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Saudi medical services learns from past lessons as hajj season starts

Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, the top cleric of Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday said that the rulers of Iran were “not Muslims”, and compared them to pre-Islamic fire-worshippers. Iran sent 60,000 pilgrims previous year, and claimed the largest number of stampede fatalities, at 464.

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Shia Iran and Sunni-led Saudi Arabia – long considered regional arch-foes – have been in a row over the annual Hajj.

In this photo released by official website of the office of the Iranian Presidency, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks at a weekly cabinet meeting in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016.

The majority of Iranians are Shiite Muslims, while most in Saudi Arabia are Sunni.

Saudi Arabia’s top cleric has said Iranians are “not Muslims”, a day after Iran’s supreme leader denounced its management of the Hajj pilgrimage. Saudi Arabia and Iran back opposite sides of the wars in Syria and Yemen, and support opposing political groups in Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon.

“Magi” was a reference to the Zoroastrian religion that was prevalent in Iran before Islam, and is sometimes used as an insult against Iranians.

He reserved some of his harshest words for Riyadh’s response to last year’s Hajj stampede which killed 2,297 pilgrims, according to a toll compiled from foreign officials.

Iran’s theocratic regime sees itself as the vanguard of Shia Islam, similar to how the Saudis, practitioners of a particular orthodox Wahabist brand of the faith, style themselves as the leaders of the Sunni world.

A former senior USA foreign policy official, John Hannah, last month cited Gulf sources in an article for Foreign Policy magazine, saying that “the Saudis did in fact go out of their way to make Iranian attendance hard”.

“If we do not say Mina stampede was premeditated, this incompetency and lack of prudence is a crime”, the official website of the leader quoted him as saying at a gathering of the relatives of Iranian victims of Mina stampede that took place a year ago near the holy city of Mecca.

Saudi authorities normally seek to avoid public discussion of whether Shias are Muslims, but implicitly recognise them as such by welcoming them to the haj, and by accepting Iranian visits to the Saudi-based Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. He said Iranian leaders were “followers of magus”, a term that refers to Zoroastrianism, the dominant belief in Persia until the Muslim Arab invasion of today’s Iran thirteen centuries ago.

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The hajj, a religious duty for able Muslims and one of the largest pilgrimages in the world, routinely attracts more than 1.5 million Muslims from around the world. Saudi authorities eventually executed 16 Kuwaiti Shi’a for the bombings after originally blaming Iranian terrorists.

Hajj rift: Iran calls Saudis 'murderers,' Riyadh accuses Tehran of 'politicizing' event