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The Mutaween (Arabic: مطوعين) (variant English spellings: mutawwain, muttawa, mutawallees, mutawa’ah, mutawi’, mutawwa') are the government-authorized or -recognized religious police (or clerical police) of Saudi Arabia. More recently the term has gained use as an umbrella term indicating any religious-policing organization in an Islamic nation with at least some government recognition or deference, who enforce varied interpretations of Sharia Law.

"Mutawwa'în" (plural; sing. mutawwa') originally referred solely to Saudi Arabia's infrastructure of proselytization and enforcement of Wahhabist tenets under the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. However the phonetic romanization "mutaween" has gained increasing use as a generic term for any religious-policing organization in a Muslim nation. This may range from official state bureaucracies to unabashed terrorist enforcers aligned to powerful local clerics (e.g., the Komité Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp and more militant Basij and Pasejis ^[1] all simultaneously exist in Iran).

Recently (2005), "mutaween" has appeared to describe the enforcement of Sharia by autonomous groups within Muslim enclaves located inside secular nations^[2][3], and has also entered the lexicon of blogosphere slang as a sarcastic pejorative describing politicized, non-Islamic religious groups.^[4]

Main article: Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice

The Mutaween in Saudi Arabia are tasked with enforcing Sharia as defined by the government, specifically by the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV). The Mutaween of the CPVPV is comprised of "more than 3,500 officers in addition to thousands of volunteers...often accompanied by a police escort." They have the power to arrest unrelated males and females caught socializing, any one engaged in homosexual behavior or prostitution; to enforce Islamic dress-codes, and store closures during the prayer time. They enforce Muslim dietary laws, prohibiting the consumption or sale of alcoholic beverages and pork, and seize banned consumer products and media regarded as un-Islamic (such as CDs/DVDs of various Western musical groups, television shows and film). Additionally, they actively prevent the practice or proselytizing of other religions within Saudi Arabia, where such a thing is banned.^[5][6]

Among the things the Mutaween have been criticized or ridiculed for include, use of flogging to punish violators, ^{[7][8][9][10]} banning Valentines Day gifts,^[11][12] arresting priests for saying Mass,^[13] and being staffed by "ex-convicts whose only job qualification was that they had memorized the Quran in order to reduce their sentences."^[14]

Perhaps the most serious and widely criticized incident attributed to them occurred on March 11, 2002, when they prevented schoolgirls from escaping a burning school in Mecca, because the girls were not wearing headscarves and abayas (black robes). Fifteen girls died and 50 were injured as a result. Widespread public criticism followed, both internationally and within Saudi Arabia itself. [1]

Religious police were very active and powerful in Afghanistan during the 1996-2001 reign of the Taliban, which also established a Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, Based at least in part on the Saudi mutaween, although commonly referred to as "munkrat" not "mutaween", the police enforcement of Sharia was one of the main activities of the Taliban regime and even stricter than that of the Saudi Mutaween.^[15]

• Apostasy
• Dhimmi
• Foreign worker
• Politics of Saudi Arabia
• The Religious Policeman
• Sharia
• Wahhabism

• Saudis Arrest Christians For Spreading 'Poison' The New York Sun, May 2, 2005
• Inside Saudi Arabia St. Petersburg Times, July 21, 2002
• "Saudi minister rebukes religious police", BBC News, November 4, 2002
• Website of Saudi Mutaween (Arabic)