Saudi Arabia is no place that you will ever want to be held in jail, particularly if you make enemies of the royal family which rules their Kingdom like an iron fist without compassion for individual human rights. Nagla Wafa (photos below) is the latest woman to feel the boot of a Saudi prison and sentenced to an entirely unreasonable sentence including floggins on her back every week all for running afoul of a pampered Saudi princess.
Photo: Nagla Wafa
Her plight has gotten the attention of human rights activists worldwide including Amnesty International, the United Nations committee for human rights, and the Egypt’s National Council for Women. She as sentenced to 1000 lashes in total, which are being dispensed at this very moment at the rate of 50 floggings per week for the first twenty weeks of a five year prison term. Her spine is already damaged and she is a broken woman with 200 more to go.
Nagla Wafa’s crime was to enter a business transaction with an unelected Saudi princess who has herself never worked a day in her life. They say that she cashed a check that was intended as a down payments but did not follow through on her contractual responsibilities. Her family disputes that charge and notes that she wasn’t even accused of fraud until she had been held in prison already for many months. You can read the report of one of her advocates in the press here,
Western woman have no idea what it is like to be a woman in Saudi Arabia. You cannot show your face in public and cannot be seen alone with a man unless you are married to him. You cannot drive and you essentially have no more rights than the family dog.
Biography: Nagla Wafa is the mother of two teenage sons who may never see their mother again. If she ever does get out of prison alive, she will be hardly recognizable as a shell of her former vibrant self. All this thanks to a backward society run by an out of touch elite group of oil sheiks. No wonder the Arab Spring has seen the overthrow of several similar governments in the area. It is what the people of Syria are fighting for this year. Basic freedoms.
Her business was that of planning weddings and designing fashionable clothing for women as CEO of her own company called Hanaya, as noted in her Linkedin profile which you can find here. She had come to Saudi Arabia from her native Egypt to expand her business opportunities during the political turmoil in her out country. That decision unfortunately put her in contact with very dangerous people within the Saudi royal family.
One snap of the fingers and she was behind bars. Two snaps and she was sentenced to 1000 lashes in a brutal prison known for more people going in than ever coming out alive. You can read more about her story here.
You can find Nagla’s Facebook page here although it does not give us any more biographical information about her. Her age is only 39 years old at the time of this writing. She has two beautiful twin boys you can see in the family photo below.
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