Qatif, Saudi Arabia - For Shi'ites living on Saudi Arabia's east coast, freedom is an invisible line in the sand.
"Over there it's Dammam and if you hold a Shi'ite gathering you are arrested straight away. In Qatif here, you can do what you want," said Hussein as he drove along the road that separates the two municipalities in the Eastern Province.
Saudi Arabia's minority Shi'ites, long viewed as heretics by authorities, are slowly testing government pledges to let them practise their religious rites more freely -- a change overseen by King Abdullah who ascended the throne last year.
But the new freedoms are tentative and have come laced with fresh fears, exposed dramatically by last week's attempt to blow up the world's biggest oil processing plant at Abqaiq in the Eastern Province, where most of the kingdom's oil wealth lies.
The failed attack by al Qaeda suicide bombers was the first direct raid on a Saudi energy target since the group launched attacks aimed at toppling the U.S.-allied monarchy in 2003.
There is no suggestion that the attack was in any way linked to the Shi'ites, a minority in the ultraconservative kingdom dominated by a rigid form of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism.
But it strengthened latent fears among the community that, even as it enjoys a new degree of tolerance, it could be exposed to the kind of sectarian violence ripping through nearby Iraq.
Encouraged by their new freedoms, Shi'ites say many of their number are thinking of returning from self-imposed exile to a country that since its inception in 1932 has considered them heretics or even agents for nearby Iran.
"We're all happy. They've been trying to hold us down for as long as I can remember. It's as if they have finally given up," said retired military official Ali al-Gassem, who as a Shi'ite found a glass ceiling limiting his career prospects.
"But it's not enough, it's just the beginning. We need positions, as teachers, in the police force, in government."
SILENT FEARS
Last month, thousands of Shi'ites tested the limits of religious tolerance by taking to the streets of Qatif to commemorate Ashura, the biggest event in their calendar.
Many of the young people in the procession wore trousers, shirts and pullovers -- a subtle rejection of the traditional white robe and headscarf that is obligatory in courts and other public offices and considered a mark of loyalty to the state.
The commemorations also reflected a desire for greater freedom since Iraqi Shi'ites emerged from decades of repression under Saddam Hussein after the 2003 U.S.-led war.
The Iraqi example also resonates on another, more worrying level in the Eastern Province, where residents said they feared they could become targets for Sunni extremists allied to al Qaeda, which has been blamed for bombing a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra last week, bringing Iraq to the brink of civil war.
"It's something we are aware of but we don't ever discuss it in public," one resident said.
The attack on Abqaiq has given those fears added bite.
"The Sunni-Shi'ite war in Iraq could spread into the rest of the Gulf," said political analyst Mansour Alnogaidan. "Many Saudis have gone to Iraq where they attack Shi'ites, and they will continue against these targets when they return."
WAHHABI STRAIT-JACKET
More than 2 million Shi'ites are thought to live in the Eastern Province -- out of a country-wide population of nearly 24 million, including around 6 million foreign workers.
Animosity between Sunnis and Shi'ites goes back to a centuries-old religious schism that still poisons relations.
In the towns and villages of Qatif, Hussein and his friends say religious police now allow them to practise their rites. But as soon as Shi'ites step outside the boundaries of their run-down towns and villages into the new cities of Dammam and Khobar, they enter the rigid world of Wahhabism.
At evening gatherings in Qatif, Shi'ite intellectuals and clerics review claims of abuse carried out by religious police who are charged with maintaining Wahhabi's strict moral code.
They mention a couple arrested in Medina because the woman's face was uncovered. They said her husband was asked to sign a document renouncing Shi'ism for his wife to go free.
"The king is serious about allowing diversity but there are residues of previous behaviour and culture. To change that takes time," says cleric Sheikh Fawzi al-Seif. "This is still the government of one region and one sect."
A report by the International Crisis Group last year said Saudi Arabia risked undermining a decade of mainly peaceful sectarian ties unless it offered Shi'ites a bigger government role and curbed discrimination.
"They want us to be closed to the world and no one to know about us," says Hussein, driving near some of the vast oil fields that make Saudi Arabia the world's biggest producer.
"They want to restrict us and make us live under a certain ceiling, so that we can't rise any higher in society."
Saudi political analyst Mai Yamani said the position of the Shi'ites reflected a wider problem of disenfranchised communities in Saudi Arabia.
"There are so many people who are politically and economically marginalised and it's not gotten better," said London-based Yamani, citing the Shi'ites and tribes in the far north and south.
"The marginalisation of the regions is still going on, via the politics of discrimination."