Just in time for Eid ul Adha, when Muslims are supposed to be celebrating their unity, a top Saudi cleric has declared “all” Shias around the world to be infidels. This means that a Shi’ite and an Israeli and an atheist are all the same to the Saudi Regime. Thank you Iraq war. I have argued repeatedly at Eteraz.Org — since way back in September before David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan made it fashionable — that the foibles in Iraq have started the Muslim version of the thirty years war.
CAIRO, Egypt
A top Saudi Arabian Sunni cleric on Friday declared Shiites around the world to be infidels who should be considered worse than Jews or Christians, the latest sign of increasing sectarianism in the Middle East.
Abdul Rahman al-Barak, one of the top several Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia and considered close to the Kingdom’s royal family, also urged Sunnis worldwide to oppose reconciliation with Shiites. The Wahhabi stream of Sunni Islam that is followed in Saudi Arabia is conservative and views Shiites as heretics.
“By and large, rejectionists (Shiites) are the most evil sect of the nation and they have all the ingredients of the infidels,” Abdul Rahman wrote in a fatwa, or religious edict, that was posted on his web site Friday.
“The general ruling is that they are infidels, apostates and hypocrites,” he wrote. “They are more dangerous than Jews and Christians,” he wrote in the edict, which Abdul Rahman said was in response to a question from a follower.
Like most hardline Sunnis, Abdul Rahman employed the word “rejectionists,” used as a derogatory term to describe Shiites because they opted out of the Sunni school of Islamic theology. He also said the sect was the work of a Jewish conspiracy.
Abdul Rahman’s remarks comes amid concern by many Sunni Arabs about what they perceive as a Shiite revival following the 2003 war that toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They include Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Earlier this month, Nawaf Obeid, an adviser to the Saudi embassy in Washington, spoke of “massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis” if the United States withdraws from the country. Saudi citizens are also reportedly raising funds for Sunni insurgents in Iraq.
Earlier this month, about 30 prominent Saudi Wahhabi clerics called on Sunni Muslims around the Middle East to support their brethren in Iraq against Shiites and praised the anti-American insurgency.
Thousands of Iraqis have been killed this year in sectarian bloodshed between the majority Shiites and the Sunni Arab minority, who lost their dominance after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Saudi Arabia, like most Arab countries, is predominantly Sunni but has a significant Shiite minority.
Do you know what is shit? That ultimately it is going to have to be regular average folk — most of them Muslims — from around the world who are going to have to suffer because of a destabilized Middle East.
Not only that, but the American government should be recognizing that this inter-religious war has started and thus should doing things to patch things up. But as Willow Wilson at Eteraz.Org said in “Really Bad Timing” the execution of Saddam on Eid Ul Adha suggests that the US is not at all taking Islam into consideration. I made the same point only more graphically.
At the moment either Muslims themselves will have to create an Islamic Truce — to which end I am trying to turn the discourse — or we’ll have another Kerbala (the historical battle in Iraq where a Sunni tyrant massacred the family of the Prophet’s grandson, thus starting the whole Shia Sunni thing in the first place).
It is pretty sad that in two days, my two diaries at Kos deal with two Muslim states where something done directly by us (Iraq & Afghan invasion), have turned into huge mistakes. Yesterday’s post looked at how an Afghan MP — a brave little woman — was running around pointing out what kind of murderers we had helped install in Afghanistan. (The post was a call of action trying to support her).
Ali Eteraz is the founder of Eteraz.Org: States of Islam, a humanist and activist Muslim website inspired by Daily Kos. His writings have appeared in Killing the Buddha and Identity Theory
