POLICY FOCUS the WASHINGTON INSTITUTE for NEAR EAST POLICY RESEARCH MEMORANDUM W NUMBER FIVE AUGUST 1987 BEHIND the RIOT in MECCA

POLICY FOCUS THE WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY RESEARCH MEMORANDUM w NUMBER FIVE AUGUST 1987 BEHIND THE RIOT IN MECCA EXECUTIVE SUMMARY By Martin Kramer The recent rioting and deaths in The fatal confrontation which occurred between Iranian Mecca have shocked Muslims and pilgrims and Saudi police on July 31, 1987 is still shrouded in confused the world. The hostility confusion. Iran has accused the United States of ordering Saudi which led to bloodshed in the sacred city was prompted in part by the Arabia to massacre demonstrating Iranian pilgrims. Saudi Arabia political tensions in the Gulf. But the accuses some of Iran's 155,000 pilgrims of provocation and claims tragedy is primarily one episode in a that stampeding rioters crushed themselves to death. According to lengthy history of pilgrimage official Saudi figures, 402 persons died in the resulting clash, conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. including 275 Iranian pilgrims, 85 security police, and 42 pilgrims That conflict is perpetuated by the from other countries. It is too early to determine with any certainty refusal of Iranians and Saudis to respect each other's Islam. what actually occurred in Mecca, and who provoked whom. Through history, the pilgrimage has The magnitude of the bloodshed at Mecca is without produced a vast corpus of bigoted precedent, for Mecca's standing in Islam has always been that of lore about Shiite pilgrims and Sunni an inviolable sanctuary. For one Muslim to raise his hand against hosts. The essence of the Sunni lore is that Shiites seek to defile the holy another in the holy city is an abomination before God. But the places; the Shiite lore holds that Meccan tragedy, while unprecedented in the number of lives it Sunni hosts will find any claimed, was preceded by a long series of confrontations between opportunity to spill Shiite blood. Iranian pilgrims and their Saudi hosts. It is in this century that the pilgrimage has become a tinderbox Since 1981, no pilgrimage season has passed without some of Sunni-Shiite tension. Since 1924, incident involving Iranian pilgrims. Their annual demonstrations Mecca has* been in Saudi hands, and in the streets and mosques of Mecca and Medina have challenged Saudi Islam regards Shiism more the Saudi concept of pilgrimage, the Saudi interpretation of Islam, severely than do other forms of and even the legitimacy of Saudi rule over the holy cities. Nor can Sunni Islam. Since 1979, Iranian Shiism has undergone a radicalizing the most recent tragedy be divorced from the history of mistrust transformation. This volatile between Shiite pilgrims and their Sunni hosts, a history which combination has produced some stretches back as far as the sixteenth century. sort of incident during every pilgrimage season since 1981. The purpose of this survey is to understand the tragedy at These have been fueled by the old Mecca in the context of Islamic history and the religious tensions libels of Shiite defilement and Sunni bloodthirstiness. of contemporary Islam. The political crisis of the moment contributed to the violence, although it is still impossible to say In turn, the incidents have how. But the rising political temperature in the Gulf cannot offer a revalidated old prejudices, now comprehensive explanation for the setting and form of the tragedy. potentially more explosive than ever In the longer perspective, the rupture of the pilgrimage peace in in the context of the current crisis in the Persian Gulf. 1987 appears not as a gross aberration, but as an unusually violent -2- episode in a continuing controversy which has only because it sometimes led to violent acts long divided Islam and cast a shadow over the against Shiite pilgrims. At the root of the Sunni pilgrimage. In the context of that essentially lore is the belief that Shiites feel themselves sectarian controversy, the violence which has compelled to pollute the holy premises. Ample occurred at Islam's sacred center is fully evidence for Sunni belief in this libel exists both comprehensible. in Islamic textual sources and in European travel literature. This pollution was said to take a THE SHIITE FACTOR particularly disgusting form: Burckhardt and Burton, the great nineteenth-century explorers In their narrowest context, the pilgrimage of Arabia, both heard about past attacks on Shiite incidents of the past seven years have been a pilgrims, prompted by the suspicion that they symptom of the political rivalry between Saudi had polluted the Great Mosque in Mecca with Arabia and Iran. Each seeks to exercise a excrement predominant influence throughout the Gulf which separates them, and the activities of The Shiite libel was just as farfetched. It Iran's pilgrims have complemented other held that Sunnis did not respect Mecca as a methods of propaganda employed by Iran. But sanctuary, and that the lives of Shiite pilgrims another latent conflict also defines the contours were forfeit even in these sacred precincts, of Iranian action and Saudi reaction. The where the shedding of blood is forbidden by disturbances have not only been manifestations religion and tradition. Shiite pilgrims were of political rivalry, but of sectarian conflict with indeed liable to humiliation at any time; as deep roots in the history of Muslim pilgrimage. Burton wrote of Shiites on pilgrimage, "that That is the conflict between Sunnism and man is happy who gets over it without a Shiism. Its origins lie in a seventh-century beating." dispute over succession to the Prophet Muhammad. Over the course of subsequent Yet it would seem that, for the most part, centuries the schism became a full-blown Shiite pilgrims were as secure as other pilgrims, division over theology, exacerbated by social provided they exercised the discretion (taqiyya) and economic disparities. permitted them by Shiite doctrine. They could and did avoid persecution by adopting an The pilgrimage ritual itself is not one attitude of self-effacing conformity with the about which Sunnis and Shiites have conducted customs of their Sunni hosts. And, while an elaborate polemic. The bedrock of sectarian schismatics were not especially welcome in the conflict has always been the matter of the holy cities, the Iranians among them had a Imamate—the question of legitimate authority reputation as well-to-do, and those who profited in Islam—which is an issue of theological from the pilgrimage traffic eagerly awaited the controversy that has found fullest expression Iranian caravan. This security was also bought outside the ritual sphere. formally through the offering of special tribute, paid both to desert tribes en route and to the Indeed, for the first thousand years of guardians of the sanctuaries. Toleration could Islam, Sunni pilgrims could not be readily be had at a price which Shiite pilgrims were distinguished from Shiite pilgrims. Shiites prepared to pay, and their lives were rarely as formed a minority throughout the Muslim threatened as their dignity. world, and spoke the same languages and shared the same culture as the Sunni majority. THE ADVENT OF THE SAUDIS But in the sixteenth century, a new dynasty set about converting all of Iran to Shiism. Only Sectarian antagonisms were given then did Shiism become identified thoroughly renewed force with the advent of Saudi rule with Iran and the Persian-speaking world. over Mecca in 1924. The doctrinal divide Henceforth, Persian-speakers could be taken for which separated mainstream Sunnism from Shiites without question, opening new Shiism seemed narrow in comparison with the possibilities for sectarian confrontation between chasm which stood between Saudi Wahhabism Sunnis and Shiites in the holy cities. and Shiism. Wahhabi doctrine regarded Shiite veneration of the Imams and their tombs to be Since that time, the pilgrimage has blasphemous idolatry. The Wahhabi produced a vast corpus of bigoted lore about iconoclasts had earned a lasting notoriety in Shiite pilgrims and Sunni hosts. The Sunni Shiite eyes when they emerged from the corpus is perhaps more readily documented, if Arabian desert in 1802 and sacked Karbala, a -3- Shiite shrine city in Iraq. They slew several inspired in part by Reza Shah's secularizing thousand Shiites on that occasion, and policy of discouraging religious ritual, in order desecrated the revered tomb of the Imam to undercut the authority of the recalcitrant Husayn, whose martyrdom in the seventh Shiite clergy. But the move was presented by century is the pivotal event in Shiite religious the Iranian government as an act of protest history. Those Shiites who perished became against the alleged intolerance of the Wahhabis martyrs in the eyes of their co-religionists, and their destruction of tombs. sacrificed on the very site of Husayn's martyrdom. Still, the ban failed to discourage the most determined pilgrims from Iran, who continued When a revived Wahhabi movement to arrive via Iraq and Syria. And, in a pragmatic swept through Arabia during the first quarter of step, Ibn Saud moved to defuse the extensive this century, it seemed as hostile as ever to Shiite agitation against him by a show of Shiism's most fundamental assumptions. The tolerance designed to win official Iranian leader of the movement, Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud, recognition, Shiite pilgrims from Arab lands when asked in 1918 about the Shiite shrines in met with exemplary treatment during the year Iraq, could still declare: "I would raise no in which Iran imposed the ban, and Iran's men objection if you demolished the whole lot of of religion soon were demanding an end to the them, and I would demolish them myself if I ban. had the chance." In 1928, the pilgrimage ban was lifted, and He never had that chance, but he did take in 1929 a treaty of friendship was concluded Medina, and his bombardment of the city between Iran and Ibn Saud's kingdom.

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