Special Correspondent: Looking for Allah as a Shiite in Saudi Arabia
I came to Mecca seeking spiritual enlightenment. I found discrimination and distrust.
MEDINA and MECCA, Saudi Arabia — It’s an image famous the world over: a teeming swirl of pilgrims, thousands upon thousands garbed in white, wending slowly in circles around a two-story gilded black cube. Islam’s holiest site, the Kaaba, and the mosque that surrounds it, has captivated both Muslims and non-Muslims alike for more than a millennium. It is the religion’s ultimate symbol of global spiritual unity, the direction toward which every Muslim in the world prays.
But photographs can lie. Praying at the spiritual center of Islam as a Shiite Muslim, the smaller of Islam’s two major sects, is like attending Catholic mass as a Southern Baptist. Or these days, perhaps more accurately, it’s like attending Catholic mass at the Vatican as a Protestant during the Counter-Reformation.
I performed a pilgrimage just a week after the Saudi government executed dissident Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, whose death set off a wave of protests in Shiite communities around the world, including a torching of Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Tehran, which prompted the kingdom to sever diplomatic ties with Iran. It was a culmination of years of worsening relations between the world’s premier Sunni power and its geopolitical and religious rival, the majority-Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran.
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WNU Editor: It is very revealing that the author for this report is keeping his name private ... I guess he knows many Sunnis who may object to his commentary. I have a Shiite friend who did the pilgrimage to Mecca a few years ago before today's Sunni-Shiite differences exploded. As he told me a few weeks ago .... it was pretty bad then, and he can only imagine what it is today. Now we have a good idea.