My first confrontation with mass corruption was during the horrific period of occupation, when, as head of the Riyadh Subsistence Committee, I handed over to our ambassador, Mr. Abdul Rahman al-Bakr, on the occasion of the end of my mission, a computer printout containing the names, passport numbers, and civil cards of all those who had received financial aid from the committee, including a vast number of people who forged various documents, and each of them received subsistence payments several times.

The ambassador was astonished by the magnitude of the number of people who robbed the country while it was occupied, and he asked me, with obvious concern, if there were copies of that statement. I reassured him that it was the only one. He asked me to swear on the truth of my words, but I refused, and added that he had to believe or not my words. But I later regretted not keeping a copy of the extract from the “mass theft,” which was behind the majority of those who prayed in front of me every day, at Al-Malaz Stadium, in Riyadh, as I looked at them from the upper balcony. A long time has passed since that incident, and there is no doubt that I have witnessed other cases of theft and mass corruption, but the weakness of my memory has forced me to forget them.

Another mass fraud occurred a year ago, when tens of thousands of students, along with a similar number of parents, teachers and observers, committed the largest fraud, and the result was that a few of them were accepted by universities abroad due to their poor level. There is no doubt that a very large percentage of the students and their parents were among the worshipers, submissive and fasting. Then came the latest phenomenon a few days ago, when thousands of students were absent from school, and in the evening they, along with their parents, stood in queues in front of clinics to obtain an excuse for absence, due to “illness”! Knowing that these same students, and their parents, were on that day or the day before, standing in the rows of worshipers in the mosques, performing their religious duties, such as, Taraweeh and other prayers!

As it became clear, from an article by our colleague Hamad Al-Hamad, that a group of mothers, on WhatsApp, which was formed to coordinate between them in what is in the interest of their children, has become the tool through which collective absence from schools is coordinated before holidays or on rainy or dusty days, etc.! These actions and dozens of others, which we see in front of us every day, such as the phenomenon of not respecting the queue system or preserving public state property, and others, put us before the following matters: First: The clear failure of religious education to teach citizens morals, and our lack of conviction that this matter is not the role of religion at all.

Second: The failure of public education to establish the concept of morality and its role in building the nation and the citizen.

Third: It is wrong to place all the blame on citizens, as they are already part of a backward society, but what is the excuse for a government that is supposed to include the best of the best, and yet it has been unable to see this moral collapse, or put an end to it … and acceptance of linking morality to sexual issues? It is unfortunate to note the repeated failure of the majority of those who assumed responsibility for the Ministry of Education, in addition to the majority of representatives, to pay attention to all this violation of morals on the roads every second, and the continuous absence of students and employees from their schools and work, making our academic and professional year the shortest in the world, knowing that the history of regular education dates back to 120 years ago. The rift is deep, the tragedy is getting worse daily, and almost everyone is preoccupied with immoral things, and often with trivial matters!

Note: 100,000 worshipers in the Grand Mosque participated in observing Laylat al-Qadr, and the majority of them parked their cars in the wrong places! If half of these people refused to violate the law and returned to spend the night in their homes, they would not have lost anything, the rest would be at ease, and morality would have a role in our lives and a meaning!

By Ahmad alsarraf
e-mail: [email protected]