A kiss, vs. Kafalah: Does Shariah kill love and legitimize exploitation and rape?

Weighed down by two severed heads, even the drongo and the myna kept a sorrowful silence in this vibrant autumn. Like dry winter, the trees became emaciated and leafless. No milk gathered within the rice paddy. Nature grew moist with silent tears. The family cloaked in the veil of Sharia and the government sustained by remittances remained hesitant for a long time.

In some desert wilderness of Saudi Arabia, a crowd of executioners had gathered. In their midst, a trial was underway. In the center were the bowed heads of Bangladeshi nationals Nazrul Islam and Beauty Akter. Their eyes and faces were covered with cloth, and their hands tied with rope. Yet, their hearts were bound by a different tie—where a flower garden of love blooms.

According to media reports, Nazrul Islam from Brahmanbaria and Beauty from Tangail had gone to Saudi Arabia from Bangladesh in search of a livelihood. There, they worked as cleaners at a mosque. One day, a video of Nazrul kissing Beauty within the mosque premises spread, causing both Nazrul and Beauty to face legal complications. Saudi legal authorities informed Nazrul's family, and the Saudi court kept them imprisoned on charges of obscenity.

In the dock, Nazrul and Beauty had no support, no opportunity for self-defense, no defense lawyer, and no intervention from their homeland's government. Before foreign, alien-tongued rulers—with closed eyes and bound hands—they perhaps silently harbored an intense hatred for this scandal-loving Sharia judicial system. For three years, the furious bluster of Sharia swirled around this flesh-and-blood, exquisitely beautiful, living couple. In their three years of expatriate life, they likely endured ten thousand years of humiliation.

Perhaps there was nothing in Sharia that could sever the love within their hearts. Perhaps there was no sword on earth that could cut through their profound bond! For three years, amidst unimaginable humiliation, the rulers wove an impenetrable agony around them. Perhaps there were no loopholes in the laws of that sandy expanse where love could find a way. Then the sword flashed—their two heads fell from their bodies onto the scattered sand. Perhaps the words of Humayun Azad (who was slaughtered by having his throat slit by Islamic militants at the 2004 Dhaka Book Fair) proved true—a single public kiss can shatter a thousand-year-old tradition.

A few days ago, the death sentences (beheadings) of Nazrul and Beauty were suddenly carried out in accordance with Sharia rules. Neither the Bangladeshi government nor the families of Nazrul and Beauty were informed in advance by the Saudi authorities. The information surfaced in international media after the execution, and it was subsequently broadcast in Bangladeshi media as well. Through these reports, the Bangladeshi government and their families learned of the matter.

The foundational fields and the earth shook. The doves and pigeons fell silent. Upon hearing this tragic news, Nazrul’s aunt died of asphyxiation. The Bangladeshi government stated that this would serve as a lesson for the expatriate Bengali community. The government believes that the livelihoods of the 4 million Bangladeshis living in Saudi Arabia—and consequently the lives and livelihoods of several more crores of people in Bangladesh—depend on the Saudi labor market. Therefore, the government believes that any kind of conflict with Saudi Arabia should be avoided. The family could not be reached for a long time. There was no protest from us. We do not know what the cap-wearing Jamaat-e-Islami, civil society figures, and the ruling government—embodiments of collective cowardice—were absorbed in.

Female workers from Bangladesh usually go to Saudi Arabia as domestic helpers on two-year contracts. But even after their visas expire, most of them do not return home. The bodies of many young women return home, while others return pregnant. Many of those who manage to return alive commit suicide after getting back. This is because Saudi kafeels (sponsors)—fathers, grandfathers, and sons alike—torture and rape the same domestic worker one after another. To them, these women are considered more as sex slaves than domestic helpers. The situation is far more horrific than we imagine. Saudi kafeels are more terrifying than murderers.

Inside the homes of kafeels, millions of women are still consumed by a profound vulnerability. Deep despair—everyday torture, oppression, and rape—does not let them live, yet they cannot die because of their sick mothers and hungry children back home. Over phone calls from home, families tell them: "Do not give sorrow eternal life. Do not give memories of humiliation life force. We are poor, destitute, laborers. Our birth is not greeted with moonlight, affection, or invitation. No one blows a conch shell. No one distributes sweets. We are not nurtured in the world of the rich. We grow like banyan trees."

The slaves of the kafeels also understand that we are used like a crude technical mechanism of laboring in someone else's house, on someone else's machine. What a profound truth illuminated today, shattering the web of lifelong belief—there is no love in the world of the rich, no savior, and only the unbridled exploitation of labor gains legitimacy. The state, too, trembles in fear here—because the state itself is dependent on those very rich.

For ages, the chronicle of all our humiliations and oppression at the hands of the wealthy society has flowed with equal intensity. No one comes to save us until we fight for ourselves. In reality, millions of women are still gang-raped in Saudi Arabia simply for two meals a day. Men are sodomized. Out of fear, they cannot open their mouths. The law is not for them—because inside those palaces, there are not four witnesses. Yet, sometimes eight rapists are present together. This is the religion of the kafeels.

In 1930, Charles Belgrave, the British advisor to the Bahraini government, began a report on the pearl divers of the Gulf by writing that slavery had been abolished on the island in 1861. Yet, just a few years prior, the condition of the divers was virtually that of slaves. These divers brought up oysters from the seabed, some of which contained pearls. Before oil, pearls were the largest business in the Persian Gulf, passing through the hands of Bombay merchants to the jewelry shops of Europe. Bahrain, a small island in the middle of the Gulf, was the center of this trade, and the island was then under British administration. The divers stayed on diving boats for the four hot months. They attached clips to their noses, tied stones to their feet, and descended into the water holding a rope; when their breath ran out, they pulled the rope, and someone above pulled them up. Countless times a day. Who owned the oysters, who owned the pearls—that was decided by the boat owner and captain, known in Arabic as a "nakhuda."

Before the season began, a diver would take an advance from the nakhuda so that the family left behind could survive for four months. Interest was piled onto that advance. Whatever they ate on the boat for four months was charged to their name at several times market price. At the end of the season, the nakhuda sold the pearls, calculated things his own way, and the diver would find out that his debt had not decreased, but increased. This account was written in the nakhuda's hand; the diver could not read, so he never had a way to verify it himself. As long as there was debt on the books, he had to go down again the next season, and the season after that. If the nakhuda wished, he could hand him over to another nakhuda—to a boat on the other side of the Gulf, or even to anyone to settle his own debts. The diver went along, and his debt went with him. If any diver died underwater during work, no one questioned that death. The nakhuda would go to his house and take the house and everything inside it. Then the eldest son of the dead diver would be summoned. The next season, he had to board the boat in his father's place, bearing his father's debt. If the son was young, the nakhuda would wait. The year the son reached diving age, the father's debt was transferred to his name. Thus, a single debt spanned two generations. Every season, about fifteen thousand such men entered the water from Bahrain alone, and around one hundred thousand across the entire Gulf. A British official during the reforms wrote after reviewing hundreds of cases over three years that he hadn't found even half a dozen divers who had ever held wages in their hands.

Reforms came. In the 1920s, the British representative on the island, Major Daly, and Bahrain's ruler, Sheikh Hamad, introduced account books for every diver, set limits on interest, and stopped the practice of burdening a dead diver's son with debt. Belgrave's report was an account of the success of those reforms.

Yet, in the same decade, the British administration created another legal shackle alongside the diver's debt—a shackle that remained even after the debt was paid off. The divers came from various sides of the Gulf and the eastern coast of Arabia. To keep track of who was coming and going, a declaration in December 1928 and passport regulations in January 1929 legally bound every diver to the name of his nakhuda. The nakhuda posted a bond for him; if a diver fled, the nakhuda's boat was confiscated. The system established for taking responsibility for someone later came to be known as "Kafala." The word was taken from Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Long before the creation of the Saudi state, the meaning of this "Kafala" was taking another person's debt or liability upon one's own shoulders. The one who takes this burden is the kafil; in fiqh, one who takes responsibility for an orphan is also called a kafil.

However, while British officials borrowed the word from fiqh, they built the shackle themselves. The kafil whom Bangladeshis working in Saudi Arabia talk about is the kafil of this system. Today, nearly 4 million domestic workers in that country are bound in the name of a kafil in this manner, and no one questions the deaths of many of them.

In the same decade, across the sea from Bahrain, the British administration was drawing lines on the map of Arabia. One party to that line-drawing was Ibn Saud. Ibn Saud later became the first king of Saudi Arabia, but back then there was no country named Saudi Arabia. He was the ruler of the Najd region in central Arabia, with Riyadh as his capital, and in December 1915 he had signed an agreement with the British government. In that treaty, he agreed that he would not maintain relations with any foreign power other than Britain, and that Britain would resolve his disputes with neighbors. In exchange, starting January 1917, he received five thousand pounds a month and weapons.

In November 1922, British High Commissioner Sir Percy Cox summoned him to the small port of Uqair on the Persian Gulf coast to determine the borders between Najd, Iraq, and Kuwait. An Iraqi minister had come, the British representative for Kuwait had come, but no one representing Kuwait itself was present. Cox’s assistant and interpreter was Harold Dickson. He was the sole witness to the scene that followed, recording it in his book thirty-four years later. According to Dickson's account, for days Ibn Saud kept talking about borders in terms of tribal movements, and one afternoon in a closed room, Cox lost his patience. He told Ibn Saud that his attitude was childish, and that he himself would now decide where the borders would run. Ibn Saud nearly broke down. He told Cox that Cox was his father and brother, who had lifted him from nothing to where he was today. If Cox ordered it, he would give up half his kingdom, even his entire kingdom. That evening, Dickson wrote, this immensely powerful man stood up and suddenly burst into tears. Cox cried too. The third man in the room was just Dickson. Then Cox drew lines on the map. On December 2, 1922, the Uqair Protocol was signed. Toward Iraq, Ibn Saud lost a large part of his claims. Kuwait, which had no one in the room, lost about two-thirds of the territory it claimed; that land went to Ibn Saud’s share.

Five years later, in 1927 in Jeddah, Britain made a new treaty with Ibn Saud. In its seventh article, Ibn Saud promised that he would cooperate with Britain in suppressing the slave trade. Percy Cox, who drew those borders, and Major Daly, who altered the divers' accounts in Bahrain—both were officials of the Political Department of the British Government of India. At that time, the entire Gulf was ruled by this department. The same office was drawing the borders of Arab states in 1922, extracting a promise to end the slave trade from the new king in 1927, and binding every diver in Bahrain to his nakhuda in 1929. The Saudi state was born within the borders drawn by this office. Thirty years later, that state wrote the rules of the diver into law for its own foreign workers.

On June 4, 1952, Saudi Arabia’s first Residence Law was issued by royal decree from Riyadh. Ibn Saud was then king, the country named after his family. Thousands of foreign workers were arriving on the eastern coast to work in the wells of the American oil company Aramco—from Eritrea, Sudan, Aden, and Bahrain. Article 5 of the law stated that every foreigner entering the country must submit the name of a sponsor who would take responsibility for them and, if necessary, handle their deportation. The Arabic name for that sponsor is kafil. Article 11 stated that this liability of the kafil is absolute, with no way out unless another kafil agrees to take on the same liability. Article 14: to leave the country, a foreigner had to obtain separate permission. Article 26: if a foreigner quit work or failed to appear for work for two days without reason, the institution or person employing them had to notify the government. The condition under which the Bahraini diver was bound in 1929 to the name of his boat owner and captain, i.e., the nakhuda, the Saudi state bound every foreign worker to the name of a kafil in 1952—by royal decree. The British did not write this decree, but in those same years, the same rule was being established in British-ruled Kuwait and Bahrain, and many of Aramco's first workers came from Bahrain. These foreign workers, bound in the name of a kafil, were free people in the eyes of the law, received wages, and were supposed to return home at the end of their contracts. Alongside them in Saudi Arabia at that time was another group of people who had no wages, no contracts, and no country to return to. They were slaves, and in 1952 holding slaves was legal in Saudi Arabia.

Ibn Saud himself told the British friend Philby in the 1930s that he had twenty-five to forty thousand slaves in his country. Most of these had been brought from Africa and Yemen. The promise to suppress the slave trade made in Jeddah in 1927 resulted in a regulation in 1936. It banned the importation of slaves by sea, while simultaneously introducing licenses for slave-traders and a government register of slaves. In 1956, the British Parliament was told that Saudi Arabia and Yemen were the only states on earth where human ownership was still legal. Slavery was abolished on November 6, 1962, under Article 8 of Crown Prince Faisal’s ten-point reforms, amid pressure from America. But the kafil system remained. The 1962 decree also included provisions for compensation; the government paid money to the owner who gave up his slave. The person who gained freedom received no money. Seven years later, in 1969, Saudi Arabia enacted a new labor law, which set rules for working hours, leave, and wages. But Article 3 of that law stated that domestic workers and those doing similar work would not fall under its purview. That sentence remains in today's labor law as well.

Then came oil money. After oil prices rose in the 1970s, the construction of roads, ports, and cities began in Saudi Arabia, and the workers for those projects came from abroad. In 1975, there were about 700,000 foreign workers in the country; by 1980, over a million—making up nearly half of the nation's workforce. Initially, most of these workers came from Arab countries. From the 1980s, workers from South and South-East Asia began to take their place. For indoor work, domestic helpers arrived—initially from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. She stays in the kafil’s house, works in the kafil’s house, and labor law does not recognize her. In 2019, BBC Arabic journalists discovered that on Haraj—a popular Saudi buying and selling app where people sell old cars and furniture—hundreds of female domestic workers were listed for sale. Ninety years ago, a Bahraini diver was handed over by one nakhuda to another; now, domestic workers are sold by one kafil to another on a mobile app.

On February 10, 2015, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia signed a memorandum of understanding at the Expatriate Welfare Building in Dhaka. Subject: sending female domestic workers from Bangladesh at a salary of eight hundred riyals per month. Khandaker Iftekhar Haider, Secretary of Expatriate Welfare, signed on behalf of Bangladesh, and Deputy Labor Minister Ahmad Al-Fuhaid on behalf of Saudi Arabia. Since 2008, Saudi Arabia had virtually stopped taking male Bangladeshi workers, dropping from 150,000 a year to 10,000. Seven years later, the market opened up with female domestic workers. The government’s own narrative was that other sectors would open up later through this path. Three months after the signing, in May, Indonesia announced it would no longer send domestic workers to twenty-one Middle Eastern countries. A few weeks prior, Saudi Arabia had beheaded two Indonesian domestic workers. Bangladesh entered the market others were leaving—at lower wages than anyone else. That the visas for men and women were tied to the same rope became public in November 2016. BAIRA, the association of recruiting agencies, complained that the Saudi embassy in Dhaka was not accepting passports of male workers unless at least twenty-five percent of the applicants were women. A year earlier, Minister Nurul Islam himself told the media that the Saudi ambassador was pressuring him to speed up the sending of women. In 2017, eighty-three thousand Bangladeshi women went to Saudi Arabia in a single year.

Then the coffins began to return. According to BRAC's calculations, from 2016 to 2022, over seven years, the bodies of 714 female Bangladeshi workers arrived from the Middle East, 202 of them from Saudi Arabia. Causes listed on the certificates: 262 natural deaths, 138 strokes, 116 suicides. Most of those listed under natural deaths were under the age of forty. In the same years, the Kenyan government informed its parliament that eighty-nine of its citizens had died in Saudi Arabia over two years, with cardiac arrest listed as the cause of death for all of them. Once these bodies return home, no one performs a second autopsy—not even when families are suspicious. In 2023, Expatriate Welfare Minister Imran Ahmed told Prothom Alo that raising objections after bodies arrive home could damage the labor market. One of these coffins belonged to Abiron Begum from Paikgachha, Khulna. Abiron went to work in a Riyadh household in 2017 to support her elderly parents. She died in that house on March 24, 2019, at the age of forty. A Human Rights Commission investigation revealed that the female employer beat her and poured boiling water on her body. Court testimony showed her face was pressed against iron grates. Her body lay in a Riyadh morgue for seven months. This time, the death certificate listed homicide. On February 14, 2021, a Riyadh court sentenced the female employer, Ayesha Al-Jizani, to death. The ministry announced this was the first verdict against a Saudi employer for torturing a Bangladeshi worker. The foreign minister thanked the Saudi government. The verdict did not hold. At the request of the accused's family and the Saudi government, Abiron's family agreed to pardon her in exchange for blood money of 4.88 million riyals. On May 15, 2023, the judge overturned the death sentence. Where Ayesha Al-Jizani is now does not appear in any news media. Out of 714 coffins, one went as far as a trial, and it ended in a pardon granted at the state's request.

In March 2021, Saudi Arabia announced reforms to the Kafala system. Foreign workers could now change jobs and leave the country without the kafil's permission under certain conditions. Human Rights Watch wrote that month that domestic workers were not covered under these reforms. Nearly 3.6 million people are outside, most of whom work indoors. Last October, news spread that Saudi Arabia had completely abolished Kafala. This news reached Bangladesh from an article by a London-based organization via Indian media. There was no decree. The organization whose name was cited in the quotes stated they had never said such a thing and knew nothing of such reforms. This March, Saudi Arabia wrote a letter to the International Labour Organization asking for complaints brought against them by African labor unions to be dismissed. A decision is due this November. In April, UN experts wrote to Saudi Arabia asking them to abolish Kafala. The US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report for this year stated in the Saudi Arabia section that 1,800 domestic workers were able to leave the country without the kafil's permission over the past year. There are nearly 4 million domestic workers in the country. Article 11 of that 1952 Residence Law still holds sway over the lives of domestic workers. The kafil's liability is absolute, with no way out—until we, the tortured and oppressed, unite and smash Kafala-ism.