When the severed head of a wolf wrapped in women's lingerie turned up near the city of Tabouk in northern Saudi Arabia this week, authorities knew they had another case of witchcraft on their hands, a capital offense in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.
Saudi Arabia takes witchcraft so seriously that it has banned the Harry Potter series by British writer J.K. Rowling, rife with tales of sorcery and magic.
Agents of the country’s Anti-Witchcraft Unit were quickly dispatched and set about trying to break the spell that used the beast’s head. The unit is charged with apprehending sorcerers and reversing the detrimental effects of their spells. A hotline encourages citizens across the kingdom to report cases of sorcery to local officials for immediate treatment.
In the case of the wolf's head, the Anti-Witchcraft Unit in Tabouk was able to break the spell. The Saudi daily Okaz reported on Monday that the unknown family that had fallen victim to the spell had been "liberated from the jaws of the wolf.”
The belief in sorcery is so widespread in Saudi Arabia, that it is even used as a defense in criminal court cases. Last October, a judge accused of receiving bribes in a real-estate project told a court in Madinah that he had been bewitched and is undergoing treatment by Quranic incantations, known as ruqiyah, a common remedy for the evil eye.
In other cases, however, false accusations of witchcraft are made against foreign domestic workers in order to counter their charges of sexual harassment within a Saudi household. Defendants will often say that the female domestic worker bewitched the Saudi into falling in love with the servant.
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