Attack on Shi'a Mosque Highlights Islamic State Challenge to Saudi Arabia

An Islamic State-linked militant killed at least 21 Shi'a worshippers and injured another 81 in a suicide bomb attack on a Shi'a mosque in al-Qadeeh village in the Kingdom's eastern Qatif province on May 22 (al-Arabiya, May 22). The bomber detonated his explosives amid worshippers performing their Friday prayers, having first locked the door of the mosque behind him (al-Sharq al-Awsat, May 22). The Islamic State soon afterwards claimed responsibility for the attack, and named a Saudi citizen known as "Abu Amer al-Najdi," as the bomber (al-Sharq al-Awsat, May 23). The attack is one of the bloodiest jihadist attacks in Saudi Arabia in recent years, as well as one of the most significant assaults on the country's Shi'a minority for at least a decade. It also highlights the increasing struggle that the country's monarchy faces in preventing anti-Shi'a sectarianism, which Saudi Arabia has long stoked up at home and abroad, from manifesting into potentially destabilizing attacks against Shi'as within the country itself.

In response to the bombing, Saudi Arabia's official religious figures swiftly condemned the attack in religious terms, with the country's grand mufti, Shaykh Abd al-Aziz al-Shaykh, saying that the attackers "are working to divide the ummah [Muslim community] and incite and spread fitna [strife]" (al-Sharq al-Awsat, May 23). The government also said that it was investigating the incident and that the bomber's father had been arrested (al-Arabiya, May 23). In addition, a spokesman from the country's Ministry of Islamic Affairs reiterated that the government would take action against any state preachers who were openly sympathizing with extremists, including on social media, and the country's state-funded preachers should continue to spread what he called a "moderate and centrist message" (al-Arabiya, May 25). The nature of the May 22 attack, involving a suicide bomber targeting Shi'as at prayer in a mosque, is a significant escalation in the Islamic State's targeting of Shi'as in Saudi Arabia. In the previous most significant such incident, in November 2014, five Shi'as celebrating the Shi'a festival of Ashura were killed in the country's al-Ahsa district in a gun and grenade attack by three Islamic State supporters, veterans of the fighting in Iraq and Syria (al-Jazeera, November 4, 2014).

The government's latest promises to crack down on extremist preachers and online expressions of support for jihadists may help to restrain some of the country's many official and unofficial preachers, and they show that the government now at least recognizes that extremist sectarian sentiments play a role in inspiring jihadist attacks. However, in coming years, the country will nevertheless continue to face considerable challenges from the Islamic State, whose very name and its open aspirations to lead the world's Muslims through a nominally meritocratic and pan-national caliphate system is a fundamental political and ideological challenge to Saudi Arabia's claims that the country's monarchy is the defender and apotheosis of true Islam. Ironically, however, the Islamic State and Saudi Arabia also share much in common, in particular, their present fixation on the alleged threat that Shi'as pose both to Sunni regional political predominance and, at a theological level, to Islam itself. Moreover, while the Islamic State is engaged in terrorist attacks on Shi'as in Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, the latter is itself engaged in a massive political and military effort to contain what it sees as Shi'a expansionism, conducting military interventions directly in Yemen, backing sectarian Sunni forces in Syria and working closely with Gulf countries like Bahrain, where a Sunni monarchy rules over an often restive Shi'a majority population. As a result, just as in the 1990s, when the Saudi religious establishment's anti-Western rhetoric helped to prepare the ground for destabilizing jihadist attacks against Western targets in the country, so Saudi Arabia now finds its domestic stability threatened by the same sectarian sentiments that it has helped to stir up across the region.

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