More than two million Muslims gather this week for the annual haj pilgrimage to Islam’s holy city of Mecca, where Saudi authorities hope to minimize spread of the H1N1 virus and prevent any political demonstration.

(Photo: Saudi security official at a checkpoint between  Jeddah and Mecca, 21 Nov 2009/Caren Firouz)

The haj, one of the world’s biggest displays of mass religious devotion and a duty for Muslims who can perform it, has been marred in the past by fires, hotel collapses, police clashes with protesters and deadly stampedes.

This year, the mainly Sunni Muslim kingdom is battling Shi’ite Yemeni rebels after they raided its territory, an issue that raises fears of possible protests by fellow Shi’ite Muslims during the rituals. Saudi Arabia bans public protests.

Riyadh is also trying to prevent a spread of the H1N1 virus as the crowded rituals provide an environment for transmission of the disease. At least four pilgrims have died of the virus since the beginning of the haj season.

Read the whole story here.

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Thousands of Shi’ite Muslims in southern Iraq are wrestling with a choice of religion or democracy before a pilgrimage which may prevent them from voting in elections to provincial councils on Saturday.

Pilgrims from the southern city of Basra are setting out on an arduous walk hundreds of km (miles) long to the holy Shi’ite city of Kerbala, far from the election centres where they are registered to vote. The pilgrimage for Arbain, or 40 days of mourning for the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson Imam Hussein slain in battle at Kerbala in the 7th century, culminates in mid-February.

(Photo: Pilgrims in Kerbala for Arbain, 27 Feb 2008/Mohammed Ameen)

“Kerbala is more important than voting, and so far I haven’t seen any candidate that deserves my confidence. I still have no job after the last election,” said Mohammed Ali, one of a group of pilgrims at a roadside tent.

Read here the full story from Mohammed Abbas in Basra. Missy Ryan in our Baghdad bureau reported last week that Iraq’s religious parties could face a backlash at the polls because voters have tired of too much religion in politics.

Missy Ryan in our Baghdad bureau sees a possible drop in support for religious parties in Iraq:

BAGHDAD - When Iraqis last voted in 2005, some in Washington feared the mainly Muslim nation would veer in the direction of Iran, an Islamic theocracy, instead of becoming the moderate democracy they envisioned for post-Saddam Iraq.

The question when Iraqis elect new provincial leaders on January 31 will be whether the religious parties that have dominated politics since then can hang on to power despite a bitterness felt by voters starved of services and security.

“Religious parties didn’t keep their promises. They exploited our problems,” said Safaa Kadhim, a teacher in Basra, reflecting anger voiced across Iraq toward the major parties, mostly founded along sectarian lines and seen by many as corrupt and self-serving…

In an opinion poll by the government’s National Media Center in November, 68 percent of those questioned rejected the use of religious appeals in the campaign and 42 percent said they favored secular parties, while 31 percent supported religious parties.

Read the full story here.

(Photo: Election campaign posters in Baghdad’s Sadr City, 13 Jan, 2009/Kahtan al-Mesiary)

Egyptian cleric Yusef Al-Qaradawi has provoked a storm of criticism with comments this month attacking Shi’ites for alleged attempts to proselytize in Sunni Arab societies. It’s a debate which has been bubbling since 2003 when the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein — which the Sunni Arab governments didn’t like but know how to live with — was removed by the American-led invasion and ultimately replaced by a Shi’ite government reflecting the demographic superiority of Shi’ites in Iraq today.

Free to contact work with fellow Shi’ites in neighbouring Iran and develop links with the powerful Shi’ites of Lebanon and even with the more precariously-placed Shi’ites in the Gulf Arab coutnries, the rise of the Shi’ites in Iraq has been nothig less than a seismic shift in the region’s potical landscape. Numerous Arab leaders have shown their concern with comments suggesting a crescent of Shi’ite power was developing across the region from Lebanon to Iran (as Jordan’s King Abdullah has said) or that Arab Shi’ites real loyalties are to Iran (according to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak).

Qaradawi’s intervention is of equal import. He is one of the most influential of Sunni religious figures, a former Muslim Brotherhood sheikh in Egypt who settled in Qatar where Al-Jazeera television gave him a weekly television show. His opinions generally reflect the mainstream of Islamist thinking, veering neither into the rigid obsessions of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism nor appearing to compromise principles for the sake of a modernity that suits the West.

In an interview with the Egyptian paper Al-Masry Al-Youm (in Arabic) on Sept. 9, he was asked which was more worrisome, Wahhabism or Shi’ism. He offered a brief, yet tart, crticism of Saudi Islam, then launched into the “danger of Shi’ism” discourse, which has centred mainly on unsubstantiated claims of Shi’ism’s spread in Syria. “They are Muslims but they have innovated (new ideas into Islam) and their danger is their attempt to invade Sunni society, and they are ready for it since they have billions in wealth and cadres trained to proselytize Shi’ism in Sunni countries,” he said. “Unfortunately, I have recently found Egyptian Shi’ites. Ten years ago they wouldn’t have succeeded in getting one. … Now they are in the newspapers, on television and come out openly with their Shi’ite beliefs. Shi’ites hide their beliefs and that’s what we have to watch out for. We have to protect Sunni societies from the Shi’ite invasion.”

UPDATE: Here’s a Qaradawi interview in English on Shi’ites from Asharq Al-Alawsat.

Governments are worried about Shi’ism for political reasons, because Iran and Hizbollah are championing resistance to Western hegemony, while the Sunni Arab governments have been about accommodating Western power ever since Egypt signed the Camp David accords and since Saudi Arabia came into existence. Shi’ism has a certain revolutionary chic that is attractive to many Arabs today. Shi’ism’s central principle of venerating the family of the Prophet has an innocent-sounding air to most as well, although in points of theology it involves some radical breaks with Sunni thinking.

Saudi Shi’ite clerics were furious about Qaradawi’s comments since they instantly bring alive an argument they have been trying desperately to counter in order to ensure a better place for themselves as a persecuted minority in Saudi Arabia (here’s one cleric responding in Arabic on the Saudi Shi’ite website Rasid.com). Interestingly, though, Saudi media have for once been sympathetic to them, even highlighting Sheikh Hassan al-Saffar’s response on the front page of al-Watan on Saudi National Day, Sept. 23. “Saffar differs with Qaradawi and rejects criticising his status,” the headline read.

The Al-Riyadh newspaper carried a frontpage article apologising to Shi’ites for having publicising Qaradawi’s comments, which fly in the face of King Abdullah’s policy of promoting dialogue among Islamic sects and moderation. “Sectarian Islam, or the Islam of one faith?” al-Riyadh asked in a frontpage editorial on Sept. 24, also marking National Day.

One could not conclude, however, that the Saudi leadership is trying to distance itself from Sunni radicalism while Egypt encourages it. The calculations are too complicated. Saudi Arabia has led the regional mobilisation against Iran and Shi’ism of recent years, taking Egypt along with it. It has also sought to improve its Shi’ite minority’s status. Both are strategies that aim to secure the stability of the country from external enemies, like Iran, or friends, like the United States after 9/11, who occasionally entertain the idea of reordering the polities of the Arabian peninsula.

Egypt’s al-Azhar university and mosque complex has placed a modern twist on the age-old ritual of book burning - now they want to throw a film to the flames.

Earlier this month, Egypt summoned an Iranian diplomat to protest against an Iranian documentary about the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, saying it would hurt improving ties between the two countries. Official statements from Cairo gave few details as to the contents of the film, other than suggesting it glorified Sadat’s assassins and portrayed Sadat as a traitor who sold out the Palestinian cause.

But apparently calling in the Iranian diplomat was deemed insufficient censure of the film, and al-Azhar, the thousand-year-old edifice of Islamic learning, was called into the fray as well. The government-appointed Sheikh of al-Azhar Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, known for his close ties to the state, convened an emergency session of al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Academy to address the issue. The resulting statement was published in the state’s flagship al-Ahram daily.

Condemning the “deviant group” that produced the movie, the academy said the film was the worst kind of un-Islamic behaviour imaginable, the “worst kind of crime.” Sadat was a martyr who deserved praise for welcoming the shah of Iran and for making peace with Israel, it said. Those acts were evidence of his courage and wisdom, “of which the world of wise men stood in awe.”

Sadat was slain by Islamist assassins in October 1981, when his popularity reached its lowest point with Egyptians following his purge of and extensive crackdown on political opponents of his controversial peace with Israel. His welcoming of the deposed shah in Egypt earned him the enmity of the Iranian regime.

But here’s the kicker: “(The rulers of Iran) must know that this ugly film will be a cause for the collapse of any efforts at rapprochement (between Sunnis and Shiites)… and this rift will not be healed without the burning of this ridiculous film.”

The wording of the preamble to the statement suggests that no one in the academy has actually seen the film, as it quotes media reports about it being offensive.

An Iranian newspaper later quoted an Iranian official as saying “The documentary has been produced by a private organisation… and does not represent Iran’s official stance.” The article seemed to confirm that the documentary praised Sadat’s assassins.

That’s actually one of the cultural issues that pops up every time something like this happens. During the Danish cartoons controversy, various figures in the religious or political establishments of Muslim countries demanded the offending paper and artists be prosecuted. They seemed to operate on the assumption that all states can control media output in their countries, as many Muslim and Arab governments do.

Despite Iran’s official disdain for Sadat, it’s possible that Tehran wasn’t too happy about this, given that Iran has been racheting up efforts to achieve a rapprochement with Egypt, possibly to break its international isolation.

The episode is another in a long line of cases where the state enlists what was once a prestigious and independent (well, depending on when) collective of Islamic scholars into echoing the government’s grievances with an added Islamic flavour. It is arguably al-Azhar’s apparent willingness to engage in such overtly nationalist and populist political manoeuvres that has left it suffering a serious credibility crisis with most Muslims.

It’s tempting to say few will have much sympathy for Al-Azhar’s statement when it rarely speaks out so vociferously against the political, social and economic ills that afflict Egypt. But nationalism backed up by powerful state-controlled media has historically had a good record at whipping up popular support.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah looks determined to get his proposal for an unprecedented Muslim- Christian-Jewish dialogue off the ground. A three-day conference in Mecca to discuss this ended with a soaring declaration of goodwill and benevolent intent. Saudi media reported that Muslim clerics from around the world had supported the call and confirmed that dialogue with other faiths was legitimate in Islam.

The official Saudi Press agency said the meeting recommended holding “conferences, forums and discussion groups between the followers of the prophetic messages and relevant civilisations, cultures and philosophies to which academics, media and religious leaders will be invited”. Given the gazillions Riyadh must be earning with oil at $140 a barrel, it may not be long before we see all sorts of petrodollar-funded “dialogue sessions” being held here and there.

Interfaith dialogue is a good thing, but the recent rising chorus of calls for more such talk hasn’t just emerged out of a vacuum. There is already a decades-long history of dialogue sessions that essentially exchanged pleasantries and generated warm feelings but did little to actually reduce misunderstanding and mistrust. The latest generation of initiatives — for example the Common Word consultations and the “Painful Verses” book we’ve blogged about here — takes the disappointment with earlier efforts as its starting point and aims to tackle the issues that earlier dialogues tended to avoid.

So where is King Abdullah on the timeline of interfaith dialogue? Up there at the cutting edge? Or a decade or so behind the times? It’s hard to say if we only have some official reports of his comments to go by. But there are a few red flags popping up in the mostly positive reporting, suggesting that whatever he comes up with may not amount to real progress.

For example, the Sunni-Shi’ite harmony message supposedly sent by the presence of former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani looked a lot thinner when journalists looked beyond centre stage. “Some Shi’ites said that, despite the presence of Iran’s Rafsanjani, few of their number were invited to the Mecca meeting. None came from Europe or North America and one from Saudi Arabia’s own Shi’ite minority which complains that it is given second class status,” our Riyadh bureau chief Andrew Hammond wrote.

Riazat Butt, religion correspondent for the Guardian, covered the conference and heard one of the classic Muslim views that goes against Abdullah’s position and turned some non-Muslims off dialogue with the muftis years ago. She wrote: “Abdullah’s understanding of interfaith dialogue differs from the one held by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Al al-Sheikh, who said dialogue with other religions was a way to bring non-Muslims into Islam. The cleric, who is the highest official of religious law, told the delegates that converting people to Islam was the ultimate goal of dialogue, a point made several times. “It is the opportunity to disseminate the principles of Islam. Islam advocates dialogue among people, especially calling them to the path of Allah.”

The grand mufti also contradicted Abdullah on dialogue with Jews, who the king has suggested could come to Saudi Arabia for talks on what would be an unprecedented visit. As Butt (right) wrote, “Several clerics, including the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, said it was almost impossible to talk to them because of the situation in the occupied territories. ‘How can you negotiate with someone who is against you all the time? They seem to be against us in every way so I don’t know how we’re supposed to have dialogue.’ Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi said he would only talk to Jews who denounced Zionism and he urged Muslims to talk to Buddhists, Hindus and atheists. His impromptu speech, lasting 15 minutes, garnered the loudest applause, proving his popularity among fellow clerics even if the west views him with suspicion.”

After having a front-row seat at the Mecca meeting, Butt was quite sceptical about the prospects for Abdullah’s initiative. But the attention this idea has been getting at the Vatican and among Jews shows there is a lot of official interest in it. If the Saudis start organising these interfaith talks, do you think they will actually produce more than nice words? Will they reflect what Saudi clerics actually think?

There were interesting words on interfaith dialogue from Mecca and Rome today and London yesterday. Efforts to improve contacts and understanding among the main monotheist religions have been gaining steam recently and we’re starting to see some concrete steps. But, as a meeting in Mecca showed, the road ahead could still be quite rocky.

The Mecca meeting, organised by the Saudi-based Muslim World League, is supposed to draw up guidelines for the inter-faith dialogue that Saudi King Abdullah says he wants with Christianity and Islam. “You are meeting here today to say to the world with pride that we are a fair, honest, humanitarian and moral voice, a voice for living together and dialogue,” the monarch said in a high-minded speech.

But former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the few prominent Shi’ites at the conference, rained on his parade with broadsides against the United States and Israel. But he also said: “To have a dialogue with other religions we need to start talking among ourselves. The call needs to be directed at ourselves first of all, and all the sects need to agree on shared points. As a Muslim and a Shi’ite … I say the things we agree on are many.”

That may have been a reaction to a statement this week by a group of independent Saudi clerics saying that Shi’ites, including Lebanese group Hezbollah, were posturing against Israel to hide an anti-Sunni agenda.

On the same day Abdullah spoke, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said his Vatican department for inter-religious dialogue was drawing up its own guidelines for Catholic dialogue with non-Christian religions. He told Vatican Radio (here in Italian) the guidelines for priests and lay people would be based on the Ten Commandments, which he called “a kind of universal grammar that all believers can use in their relations with God and their neighbour.” This approach neatly links Christians with Jews and Muslims such as the “Common Word” scholars who’ve called for a dialogue based on the principle of love of God and neighbour.

In London, Lambeth Palace issued a statement on Tuesday about an ecumenical meeting that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams convened on June 1-2 to discuss ways to deepen Christian-Muslim dialogue. More than 40 participants discussed the “Common Word” initiative and “what degree of consensus might be possible as we look forward,” he said. The list of participants shows most of the Christian churches addressed by the “Common Word” letter were present. The statement said: “Delegates at the Consultation were heartened by the great variety of initiatives, some by Muslims and some by Christians, that were taking place at many different levels - many with a well-established track record. A great emphasis was placed on the need to ensure that the results of these encounters were more widely disseminated and influenced the education and formation of young people. The Archbishop agreed to take forward further work, particularly in response to A Common Word.”

There have been several other stories about interfaith dialogue recently, including the following:

• Cardinal Tauran gave a speech in London last month where he said: “There is a change of climate [in interreligious dialogue] now. It is more open minded, there is greater cordiality.” Here are reports in The Times and the Guardian and the speech text in Zenit.
• Tauran also attended the sixth Doha Conference of Interfaith Dialogue in May.
• French bishops issue a document on dialogue entitled “How do Christians and Muslims speak of God?” (here in French). Rev. Christophe Roucou, the bishops’ conference specialist for relations with Islam, comments in this La Croix interview (in French).

Sunni-Shi’ite tensions are regularly in the news, but usually from a small number of countries in or around the Middle East. Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan are probably the most frequently mentioned. It’s much rarer to hear how Islam’s two main families get along (or don’t) further afield. Now, two of our reporters in Nigeria, Farouk Umar and Estelle Shirbon, have written a feature about sectarian strife in Sokoto, a historic Muslim city in the remote northwest of the country. As they explained:

Shi’a Islam was almost unknown in Nigeria until the early 1980s when Muslim radical Ibrahim Zakzaky, fired by the Iranian revolution, campaigned for an Islamic government and stricter adherence to sharia, or Islamic law.

For many youths in the poor, predominantly Muslim north, joining Zakzaky’s movement was an act of rebellion against a disappointing political and religious establishment.

Zakzaky’s personal religion is an eclectic blend of Sunni and Shi’ite ideas but many of his followers have come to identify themselves as Shi’ites. For Sunnis in Sokoto, these followers present a threat to their own religious hierarchy.

Read the whole feature here.

Thanks to Haroon Siddique over at the Guardian newsblog for doing some work I left unfinished last week. On Feb. 26, I wrote a post about a leading Muslim seminary in India declaring terrorism to be un-Islamic and noted that the news got almost no coverage in western media. “So the statement, which was backed by several thousand Islamic scholars, looks like it will end up like the tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it,” the post added. The next day, our Beirut bureau reported that Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah — one of the most respected clerics in Shi’ite Islam — had denounced the practice of Muslims charging others with non-belief as “one of the most dangerous issues” faced by the Muslim world. This practice, called takfir in Arabic, is used by radical Islamists as a justification for killing other Muslims.

As soon as I saw the report, I thought this would probably be another tree falling in the forest unheard and bookmarked it to wait to see if it would be picked up. Other demands got in the way and then other blog subjects came up, so the takfir post didn’t even make it to the falling tree stage in the blogosphere. This happens more frequently than I like, but we can’t cover everything.

Now Siddique has come to the rescue with his post “Who’s listening to the Muslim moderates?” A few excerpts:

“How many times have we read or heard calls for moderate Muslims to speak out about wrongs supposedly carried out in the name of Islam?

Politicians including Tony Blair and various commentators - here’s a Telegraph leader - have urged the moderate voice of Islam to make itself heard above the din of extremist preachers.

Last week, one of the most respected clerics in Shia Islam, Lebanon’s grand ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, condemned the perpetrators of an attack against pilgrims in Iraq as “murderers and animals” and called for the repudiation of a school of thought that it was permissible to spill the blood of Muslims “who embrace another doctrine, or believe in alternative political views”…

…If you do not remember reading or hearing about his comments that is probably because you did not. His words, reported by Reuters, might have been expected to be picked up by the same media which regularly feature writers bemoaning a lack of moderate Muslims. But there was no mention of his strong words in the British papers, their websites or that of the BBC.“

Do you think news items like these don’t get media play because they don’t fit certain stereotypes? Of because editors don’t understand the role that the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary or Grand Ayathollah Fadlallah play? Or for some other reason?

Ashura, the Shi’ite day of mourning for Mohammad’s martyred grandson Hussein, is so marked by bloody scenes of self-flagellating men that news reports about it rarely get beyond the vivid images (like our photo from Lahore on the right). Jack Fairweather has produced a fascinating short video that asks the question usually missed — what really motivates people to do this? — and follows one man who explains his feelings and joins in the ritual. This is the first part of a series on the Washington Post PostGlobal site meant “to challenge our perceptions of Islam as a monolithic and extremist creed.” If Fairweather keeps it as up close and personal as this, it should be very good.