The sectarian conflict between the Shi’ite and Sunni citizens of both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain reached new heights during the past few days.
In Saudi Arabia a Shi’ite cleric was reportedly arrested in the Eastern Province on Sunday for protesting against a proclamation signed by 22 Sunni clerics. The proclamation referred to the Shi’ites as heretics.
Sheikh Tawfiq Al-‘Amir was detained after he had called the 22 clerics "instigators of civil strife," the Saudi news agency Ra’sid reported.
Al-‘Amir, who serves as an imam (preacher), said last Friday during his sermon that these Sunni clerics were preparing the atmosphere for war against the Shi’ites.
According to Ra’sid news agency, Al-‘Amir was warned several times by the security authorities not to deliver the Friday sermon in the Aima Al-Buqe’i Mosque in the city Al-Hufouf.
The Shi’ite minority in Saudi Arabia constitutes around 10 percent of the entire Saudi population of 24 million.
Civil strife between the kingdom’s two major sects was stirred in the Eastern Province in November last year, when a Saudi Appeals Court sentenced a Shi’ite woman, who was gang-raped, to six months in jail and 180 lashes.
The court explained its decision by saying that the woman, who was married, had an affair that lasted several months before her rape. This "immoral behavior" led to her rape, the court concluded.
The local Shi’ite population accused the court of giving relatively mild sentences to the rapists, who were Sunnis.
A few months later, in February 2008, Shi’ites in the southern province Najran, near the border with Yemen, asked the authorities to stop the settlement of Sunni Yemenites in the province. The Shi’ites in Najran complained that the Saudi authorities were not living up to a promise to halt the settlement of Yemenis in the area, and that they were trying to tip the demographic makeup of the province in favor of the Sunnis.
Currently, it is estimated that the Shi’ites constitute a majority in the Najran province.
Meanwhile, in Bahrain an inter-ministerial committee, which was established on Sunday to fight abuses against national values and sectarianism, announced the closure of three Internet websites.
"The sites have broken the law by exacerbating tension and the decision to shut them down is in line with the new directives to address promptly and decisively any attempt to undermine national unity and compromise Bahrain’s social fabric,” Information Undersecretary Hamad Al-Manni told reporters, according to Emirati-based daily Gulf News.
Al-Mannai refrained from revealing the names of the Internet sites or their affiliation.
The decision to set up the committee – which would be comprised of representatives from the ministries of Information, Justice, Islamic affairs and Interior – comes at the peak of a Sunni-Shi’ite conflict in the tiny Gulf kingdom.
Last Thursday The Media Line reported that Bahrain had witnessed a bitter standoff between supporters of Sheikh ‘Issa Qasim, the Shi’ite leader of WNIS, and Jasim A-Sa’idi, a Sunni imam and a former MP.
A-Sa’idi fiercely attacked Qasim for the latter’s claim that Shi’ite citizens, who were detained last December for suspicion of acts of sabotage, had been tortured by the Bahraini security forces.
Qasim’s statement was "irresponsible, irrational and ignorant," A-Sa’idi said.
The conflict between the two was given a lot of publicity in the local media outlets, which had taken sides according to their leanings.
The Sunni-Shi’ite conflict is threatening, or may already become, one of the Middle East’s major frictions.
Last year, in an interview he gave The Media Line, Yemen’s Foreign Minister Dr. Abu Bakr Al-Qirbi warned that the rift between Sunnis and Shi’ites around the Middle East was developing into a "highly dangerous conflict, which threatens the stability of the entire region."