Also, their name matched that of the country, which was convenient.
Asking for clarification, presuming it is done in a suitably humble way, is not expressing an opinion.
Ok, you go to Saudi Arabia and ask for clarification, if you’re a citizen and all your family and wealth and everything you own and care about is there and under the absolute rule of the Saudi family?
Would you?
I mean, as well as the Shia, there are Ismailis, Alawites, Sufi…and the Druse.
Are they all considered heretical by Wahabis?
Why do the Christians in Palestine allow Protestants to pilgrimage to Bethlehem?
Well, there are occasional fistfights at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Here’s the thing - you have to at least to some extent divorce the pronouncements of government-funded clerics in Saudi Arabia from the opinions of the Saudi government. I know this kinda tends to generate a big “Huh?”, but SA is very strange place with a very unusual system of governance. At the end of the day the SA government, like most governments, is pragmatic. And pragmatically, they’ve kind of made a deal with the devil.
Ibn Saud, who founded the modern state of Saudi Arabia, rose to power in large part on the backs of the Ikhwan, a fanatical Wahhabi irregular militia he largely created in 1911 to subsume tribal rivalries. He used fanaticism to trump nomadic independence and create a united fighting machine of extremely high elan. And with it he conquered his kingdom. But as stated the Ikhwan were fanatics and were irregulars. They shunned military modernism and healthy political moderation. The ever pragmatic Ibn Saud also created a more modern regular army in parallel ( around 1923 ) loyal to him and when the Ikhwan became politically too unruly ( starting in 1926 ), he used the first to break the second. One of the causes of this increasingly unruly behavior was that the Ikhwan had demanded the forcible conversion of Arabia’s Shi’a population and Ibn Saud refused.
But though the Ikhwan was disposed of, the kingdom had still been built on a fragile unity predicated on state alliance with the conservative ( or extremist if you like ) Wahhabi clergy. Wahhabism was the ONLY unifying factor - at the time the Saudi’s own personal tribal allegiances based around Riyadh were probably simply not enough to sustain a state spanning the entire Arabian peninsula.
So since then the Saudi state has been built on the basis of a hand-in-hand alliance between a ultra-conservative clergy, who are largely on the government payroll. And the State gives them an awful lot of leeway. Or at least they did. Those controversial fatwas and the like you quoted date to the 1990’s. But 9-11 changed matters somewhat. After 2001 the SA government cracked down in general on radicals and told their pet clerics on their payroll to dial back the rhetoric. Which hasn’t entirely prevented quasi-governmental and private groups to continue to quietly slander the Shi’a. But it has cut back on it a bit - the SA government is well aware ( and has been since the 1979 Revolution in Iran ) that their own restive Shi’a minority sitting on oil-rich lands could become an unstable bomb.
At the end of the day AK84’s observations are doubtless correct. Certain extremist Wahhabis may well regard Shi’a as kufr. But for most nominal Wahhabis ( i.e. the mass of the population ), it is likely that they regard certain Shi’a practices as shirk without taking that next step of labeling them non-Muslim or apostates. And into this category doubtless falls much of the Saudi royal family.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t conservatives and extremists in the royal family itself - at the end of the day it is a 15,000-headed hydra with more factions and sub-groupings than you can shake a stick at. But many are well-educated, westernized “liberals.” And like I said, governments tend towards the pragmatic. For the Saudi’s in their weird little world, it doubtless seems pragmatic both to accept all categories of Muslims into Mecca (the shit storm from not doing so could be huge ) AND it also may appear pragmatic to continue to tolerate at least some extremists blathering on about how many non-Wahhabi Muslims are virtual or actual apostates.
Of course the bad thing about extreme pragmatism is that sometimes it can come back to bite you in the ass. In SA’s case its nurturing of religious fanaticism seems to have done exactly that.
If I were a citizen and living there? Sure, why not? You’re making out the situation in authoritarian countries to be much more dire than it really is. Take the GDR, for example, which effectively was an authoritarian single-party state with what is generally agreed to be the largest and most pervasive system of internal surveillance in history. The government line was that their Leninist planned economy was far superior to the decadent capitalist system in the west – a veritable workers’ paradise – and yet millions of their citizens tried to emigrate to West Germany. Even the Berlin Wall and other physical barriers were unable to fully stem the tide of economic emigrants and political refugees. Despite their tight control of people’s lives, the rulers had to face the embarrassing reality that the droves of people desperately trying to leave the country glaringly conflicted with their claims that things were so good at home. So they created this elaborate theory of Republikflucht to explain how emigres were either well-intentioned citizens deceived by the false promises of the capitalist west, or spies and traitors actively seeking to undermine their “socialist” project, and so on. They even established a television show, Der schwarze Kanal, concerned solely with critiquing West German television’s (whose broadcast signal was available in most of the GDR) claims and its depiction of life under capitalism. Citizens were actively encouraged to participate in state-sponsored political education programs and to petition the government at all levels for information. Certainly it may not have been wise to object to the answers provided, but at least questions were solicited and answers were offered.
It’s much easier to placate your citizens with reassuring lies than it is to lose their confidence and earn their enmity by refusing to answer uneasy questions. Authoritarian regimes, including Islamic absolute monarchies, have known this for centuries.