Iran's Sunni Muslims face discrimination amid Eid al-Fitr

On April 9, millions of Muslims around the world will celebrate Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. On this major holiday in the Islamic calendar, devout Muslims tend to begin the day with a communal prayer. 

But Iranian women's rights activist Fariba Balouch said that once again this year, this will not be possible for Sunnis in the Iranian capital, Tehran. "Even 45 years after the founding of the Islamic Republic in Iran, they still do not have their own mosque to celebrate this festival with a communal prayer," she told DW.

Balouch, who has lived in exile in London for four years, was born into a Sunni family in the eastern Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchistan, which is located on the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Almost half of the province's population of 3.2 million is Sunni. It is estimated that, overall, Shiite Muslims make up 10% of the population in predominantly Shiite Iran.

"We are oppressed because of our religion," said Balouch. "Sunnis in Iran are not allowed to hold any important political offices; they cannot become president or head of the judiciary, nor can they be members of the Guardian Council or establish political parties or own newspapers or magazines. We are not even second-class citizens: we have virtually no rights."

Hardly any of the income from the extraction of natural resources, such as oil and gas, reaches Sistan and Baluchistan, one of Iran's poorest provinces. There are few schools in the small towns and villages; electricity and water supplies are poor. Water is scarce because of persistent drought and poor management in agriculture.

The province, as well as the other regions on the country's borders in which Sunni Muslims live, are systematically disadvantaged. The Sunni minorities in Iran include the Turkmen in the northeast, the Kurds in the west, Arabs in the southwest and Baluchis in the southeast.

Shiite Islam became Iran's official religion in 16th century

Of the approximately 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, an estimated 85% to 90% are Sunnis. Shiites are only in the majority in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain.

In Iran, Shiite Islam has dominated since the 16th century when Ismail I, the first shah of Safavid Iran, declared it to be the official religion of the Persian Empire. To strengthen Iran's defense against the Ottoman Empire, he exploited sectarian conflicts and presented himself as the patron of the Shiites.

"Iran's Shiite rulers demand absolute obedience and loyalty from the country's Sunni minorities," Hojjatoleslam Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, a Shiite cleric who is one of Iran's best-known scholars of Islam, told DW.

In 2000, he was sentenced to death by a Special Court for Clerics after expressing criticism of Iran's ruling clergy. The sentence was later converted to a jail term. He was released in 2005 and went into exile in Germany.

"Since the 1979 revolution, the rulers have fought and suppressed any difference of opinion," he said. "This affects religious minorities — such as Sunnis, Sufi orders and Bahai, as well as Shiites with dissenting views — whose beliefs are interpreted in the Islamic Republic as anti-Shiite.

"In addition to the political and religious authorities at the center of the Islamic Republic of Iran, there are other Shiite scholars who support the restrictions on Sunnis in Iran. The refusal to build a Sunni mosque in the capital is mainly due to hidden pressure from the religious authorities in the country's Shiite center in the city of Qom. They are unofficially and secretly using their influence to prevent this."

'We will never forget the massacre'

The pressure on Sunni minorities has grown over the past two years. After the death in police custody of the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, the capital of Sistan and Baluchistan, Zahedan, became a stronghold of the nationwide protests. For months, demonstrators would gather on the streets after Friday prayers.

On September 30, 2022, more than 80 people were shot dead by the security forces. Some had taken up positions on the roofs around the city's Grand Mosque, the largest Sunni mosque in Iran, and opened fire on a crowd that had gathered after Friday prayers.

"We will never forget the massacre," said women's rights activist Balouch. "In front of this mosque in an Islamic country, devout Muslims were shot because they were protesting peacefully. That alone shows what civil rights Sunni minorities have, namely none at all!"

The number of executions in Iran has risen dramatically in the past two years. Some 20% of the people executed in 2023 belonged to the country's Sunni Baluch minority. As a whole, one in 20 Iranians are Sunni Baloch.

This article was originally written in German.