On Feb. 24, violent confrontations between Shiite pilgrims and the Saudi religious police and security forces occurred at the entrance to the Prophet Mohammed's Mosque in Medina. The timing and location of the clashes may have serious repercussions for domestic security, if not for the regime itself.
Some 2,000 Shiite pilgrims gathered near the mosque that houses the Prophet's tomb for the commemoration of Mohammed’s death, an act of worship that the ruling Saudi Wahhabi sect considers heretical and idolatrous. Thus, the Mutawa'ah, the religious police of the Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prohibition of Vice, armed with sticks and backed by police firing into the air, tried to disperse the pilgrims. The pilgrims resisted.
Three pilgrims died and hundreds were injured in the ensuing stampede. A large number of pilgrims remain in detention, among them 15 teenage boys.
Soon after, representatives of Saudi Arabia's Shiite community sought a meeting with King Abdullah in an effort to free the detainees. Dialogue seemed like a promising strategy: Just 10 days earlier, Abdullah had announced a promising reform agenda for the country. But the king refused to meet the delegation.
The violence outside the Medina mosque has led to unprecedented demonstrations in front of Saudi embassies in London, Berlin and The Hague, with protesters demanding independence from the Saudi state.
Such demonstrations are, of course, illegal in Saudi Arabia. But domestic suppression has only served to export and expand the problem. And now, the regime's policies of repression, discrimination and antagonism directed at the Shiite and other politically marginalized groups increasingly threaten the Saudi state with disintegration.
The Shiites are a special case, constituting 75 percent of the population in the Eastern Province, the kingdom's main oil-producing region, and identifying far more strongly with Shiites across the border in Iraq than with the Saudi state. Indeed, the empowerment of Iraq’s long-suppressed Shiites has raised expectations among Saudi Arabia’s Shiites that they, too, can gain first-class status.
From the regime's point of view, however, Shiite Iran is now the most serious security threat. The Saudi authorities perceived the Shiite demonstrations as an assertion of Iranian policy, as they coincided precisely with Iran's celebration of the 30th anniversary of its Islamic Revolution. Suppression of the Shiites is thus a part of the kingdom’s strategy to counter Iran’s bid for regional hegemony.
But this thinking is tremendously shortsighted. Only by transforming Saudi Arabia’s currently monolithic Saudi/Wahhabi national identity into a more inclusive one will the kingdom become a model that is attractive to its minorities. Today, the disempowered Shiites are forced to seek political connections and backing from the region's wider Shiite political movements to compensate for the discrimination they face at home.
So the choice for the Saudi rulers is stark: empower the Shiites within the system, or watch as they increase their power through external alliances. The threat that this would represent is not abstract: The kingdom’s borders are very porous.
So far, King Abdullah has shown no sign of opting for a policy of inclusion — not even a token gesture, such as a Shiite minister. Moreover, Abdullah is unable even to stop Wahhabi satellite TV stations from denouncing the Shiite “heretics,” or the hundreds of Wahhabi Web sites that call for the outright elimination of the Shiites.
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