ON Friday in Makkah, three leaders knelt together for prayers at Masjid al-Haram before walking to Al-Safa Palace to sign a document that may come to define the next phase of Middle Eastern security. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif put their names to the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, a pact that binds their three states into a formal collective-security arrangement: an armed attack on any one of them, the joint statement declares, “Shall be regarded as an attack against them all.”

The timing and setting are not accidental. This agreement did not emerge in isolation but grew out of a year of accelerating anxiety across the Muslim world. In September 2025, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a bilateral Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement, itself a response to Israel’s unprecedented strike on Hamas negotiators inside Doha, an attack that shook Gulf capitals to their core. If Qatar, hosting the largest American air base in the region, could be struck despite its ties to Washington, then no Gulf state could take its safety for granted. That episode, layered onto months of upheaval from the Gaza war and, more recently, escalating US-Iran confrontation, convinced Riyadh that its security could no longer rest solely on American guarantees. Pakistan, the only nuclear-armed state in the Muslim world, offered an alternative pillar of deterrence.

What has now happened in Makkah........

© Pakistan Observer