RIYADH — Saudi intellectuals have voiced their support for Hizbullah and its chief Hassan Nasrallah, counting an old fatwa by a Saudi scholar banning Muslims from helping Lebanon’s resistance movement because it is Shiite.
“I, as a Muslim and Arab, feel happy when Hizbullah inflicts damage on the Zionists, and we should praise the resistance in the media,” Sheikh Salman Al-Odah told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Friday, August 4.
Odah said Sheikh Abdullah bin Jebreen’s edict is “an old fatwa issued several years ago and does not apply to the current situation.”
“All Muslims must stand by the entire Lebanese people and help them at the humanitarian, material and moral levels,” Odah stressed.
The scholar said some of those who have revived bin Jebreen’s fatwa may have done so because they are dismayed by events in Iraq, where Shiite militias are accused of systematically killing Sunnis and putting the country on the edge of a devastating civil war.
“They have not been careful to differentiate” between what is happening in Iraq and in Lebanon, he said.
The revival of the fatwa was harshly criticized by prominent Muslim scholars, accusing its supporters of seeking to provoke sectarian dissension.
Sectarian Dissension
Saudi columnist and media adviser Jamal Khashoggi expressed regret that some scholars and preachers in his country were trying to “provoke a stupid sectarian dissension between Sunnis and Shiites.”
Bin Jebreen’s old fatwa had been “invoked by an advocate of hatred in order to serve (the agenda) of Salafi extremists,” Khashoggi wrote in the Emirati daily Al-Ittihad.
He said another scholar, Sheikh Nasser al-Omar, “who never made a secret of his antipathy for Shiites,” added his own “political reading to the fatwa” and went on Arab satellite channels to claim that “the current events prove the hatred that the Shiites and Iran harbor toward Sunnis.”
He also deplored that the Saudi criticism of Hizbullah at the beginning of the war had been ideologically motivated.
“The sectarian dimension was the last thing on the mind of the Saudi official who spelled out the Saudi position in the first statement issued after the outbreak of the crisis,” he said.
“The Saudi position would not have been any different if the (Sunni) Islamic Group or the Lebanese Communist Party had abducted the soldiers and triggered the crisis.”
In a recent televised message, Nasrallah warned against reacting to purported anti-Hezbollah edicts in a manner that would benefit Israel.
“Positions or fatwas might be issued that undermine (Muslim) unity. We should not be influenced by them, and I warn against … being dragged to inappropriate reactions, because reactions which are wrong, like these fatwas, will serve our enemies,” Nasrallah said.
Prominent scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi called in an interview with Al-Jazeera Arab news channel for “supporting the resistance in Palestine and Lebanon” and criticized “calls which stoke up sectarianism.”