Why Salafists see Shiites as their Greatest Enemy

This hostile position against Shiites represents a principle that remains with the Salafists today. For example, Saudi Arabia’s former Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz bin Baz issued a religious edict at the time permitting the use of help from the Western alliance against Iraq in 1991. He deemed it permissible for Saudi Arabia to open its land to the alliance to carry out attacks from Saudi territory against Iraq.

The Salafists have no objections to using unbelievers to kill an enemy that has usurped land. But bin Baz hesitated about whether it was right to cooperate with the Shiites against Israel by questioning the intentions of the Shiites.

Historically, the Sunni-Shiite relationship has been affected by majority-minority logic, whereby the Shiite minority tries to link itself to the general Islamic entity and thus gain the majority’s recognition as an equal. However, the majority has usually been suspicious and distrustful of the Shiites and considered them inferior.

Here appears one of the fundamental differences between the two fundamentalist currents in the Muslim world. There is ideological Salafism, which makes ideology a strict principle in dealing with politics and is often influenced by Wahhabi ideology. Then there is political fundamentalism, whose principles serve the groups' political goals. The Muslim Brotherhood and its extensions in the Middle East are of this second kind.