different from our laws. For a couple of hundred years, we had the Witchcraft Act, which tends to get mocked when people hear about it and there have been various calls to have people convicted under it pardoned. But the whole point was that it was a law against pretending to have magic powers, not against actually using them. It's since been replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which tends to get misunderstood a bit less but serves essentially the same purpose.

So yeah, killing someone for being a con artist is rather extreme. But convicting someone in court and punishing them for being a con artist is entirely reasonable.
 
I'm not going to take the religious police's word that she was doing what she was accused of doing. There have been many cases where an accusation of "sorcery" has been used as a convenient way for the Saudi government to get rid of someone they don't like.
 
I could be wrong, but I got the impression that most witch killings, at least in Salem, had something to do with promiscuity.
 
The ones with the tits that are twice as cold as a well-diggers ass, natch.
 
A co worker told me about this story at work. At first she said someone in saudi arabia was executed for being convicted of being a witch. I rolled my eyes at first until she said that she was some kind of a charlatan faith healer.

As much as I'd like these kind of frauds to be brought to justice and exposed for the fakes they are, execution is far too extreme for being a liar.
 
Lamuella said:
I'm not going to take the religious police's word that she was doing what she was accused of doing. There have been many cases where an accusation of "sorcery" has been used as a convenient way for the Saudi government to get rid of someone they don't like.
Click to expand...

I'd be interested in learning more about this.


kerikiwi said:
The witchcraft part is worthy of discussion
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Yes. Witch-hunting in Western Africa comes to mind.
This site has a number of links on the subject:
http://www.steppingstonesnigeria.org/witchcraft.html

There seem to be a number of issues here- fraud, fear and finding scapegoats.
 
I am confused here. Are we saying that the Saudi court considers "sourcery" to be a threat to Islam because they believe it is real, or because it is fraudulent?

If it is the latter, why do they perceive it to be a threat?
 
Lamuella said:
I'm not going to take the religious police's word that she was doing what she was accused of doing. There have been many cases where an accusation of "sorcery" has been used as a convenient way for the Saudi government to get rid of someone they don't like.
Click to expand...

Have there? Any evidence for that? More importantly, any evidence it's actually true in this particular case? While it sounds plausible, just because a country is a backwards dictatorship doesn't mean everything they do is always wrong. Amnesty, for example, have commented on the case, but haven't said anything at all about it being politically motivated, and that's exactly the sort of thing they take an interest in.

R.A.F. said:
...this story would not be "news".

So if were going to ignore that pesky death penalty "part", there is no point in further discussion
Click to expand...

As kerikiwi, the witchcraft part seems perfectly reasonable to discuss regardless of the penalty. I find it interesting because this story seems to be being presented as the Saudi judicial system believing in superstitious nonsense, when it actually seems to be a simple case of prosecuting a fraud.

You can talk about the death penalty if you like, but I have absolutely no interest in yet another pointless death penalty thread, so I chose to focus on the other aspects.

Explorer said:
I am confused here. Are we saying that the Saudi court considers "sourcery" to be a threat to Islam because they believe it is real, or because it is fraudulent?

If it is the latter, why do they perceive it to be a threat?
Click to expand...

No, see my earlier post. This doesn't appear to be any different from the Witchcraft Act in the UK - it's not about witchcraft, it's about frauds pretending to be able to do magic.

Of course, the BBC article also mentions a case from 2007 where someone was executed for casting spells, so they may also believe magic to be real and a threat to Islam. That's just not what seems to be happening in this particular case.
 
I'm looking for examples of politically motivated sorcery accusations but there have definitely been sorcery and charlatanry accusations that are highly spurious. To pick one example, an Eritrean man called Muhammad Burhan was arrested for possession of what the religious police described as a "talisman" and sentenced to 20 months in prison and 300 lashes (he actually served double this time). The book was an address book written in the Ge'ez alphabet which is often used in Eritrea. This was all the evidence they had against him:

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/11/24/saudi-arabia-witchcraft-and-sorcery-cases-rise
 
Brombadil said:
A co worker told me about this story at work. At first she said someone in saudi arabia was executed for being convicted of being a witch. I rolled my eyes at first until she said that she was some kind of a charlatan faith healer.

As much as I'd like these kind of frauds to be brought to justice and exposed for the fakes they are, execution is far too extreme for being a liar.
Click to expand...

While i agree she shouldn't have been killed...

What type of addiction to being a con artist does on have to have in order to practice such cons in a place that has a death penalty for it? Assuming the facts are presented correctly, and this lady was just running a Sylvia Browne esque con, this is just insane. How lazy are you when free money means more than life?
 
quarky said:
I could be wrong, but I got the impression that most witch killings, at least in Salem, had something to do with promiscuity.
Click to expand...

I've been studying about this for a book I have been writing. Promiscuity was not a major cause for witch accusations in Europe (the Salem trials are trivial by comparison to the massive witch hunts of Europe.) Although females were much more likely to be accused than males, they were often older women. Being a lower income, social outcast was the quickest way to earn an accusation of witchcraft.
 
Cuddles said:
I'd actually have to go with this one. Don't get me wrong, I actually oppose the death penalty under any circumstances and think killing someone over something so minor is utterly insane. However, ignoring the death penalty end of things and looking at it instead as "Person convicted under law X and punished according to the law", it turns out that law X is actually a lot less silly than the headlines about witchcraft might suggest.

Here's what she was actually convicted for:

She's a con artist. She took people's money by lying to them that she could cure them by magic. While I don't think she should have been killed for that, that's absolutely the sort of thing that people should be prosecuted for.

It's also worth bearing in mind that, again aside from the death penalty part, it's not actually particularly different from our laws. For a couple of hundred years, we had the Witchcraft Act, which tends to get mocked when people hear about it and there have been various calls to have people convicted under it pardoned. But the whole point was that it was a law against pretending to have magic powers, not against actually using them. It's since been replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which tends to get misunderstood a bit less but serves essentially the same purpose.

So yeah, killing someone for being a con artist is rather extreme. But convicting someone in court and punishing them for being a con artist is entirely reasonable.
Click to expand...
Peter Popov wouldn't last long in this society.
 
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