Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei renewed criticism of Saudi Arabia over how it runs the haj after a crush a year ago killed hundreds of pilgrims, and suggested Muslim countries think about ending Riyadh’s control of the annual pilgrimage.
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Responding to a question by Saudi newspaper Makkah, Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh said he was not surprised at Khamenei’s comments. For the Grand Mufti, an influential scholar respected across the globe, to say that “they (Iranians) are children of Magi and their hostility towards Muslims is an old one”, is truly shocking and will haunt Shia communities living across the region for years to come.
The 2015 hajj incident killed at least 2,426 people, according to an Associated Press count.
The head of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council said that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s remarks accusing Riyadh of “murder” over the deaths of almost 2,300 pilgrims at last year’s hajj were “inappropriate and offensive”.
Khamenei published an extensive article Tuesday accusing Saudi Arabia of the “murder” of pilgrims in last year’s hajj, where a stampede resulted in the deaths of thousands. Predating Christianity and Islam, Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion in Persia before the Arab conquest.
Saudi Arabia accused Iran, its long-standing rival, of seeking to politicise this event, saying that Iran was compromising safety with its actions. “They murdered them”, Khamenei wrote on his website, AP news reported.
Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei went as far as writing a letter to the leaders of the Islamic world as well as Egypt’s top Islamic institution Al-Azhar, asking them reject the modern Saudi royal family as custodian of the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina.
“This is a place where other pilgrims need serenity.to feel at peace”, he said, adding that citizens of more than 50 nations participate in the Hajj each year and keep politics out of it. Among the dead were 464 Iranians.
An official Saudi inquiry has yet to be published, but authorities suggested at the time some pilgrims ignored crowd control rules.
The kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef reiterated those concerns on Monday, saying Iran wanted to “politicise hajj and convert it into an occasion to violate the teachings of Islam, through shouting slogans and disturbing the security of pilgrims”.
Tensions between the two countries have been rising since Riyadh cut ties with Tehran in January following the storming of its embassy in Tehran, itself a response to the Saudi execution of dissident Shi’ite cleric Nimr al-Nimr.
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Jane Kinninmont, deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa programme at the Chatham House think tank in London, said the world needed to pay more attention to the “cold conflict” between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
