Chapomatic

This might be big news. First saw it at Ace’s but John at Crossroads Arabia was the next place to visit.
Ace quotes from the BBC:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has sacked two powerful religious officials in a wide ranging shake-up of the cabinet and other government posts.

One of the dismissed men was the head of the controversial religious police force. The other was the country’s most senior judge.

…

The sacked head judge, Sheikh Salih Ibn al-Luhaydan, caused controversy last September when he said it was permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV channels which broadcast immoral programmes.

XRDArabia adds details:

My first take on this shuffle is that the Saudi religious establishment has been taken down a couple of notches, big notches. Al-Luhaidan became notorious for his ‘Mickey Mouse’ [Sorry, that was Sheikh Muhammad Munajid] and ‘death to broadcasters’ fatwas. This was not only embarrassing to the government, but actually scared many Saudis. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, of course, has been a constant concern for many Saudis who, while supporting in the mission of the Commission, believed it was acting without sufficient control and had been arbitrary and abusive in its acts.

The re-establishment of the Grand Ulema Commission undercuts the authority of the Salafist trend within the Saudi religious establishment. It calls for working toward agreements that all Sunni Muslims find acceptable, not just the hardest of the hard-liners.

Clearly, appointing a woman to a senior position is a direct challenge to those who believe a woman’s ‘place’ is sheltered at home in a unisexual universe.

The change perhaps most directly important to the US is the change of the Minister of Education. News reports do not give a full name of which “Prince Faisal bin Abdullah” is named. It might be the King’s son, “Faisal bin Abdullah bin Abdelaziz”, but it’s more likely that it’s “Faisal bin Adbullah bin Mohammed”, the Assistant Director of General Intelligence. That being the case, then this move means that the government is deadly serious about rooting out extremism in the Saudi education system. It has been reported that this Prince Faisal had been working in the background to track them down. Now, he would be in a position to remove them definitively.

All in all, this is a pretty nice Valentine’s Day present to the Saudi people, even if the Commission doesn’t believe in celebrating it!