There is something disturbingly Orwellian about Saudi Arabia, perhaps best illustrated by a sign on a downtown building: "General Presidency of the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vices."

Right behind this building, next to a large mosque, in a wide public square, is where they behead those found guilty of crimes. (See photo at right; workers were rinsing the square down with a hose when your blogger visited Saudi Arabia with a team of White House staffers doing a site survey for the trip of President Bush, who arrived in Riyadh this morning).

The definition of "crime," of course, depends on the eye of the beholder. For instance, Sadiq Malallah was publicly beheaded in 1992 after he was charged with throwing stones at a police patrol. But Malallah, a poet and member of Saudi Arabia's Shi'a Muslim minority, was actually convicted of apostasy and blasphemy. (The government's persecution of Shi'a is reminiscent of another dystopis novel, Farhenheit 451 — Shi'a books are banned.)

The judge in the Malallah case reportedly asked him to convert to Sunni Wahhabi Islam, but he refused (he hadn't done so under torture, either). He was taken to al Qatif in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province and beheaded in a public square.

There is a precise ritual when beheading the guilty: "The prisoner now recites verses from the Quran while a government official reads the charges and the verdict," according to a recent account in Arab News, a Saudi daily. "Halfway through the reading the executioner suddenly nicks the back of the prisoner's neck with his sword, causing him to tense and raise his head involuntarily."

Then, in one sweeping move, the prisoner is beheaded. Sometimes the executioners "fix the chopped head to the body and then either hang it from a pole or from a mosque window or balcony for about two hours during the noon prayer," another news account says.

Perhaps it is not unexpected that while Malallah urged more rights for the Shi'a minority, he also sought more freedom and equality for women. Women are inferior under Islamic law, and they are watched closely by the Mutawwi'in, a police force of 10,000 men from the Presidency of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices charged with enforcing dress codes and sex segregation.

Earlier this year, A 37-year-old American businesswoman and married mother of three was arrested by the Mutawwi'in for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in a fancy mall in Riyadh. She told The Times, a British paper, that she had been in the shop's "family" area, the only place where men and women can sit together, and was wearing a headscarf and abaya, a neck-to-toe black garment. One officer told her "you are sinful and you are going to burn in hell," she said.

President Bush is in Riyadh today to meet with King Abdullah, who recently pardoned a female victim of a gang rape who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six years in jail for having been in an unrelated man's car at the time. Bush and Abdullah will have three tea services, as well as lunch and dinner together on the king's horse farm. The White House says they will discuss petroleum production and Middle East peace.

It will be interesting to see if Bush — who ripped Afghanistan last year as a "totalitarian nightmare … where religious police roamed the streets, where women were publicly whipped" — brings up human rights in Riyadh. But perhaps that is not polite conversation over tea with a king who controls the world's largest supply of oil.

— Joseph Curl, senior White House correspondent, The Washington Times