Saudi Arabian law does not recognize religious freedom, and the public practice of non-Muslim religions is actively prohibited. No law specifically requires citizens to be Muslims, but article 12.4 of the Naturalization Law requires that applicants attest to their religious affiliation, and article 14.1 requires that applicants get a certificate endorsed by their local cleric. The Government has declared the Quran and the Sunna (tradition) of the
Islamic prophet Muhammad to be the country's constitution. Neither the Government nor society in general accepts the concepts of separation of religion and state, and such separation does not exist. The legal system is based on Shari'a (Islamic law), with Shari'a courts basing their judgments largely on a code derived from the Quran and the Sunna. According to Human Rights Watch, Saudi Arabia "systematically discriminates against its Muslim religious minorities, in particular Shia and Ismailis", but the Government permits Shi'a Muslims to use their own legal tradition to adjudicate noncriminal cases within their community. In 2014, Saudi Arabia enacted new "anti-terrorism" legislation.
Human Rights Watch criticized the broad language of the legislation and related government decrees, which have been used to prosecute and punish peaceful political activists and dissidents. HEW stated "these recent laws and regulations turn almost any critical expression or independent association into crimes of terrorism." It is not a party to the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which includes freedom of religion. The country holds a reservation to the
Convention on the Rights of the Child against any provisions that are in conflict with sharia law; Article 14 gives freedom of "thought, conscience and religion" to children. Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states have been carrying out airstrikes on Yemen, violating international laws and arresting anyone that criticizes them.
Jews There has been virtually no Jewish activity in Saudi Arabia since the beginning of the 21st century. Census data does not identify any Jews as residing within Saudi Arabian territory.
Christians As an Islamic state, Saudi Arabia gives preferential treatment for Muslims. During
Ramadan, eating, drinking, or smoking in public during daylight hours is not allowed. Foreign schools are often required to teach a yearly introductory segment on Islam. Saudi religious police have detained Shi'ite pilgrims participating in the
Hajj, allegedly calling them "
infidels in Mecca". The restrictions on the Shi'a branch of Islam in the Kingdom along with the banning of displaying Jewish, Hindu and Christian symbols have been referred to as apartheid. The Saudi government has gone further than stopping Christians from worshipping in publicly designated buildings to even raid private prayer meetings among Christian believers in their own homes. On 15 December 2011, Saudi security forces arrested 35 Ethiopian Christians in Jeddah who were praying in a home, beating them and threatening them with death. When the Ethiopian workers' employers asked security forces for what reason they were arrested, they said "for practicing Christianity". Later, under mounting international pressure, this charge was changed to "mixing with the opposite sex". In December 2012, Saudi religious police detained more than 41 individuals after storming a house in the Saudi Arabian province of al-Jouf. They were accused of "plotting to celebrate Christmas," according to a 26 December statement released by the police branch. Proselytizing by non-Muslims, including the distribution of non-Muslim religious materials such as
Bibles, is illegal in Saudi Arabia.
Shia Muslims Saudi Arabia's civil law gives shia the right to establish their mosques and personal courts in regions with significant Shia population. For example, the eastern region has “Ja'fari Court” for those who adheres the Jaafari Sect of Shia Islam. although there are no official statistics on how many shia mosques in Saudi Arabia, its presence in the eastern region is high.
Saudi Arabia has historically appointed shias in high government positions notably the chairman of
Aramco,
Amin Nasser, who hails from the Predominant Shia city of
Qatif. And the former Chairman of
NEOM,
Nadhmi Al-Nasr, who hails from the same city as well.
Kawthar Al-Arbash, a prominent member of the Saudi Shura Council, is a Shiite woman from
Qatif as well. Jamil al-Jishi, an engineer who helped built
Jubail Industrial City was a Shiite citizen who later served as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Tehran. Shiite citizens joined the third Saudi state in 1913, when Al-Ahsa and Qatif were annexed by Ibn Saud. There was no resistance or fighting involved. Ibn Saud guaranteed the Shiites of these regions the right to worship and to practice their religious rituals according to the rulings of the Shiite Jaafari sect. The
Saudi government had often been viewed as an active oppressor of Shia Muslims because of the funding of the Wahhabi ideology which denounces the Shia faith. According to a 2009
Human Rights Watch report, Shia citizens in Saudi Arabia "face systematic discrimination in religion, education, justice, and employment". In November 2014 at
al-Dalwah village in the eastern province of
al-Ahsa, three unknown masked gunmen
opened fire at a Husseiniya, or Shi'ite religious center, killing eight and injuring dozens. While the government and the official media and religious establishment strongly condemned the attack, a handful of articles in the Saudi press argued that the attack "had not come out of nowhere", that there was anti-Shi'ite incitement in the kingdom on the part of "the religious establishment, preachers, and even university lecturers – and that it was on the rise". In the Eastern city of
Al-Khobar, whose population is predominately Shia, there are no Shia mosques. Saudi Arabia's religious police mandate prayers and all those in public buildings during prayer time are required to stop what they are doing to pray. Because there are minor differences between the way that Shiites and Sunnis pray and between prayer times, Shiites are forced to either pray the Sunni way or take a break from work. In 2009, a group of Shiites on their way to perform
hajj pilgrimage (one of the five pillars of Islam that all able-bodied Muslims are required to perform once in their lives) in Mecca were arrested by Saudi religious police. A prominent Shiite Canadian cleric,
Usama al-Attar was also charged. He was released on the same day, declaring the arrest entirely unprovoked. Much of education in Saudi Arabia is based on Sunni Wahhabi religious material. From a very young age, students are taught that Shiites are not Muslims and that Shiism is a conspiracy hatched by the Jews, and so Shiites are worthy of death. Government Wahhabi scholars, such as Abdulqader Shaibat al-Hamd, have proclaimed on state radio that Sunni Muslims must not "eat their [Shia] food, marry from them, or bury their dead in Muslims' graveyards". Teachers who proclaim that Shiites are atheists and deserve death have faced no repercussions for their actions, barely even receiving punishment. The Saudi government has often been viewed as an active oppressor of Shias because of the funding of the Wahabbi ideology which denounces the Shia faith. In 1988,
fatwas passed by the country's leading cleric,
Abdul-Aziz ibn Baz denounced the
Shias as
apostates. According to a 2009
Human Rights Watch report, Shia citizens in Saudi Arabia "face systematic discrimination in religion, education, justice, and employment". In January 2016, Saudi Arabia executed the prominent Shiite cleric
Sheikh Nimr, who had called for pro-democracy demonstrations, along with 47 other Saudi citizens
sentenced by the
Specialized Criminal Court on terrorism charges. In May 2019,
Human Rights Watch said that Saudi Arabia was seeking to extend the jail term for Sheikh Mohammad bin Hassan al-Habib, who the human rights group described as "a cleric known for supporting protests against the systematic discrimination of Saudi Arabia's Shia minority". At the time, Hassan al-Habib had been serving a seven-year prison sentence.
The Independent reports that a three-year-old and a two-year-old were killed by gunfire resulting from violence between government forces and armed anti-government protestors. The clashes began in May 2017, According to an estimate provided by residents of the city, 20,000 residents were fled the city in response to the violence.
Charges of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery According to Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at
Human Rights Watch in 2009, "Saudi judges have harshly punished confessed 'witches' for what at worst appears to be fraud, but may well be harmless acts." In 2009, the Saudi "
religious police" established a special "Anti-Witchcraft Unit" to educate the public, investigate and combat
witchcraft. (executed in December 2011 in
Jawf), and Abdul Hamid Bin Hussain Bin Moustafa al-Fakki (a Sudanese migrant worker executed in a car park in
Medina on 20 September 2011).
Ali Hussain Sibat, a Lebanese host of a popular fortune-telling TV program, was arrested while in Saudi in May 2008 on
Umrah and sentenced to death but finally released sometime in 2011 or 2012. Many convicted of magic receive lesser punishments of lashes and/or prison. In 2011, the "Anti-Witchcraft Unit" processed over 586 cases of magical crime. The majority of these offenders are foreign domestic workers from Africa and Indonesia. and widespread belief in witchcraft means it can be invoked as a defense in Sharia courts against workers complaining of mistreatment by Saudi employers.
Human Rights Watch believes that the conviction of a Syrian national, 'Abd al-Karim Mara'I al-Naqshabandi, who was executed in 1996 for undertaking "the practice of works of magic and spells and possession of a collection of polytheistic and superstitious books, was actually resulted from a dispute with his employer Prince Salman bin Sa'ud bin 'Abd al'Aziz, a nephew of
King Fahd". ==Extraterritorial harassment, forced repatriation, and killing==