Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has shut down a sweets shop for selling cakes deemed offensive to Islam.
Six men working in the shop were arrested in the raid conducted by the commission after it received a tip from a client who complained about the cakes that featured a plane and anti-Islam messages.
The messages were in fact a depiction of the idea by highly controversial anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders for a new Saudi flag that changes the Islamic declaration of faith into anti-Islam, anti-Koran and anti-Prophet words.
In May, the distribution of the flag stickers by Wilders reportedly led Saudi Arabia to issue trade sanctions on the Netherlands.
Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans said then that the sanctions had hurt the country’s business interests, and later visited then kingdom to calm tensions.
The shop staff are believed to be from different Arab countries while the manager is from Lebanon, local news site Sabq reported on Monday.
Social media users have condemned the use of cakes to target Islam or local values and traditions and called for stiff action against offenders.
In June, a sweets shop had waded into controversy after one of its employees made a cake that reportedly denigrated the moral police for tailing an open truck driven by a woman and transporting women.
Social media in Saudi Arabia, where women are banned from driving, promptly decried the cake and users said that “it was making fun of the highly respected members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice who were depicted as using a van to chase the all women truck.”
The shop management deplored the incident and said they fired the employee who conceptualised and made the controversial cake.
“It was an individual act by an employee who prepared the cake as requested by a female client,” the management said. “The company was not involved and we conducted a probe that resulted in firing the man who made it and the employee who took a picture. We do condemn this act even though the employee explained that he had acted in good faith and with good intentions.”
The company said that it did not normally accept such orders and that all employees regretted the lapse.
