Since King Salman inherited the throne in Riyadh a year ago, Saudi Arabia’s execution rate has soared. Last year, the kingdom executed 158 people, marking a 20-year high.
Apparently not content to rest on those dubious laurels, Saudi authorities followed that high water mark by executing 47 people—by beheadings and firing squads—on New Year’s Day alone. It was the highest number of executions in a single day in the kingdom since 1980, when Saudi authorities publicly beheaded 63 Sunni fundamentalists behind the takeover of the Kaaba during the 1979 Hajj.
The majority of those killed on Jan. 1 were alleged terrorists convicted on charges stemming from the country’s al-Qaida insurgency, which wreaked havoc across Saudi Arabia in the mid-2000s. Four, however, were Shiites—including the internationally revered Ayatollah Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a vocal advocate for the kingdom’s oppressed Shiite minority.
A Saudi court sentenced al-Nimr to death in 2014 after convicting him of eight crimes, including “waging war against God.” In the immediate aftermath of the execution, Arab News—a Jeddah-based English daily owned by the royal Saudi family—accused the slain cleric of delivering sermons that incited violence, even blaming him for the death of policemen in the Shiite-majority Eastern Province in 2011.
According to the article, al-Nimr advocated a “public uprising against the state” and “secession of the Shiite regions to form a united Shiite state.” Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti—the kingdom’s highest religious authority—endorsed al-Nimr’s execution, asserting that the Saudis were showing “mercy” by preventing al-Nimr and the others from committing more “crimes.”
A Shiite Backlash
Across the Muslim world, however, Shiite political and religious figures have disputed this characterization of al-Nimr’s advocacy and expressed outrage at his execution.
To protest the killing of al-Nimr, hundreds of Saudi Shiites held demonstrations in the Qatif district of the Eastern Province, chanting “down with Al Saud” while holding placards bearing portraits of the slain cleric.
Across the Gulf, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned on Twitter that the “unfairly-spilled blood of oppressed martyr #SheikhNimr” would herald “divine revenge” on Saudi politicians. Iran’s top leader added, “This oppressed scholar had neither invited people to armed movement, nor was [he] involved in covert plots. … The only act of #SheikhNimr was outspoken criticism” of the Saudi regime.
The day after the execution, several hundred Iranians gathered outside the Saudi embassy in Tehran, storming and ransacking its offices and setting fire to the building before police drove them out. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who has sought to improve Iran’s relations with the Saudis since becoming president in 2013, condemned both the execution of al-Nimr and the attacks on the embassy, which he attributed to Iranian “extremists.” Since then, Tehran’s local council has passed legislation to change the name of a street near Riyadh’s embassy from Bustan to “Martyr Sheikh al-Nimr.”
Nouri al-Maliki, who served as Iraq’s prime minister from 2006 to 2014—and is still thought to be close with Iranian-backed militias operating in the country—likewise issued a condemnation of Saudi Arabia’s “detestable sectarian practices” against its Shiite minority. He predicted that the “crime of executing Sheikh al-Nimr will topple the Saudi regime” and likened al-Nimr’s death to Saddam Hussein’s execution of a prominent Iraqi Shiite cleric, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, in 1980. While speaking on Palestine Street in Baghdad, Ahmed al-Shahmani, a prominent Iraqi cleric, declared that “The House of Saud has opened the gates of hell on its own regime.”
In Bahrain, a Shiite-majority country ruled by a Saudi-backed Sunni monarchy, Shiites held protests on the restive island of Sitra and in al-Daih, a village situated west of Manama, where they chanted that al-Nimr is “our martyr.” The island kingdom’s interior ministry announced that Bahraini authorities had arrested “several rioters and vandals,” as well as “a small number of people who misused social media for illegal purposes” in response to al-Nimr’s execution.
