The beheading took place in Makkah. A Burmese woman named Laila Bin Abdul Muttalib Basim, who lived in Saudi Arabia, was first dragged on a public street. Then, she was grabbed by four policemen, while a man took a sword and cut off her head.

It took three blows to do this, until the head was finally severed. Until then, the woman could be heard screaming and begging for her life, a plea that is of course completely ignored. “I did not kill! I did not kill!” she screams.

Then, she is silent and dead.

Little is known about Laila other than her crime: the murder and sexual abuse of a seven-year old girl who was her husband’s daughter from another marriage.

As is the case with the opaque Saudi brand of justice, little is known regarding whether the accused was permitted any means to a defense or whether she was convicted simply on the basis of the allegations against her.

The only part of justice that is visible to all in Saudi Arabia is, after all, the punishment; gruesome, grotesque in a way only a kingdom grown fat with liquid gold can afford to be.

Normally, a beheading such as this one, despite its barbarity, would be shrugged and ignored. Saudi Arabia is after all littered with the blood of executed immigrants, men and women who came for jobs, to escape the hardscrabble and thankless penury of their own lives. Their heads and bodies are likely gathered up and, before the sun has set, committed via the labour of others just like them to nameless unmarked graves, becoming one with the sand of the Holy Kingdom. So it would have been with Laila.

 

Also read: Indignity and death in Saudi Arabia

 

It was not so because of a curious accident of geopolitics, one which betrays the facile vacuity of moral rights and wrongs in the scale of world opinion.

Since the summer of last year, when the black swathed fighters of IS marched into Syrian and Iraqi cities, beheadings have become interesting and condemnable.

The cynics among us would pronounce this the consequence of the IS-inaugurated theater of brutality, in whose grisly episodes one, then two and then even more Westerners have been slain before video cameras.

Of course, non-westerners have also met the merciless blades of IS executioners, but brown is imagined as accustomed to brutal, somehow complicit. There is no fairness in the order and scale of world mourning.

 

Also read: Saudi Arabia beheads ninth Pakistani since mid-October

 

Saudi Arabia has been at the forefront of the march against the IS