Haj begins amid political tensions

Caryle Murphy, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 22. 2009 12:39AM UAE / November 21. 2009 8:39PM GMT

Pilgrims gather atop the Mount of Mercy (Jabal al Rahma) in the plain of Arafat, south-east of the holy city of Mecca, yesterday. Mahmud Hams / AFP

RIYADH // Millions of Muslims from around the world have begun pouring into Saudi Arabia for the once-in-a-lifetime Haj pilgrimage, an event that this year takes place against a backdrop of heightened Saudi-Iranian tensions.

The convergence of more than two million people on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, including about 65,000 from Iran, always demands a high degree of attention and co-ordination by Saudi officials.

However, this year’s Haj will be particularly sensitive given the recent volleys from Iran criticising Riyadh’s protracted air-and-ground operation against al Houthi rebels in Yemen. In the past, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has also complained about alleged Saudi mistreatment of Iranian pilgrims.

“It’s going to be interesting and challenging for the Saudis as Iranian pilgrims arrive because the … Haj is a good time to come into the kingdom to cause mischief,” said Theodore Karasik, the director of research and development at the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis.

There is a potential for the pilgrimage, one of Islam’s most important rites, to be marred by trouble because “the region is unsettled, more so than in the last few years”, Mr Karasik said.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are engaged in a competition over their respective roles in the Gulf, with Iran aiming to become the dominant regional power.

Their rivalry is also sectarian. Saudi Arabia sees itself as leader of the Sunnis, the dominant branch of Islam worldwide. Iran regards itself as the guardian of Shiites, which has millions of adherents in major Arab countries such as Iraq and Lebanon and in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich east.

This year’s pilgrimage is also trickier because of apparently deep internal divisions in Iran. The summer’s street protests disputing the June election results led to an open split within the ruling religious establishment. And there are reportedly bitter disagreements among the ruling elite over how Iran should respond to western pressures to abandon its clandestine nuclear weapons programme.

The effects of these dissensions are difficult to gauge, making it harder for the Saudis to know if they should take Iranian statements as bluster or as real threats.

A conflicting signal came last week when the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, warned “neighbouring countries” not to interfere in Yemen’s internal problems, adding ominously that “those who pour oil on the fire must know that they will not be spared from the smoke that billows”.

His remarks, aimed at Saudi Arabia, stoked fears in Riyadh that Iran wanted to take advantage of the Yemeni rebellion to interfere in an Arab state that Saudi Arabia considered to be firmly in its sphere of influence.

A day after Mr Mottaki spoke, Ali Ghazi Asgar, an Iranian official in charge of Iranian pilgrims in Medina, told Agence France-Presse that Mr Mottaki would arrive in the kingdom soon “to reassure our brothers in Saudi Arabia” that Iran wanted “to avoid all troubles” during the annual pilgrimage.

“We do not want those who seek to sow seeds of discord between Saudi Arabia and Iran to succeed,” Mr Asgar added.

Mr Mottaki’s visit, however, never took place, although it is not clear whether he or the Saudis cancelled it.

The annual pilgrimage has been a contentious matter between Saudi Arabia and Iran ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In the years that followed, Iran aggressively sought to spread its revolutionary Islam abroad and to make political statements during the pilgrimage.

The Saudis want to avoid any repetition of the disastrous events during the 1987 pilgrimage when more than 400 pilgrims, most of them Iranians, were killed when Saudi security forces opened fire as they tried to halt anti-US and anti-Israel rallies in Mecca.

Saudi officials have warned against attempts to politicise the Haj. “The kingdom does not permit any party to disrupt the security of the pilgrims or to attempt to divide the ranks of Muslims,” the government said in a statement dated November 2.

This came after comments from senior Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Khamenei, that were taken in Saudi as swipes against past treatment of Iranian pilgrims on Haj.

Saudi columnists have been responding loudly.

“The biggest mistake that the Iranian leadership can commit would be to seek a confrontation at the coming pilgrimage,” wrote Abdul Rahman al Rashed, the general manager of the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television station and a columnist at Al Sharq al Awsat newspaper. “Iran knows it will not find a single Islamic state that stands on its side in this battle if it sparks it and that it will be alone.”

cmurphy@thenational.ae