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.
