Saudi Arabia’s execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia cleric, on Saturday was an act motivated more by politics than judicial considerations. Although in a BBC interview William Patey – a former British ambassador in Riyadh – charitably described Nimr’s killing as a Saudi “miscalculation”, the consequences so far have been totally predictable.
In Iran, the headquarters of Shia Islam, demonstrators set fire to the Saudi embassy while the authorities turned a blind eye, and the Saudis have now responded by severing diplomatic relations. Bahrain quickly followed suit and the UAE downgraded its relations too. The execution has also triggered demonstrations among Shia communities elsewhere – including Bahrain, where the Shia majority is ruled by a Sunni minority.
More seriously, but no less predictably, the inflaming of sectarianism will have knock-on effects in Syria and Iraq. In Syria, where Saudi Arabia backs Sunni Islamists and Iran is supporting President Assad, we can expect a hardening of positions at a time when international peace efforts are aimed at softening them and starting a dialogue.
Ditto with Iraq. As Patey put it in his interview: “If you are trying to repair the Sunni-Shia split in Iraq in order to have a united front against Daesh, this will make life a bit more difficult.” Interestingly, just a day before Nimr’s execution Saudi Arabia reopened its embassy in Baghdad after a 25-year break. While this was formally hailed as the start of a new era in cooperation, some see it as an attempt to counter Iranian influence in Iraq and establish an unofficial mouthpiece for Iraqi Sunnis in Baghdad.
It may also be worth recalling that nine Qatari royals disappeared in Iraq last month, apparently kidnapped while hunting with falcons. An unconfirmed report by Erem News, an Emirati website, claimed that their captors were seeking to exchange them for Nimr al-Nimr.
Saudi-Iranian rivalries have deep roots, of course, and the roots of the Sunni-Shia schism run even deeper. Saudi Arabia sees itself as the worldwide leader of Sunni Islam, while Iran is the main representative of Shia Islam. There are plenty of reasons to worry about Iran, but on the ideological front its influence is always likely to be limited, because the Shia version of Islam is followed by only 10%-13% of the world’s Muslims. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has been much more successful at promoting its own – Wahhabi – version of Sunni Islam. One reason is that Saudis have spent vast amounts of money doing so. Another is that, since the kingdom is the original birthplace of Islam, it’s a lot easier to persuade Muslims in other countries that the Saudi version is the most authentic.
This has had baleful effects in many parts of the world. “Saudi Arabia’s export of Wahhabi puritanical Islam,” Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, “has been one of the worst things to happen to Muslim and Arab pluralism – pluralism of religious thought, gender and education – in the last century”.
Iran’s influence in the Middle East, though far from harmless, is mainly confined to areas where there are Shia Muslims – Bahrain, plus parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia itself (where they account for around 15% of the population). One consequence of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was that it empowered the Shia majority who had previously been kept in subjugation by Saddam Hussein.
Even where the Saudi regime has reasons to be fearful, the scale of the Iranian/Shia threat has often been exaggerated for political reasons, and Saudi responses have turned out to be counterproductive. For example, the establishment of Wahhabi-run schools in Pakistan in the 1980s, intended as a bulwark against Iranian/Shia influence, helped fuel the conflict in Afghanistan.
In Yemen, aggressive Saudi-Wahhabi proselytising, starting in the 1990s, stirred unrest among the Zaidi communities (a branch of Shia Islam), which then led to a series of Houthi uprisings. Today the Saudis are at war with the Houthis and Yemen is being destroyed in the process. Naturally they have characterised this as a war with Iran, though in comparison with what the Saudis and their allies have been doing in Yemen, Iranian involvement has mostly been marginal.
Another effect of this onslaught in Yemen, whether intentional or not, has been to empower militant Sunni elements there, including al-Qaida and Islamic State. In the wake of the Arab spring uprisings, sectarian narratives have also proved auseful tool for Gulf monarchies leading the counter-revolution – characterising protesters as foreign-inspired or at least not representative of the Sunni mainstream.
Last month the Saudis also suddenly announced the formation of a new “military coalition”, which looked suspiciously like an attempt to sectarianise counter-terrorism efforts. More than 30 predominantly Muslim countries were said to have joined forces to protect “the Islamic world” against terrorism. Significantly, the list of members did not include Iran, though bizarrely it included Togo where Christians outnumber Muslims and the majority have indigenous beliefs of a sort that could easily get them arrested in Saudi Arabia.
One problem the Saudi regime now faces is that the sectarian and anti-Iranian narrative on which it relies has been undermined by the international nuclear deal struck with Iran last year. The kingdom had little choice but to officially accept it – though it is still far from happy about it. Provoking Iran might be one way of demonstrating that unhappiness. And in the context of Saudi-Iranian relations, Nimr’s execution looks less like a miscalculation than part of an emerging pattern.(Brian Whitaker)
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/04/saudi-arabia-execution-muslim-world-sectarianism-syria-iraq
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