The
Iraq Effect in Saudi Arabia
Toby
Jones
(Toby
Jones is a Gulf analyst who has written on
Saudi Arabia for Middle
East Report, Strategic
Insights and the International Crisis Group.)
| 
Shi‘i clerics voting in municipal
elections in Saihat on April 4, 2005.
(Atheer I. Al-Sadah) |
Shi‘is
in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have watched Iraq’s
political transformation with a combination of
horror and optimism. Iraq’s slide toward
civil war, the carnage wrought by militant violence
and the targeted slaughter of thousands of Iraqi
Shi‘is by Sunni insurgents have sown fears
among Shi‘a in the kingdom that they might
be the next to suffer bloodshed. Their worries
are not unwarranted. They live in a sea of sectarian
hostility, where the Sunni government and its
clerical backers have long made clear their antipathy
for the Muslim minority sect.
The
violence in Iraq has led Saudi Arabian Shi‘is
to distance themselves from the war and the US
role in bringing Iraqi Shi‘is to power.
Even so, the new political dynamic there has
fed a growing opportunism, feelings set in motion
by both domestic and regional events. Many now
believe that with the recent accession of King
Abdallah, who is widely viewed as sympathetic
to Shi‘is, and with the balance of power
shifting in the region, resolution of long-standing
Shi‘a grievances may finally be achievable.
Shi‘is demand inclusion in formal politics,
the right to observe religious rituals and the
right to move their struggle against the extreme
anti-Shi‘ism that permeates society and
is condoned by the state into the public sphere.
As
many as two million Shi‘is live in Saudi
Arabia, where they make up between 10–15 percent
of the population.[1] Although some live in the cities
of Mecca, Medina and Riyadh, the majority of
Shi‘is are concentrated in the two oases
of Qatif and al-Hasa in the kingdom’s Eastern
Province, a region that is also home to most
of Saudi Arabia’s massive oil reserves.
Most Saudi Arabian Shi‘is are from the “Twelver” branch
that claims the majority of the world’s
Shi‘a; they believe that the last successor
to the Prophet Muhammad as religio-political
leader of Muslims was the twelfth imam who went
into occultation in the ninth century. A smaller
community of around 100,000 Isma‘ilis,
who observe an offshoot of Shi‘ism that
traces imamic descent from the seventh imam,
makes its home in Najran near the southern border
with Yemen.
The
Shi‘is’ sense of vulnerability is
easy to understand. Although sectarian violence
has only been episodic in the twentieth century,
leading religious scholars in the kingdom have
denounced Shi‘a as apostates, and since
the founding of Saudi Arabia in 1932 have periodically
called for their extermination. Historically,
Saudi leaders have done little to tone down anti-Shi‘a
rhetoric and at times have manipulated the sentiment
that fuels it. Until the end of the twentieth
century, the kingdom’s rulers preferred
publicly to ignore the Shi‘is’ existence.
The nationalist narrative popularized in recent
years in various media, including the press,
national television, historical texts and most
visibly a series of exhibits displayed at an
annual Riyadh fair called the Janadiriyya, spotlights
the “heroic”
efforts of the kingdom’s founder, ‘Abd
al-‘Aziz, in bringing together warring tribes.
It scarcely mentions the Shi‘a.[2] But
recent events have made this erasure untenable.
With
Iraq possibly disintegrating along sectarian
lines and hundreds and perhaps thousands of Saudi
Arabian Sunnis taking part in the anti-occupation
and anti-Shi‘a insurgency, many in Saudi
Arabia fear that the spread of sectarian violence
is just a matter of time. Remarkably, the Shi‘is’ anticipation
that they will eventually be targeted by their
fellow countrymen and the widely held belief
that Saudi rulers have abetted, if not actually
supported, sectarian violence have not altered
the Shi‘is’ pursuit of rapprochement
and cooperation with the state.
In
recent years, liberal-minded and even Sunni Islamist
reformers in the kingdom have welcomed Shi‘is
as part of a small but vocal reform lobby that
has pressed Saudi Arabia’s rulers for the
expansion of political rights and greater religious
tolerance. Some Saudi leaders, particularly King
Abdallah, have given Shi‘is reason for
hope by cautiously supporting the community’s
call for greater rights and an end to systemic
discrimination. But it is not clear how much
support there is within the Al Saud for relief
for the embattled minority. Inasmuch as the Shi‘i
ascendancy in Iraq has emboldened their co-religionists
in Saudi Arabia, it has also intensified anti-Shi‘ism
in the kingdom. Most obviously, although it does
not manifest itself openly, there is support
for the anti-Shi‘a and anti-occupation
violence, as many Saudi Arabians consider the
US occupation and the Iraqi Shi‘a ascendancy
one and the same. Perhaps more importantly, the
belief in the kingdom that Iran is playing an
increasingly active role in shaping Iraqi politics
is resuscitating old animosities about a pan-Shi‘i
threat, a trend that does not bode well for regional
security or for Shi‘is living in Saudi
Arabia.
A
Savior from the Al Saud?
Setting
aside decades of political oppression, suffering
and their distrust of the royal family in general,
most Shi‘is embraced Abdallah when he ascended
to the throne in early August 2005. Many
consider him the best hope for much needed political
and social reform as well as the only likely
champion for tolerance in a country better known
for its religious virulence and fanatical anti-Shi‘ism.
A community leader from Qatif said that endorsements
for the new king rang out from the pulpits of
mosques and the daises of community centers (husseiniyyas) across
the region. A busload of clerics, religious scholars
and other political figures even trekked to Riyadh
to pay homage to the new monarch and pledge loyalty
after his predecessor’s death. On the widespread
and very public support for Abdallah’s
succession, an activist remarked: “I have
never seen anything like it.”[3]
In
spite of the embrace of the new king, however,
the Shi‘i community remains deeply skeptical
of the kingdom’s rulers and their willingness
or ability to deal genuinely and effectively
with the challenge of sectarianism. Even Abdallah,
who has supported Shi‘is in the past, is
viewed as insufficiently proactive, a potentially
critical but conservative ally who must be prodded
to act. A Shi‘i activist noted that while
the new king is compassionate, he “responds
to rather than initiates discussions about community
grievances.” Abdallah has been the focal
point of Shi‘i communal advocacy since
2003, when he received a delegation bearing a
petition signed by 450 Shi‘i men and women
entreating him for help in rolling back “fanatical
sectarian tendencies stimulating hatred,” protecting
Shi‘a from official and unofficial forms
of discrimination, and securing Shi‘i representation
in local and national government. With talk of
reform more open since then, Shi‘is have
become more aggressive in pursuing their interests
and more shrewd in using Abdallah’s public
embrace of tolerance and pluralism as an excuse
to align him with their interests, which they
achieve by emphasizing whenever possible that
he is their defender.
The
Shi‘i political strategy is not new. Since
the early 1990s, the most popular political network,
the Shi‘a Islamic Reform Movement headed
by Hasan al-Saffar, has promoted improved relations
with the ruling family and Saudi Arabian Sunnis.
Shi‘i leaders have emphasized that the
rebelliousness that dominated the community’s
politics in previous decades, resulting in widespread
violence in November and December 1979,
was not an effective instrument for resolving
Shi‘a grievances.[4]
Their
strategy held true to form in the weeks after
King Fahd’s death. Within two months of
his accession, King Abdallah hosted two significant
meetings with different Shi‘a delegations,
who quickly mobilized to support the new sovereign
and press him to move more boldly. In mid-August,
Saffar headed a mission of activists and leaders
from the Eastern Province to Jidda to meet with
the new regent. There, Saffar, who has guided
the Shi‘a community since the late 1970s,
and the other delegates offered personal oaths
of loyalty (bay‘a) as well as their
commitment to the Saudi Arabian nation. The delegates
also used the meeting to plead for amnesty for
political prisoners who have languished in Saudi
prisons since the mid-1990s, and to remind the
monarch of the need for ongoing efforts to end
anti-Shi‘ism.[5]
On
September 17, 2005, five Isma‘ili
leaders from Najran met with Abdallah and added
their own pledges of loyalty. Emboldened by Abdallah’s
comment immediately after his accession that
he sought “prayer and advice” and
desired to instill “the principles of justice
and equality among [Saudi Arabians] without distinguishing
between them,” they also delivered a respectful
letter filled with demands. The five first appealed
for opportunities to “serve the nation,” asking
directly for enhanced roles in and an end to
their exclusion from the “highest institutions
in the country including the Council of Ministers,
the Majlis al-Shura [Consultative Council], the
Royal Court and the Foreign Ministry.”
While
there is little reason to doubt the sincerity
of the letter writers’ interest in greater
involvement in government, the letter’s
main objective was to highlight continued frustration
with anti-Isma‘ili discrimination and plead
with Abdallah to end punitive state policies
directed against them. Most importantly, the
petition asked for amnesty for political prisoners
jailed in 2000 following lethal violence between
the authorities and residents in Najran. In April
of that year, the governor of Najran dispatched
security forces to the al-Mansura mosque, the
main Isma‘ili center of learning, where
they arrested Sheikh Ahmad bin Muhammad al-Khayyat,
a cleric and teacher who was subsequently imprisoned
on charges of sorcery. In the clashes that followed,
protesters killed at least one security officer
and wounded several others. But it was the Isma‘ili
community that endured the harshest suffering.
Security forces killed two protesters and arrested
hundreds of others, many of whom alleged torture
at the hands of their captors. Two years after
the unrest, King Fahd pardoned an unknown number
of prisoners, halved the jail terms for 70 others
and commuted the death sentences of 17 to ten
years in jail.[6]
In
addition to the hardnosed police response, Saudi
officials expelled thousands of Isma‘ilis
from Najran, forcing them to relocate to other
regions, where they remain today, forbidden from
returning home. The government’s attempt
to break up Isma‘ili social and cultural
cohesion in the south echoed similar efforts
at manipulation of sectarian demography throughout
the twentieth century, including attempts to
dilute the numerical strength of Shi‘is
in the Eastern Province by displacing them or
flooding the region with settlers from elsewhere
in the kingdom. Claiming that many of their exiles
had grown old, feeble and impoverished, the Najran
petitioners called for their return on humanitarian
grounds. For the remainder, they cited the need
for qualified people and local leadership to
return to the region in order to reduce unemployment
and aid those forced into poverty.
As
was the case with Saffar’s delegation,
the 2005 meetings were not the first of their
kind between Abdallah and the Isma‘ilis.
In April 2001, a year after the violence
in Najran, a handful of Isma‘ili activists
met with the then crown prince in Jidda, where
they beseeched him to protect the region from
what they believed were attempts by the local
governor, Prince Mish‘al, and Interior
Minister Prince Nayif to impose a system of apartheid
that discriminated against the Isma‘ilis,
a reference to the expulsion of thousands the
year before. Furthermore, they claimed that the
two princes were working directly to provoke
a confrontation between the region’s Shi‘is
and Sunni radicals by inundating Najran with
Wahhabi mosques and schools and defaming Isma‘ili
beliefs. Reports of the meeting, which reportedly
upset Prince Nayif, landed several of the activists
in prison in spite of an alleged promise by Abdallah
that he would address their grievances. Abdallah
eventually intervened to orchestrate their release,
although he was unable to order the right of
return for those expelled from Najran the previous
year to secure the release of the remaining prisoners.
Abdallah’s
willingness to meet with both groups of Shi‘i
activists after becoming king demonstrated his
continued engagement with the beleaguered minority.
More importantly, that he permitted the details
of the meetings to be disclosed publicly, although
they were barely commented upon inside the kingdom,
sent a clear signal to Shi‘i bashers that
Abdallah remains committed in principle to the
pursuit of Islamic pluralism within Saudi Arabia,
an objective he made a centerpiece of a national
unity and national dialogue campaign he launched
in 2003. But in spite of appearances, it remains
to be seen if Abdallah is willing or able to
effect significant change. The king no doubt
understands that while perception matters, it
has little bearing on political reality in Saudi
Arabia.
The
Politics of Hostility
Whatever
Abdallah’s actual interest in a campaign
to roll back sectarian enmity in Saudi Arabia,
he did little as crown prince to achieve comprehensive
results. Shi‘is enjoy only a few more rights
than in the past. Most important is the ability
to observe the ‘Ashura holiday on the Tenth
of Muharram, the holiest Shi‘a holiday
and the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam
Hussein. Restrictions have eased on the building
of Shi‘a mosques. But the most severe forms
of discrimination, including the unfettered publication
of anti-Shi‘a religious texts, anti-Shi‘ism
in schools, restrictions on employment in the
government and in private business, and the royal
family’s refusal to include Shi‘is
in representative numbers in its national institutions,
such as the Majlis al-Shura, a quasi-legislative
body that advises the monarch, where four out
of the 150 members are Shi‘is, remain firmly
in place. There are powerful reasons to doubt
that Abdallah can achieve more as king.
It
is not at all clear that Abdallah’s support
for greater tolerance is widely shared within
the royal family or that he even considers it
a political priority. While he has been nominally
in charge of running the state’s affairs
since his brother and predecessor Fahd suffered
a stroke in 1995, Abdallah hardly enjoys free
rein to do as he pleases. Rivals, including his
half-brothers Sultan (the crown prince), Nayif
and Salman (the governor of Riyadh), wield considerable
authority and restrain the king’s ability
to forge ahead with what they may see as risky
or disagreeable measures. Considering that anti-Shi‘ism
retains a powerful grip on popular thought in
Saudi Arabia, a grip rendered tighter by the
Iraq war, directly confronting sectarian animosity
is fraught with uncertainty. So ingrained is
the hostility for Shi‘is in Saudi Arabia
that leaders in the royal family, even if they
are interested in dealing with the phenomenon,
are unable to root out anti-Shi‘i ideologues
in powerful state bureaucracies and non-governmental
organizations, let alone stem the production
of hate materials and their dissemination.
The
roots of such hatred are directly traceable to
the state’s historical reliance on a particularly
austere interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, for
its political authority. But the commanding,
normative power that anti-Shi‘ism enjoys
today is more the result of political decisions
made by the government in the late 1970s and
1980s, when Saudi leaders feared the rise of
Shi‘a Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, who
directly threatened Saudi rulers by encouraging
coups, loudly broadcast his desire to export
the Islamic Revolution and sparked a decade-long
security crisis in the region. Although Khomeini
played no direct role in fostering domestic unrest
inside Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Revolution did
help galvanize civil disobedience by the kingdom’s
Shi‘a in 1979.
To
counter the perceived Khomeinist threat, Saudi
Arabia threw its weight behind ideological efforts
that excoriated the Shi‘a as a global enemy
(like the Soviets in Afghanistan) and damned
what they viewed as un-Islamic Shi‘i political
and theological principles. These efforts included
the publication and distribution of key monographs
exploring the theological and political justifications
for anti-Shi‘ism, including a broad assault
on Shi‘a theology written by Ibrahim Sulayman
al-Jabhan in 1980, entitled Removing the Darkness
and Awakening to the Danger of Shi‘ism
to Muslims and Islam.[7] Jabhan’s book was licensed
by the office of the highest religious authority
in Saudi Arabia. Other tracts followed throughout
the 1980s, including a series of malicious volumes
by the vitriolic Pakistani author Ihsan Ilahi
Zahir, The Shi‘a and the Sunna, The
Shi‘a and the Qur’an, The
Shi‘a and the Prophet’s Family and
a stand-alone screed against Isma‘ilis.
Even
after Khomeini’s death and an improvement
in Saudi-Iranian relations, the production of
anti-Shi‘a material continued apace. In
the early 1990s, Nasir al-‘Umar, a particularly
vicious Sunni cleric, wrote a treatise called “The
Rafida in the Land of Tawhid.” Rafida,
or rawafid, is a pejorative term meaning “rejectionists,” a
reference to how radical Sunnis consider the
Shi‘a to be outside Islam. Religious edicts
(fatawa) issued by other well-known clerics,
including several by Abdallah bin Abd al-Rahman
al-Jibrin—then a member of the Higher Council
of ‘Ulama—condoned and even mandated
the killing of Shi‘is. As late as 2002,
a leading Saudi Arabia-based charity, the International
Islamic Relief Organization, circulated a pamphlet
entitled One Hundred Questions and Answers
on Charitable Work in the Eastern Province.
The pamphlet contained passages slandering the
Shi‘a as apostates and called for efforts
to “get rid of their evil.”[8]
The
Bogeyman Returns
The
Iraq war has stoked sectarian ill will. Internet
discussion forums popularized by Saudi Arabian
visitors are full of vitriolic denunciations
of Shi‘is inside the kingdom and out. At
least one website supportive of Sunni jihadis
reported a widely believed rumor that militants
planned to kill the Shi‘a cleric Hasan
al-Saffar during ‘Ashura in 2004. Similar
threats may have been leveled at Shi‘a
communities in Bahrain and Kuwait in 2005.[9]
Most
troubling to Saudi Arabians is the appearance
of cooperation between the US and the new Shi‘i
power brokers in Iraq. Nasir al-‘Umar launched
a simultaneous direct assault on Iraqi Shi‘is
and the US when he denounced the “strong
relationship between America and the rafida” and
argued that they were both the enemies of Muslims
everywhere.[10] The
appearance of coordination between the US and
Iraqi Shi‘is to marginalize and oppress
Iraqi Sunnis has produced widespread anger. During
the November 2004 US-led siege of Falluja,
popular websites published images of Iraqi Shi‘i
national guardsmen carrying pictures of Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani alongside photographs of
US tanks with rosaries dangling from their barrels,
providing symbolic power to arguments about the
forces aligning against Sunni Muslims. Speculation
that the US and Shi‘is are actively working
to alter the sectarian shape of the region has
been further fueled by the widespread belief
that Iran, the bogeyman from the 1980s, is actively
promoting the establishment of what, in December 2004,
Jordanian King Abdallah II called a “crescent” of
Shi‘i-dominated polities stretching from
Iran to Lebanon “that will be very destabilizing
for the Gulf countries and for the whole region.”
In
addition to popular outrage about the sectarian
transformation of Iraq, fears that Iran intends
to use its influence in Iraq to ignite a wider
conflict are evident within the royal family.
On September 20, 2005, Saudi Arabia’s
Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal worried aloud
at the Council of Foreign Relations that “if
you allow…for a civil war to happen between
the Shiites and the Sunnis, Iraq is finished
forever. It will be dismembered. It will not
only be dismembered, it will cause so many conflicts
in the region that it will bring the whole region
into a turmoil that will be hard to resolve.” The
foreign minister seemed most upset by the prospect
that the US was “handing the whole country
over to Iran without reason.” In apparent
disbelief, he said, “It seems out of this
world that you do this. We fought a war to keep
Iran from occupying Iraq after Iraq was driven
out of Kuwait.” King Abdallah was more
circumspect in comments he made to an American
television news program, but he hardly put the
issue to rest. “Iran is a friendly country,” he
said. “Iran is a Muslim country. We hope
that Iran will not become an obstacle to peace
and security in Iraq. This is what we hope for
and this is what we believe the Iraqi people
hope for.”[11]
Saud
Al Faisal’s comments are important not
only for what they reveal about Saudi Arabia’s
regional interests, but also the logic that continues
to frame its approach to geostrategic challenges
in the Gulf and how they will likely impact domestic
sectarian tensions. While the kingdom has maintained
much improved relations with Iran since 1990s,
it is clear that the old political anxieties
and uncertainties remain, as does the old anti-Shi‘i
thinking that framed it. The reemergence of Iran
as a regional threat, a sense compounded by its
alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, will likely
push anti-Shi‘ism even further. A few weeks
after the foreign minister made his provocative
comments, Sa‘d bin Abdallah al-Barik, a
contributor to the website of Salman al-‘Awda,
a prominent Saudi Arabian cleric who has a history
of political activism, wrote an article called “The
Tribulation of the Sunnis: Is Iraq the Gateway
for Iranian Shi‘ism?” The article
is significant not only because it demonstrates
the interest of Saudi Arabia’s powerful
religious scholars in the issue, but because
Salman al-‘Awda had previously set aside
his personal sectarian prejudices to work with
Shi‘is in King Abdallah’s national
unity project. If al-‘Awda determines that
working with Shi‘is is no longer politically
useful, then there is little hope that the kingdom’s
sectarian problems will go away any time soon.
Saudi
Arabian Shi‘i political leaders are well
aware of how fragile the current political moment
might be. To be sure, the Iraq war has unleashed
a wave of foreign pressure on Saudi rulers to
reform and affirmed Saudi Arabian Shi‘is
in their conviction that they, like the Shi‘a
of Iraq, deserve more political opportunity.
But more importantly, and perhaps tragically
in the end, the war has set back the kingdom’s
Shi‘a in their titanic struggle to delink
themselves from the politics of sectarianism
set in motion by Iran’s Islamic Revolution
and to assert a sense of loyalty that transcends
sectarian difference. Saudi Arabian Shi‘is
are caught in a delicate balancing act, forced
to constantly renew and demonstrate their loyalty
to a state that has historically displayed overwhelming
animus toward them, while outmaneuvering charges
that they are preternaturally bonded with their
co-religionists elsewhere in the region. The
rise of the Shi‘is in Iraq, and more importantly
the role that the Iraq war has played in re-politicizing
sectarianism in the region more generally, has
made their task considerably more difficult.
Endnotes
[1] According
to government figures, there are 16.5 million
Saudi Arabians living in the Kingdom. There are
no reliable figures for the number of Shi‘is
in Saudi Arabia. Community leaders put the number
at around 1.5 million.
[2] See
Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapter
7; and essays by al-Rasheed and Gwenn Okruhlik
in al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis, eds. Counter
Narratives: History, Contemporary Society and
Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).
[3] All
interviews were conducted by the author in Saudi
Arabia and Bahrain between April and August 2005.
[4] There
are Shi‘a political groups that have previously
rejected the legitimacy of and cooperating with
the Al Saud, most notably the network widely
known as Saudi Hizballah, whose local name is
the Followers of the Line of the Imam [Khomeini]
(Ansar Khatt al-Imam). See International
Crisis Group, The Shiite Question in Saudi
Arabia (Brussels/Amman, September 2005),
p. 6.
[5] Reuters,
October 2, 2005.
[6] Agence
France Presse, September 22, 2005.
[7] In
Arabic, Tabdid al-zalam wa tanbih al-niyam
ila khatar al-tashayyu‘ ‘ala al-muslimin
wa al-islam.
[8] Al-Madina,
October 22, 2004.
[9] The
original threat against al-Saffar was reported
at http://www.d-sunnah.net.
[10] International
Crisis Group, p. 11.
[11] ABC
News, October 14, 2005.
