JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Rabea Dahlan, a descendent of the prophet Mohammed, was deputy governor of the Muslim holy city of Mecca until three years ago, when he was jailed. Dahlan's crime, according to supporters: He belongs to a Muslim sect that doesn't conform to Saudi Arabia's state religion.
Christians and Jews routinely complain that they are not allowed to practice their faiths in Saudi Arabia. But human rights activists say the worst repression is reserved for the half-dozen Muslim sects that depart from the Wahhabi form of Islam of the ruling family.
Last week, Gwenn Okruhlik, a Saudi expert at the University of Arkansas, told a U.S. congressional hearing that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah ''should incorporate diversity of Islam into social practice to send a message of tolerance.''
Saudis say discrimination falls upon Muslims in the western Saudi region known as the Hijaz for the waves of Hajis -- Muslim pilgrims -- who come here from other nations. Several Hijazi Muslims interviewed recently say they practice their faith secretly.
The most oppressed, rights activists say, are 1 million Saudi Shi'ites, a sect that is a majority in several other Muslim nations.
''There is institutionalized discrimination against adherents of the Shi'a branch of Islam,'' says the State Department's human rights report. But the department has not sanctioned the country, despite a recommendation two years running from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that Saudi Arabia be branded a ''country of particular concern.''
Ali Ahmed, a Saudi Shi'ite who lives in Virginia and researches Saudi human rights abuses, says there are about 200 political prisoners in his homeland, including 105 members of a Shi'ite Muslim sect called Ismailis.
Ahmed Turki al-Saab, 42, an Ismaili in the southern province of Najran, was arrested in January after he was quoted in a U.S. newspaper criticizing discrimination and remains jailed, Ahmed says.
Last year, Ahmed says, authorities imprisoned a 94-year-old Shi'ite cleric from the western city of Medina for two weeks for the ''crime'' of praying with Lebanese visitors at his farm.
''The Shi'ites have saint cults and visit tombs,'' says Brian Evans of Amnesty International. ''The Wahhabis see this as idol worship and consider it to be almost apostasy.''
Non-Wahhabis lost out when the al-Saud tribe from the central Nejd region unified the country a century ago in alliance with the descendants of Mohammed Abdul Ibn Wahhab, an 18th-century Islamic puritan. The al-Saud gained political power; the Wahhabis got control of the mosques.
Critics say religious intolerance helped create the fanaticism of 15 Saudi hijackers in the attacks on Sept. 11. Saudi defenders say their religion is peaceful and the terrorists were ''deviants.''
But Ahmed says teachers of religion instruct impressionable young Saudis that ''all Muslims will go to hell except the Wahhabis.''
What is missing in Saudi society, says Sami Angawi, an architect in Jeddah, is ''balance. In architecture, you cannot build on two supports, you need at least three, and four is better. But our society relies on a single school of thought.''
The Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, said in an interview that the government would soon set up an ''independent'' human rights body. Ahmed says the Saudis have talked about creating such an organization for two years. The government has declined repeated requests by foreign rights groups to send their own monitors.
Supporters say harassment of Dahlan, 52, began when he was named deputy governor of Mecca. He was educated in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the USA, where he was awarded graduate degrees in management at the University of Colorado and Pepperdine University. Dahlan built schools that taught vocational skills urgently needed by the growing young Saudi population. But in 1999, a Saudi who had been sent to a mental hospital after making threats against Dahlan and his family sued for damages. Religious courts jailed Dahlan for four months in what supporters say was a case of religious discrimination.
Dahlan now lives in Lebanon. The governor who appointed him, Prince Majed, resigned and left for Vienna.
A protest letter circulating in Jeddah recently accused Saudi authorities of discrimination for prosecuting Dahlan while giving amnesty to an official of the Saudi water and sewage authority who had embezzled $80 million. That official, from the Wahhabi heartland of the Nejd, was a brother of the private secretary of King Fahd.
Wahhabi favoritism is also distorting Islam abroad, critics say. A non-Wahhabi Saudi academic who lives in Jeddah visited the USA recently and met a Pakistani Muslim who told him in tears that the local Saudi-paid cleric had issued a ruling against American Muslims celebrating Thanksgiving.
Wahhabis recognize only two holidays: The end of the fasting month of Ramadan, and the end of the month of pilgrimage to Mecca. They fall on different days each year depending on the Muslim lunar calendar
Ali Alyami, a Saudi-born Shi'ite, told Congress last week that the Bush administration should take a tougher stance with the Saudis if it hopes to defeat terrorism: ''Our myopic policies are producing anti-American hatred because of our support for a brutal regime.''