The administration of punishment to a thief in Saudi Arabia is, to a western observer, chillingly simply: a grim parody of law and order conservatives' calls for "swift, sure" administration of justice. On Friday, the Muslim holy day, following prayers at the mosque, the thief is led out into the square and his right hand is placed on a block. A sword blade flashes in the sun. The hand is severed. The man is tended to medically, then released. Islamic justice has been served.
This brief vignette of Saudi penal law in operation serves to illustrate the most fundamental characteristics of the Saudi Arabian legal and justice system: its traditionalism, and its complete distinction in methodology and what may be called style from justice procedures elsewhere. In most of the world, including the nonwestern world, legal and penal procedures are distinctively of Western origin. These sometimes follow broadly Anglo American procedures; more often, they are derived from the European "civil law" ultimately Roman tradition. Usually they are based on the procedures of a former colonial power; sometimes (as in Turkey or Japan) they were adopted as deliberate reforms by modernizing leaders or movements. More broadly, the world has largely adopted not only western style machinery, but a western and secular concept of the purpose of law as primarily the practical regulation of worldly affairs. The underlying Saudi assumption is quite different, that law is a God given and moral force (Anderson, 1959).
Criminal and police procedures are broadly recognizable almost everywhere (even in Saudi Arabia). The police may be highly "civilianized" and legal procedures be more or less scrupulously observed. Or the police may be paramilitary, and observe the law largely in the breach. But the organization, training, even uniforms of the police are almost everywhere of Western origin, save in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has w...