The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism

"It is true that the Shia, who are a minority in Saudi Arabia, have benefited from oil in the sense that they have been employed by the Aramco oil company. At the same time, they have been the most activist group of people, the most rebellious. They have benefited from oil because the territories that the Shias have lived in for generations are so close to the oil fields. But, at the same time, they are discriminated against as a religious group because they have a different religious tradition from mainstream Wahhabi Islam. From 1913, when the Eastern Province came under the control of the Al-Sauds, you begin to see discrimination against Shias. They were not allowed to express their religious beliefs or practise their rituals. There is also serious discrimination in employment. They are employed by Aramco, but it’s very unlikely that any of them would ever be promoted to the top jobs. They are excluded from the judiciary and from the military and there is all sorts of other discrimination. “Vitalis does a great job explaining how the context of American corporate culture and the racism that goes on in America affected the rest of the world. It’s a story with a lot of strands. You have oil, you have class, you have race and you have gender.” Matthiesen captures the resistance of this community. He talks about how they define the community and why there has been a high level of activism in the Eastern Province right up to the present day. Since the discovery of oil and the employment of the Shia in the oilfields, the Shia have responded to all the political movements that have spread through the Arab world. In the 1950s and 1960s, they were drawn to Arab nationalism, but also socialism and communism. They were always very active in trying to express their sense of marginalization by engaging with these ideologies. Matthiesen describes in great detail how, in the 1970s, they were drawn to the Islamist movement in Iran. This is important, because it changed the language of resistance from the secular one of the 1950s and 1960s to a more religious one after the Iranian Revolution. He has a great command of the sources in Arabic—books on history and ideology—that the Shia have produced. His book has been criticised by some Saudis because it’s seen as focusing on a minority issue that plays to the Western interest in religious minorities across the Middle East, in trying to project them as discriminated against. A lot of Saudis don’t like his book simply because it highlights the issue of discrimination. Other Saudis think that he overemphasises the sectarian element. Before the 1970s, the Shia had engaged with other Arabs—as communists, as Baathists, as socialists—and they worked together. I don’t want to overemphasise the role of the Iranian Revolution in pushing the Shia towards an Islamist agenda. Islamism had become important in Saudi Arabia and around the Muslim world in general before the Iranian Revolution. Arab nationalism collapsed as an ideology after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, but the sentiment that inspired it remained and the Shia, like the Sunnis, engaged in Islamist politics simply because there was this vacuum."