AMMAN, Jordan, April 15 (UPI) -- It may have been a Freudian slip or it might have been a conscious, intentional statement by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that Arab Shiites are more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. In either case, it was loaded.
Mubarak's comments in an interview with the Dubai-based al-Arabiya news channel last week drew the wrath of the Shiites in the Middle East, particularly the Iraqis who are being generally labeled as the Iranian regime's pawns.
The outgoing, Shiite-dominated Iraqi government boycotted an Arab League meeting in Cairo Wednesday on Iraq to protest Mubarak's bold comments.
Iraq's highest Shiite religious authority, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, sent a letter of protest to the Egyptian president on the issue, while many Iraqi Shiites have demanded an apology.
Lebanon's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Fadlallah, criticized Mubarak's assertion as inflaming sectarian tensions and fuelling prejudice against the Islamic sect.
There has been widespread criticism about the timing of such comments emerging from the president of an influential Arab country, citing the sectarian tension and fighting in Iraq as it tries to form a government, Iran's possible emerging nuclear power and the current political crisis in Lebanon where the Iran-backed Shiite Hezbollah organization is struggling against internal and Western pressure to disarm.
But when is it a good time for any Arab leader to come out and make a public statement about a taboo that has been swept under the rug for too long?
When Jordan's King Abdullah warned two years ago against the threat of a "Shiite crescent" spreading from Iran to the Mediterranean, the Iraqi Shiites, making up more than 60 percent of the country's population, held widespread protests and stormed the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad.
It is no secret that Arab Shiite minorities have been drawing strength from Shiite-dominated Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution toppled the Shah's regime and that Arab rulers have been trembling with fear at the thought of a rising Shiite power in their midst.
Almost every Arab country supported Iraq in its bloody 1980-88 war with Iran to stop the spread of a Shiite-led Islamic revolution across the region.
And since the U.S.-led forces toppled the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein three years ago, Arab governments are dreading the emergence of a Shiite-controlled government in Baghdad that they believe will be an infiltration of Iranian power into the Arab world.
While there are no official estimates on the number of Shiites in the Arab world, unofficial statistics say they represent between 15 to 20 percent of Muslims, while the remaining are Sunni.
However, they constitute a majority or large minorities in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Bahrain, with fewer in other Arab Gulf countries, such as Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In Saudi Arabia, the Shiite minorities in the Eastern Province were virtually stripped of their religious identity with the rise of the House of Saud in 1926 and Shiite pilgrims to Mecca claim they are continuously harassed.
Shiite protests demanding equal rights in Bahrain and some other Arab Gulf countries, where many of whose ancestors immigrated from Persia, have been crushed in recent years.
The Shiite sect was formed shortly after Prophet Mohammad's death following disagreement on who was qualified to lead as the Prophet's successors, where the Shiites believed only members of Mohammad's clan, specifically the descendants of his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali, were the legitimate successors.
It is believed the split between Sunni and Shiite began with Mohammad's death when a small number of Muslims supported the succession of Ali and the rest accepted Abu Bakr, then Omar and Othman, as the Shiites insisted the succession was directly passed on to Ali by the Prophet upon his death.
Although Ali became the fourth caliph in 655 A.D., he was murdered in 661 and the majority of Muslims named Umayyad Muawiya I as caliph, but the Shiites supported the claims of Ali's sons, Hassan and Hussein.
Islamic historians say Hassan died mysteriously in 669 and his brother, Hussein, was killed by Umayyad troops in Kerbala (now in Iraq) in 680 A.D.
Historians recorded the persecution, intimidation and murder of Shiites because of what they considered a coup d'état against Ali's caliphate, while some Sunni scholars had labeled the Shiites as "disbelievers."
The Shiites believe the study of Islamic scriptures is a continual process necessary for identifying God's laws and that the door to "ijtihad," or interpretation of the Koran, Islam's holy book, and the "hadith" (Prophet's sayings) was never closed. But the Sunnis claim it cannot be interpreted with the same authority as their predecessors.
Nevertheless, in 1956, the Shiite sect was accepted as a legitimate Islamic group when Egypt's al-Azhar, the main center of Islamic scholarship in the world, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, decreeing the "Shia is a school of thought that is religiously correct to follow in worship as other Sunni schools of thought."
The Shiites may have been recognized as an Islamic sect, but Mubarak's comments on their loyalties broke a taboo on the simmering political, rather than religious, tension between the ruling Sunnis and often repressed Shiite communities in Arab countries.
While some Arab analysts and commentators blasted Mubarak for having opened the subject of Shiite allegiances, others say he merely expressed a legitimate concern discussed in closed, yet large, circles, where Iran is widely seen as hostile to the Arabs.
As much as Iraqi Shiite leaders like to deny the Iranian influence on their political process, it is known that Sistani's Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq - today's most powerful political group in the country that leads the Shiite alliance - was based in Tehran during the Baath rule.
Lebanon's Hezbollah group, although widely respected among the Arab masses for its resistance against Israel and for not fighting their countrymen during the 1975-1990 civil war when other sects were killing each other, continues to raise the Iranian flag and posters of the leader of the Islamic revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, during its rallies and public events.
In other words, the connection is evident between Iran and the influential political Shiite groups in Arab countries where they are allowed to work, even if Hezbollah's political agenda, for example, is clearly aimed against Israel.
With the alleged threat of Tehran's possible manufacture of a nuclear bomb, analysts warn, perhaps it's time for Arab regimes to start showing some respect to their Shiite minorities - or at least the minimum respect they show the rest of their repressed subjects - if they want to shift their allegiances from Iran to their own countries.
