Ayesha Siddiqa - A friendship fit for a king: 70 years of Pakistan’s ties with Saudi Arabia
Dr Ayesha Siddiqa examines 70 years of Pakistan’s ties with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in light of new archival material
In August 1947, the Arab Peninsula and the
Gulf formed a lump of weak states that did not appeal as such to the founding
father. He was, however, drawn to Egypt that had greater stability
territorially at that time. In
January 1948, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had even written a letter to the Egyptian
imam and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Hassan al-Banna. “I am
writing to you, the great Muslim leader, to inform you that I am determined, by
God’s will, to save Pakistan from the tyranny of imperialism and the various
hostile currents,” he wrote. “I have therefore decided to follow the advice you
kindly gave me in your recent letter, that my government should assume a purely
Islamic character and work in close cooperation with the other strong
international Islamic organizations which are headed by your Ikhwan-al-Muslimun
society [the Muslim Brotherhood].” Jinnah even asked al-Banna to send prominent
Egyptian journalist Saleh El-Ashmawy to Pakistan so he could consult on “how to
build our Islamic government and build [the] idea of the Islamic league.”
As Pakistan commits
5,000 operational troops to Saudi Arabia to become part of its 33-nation
counter-terrorism coalition, some Pakistanis wonder why we couldn’t just say
‘no’. It is felt that had it not been for the prime minister’s personal
interests or our civil-military leadership’s hankering for oil at concessional
rates and the lure of military support, we may have not considered joining an
arrangement that could encourage greater internal insecurity and spoil
relations with neighbours such as Iran. These points of view are not, however,
the correct lens through which we can decipher developments in a bilateral
relationship that is as strategic as the one we have with China but that is
rarely talked about in detail. There is no other country in the world whose
defence minister has been taken on a visit of our uranium-enrichment facility
at Kahuta. But this was the case with Saudi Arabia’s defence minister, Prince
Sultan bin Abdelaziz al-Saud, in 1999.
Unlike with China with
whom our foreign policy-making community rates relations as the only ones that
qualify as strategic, any description of Pak-Saudi linkages is relegated to the
realm of the personal and is limited to engagement by either Zia-ul Haq or
Nawaz Sharif. Perhaps the failure to categorize our relations with Saudi Arabia
as strategic is based on the thinking that it never had military muscle to bail
us out during a crisis. In reality, the
foundation for Pak-Saudi ties was laid by interactions and interventions that
date to the immediate time after the creation of Pakistan. In those days we
concentrated on the Saudi state in a bid to position ourselves in the hierarchy
of nations. The edifice of this bilateral relationship is erected on our
insecurity when it comes to India, our urge to become part of a security
relationship with the West (that was always justified on the basis of Pakistan
playing a role in the Middle East defence architecture), and Pakistan’s
historical traction towards pan-Islamism underpinned by her existential
anxieties in the global geopolitical system.
It is only after
combing through rare archival material that one realizes how central the Saudi
state has been to our national imagination and geopolitical vision. Pak-Saudi
relations are certainly not a one-way street… read more:
More posts on the history of Pakistan
