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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Pakistan wants to revive Middle East alliance yet again. Terrible ideas die hard

Led by Türkiye and Saudi Arabia, and with Pakistan and Egypt as its providers of hard military power, the group seeks to push back against Iran’s power in the Persian Gulf.

Foreign hand,” screamed the headline on one Karachi magazine in 1952: Like the fruit-and-vegetable vendors, minibus owners, drug addicts, and homeless people who would later colonise Khan Bahadur Behramjee Jehangirjee Rajkotwala Park, the crowd which trampled over the flower-beds and lawns was actually drawn from the nearby lanes of the Saddar market. The mob had tried to burn down the Shezan Hotel, Shahnawaz Motors, and a community library before throwing stones at Chaudhuri Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, Pakistan’s foreign minister, who was delivering a learned lecture on the theological traditions of his heterodox Ahmadi faith.

The eminent police officer and spy Qurban Ali Khan snorted dismissively when he was told of the magazine’s claim: “I do not think any Foreign Power would attach, or has any need to attach, so much importance to Pakistan.”

For once, Ali was wrong. Weeks earlier, in March 1952, Zafrullah had secretly pushed for a meeting of a dozen prime ministers in Karachi to discuss setting up a Muslim security bloc to resist Communism. The meeting was never held. The divergent security interests of the countries led some to hold back. The savage anti-Ahmadi communal violence in Pakistan, which ran from 1952 to 1953, demonstrated the considerable gap between the idea of Muslim unity and the thing itself.

This week, the same countries at the heart of the 1952 effort have again been pushing for a security alliance. Led by Türkiye and Saudi Arabia, and with Pakistan and Egypt as its providers of hard military power, the group has held a succession of meetings through March and April. It seeks to push back against Iran’s power in the Persian Gulf, but also resist the growth of Israeli and United Arab Emirates influence around the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.

As in 1952, the project has the enthusiastic support of the United States, which sees such a bloc as a tool to mitigate its military commitments in the Middle East. There is a difference, though, between hopeful desires and the realities of strategic policy.

England’s Islamic bloc

The idea of a post-colonial Muslim security bloc was not crafted in Islamabad or Istanbul. Liaquat Ali,........

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