The bad news, or rather the problematic news that takes us into uncharted territory, is that for the first time since the 13th century, a major Arab nation is about to be governed by Shiites. The minority sect of Islam, the Shia have traditionally been seen as the despised heretics and the lower classes, and as the potential traitors of the Arab world.

In the Persian Gulf and in the Lebanon, the Shiites have long been the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, and even as a serf class that labors for Sunni masters. Even when they have prospered as merchants, as they have in Basra, they have been looked down on as tradesmen rather than soldiers or landowners.

Despite their loyalty to the regime of Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the Shia have long been suspected by the Sunni of potential disloyalty to the fellow Arabs, and as too susceptible by the Shiite heresy to the blandishments of their fellow Shia in Persia.

They have been landless peasants, swiftly becoming an urban underclass once they move to the cities. And with their cult of blood-soaked martyrdom and curious forms of worship, which include flagellation until the blood flows and the slashing of one's scalp and flesh with knives, they are seen by many Sunni as more than a little mad.

And now the prospect of their dominance is ending shivers of alarm throughout much of the Sunni-dominated Arab world. Jordan's King Abdullah warned last month of the emergence of a "Shiite crescent" that ran from Iran, through southern Iraq and west through the Shia of Lebanon to the Mediterranean and south through the Shia of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to the Persian Gulf.

About 15 percent of the Saudi population is Shia, and they happen to live in the eastern provinces where most Saudi oil is to be found.

With Lebanon to the west and Iraq to the east, Jordan is surrounded by Shiites, which gave a personal note of urgency to the young king's remarks in his abortive campaign to delay the Iraq elections.

"President Bush needs to be aware that the new government of Iraq will write the constitution," the king said. "The president needs to think out of the box and consider what type of government this will create. If the Americans are so keen to put the Iranians (and their highly controversial nuclear weapons program) in their place, they need to see that Iraq is the soft under-belly of Iran."

Washington did not take him too seriously, and nor did most Western Arabists. After all, they point out, many Iraqi tribes contain both Sunni and Shiite members, and intermarriage is quite common in Iraq and Lebanon. Sociologically, they are right. Politically, they may be dangerously wrong.

The king may have got a cold shoulder from the Bush administration, but sources in the region say that he was thanked by his fellow rulers (and fellow-Sunni) in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain for saying what they were thinking. (In the words of one former Jordanian cabinet minister, speaking at a private seminar that this reporter attended in Amman last week, "political correctness has now infected the Arab world.")

For the Sunni rulers, there is a whiff of Bolshevik revolution about the rise of the Shiites in Iraq. For the West, there is something more to ponder. Imagine that the ayatollahs of Tehran are able to fulfill their dream of a greater Shiite empire that brings together the underdogs of the Islamic faith from Lebanon to Iran, from Iraq to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Such a Shiite empire, protected by the Persian nuclear weapon, would control the oil of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia - or more than half of the world's known reserves. These, it will come as no surprise, are developments that are being closely watched in Israel.

"With these elections, the Americans are changing a historic balance of power between Sunni and Shia in the Arab world that has endured for centuries," Professor Asher Susser, who runs the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University, and is one of Israel's top experts on the Arab world, told this reporter Thursday.

"Now the Shiites are on the rise in Lebanon, where demographics have made them the largest single community, and where their Hizbollah Party is a major force in parliament. They are the majority community in Bahrain, and close to the majority in other Gulf states," Susser added. "And the prospect of Shiite rule in Iraq suggests to much of the Arab world that Iraq will no longer be able to fulfill its historic role of holding the Persians at bay."

The Shia brand of Islam was born in defeat. Their founder, Ali, the devout son-in-law of the Prophet, was out-maneuvered for the succession by the father-in-law when Mohammed died.

The seminal figure in Shia history, the Imam Hussein, was a grandson of the Prophet and he died a martyr, hopelessly outnumbered, at the battle of Karbala in 680, defending the faith and its purity against the corrupt dynasty that had assumed power in Islam.

There is a legend that as he died, Hussein condemned the Iraqis who had failed to rally to his banner. "May you never satisfy a ruler," he cursed them. "And may you never be satisfied by a ruler."

And now the long defeat and subordination of the Shiites may be drawing to a close. The Shia are poised to rule Iraq, courtesy of the Americans and their well-meant democracy. It remains to be seen whether Hussein's curse remains in force, for Iraq, for the Shia and the wider world.

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