Once I was reporting on a modern chicken farm outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when the midday call to prayer sounded, halting the assembly line carrying the birds about to be slaughtered. The chickens were left hanging upside down on the conveyor belt bringing them to the butcher’s knife.

By strict Wahhabi religious edicts, all activities in Saudi Arabia must stop at prayer times, even chickens dangling in the air. Their reprieve ended about 40 minutes later, when the praying ended and the conveyer belt resumed carrying them to their fate. Strangely, all the workers were Filipino Christians who did not need to pray. The owner, a liberal Saudi businessman, said he was frustrated because of the money in lost time this costs him each year. We both laughed at the scene, although he was not amused.

Mandatory prayer several times a day is frustrating to many Saudi citizens and businessmen, especially as living standards and business volumes rise because of huge oil revenues. This wealth has created an expanding consumer society.

The issue has become a hot potato. Take a typical recent day, March 10, when prayer times, according to the Muslim calendar, fell at 4:47 a.m. for the dawn prayer and 6:06 a.m. for the sunrise prayer, followed by the noon prayer at 12:04 p.m., the afternoon prayer at 3:28 p.m., and the evening prayer at 7:31 p.m. Aside from the dawn prayer, this means interruptions during busy times.

Once the call to prayer is broadcast, hundreds of government offices and gigantic shopping malls start emptying as the redoubtable religious police, sandaled-clad men with untrimmed beards and whipping canes, roam the premises to make sure everyone is complying. Imagine a whole country stopping all activity for about 40 minutes several times a day. Think of hotels where reception desk clerks disappear, airports where customs officers leave to pray while hundreds of passengers wait to have their passports stamped, and queues lengthen by the minute everywhere.

The paralysis extends to commercial shops, supermarkets, schools, universities, and shopping malls, as shutters come down.

Most people outside Saudi Arabia do not know that many Saudis find these situations humiliating, both to the general populace who do not wish to be herded off to mosque arbitrarily or stop working, and to the estimated 8 million foreigners, at least half of whom are non-Muslims.

So the government has been trying to solve this, Saudi-style. This mean letting someone else make a decision — in this case, the so-called Consultative Council. This group of eminent scholars, businessmen, and religious leaders is appointed by the king, but its decisions are nonbinding.

According to a front-page item in the daily Okaz last Sunday, the Consultative Council is considering a general proposal that all commercial shops open at 6 a.m. and close no later than 10 p.m., with the exception of food shops, bakeries, pharmacies, and all shops in the cities of Mecca and Medina — except in times of prayer. How this will ease the problem is not clear.

Needless to say, the outcry was immediate in the letters to the editor page of Okaz. “Folks, please, enough,” one reader, Abdelrahman Al-Harbi, wrote. Another said the government should allow businessmen to reduce wages to compensate for lost hours.

A coffee shop owner wrote, “But we only start our business at 10 o’clock at night.” A third reader, who gave his name only as Hassan, simply said, “God help you, oh Arabs. From strange to stranger.”

And so it went. The outlook does not seem promising for the Consultative Council reform proposal.