Saudis oppress Muslim splinter sects, activists say
Thu Jun 13, 8:55 AM ET
Barbara Slavin USA TODAY

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Rabea Dahlan, a descendent of the prophet Mohammed,
was deputy governor of the Muslim holy city of Mecca until three years ago,
when he was jailed. Dahlan's crime, according to supporters: He belongs to a
Muslim sect that doesn't conform to Saudi Arabia's state religion.



Christians and Jews routinely complain that they are not allowed to practice
their faiths in Saudi Arabia. But human rights activists say the worst
repression is reserved for the half-dozen Muslim sects that depart from the
Wahhabi form of Islam of the ruling family.

Last week, Gwenn Okruhlik, a Saudi expert at the University of Arkansas,
told a U.S. congressional hearing that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah ''should
incorporate diversity of Islam into social practice to send a message of
tolerance.''

Saudis say discrimination falls upon Muslims in the western Saudi region
known as the Hijaz for the waves of Hajis -- Muslim pilgrims -- who come
here from other nations. Several Hijazi Muslims interviewed recently say
they practice their faith secretly.

The most oppressed, rights activists say, are 1 million Saudi Shi'ites, a
sect that is a majority in several other Muslim nations.

''There is institutionalized discrimination against adherents of the Shi'a
branch of Islam,'' says the State Department's human rights report. But the
department has not sanctioned the country, despite a recommendation two
years running from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom
that Saudi Arabia be branded a ''country of particular concern.''

Ali Ahmed, a Saudi Shi'ite who lives in Virginia and researches Saudi human
rights abuses, says there are about 200 political prisoners in his homeland,
including 105 members of a Shi'ite Muslim sect called Ismailis.

Ahmed Turki al-Saab, 42, an Ismaili in the southern province of Najran, was
arrested in January after he was quoted in a U.S. newspaper criticizing
discrimination and remains jailed, Ahmed says.

Last year, Ahmed says, authorities imprisoned a 94-year-old Shi'ite cleric
from the western city of Medina for two weeks for the ''crime'' of praying
with Lebanese visitors at his farm.

''The Shi'ites have saint cults and visit tombs,'' says Brian Evans of
Amnesty International. ''The Wahhabis see this as idol worship and consider
it to be almost apostasy.''

Non-Wahhabis lost out when the al-Saud tribe from the central Nejd region
unified the country a century ago in alliance with the descendants of
Mohammed Abdul Ibn Wahhab, an 18th-century Islamic puritan. The al-Saud
gained political power; the Wahhabis got control of the mosques.

Critics say religious intolerance helped create the fanaticism of 15 Saudi
hijackers in the attacks on Sept. 11. Saudi defenders say their religion is
peaceful and the terrorists were ''deviants.''

But Ahmed says teachers of religion instruct impressionable young Saudis
that ''all Muslims will go to hell except the Wahhabis.''

What is missing in Saudi society, says Sami Angawi, an architect in Jeddah,
is ''balance. In architecture, you cannot build on two supports, you need at
least three, and four is better. But our society relies on a single school
of thought.''

The Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, said in an interview that the
government would soon set up an ''independent'' human rights body. Ahmed
says the Saudis have talked about creating such an organization for two
years. The government has declined repeated requests by foreign rights
groups to send their own monitors.

Supporters say harassment of Dahlan, 52, began when he was named deputy
governor of Mecca. He was educated in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the USA, where
he was awarded graduate degrees in management at the University of Colorado
and Pepperdine University. Dahlan built schools that taught vocational
skills urgently needed by the growing young Saudi population. But in 1999, a
Saudi who had been sent to a mental hospital after making threats against
Dahlan and his family sued for damages. Religious courts jailed Dahlan for
four months in what supporters say was a case of religious discrimination.

Dahlan now lives in Lebanon. The governor who appointed him, Prince Majed,
resigned and left for Vienna.

A protest letter circulating in Jeddah recently accused Saudi authorities of
discrimination for prosecuting Dahlan while giving amnesty to an official of
the Saudi water and sewage authority who had embezzled $80 million. That
official, from the Wahhabi heartland of the Nejd, was a brother of the
private secretary of King Fahd.

Wahhabi favoritism is also distorting Islam abroad, critics say. A
non-Wahhabi Saudi academic who lives in Jeddah visited the USA recently and
met a Pakistani Muslim who told him in tears that the local Saudi-paid
cleric had issued a ruling against American Muslims celebrating
Thanksgiving.

Wahhabis recognize only two holidays: The end of the fasting month of
Ramadan, and the end of the month of pilgrimage to Mecca. They fall on
different days each year depending on the Muslim lunar calendar

Ali Alyami, a Saudi-born Shi'ite, told Congress last week that the Bush
administration should take a tougher stance with the Saudis if it hopes to
defeat terrorism: ''Our myopic policies are producing anti-American hatred
because of our support for a brutal regime.''