Chances that the United States should return to a nuclear deal with Iran seem to have gone up after Washington again decided to waive certain sanctions on Teheran. Indirect negotiations between the two sides, which have been ongoing for nearly 10 months, have now entered their final stretch – which doesn’t mean that a deal is still on the table, especially as there are significant drawbacks still stalling the talks. Even if Washington did return to the nuclear agreement and thus managed to ensure that Iran won’t be manufacturing any nuclear weapons, this would very unlikely solve all the problems linked to Iran. Teheran has no intention whatsoever to renounce its sphere of influence – the so-called Shia Crescent – which it has painstakingly constructed in recent decades and which is based on a number of state actors, such as Syria, and a series of non-state actors, such as Hezbollah and the Iraqi Shiite militias. Similarly, Teheran is unwilling to give up its ballistic program, which allows it to threaten the oilfields in the Gulf, the American bases in the Middle East, but also Israel. Finally, irrespective of what the Americans will obtain from the current negotiations, odds are their main allies in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia (but also other Sunni monarchies in the Gulf) will not be happy with the result. For these states, Iran continues to be perceived as a threat.
What is more, this perception of a common threat has led to an unprecedented level of friendly relations between Arab countries allied with Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Saudis have started to cooperate tacitly with the Israeli in the field of intelligence, ever since a couple of years ago. Riyadh has so far refrained from establishing formal relations with Israel, although it obviously urged other Arab nations to do so.
The Saudis were not quick to officially sanction relations with Israel themselves, due to the impact such a decision might have and which some Muslims – extremists in particular – might regard it as an unforgivable act of betrayal. Unlike the United Arab Emirates, Bahrein and other Arab states that have taken such decisions, the Saudis are also the custodians of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. The Arab-Israeli struggle has always had religious underpinnings, so the Saudis, who consider themselves the leaders of the Muslim world, must also take into account the impact any official recognition of Israel would have in the eyes of the faithful.
The Iranians know exactly the kind of suspicion any openness towards Israel would stir in Arab nations, and are actively trying to exploit this by means of their propaganda. Not long ago, the commander of Iran’s navy said that the Saudi royal family are descendants of Jews who fought the prophet Muhammad. It’s a statement with a threefold purpose: to undermine informal Israel-Gulf relations, to weaken the position of the Saudi dynasty at home and in the Muslim world and finally, to insult and put out the Saudis.
Historical relations between Muslims and Jews, between hostility and tolerance
The relation between Muslims and Jews was delicate from the very beginning. On the one hand, Judaism, much like Christianity, is recognized by Islam, and Jews and Christians are considered People of the Book who were handed down by generations of prophets the same Abrahamic religion that Muhammad himself preached and from which they have strayed. The Jewish tribes of Yathrib/Medina, the oasis where Muhammad and the first Muslims took refuge in 622 when they fled Mecca (which marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar) at first cooperated with the communities that flocked around the Prophet. Relations between the two sides were regulated by the Book of Yathrib. Large communities of Jews were tolerated – although not entirely exempted from persecution – in the Muslim world up to the modern period. In fact, they found safe haven here when facing persecution elsewhere; Sephardi Jews driven away by the Spanish Inquisition, for instance, migrated in mass to the Ottoman Empire.
On the other hand, it was Muhammad himself who declared war on the Jews shortly after the first armed clashes between the small force of the Muslim community in Yathrib and the army of Mecca. In the case of one such tribe, the Banu Qurayza (not to be confounded with Quraish, the Meccan tribe the prophet Muhammad himself was born into), all the men were beheaded, while the women, children and their assets were divided between Muslims. The Qurayza were accused of having betrayed and violated the Medina Charter. Before massacring the Banu Qurayza tribe, Muhammad had already broken peace with another two tribes of Jews in Yathrib, Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir, which in turn were also accused of having violated the Charter and were thus driven away from the oasis.
Banishment from Yathrib/Medina was just the first step. A few years after Muhammad’s death, Omar, the second “rightly-guided” caliph, issued a decree whereby he drove away both Jews and Christians from the entire Hejaz region. The decree was based on a hadith attributed to Muhammad himself, stating “let there be no two religions in Arabia”, a prompt that was never fully enforced: a significant community of Jews would remain in Yemen for one thousand and three hundred years. Yemenite Jews migrated to Israel in mass shortly after the emergence of this state. The migration of Yemenite Jews to Israel was part of a mass exodus that swept the entire Arab world at the time – no less than 850 thousand Jews moved to Israel at the time. Some of the Jewish communities that completely disappeared at the time had been around for thousands of years, long before the advent of Islam or Christianity. The exodus occurred against the backdrop of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and many of the Jews were forced out of their homeland. The process would continue, albeit at a much smaller scale, in the coming decades at well. A large wave of Jewish migrants – this time leaving a non-Arab country – was reported after the Islamic revolution in Iran.
The foundation of Israel and the ensuing conflicts eventually ramped up anti-Jewish sentiment across the Muslim world. In the eyes of the faithful, a Muslim territory had been attacked by a foreign force. After 1967, Jerusalem, home to the third most holy place of worship in Islam, had also been conquered by this force. Although the official semantics did distinguish between Jews in general and those who live in the State of Israel in particular, or between Judaism and Zionism (the latter having been denounced most vehemently), references to the conflict between the early Muslims and the Jewish tribes of Mecca were inevitable, thus adding a religious dimension to the modern conflict as well.
It is not by chance therefore that Osama bin Laden listed the occupation of Jerusalem among the reasons he outlined when he launched his jihad. And when trying to justify the massacre of civilians on 9/11, the al-Qaeda leader resorted to analogies of Muhammad fighting the Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza tribes.
Muslim fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden are not obsessive about “Zionists” and “Crusaders” alone. There are another two major targets for their jihadist zeal: the “apostate” governments and Shiites. Governments whom they deem to be apostate are those controlling states with modern, non-Islamic institutions and those “collaborating” with the enemy. This was the primary reason why bin Laden hated the House of Saud and precisely why al-Qaeda launched a terrorist campaign in Saudi Arabia.
To some jihadists, Shiites are even worse than the apostates: they are idolaters, and idolatry has always been Muhammad’s archenemy. It was no accident that the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq – an organization that later became the Islamic State – Abu Musab al Zarqawi, launched a wave of terrorist attacks on Shiite civilians. Zarqawi’s plan was to force the Shiites to respond and attack the Sunnis so the latter would be forced to mobilize and mount a defense, thus joining his organization. The Jordanian did manage to trigger a civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis. It was not the first confrontation of this kind between the two chief branches of Islam.
The great Muslim civil war – Shiites vs. Sunnis
The conflict between Shiites and Sunnis is nearly as old as Islam itself, having broken out immediately after Muhammad’s death, when the question of who his successor would be arose. Part of the Muslims believed that the Prophet’s family – Ahl al-Bayt (“People of the Household” or “Family of the House”) should take over the community leadership, and that Ali, Muhammad’s primary cousin and husband to his favorite daughter, Fatimah, should be caliph (a word derived from the Arabic term Khalīfat Rasūl Allāh, meaning “deputy to the Messenger of God”). Ali had been the second person to convert to Islam after Muhammad’s wife, Khadija, herself also considered one of the bravest and most pious of Muslims. Ali eventually became caliph, a quarter of a century following Muhammad’s death. He was the last of the four Rashiduns, “rightly-guided” caliphs who, alongside Muhammad, are symbols of an idyllic period of Islam. The reign of Ali corresponds to the first Muslim civil wars. Ali was first challenged by the Umayyad clan, which included his predecessor, Uhtman. Then there were the Kharijites, an Islamic sect that branched out from the rest of the community in response to the power struggle and in the wake of Ali’s decision to negotiate with his main adversary, Mu'awiya, who would become the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty. Ali was assassinated by a Kharijite, not five years after becoming caliph.
Following Ali’s death, his followers, “Shīʿatu ʿAlī” or Shiites – grew increasingly isolated from the rest of the community. Over the years, the Shiites started to believe that Muhammad, Ali and the offspring of Ali and Fatimah had “a divine spark”, an idea rejected by the Sunnis and Muhammad himself, who never claimed to be anything more than human. As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that the fundamental school of Sunnis, which includes the Wahhabist movement and which was embraced by the Saudi dynasty, focuses on rejecting any form of idolatry, to the extent that its adherents destroyed tombs or altars devoted to iconic figures of Islam on numerous occasions.
The “spark” was allegedly passed down from one imam to another, the first being Ali himself, followed by his sons, Hasan and Husayn and the latter’s descendants. Most Shiites, also known as Twelvers, believe in the existence of 12 imams, the last of whom, Mahdi, entered his occultation in the 9th century and is due to return in order to lead his followers in the final battle between good and evil.
All the imams, with the exception of Mahdi, were assassinated, most by order of Sunni caliphs – first the Umayyads, then the Abbasids. Of all these untimely deaths, the one that particularly traumatized the Shia community was that of Husayn, who was slain in the battle of Kerbala in 680. Approximately 70 of Husayn’s men also fell in battle, including close relatives (who were also related to the Prophet himself). Kerbala marked the final break between Shiites and Sunnis, a milestone that convinced the Shia they were being persecuted and gave rise to their thirst for revenge. Kerbala is deeply ingrained in the Shiites’ collective memory. The mosques devoted to Husayn have a red flag above their domes, a symbol to the blood of Husayn. The Shiites sit on a piece of clay called turbah while praying, which is usually brought over from Kerbala. The Shiites’ battle-cry is “Ya Husayn!” The third imam is traditionally commemorated every year during Ashura, a celebration which occasions mourning processions during which the faithful perform self-flagellation rituals.
Many of the events that marked the Muslim world over the centuries would be analyzed also from the perspective of the conflict between Shiites and Sunnis, from the assassinations committed by the Ismaili Hashashins (assassins) to the deposition of the Shiite Fatimids by the Sunni sultan Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), from the wars between the Safavid and Ottoman Empires to the civil wars that broke out in Iraq and Syria at the start of this century.
The Saudi-Iranian rivalry, between history, religion and geopolitics
The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran cannot be fully understood without factoring in the historical conflict between Shiites and Sunnis. Saudi Arabia is led by Sunni fundamentalists, while Iran is governed by Shia Islamists. Both represent the extremes of their particular religions. The ideological divide between Sunni fundamentalists and militants (al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, etc.) or between Shiite Islamists and combatants are insignificant; what truly sets them apart is their willingness to resort to violence.
The inter-confessional dimension cannot by itself explain the Saudi-Iranian enmity. The two are also divided by the system of government – an authoritarian fundamentalist monarchy on the one hand, and a revolutionary Islamic republic on the other hand. Additionally, there is an ethnic component as well – Iranians are Persians, whereas the Saudis are Arabs. The expansion of the first Muslim state beyond the Arab Peninsula triggered a conflict with the Sasanian Empire, which it defeated in the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah. In the East, history has its own heartbeat, and a battle such the one at al-Qadisiyyah is more than a story in a history textbook. Saddam Hussein, for instance, described the war between Iraq and Iran as a second al-Qadisiyyah, in order to better appeal to the Iraqi soldiers (both Sunnis and Shiites), as well as to rally the support of other Arabs.
Finally, the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia also has an important geopolitical layer. Iran (and Persia before) is a major power in the Gulf and one of the greatest in the Middle East. For thousands of years, states that successively controlled the Iranian plateau sought to expand their influence eastwards, at least to Mesopotamia and the Gulf. Iran’s Arab neighbors see this as a threat, which is in fact the very reason why the Sunni monarchies in the Gulf supported Saddam Hussein’s secular and republican regime in its confrontation with Iran. For the last twenty years, Teheran has given Gulf nations no respite, as it continued to build a sphere of regional influence with the support of Shiite populations in several Arab states. It has become the dominant force in Iraq, a country that had previously been led by Sunnis (whether Arabs or, prior to its independence, Ottomans). It has consolidated its foothold in Syria, whereas its number one non-state client, Hezbollah, has become the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. Moreover, it sought to foster relations with various Shiite communities in the Gulf. Let us recall, in this respect, that diplomatic relations between Teheran and Riyadh were severed in 2016, after the Saudis executed a cleric of the Shiite minority, whereas Iran saw street protests that culminated with the mobs storming the Saudi Arabian Embassy. From the Saudis’ point of view, the worst part is Iran’s alliance with the Houthi militias in Yemen. Their victory would spell a bitter defeat for Saudi Arabia, as Teheran would thus succeed in establishing a bridgehead in the Arab Peninsula. Such a scenario is anathema to the Saudis, who in the last seven years have been waging a war they are incapable of winning, despite their clear technological superiority.
A nuclear agreement between Iran and the world’s superpowers would thus solve none of the abovementioned problems. It would only prevent Teheran from getting its hands on the most powerful weapon in the world. Even without it, Iran has proved it can be extremely dangerous and hostile. And the Saudis (along with their older and newer allies) are well aware.
