AP, 20 April 2010: The head of Saudi Arabia’s powerful religious police has fired the chief of the Mecca branch for advocating the mixing of the sexes, an official from the force said Tuesday. Ahmed bin Qassim al-Ghamidi’s suggestion in a newspaper interview this week that men and women should be left to mingle freely directly clashed with a central preoccupation of the force.

The religious police, under the control of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, are charged with enforcing Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam, which prohibits men and women who are not immediate relatives from mingling.

“Mixing (between the sexes) is just natural and there is no good reason to ban it,” al-Ghamidi said in the interview. He was dismissed soon after . . .