A writer campaigning against moves to bring women into mixed-gender work environments

Abu Dhabi: A Saudi writer has urged his Twitter followers to sexually molest women hired to work as cashiers in big grocery stores, the latest backlash from conservatives who want to roll back limited social and economic reforms launched in Saudi Arabia.

Al Dawood, who has more than 97,000 followers on Twitter, justified his call to harass female workers by using an obscure story from the early days of Islam about a famous warrior, Al Zubair, who did not want his wife to leave home to pray in the mosque. Al Dawood claimed that Al Zubair hid in the dark one night and molested his wife in the street. The wife rushed home and decided against ever going out of her house again, saying that the “there is no safer place than home and the world out there is corrupt”.

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Saudi writer Abdullah Mohammad Al Dawood