In researching a possible motive behind Iran’s alleged murder-for-hire plot (of the Saudi ambassador to the US), I found this on the NPR website:
So whence this competition? Does it have its roots in ideological differences, or are there more practical reasons? How old is this rivalry? Does it pre-date the overthrow of the Shah in 1979?
Here’s the link: U.S. Drawn Into Long-Running Iran-Saudi Feud : NPR
I think it might have to do with the fact that Saudi Arabia is primarily a Sunni Muslim country, and Iran is primarily a Shia Muslim country.
It might go back a ways.
They are two rival powers vying over who is the big dog in the Middle East. Although the Shi’a are a minority, you can find sizable pockets of them in Iraq (of course, they are a majority there), Bahrain (a majority there, too), Syria, Lebanon and even in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis would ideally like to contain Iran to Iran and limit or eliminate its influence in the Arab nations of the M.E… The Saudis don’t like dissent, and when you live in a Sunni dominated world, Shi’a = dissent. Especially when you’re talking the fundamentalist Wahabi brand of Sunni Islam that dominant in Saudi Arabia.
Iran, of course, is worried that the Sunni Arabs will eventually gang up on it, similar to what we saw Iraq do in the 1980s.
Which is where the Turks come in, but that’s a story for another thread…
It’s Arabs vs. Persians.The Shiite/Sunni split draws in the religious crowd. It’s tribal hatred, with Islamic fundamentalist frosting on top.
Short over-simplified answer: Saudi Arabia and Iran (meaning, mostly, their political and economic elites) are rivals for a strong leadership role in the Muslim Middle East, and especially for controlling influence in post-Saddam Iraq.
Iranians are (mostly) Farsi-speaking Shi’ites, with an ancient literate and urban civilization including centuries of regional and sometimes imperial political dominance over multicultural and multiethnic societies.
Saudis are (mostly) Arabic-speaking Sunnis, who control the geographical and cultural cradle of Islam succeeding a pre-Islamic tribal nomad culture, and in consequence have a certain cachet as both the most Muslim of the Muslims and the most Arab of the Arabs.
Historically, Sunnis and Shi’ites distrust each other, and both complain about oppression in populations where they’re outnumbered by the other group.
An Iranian who wants to be mean to a Saudi calls him, e.g., an illiterate woman-hating Bedouin camel jockey, while a Saudi who wants to be mean to an Iranian calls him, e.g., a sneaky Jew-loving apostate-Muslim pervert.
lolz
You can’t be serious?!
Why is this still in GQ?
It would seem that at least some parts of the Iranian government uses terror plots and other outrages and misbehavior in order to ensure Iran cannot become a ‘normal’ country, even if political leaders try to make that happen. I would suppose the plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was mostly designed to strengthen hardliners in Tehran.
Why can’t I be serious? Of course I’m somewhat exaggerating the insults for effect in both cases, but it is absolutely true that many radical-extremist Sunni Muslims stereotype Shi`a Muslims as untrustworthy and not “real Muslims”.
And it is also absolutely true that many radical-extremist Sunni Muslims suspect Iranian Muslims of being insufficiently antisemitic. This is partly a holdover from the comparatively friendly Iran-Israel relations in the days of the Shah, and partly due to Arab perceptions of Iran as being more comfortable with its (relatively large) Jewish minority population than most Arab states are—which, in fact, it is. Yes, Iranian radicals and the Iranian political elite are very vocal in their antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric, and I’m sure many of them mean every word they say; but Iranian antisemitism is also a deliberate political strategy to encourage anti-Israel Muslim Arabs to put confidence in Iran as a regional leader.
As for certain bigoted extremist-Arab stereotypes of Iranians as “perverts”, I will not elaborate, except to say that it partly reflects differing historical levels of cultural tolerance for wine-drinking.
Why shouldn’t it be? AFAICT, the OP was inquiring about the nature and sources of political “competition” between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That’s a question that can be answered at least to some extent factually, and that’s what we previous posters have been attempting to do.
Oh, and as for the abovementioned Iranian anti-Saudi stereotypes, you can see some of them directly expressed
right here.
I should clarify that of course I’m not advocating or justifying the use of any of those stereotypes that I mentioned. I was just trying to illustrate some of the cultural antagonisms between Saudis and Iranians that are stirred up by their governments’ political rivalries.