Before we get to the law, let me tell you what the law is not about.
It is not about animal welfare. It is not about religious impurity. It is not about protecting ecosystems or controlling feral populations. The reason Saudi Arabia’s religious police announced a ban on selling cats and dogs as pets in Riyadh, and on walking them in public, is this: young men were using them to flirt with women.
Take a moment with that.
In 2008, Othman al-Othman, head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Riyadh, known locally as the Muttawa, announced that the commission had begun enforcing an old religious edict banning the sale of cats and dogs as pets, and prohibiting walking them in public. The reason he gave to the Saudi edition of Al-Hayat newspaper was explicit: young men had been “taking advantage” of pets “in a way that conflicts with the rules and regulations of Islam.” The technique, apparently, was to approach women in public spaces under cover of the pet, using the animal as a conversation opener in a society where unsupervised interaction between unrelated men and women was forbidden. The cat, in short, had become a pickup tool. Saudi Arabia banned cats because of dating.
The announcement was greeted in Saudi Arabia with something between derision and confusion, and around the world with unrestrained amusement. What made it particularly awkward, as Muslim scholars and Saudi cat owners were quick to point out, is that the Prophet Muhammad was famously devoted to cats. This is not a minor footnote in Islamic tradition. It is well documented and widely known throughout the Muslim world.
The Prophet is recorded to have let a cat drink from the water he intended to use for his pre-prayer ablutions before cleaning himself, rather than disturb the animal. In another account, he cut the sleeve of his robe rather than wake a cat that had fallen asleep on it. He is said to have stroked a cat’s head, and to have remarked that those who mistreated cats would face divine consequences. One of his closest companions, Abu Hurairah, whose name literally means “Father of the Little Cat,” was so associated with his love of cats that the nickname stuck for fourteen centuries. The Quran contains a story of believers who slept in a cave for three hundred years with their dog present, which has been read as an endorsement of animal companionship.
None of this theological context seemed to have been considered by the commission before the announcement. Several Saudi clerics and Islamic scholars pointed out, politely but firmly, that nothing in Islamic law prohibits owning a cat, and that the Prophet’s example was precisely the opposite of what the religious police appeared to be enforcing. One Islamic scholar noted that the ban on cats, unlike the more theologically grounded restrictions on dogs, had no basis in religious texts whatsoever. The cat ban was not Islamic law. It was an improvised response to a flirting problem.
The enforcement, such as it was, turned out to be inconsistent and short-lived. Pet shop owners in Riyadh reported receiving no official notification. Customers continued buying cats. Fahd al-Mutairi, who owned thirty-five cats, expressed shock but continued owning thirty-five cats. The commission’s agents, who had other priorities in a city of several million people, did not appear to mount a systematic campaign against cat ownership. The ban existed more as a statement of intent than as an operational reality on the ground.
What makes the story genuinely interesting is not the ban itself but what it reveals about the mechanism of Saudi social regulation at the time. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice operated with considerable latitude to enforce rules it deemed necessary for social order, whether or not those rules had clear textual foundations. An improvised regulation could be announced, attributed to a religious edict, and enforced sporadically without ever being formally codified into law. The cat ban was less a legal instrument than a public declaration of priority: the separation of the sexes mattered more than anything else, including common sense, and any vector for male-female contact, up to and including a tabby cat, was a legitimate target.
Saudi Arabia has changed significantly since 2008. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice had its powers dramatically curtailed in 2016, when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stripped the religious police of their authority to arrest people. Women were given the right to drive in 2018. Mixed-gender entertainment events, previously banned, are now routine. Pet ownership in Saudi Arabia has grown substantially among the urban upper class, and cats in particular have become fashionable. There are cat cafes in Riyadh. The flirting cat problem, to the extent it ever existed at scale, does not appear to have survived the reform era.
The original edict still technically exists somewhere in the archive of religious rulings. It is simply no longer enforced. Which means that, on paper, somewhere in Saudi Arabia, a man with a cat is still violating a religious decree designed to protect women from his conversational intentions.
The cat, for its part, does not know any of this. It never did. Right, imagine the face of Garfield on a Monday!
The world is stranger than anyone told you. I am just keeping count.
Marco Bellinari
Think that was strange? These books will finish the job.
Sources
- Al Jazeera. Saudi Arabia to Ban Sale of Cats and Dogs. Original 2006 announcement, Mecca and Jeddah ban, Islamic tradition on cats.
- Christian Science Monitor. In Dog-Walking, Saudi Virtue Police See Vice. Riyadh 2008 enforcement, pet shop reactions, al-Othman statement.
- The National. Pet Ban Baffles Saudi Animal Lovers. Islamic scholars’ response, enforcement inconsistency, cat owner reactions.
A Note from Marco Bellinari
Thank you for reading. Every fact in this article is documented and sourced. You will find the references at the bottom if you want to dig further. I hope it surprised you at least once. That is always the intention.
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