Pro-government cleric to start own party in Bahrain

“The answer is that we would end up somewhere along the lines of Lebanon. Bahrain would enter into a dark phase.”

Sheik al-Asfoor called Wefaq’s leader, Ali Salman, a religious lightweight.

“He went to Qom [the Iranian holy city] for seven years and worked as an office boy. He was regarded as a joke there,” Sheik al-Asfoor claimed.

“He wears the turban in Bahrain, but he used to wear pants and a shirt. He’s garbage.”

He also criticized Sheik Issa Qassem, Wefaq’s spiritual guide.

“What has he given to society other than inflaming the situation?” he asked.

The sheik rejected the argument that he was too closely aligned with the Sunni-dominated regime to appeal to the Shiite community, saying that he represented the “silent majority.”

“To Wefaq, anybody who says, ‘Don’t burn, Don’t destroy,’ is a government stooge,” he said.

Khalil Marzooq, a Wefaq leader, told The Washington Times that he refused to dignify Sheik al-Asfoor’s attacks.

“My response is not to respond,” he said.

Toby Jones, a professor of Middle East history at Rutgers University and a former Bahrain-based consultant for the International Crisis Group, said that despite his religious credentials, Sheik al-Asfoor’s political support remained minimal among Bahraini Shiites, confined to the socially upscale and religiously moderate.

In a typical election for Bahrain’s 40-member Council of Representatives, a party led by Sheik al-Asfoor would be lucky to get one or two seats and would be more likely to take votes away from pro-government Sunni candidates than from opposition Shiite ones, he said.

On closely divided votes, though, Mr. Jones said that a couple seats could alter the equation, possibly allowing a cross-sectarian coalition of secular independents and moderate Islamists to pass progressive social legislation.

“The government would jump for joy, if he became a mainstream alternative to Wefaq,” he said.

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