Sana Haroon
This chapter traces the development of economic, political, and religious ties between Pakistan and Iran and Saudi Arabia from 1947 to the present. This discussion is intended to link the debate about religious ties between Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world to a broader body of scholarship and evidence of Pakistan’s regional ties as deriving from trade, migration, diplomacy, and geopolitics.
The religious politics of Western Asia are often analyzed through the dichotomy of Iran’s Shia revolutionary state and Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchical one. Pakistan’s relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia over sixty years, from 1947 to 2014, suggest ways in which a variety of ideologies have been received politically, diplomatically, and through nonstate actors and the manner in which Pakistan has tilted in favor toward the Arab world and Sunni Islam in spite of the geography, history, and language that link it to Iran.
The first section of the chapter sets up a periodization for the consideration of Pakistan’s relations in Western Asia by exploring diplomatic relations between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran from 1947 to 2013.1 I will explore a substantial body of scholarship that proposes that Pakistan’s policy position toward a postcolonial Middle East emerged slowly as a product of Cold War alliances managed by Ayub Khan from 1952 to 1968. Ayub Khan’s position was altered by the politics of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto from 1968 to 1977, a period during which, I will argue, the course of Pakistan’s current relations with the Middle East was set. The era of Zia ul Haq’s dictatorship from 1977 to 1988, followed by the governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from 1988 to 1999, constitute a third period in the development of Pakistan’s foreign policy. This phase was deeply influenced by the revolution in Iran and the Soviet occupation of and then withdrawal from Afghanistan. This section builds on the work of Shahid Amin, Hasan Askari Rizvi, S. M. Burke, and others who have broadly framed the study of Pakistan’s relations in the Middle East in the regional security context and through the idea of an “Islamic” cultural continuum.
The second section of the chapter builds on this periodization to explore the movement of goods, capital, and labor between Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia from 1947. This analysis of published economic data and sources describing the development of Islamic finance and sharia-based economics suggests the mainstays of Pakistan’s economic and financial links in Western Asia. The third and fourth sections explore cultural relations between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Iran since 1979 and transnational Islamism, arguing for a better understanding of Pakistan’s participation in a Sunni regionalism. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of events since 2008.
PAKISTAN’S DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH SAUDI ARABIA AND IRAN
British colonialism had disrupted many of the transfers of people, capital, and ideas across borders and in the maritime region.2 Prior to 1947, India’s governmental relations with the Arab world and Iran were mediated through the Foreign and Political Office of the Government of India.3 The primary issues of concern for colonial Indian relations with the Gulf were the limitation of “piracy” for protection of crown shipping routes and, later, the laying of telegraph lines across Iran, under the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf, and into India.4 By the early twentieth century, colonial officials had become concerned by reports of gunrunning and smuggling between Afghanistan, colonial India, and Iran and into the maritime Gulf region from the Makran coast.5 Relations with the Hijaz were affected by colonial concerns about the loyalty of British Indian subjects during World War I.6 After the war, the Government of India used passport restrictions to discipline hajj pilgrims, embarrassed by the apparent poverty and itinerancy of Indian travelers to Mecca.7
Decolonization opened the door for relations of a more meaningful and mutually beneficial nature. As early as 1947, Pakistani statesmen championed the cause of nationalism and self-determination for colonized Muslim states in testimonials in the United Nation’s General Assembly. Despite such nationalist passions, it took time for Pakistan to put together its Foreign Service, and diplomatic relationships evolved slowly. With a piecemeal inheritance of the apparatus and tools of diplomacy in postwar Asia, the state strove to put a diplomatic service and strategy in place. The new government of Pakistan took account of those of its citizens who had received exposure in the colonial civil service, assigning them to key relationships with the United States, Britain, and China. Other posts were filled by young college graduates who completed two-year courses in diplomacy at the Fletcher School, funded through Fulbright fellowships.8
Chaudhuri Khaliquzzaman, then president of the Muslim League, set out on a two-month tour of the Middle East barely two years after Partition, attempting to cobble together a national foreign policy position. S. M. Burke writes that he began to envisage a “United Islamistan” in the course of his travels, and his wide publicizing of this agenda did more harm than good for Pakistan’s image in the West and accomplished nothing among the Arab states, which seemed unmoved by Pakistan’s efforts on behalf of Palestine at the United Nations.9
Shortly after Pakistan’s entry to the United Nations, the delegation voted with the Arab bloc and Iran to oppose the creation of Israel. In 1949, the International Islamic Economic Conference met in Karachi, attended by delegates from across the Muslim world. Ghulam Muhammad asked that members imagine themselves part of an “organic whole,” thereby creating a basis for “collective bargaining.”10 In 1951, the first foreign minister, Zafrulla Khan, continued to address Pakistan relations with the Middle East only in the most general terms, writing of Iran and Saudi Arabia as countries and people that shared the bitterness of the colonial legacy and the geography of an Islamic front against communism.11
The United States positioned Pakistan as an ally as the influence of the USSR increased in the Middle East and in Afghanistan. The alliance with Pakistan was justified on the basis that East Pakistan and West Pakistan would each offer bases in the case of a major war, thereby allowing the United States to “close” a “world engirdling circle of influence,”12 and U.S. spy planes were stationed at Pakistani airbases in the northwest. Hence, when Ayub Khan joined Muhammad Ali Bogra’s government as defense minister in 1954, he managed Pakistan’s entry into the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement and then the Baghdad Pact in 1955 (later renamed the Central Treaty Organization, or CENTO).13 This period marked the beginning of Pakistan’s foreign relations with countries of the Middle East—relations that privileged anti-Soviet defensive arrangements with Turkey, Iran, and, for a short time, Iraq, over alliances with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states.
During the early years of Pakistan’s existence, Saudi Arabia was openly critical of the Pakistan government. When Maulana Maududi of the Jamaat-e-Islami was sentenced to death for his involvement in the movement against the Ahmadi community, Saudi Arabia threatened to sever diplomatic ties with Pakistan.14 During the 1956 Suez crisis, King Saud met with Nehru and openly criticized Pakistan’s position in the Baghdad Pact.15 Bhutto later claimed that the Arab world’s grievances toward Pakistan were personal and that Ayub Khan’s coup in 1958 “noticeably improved” the attitude of the United Arab Republic (the polity representing the briefly united governments of Syria and Egypt).16
Ayub Khan attempted to reverse some of the damage caused by his entry into the Baghdad Pact in a 1960 visit to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic. He enunciated his support of the Arab position against Israel, sought economic assistance from Saudi Arabia, and received assurances of consideration of his request.17 The following year, Riyadh agreed to represent Pakistan’s interest in Afghanistan in view of rapidly deteriorating relations between the governments of Kabul and Islamabad.18
The relationship between Pakistan and the Saudis began to improve after the 1960 visit, at the expense of relations with other Arab countries and peoples. In 1961, Pakistan began to supply Saudi Arabia with weapons (rifles and ammunition), which were “passed on to royalist forces in Yemen” fighting against the newly established republican government.19 In 1967, Ayub Khan signed an agreement whereby Pakistan would train the Saudi Armed Forces.20 During the 1971 war, when there was a U.S. embargo on military sales to Pakistan, it was rumored that Libya and Jordan provided American-built combat aircrafts to Pakistan in return for services rendered by Pakistani pilots in “different Arab air forces.”21
Conversely, relations with Iran were cordial at the outset of the bilateral relationship. In 1947, the demarcation of the Pakistan–Iran border necessitated an early diplomatic engagement between the two countries. The border demarcation was amicably concluded in 1958 and included a gift of territory from Pakistan to Iran, to protect Iran’s oil drainage in the region.22 The Baghdad Pact opened up early relations between Pakistan and Iran. When Iraq exited the pact in 1959, the shah positioned Iran as a regional center, opening the Baghdad Pact Nuclear Center at Tehran University for “cooperation and training in the use of radioactive isotopes.”23 That year, Ayub Khan addressed the Iranian Parliament in a declaration of friendship, and a stamp was printed commemorating his visit to the country. In 1964, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey entered into an agreement establishing the Regional Cooperation for Development.
During the 1965 war, Iran provided medical supplies, fuel, and aid as well as facilities for repair and refueling of Pakistani air force fighter planes.24 Trained Irani nurses were also sent to help treat the wounded.25 After the war, Iran was thought to be aiding Pakistan in the purchase of West German jet fighter aircrafts despite the U.S.-imposed sanctions on arms sales to Pakistan.
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had been an influence on Pakistan’s foreign relations as early as 1957 when he was appointed as a delegate to the United Nations. He then became a cabinet minister in Ayub Khan’s government after the coup of 1958 and became foreign minister in 1963. During this time, he articulated his commitment to the politics of nonalignment and remained in favor of cultivating relations with an Islamic bloc. Bhutto wrote that the sharpening of Pakistan’s commitments to the Arab world came in 1960 with the revelation of German agreements to arm Israel.26
During and after the 1965 war, Bhutto was the primary engineer of Pakistan’s foreign policy. He led Pakistan in the Tashkent peace negotiations brokered by the USSR but then broke with Ayub Khan’s government and toured the country speaking in public rallies against the government. This movement escalated alongside growing anger in East Pakistan and brought down the Ayub Khan regime in 1969.
In the well-studied events that followed, Pakistan’s first direct elections in 1970 gave an absolute majority to the East Pakistani party Awami League led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. However, Zulfiqar Bhutto, whose party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), had dominated the elections in West Pakistan, was asked to convene the assembly.27 The civil war that followed led to the separation of East Pakistan into the nation-state of Bangladesh. In December 1971, a few days after the end of the war, Bhutto was appointed president of Pakistan as the Constituent Assembly set to work drafting a new constitution.
Championing the politics of the people, Bhutto nationalized key industrial sectors in Pakistan and passed land reforms months after coming to power. He also appeared to take up the cause of Arab socialism, renaming Lahore Stadium in honor of Muammar Al-Qaddafi for “the friendship Libya had shown Pakistan.”28 Bhutto’s actions provoked the suspicion of many of the monarchs of the Middle East, and he keenly felt the need for validation of his government, particularly in light of ongoing hostilities with India over Kashmir. He made several visits to the Middle East and North Africa in 1972, soliciting statements of support from Turkey, Iran, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya (in addition to the USSR and China) for implementation of the UN General Assembly Resolution for the cessation of hostilities, repatriation of prisoners of war, and withdrawal to cease-fire lines.29 As the scheduled peace meetings with India approached, Bhutto embarked on a whirlwind tour of Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran in addition to Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Mauritania, and Turkey in late May 1972.
Bhutto’s politics did not overturn the earlier terms of engagement with the Middle East. Military Staff College in Quetta had trained officers from British colonial armies across the Middle East since the 1920s. The Pakistani military offered its services in Jordan from the 1960s and extended these arrangements to the newly independent emirate of Abu Dhabi, and presumably to Saudi Arabia, after 1972. Bhutto continued to barter the skills of the Pakistan army for aid, preferential ties, and camaraderie and the creation of a front against India. However, Bhutto augmented these relations by opening up commercial and economic bilateral agreements with the Middle East and North Africa, solidifying Pakistan’s position in a Western Asian and North African economic sphere. During the 1972 trip, Bhutto set the ground for an agreement between Pakistan International Airlines and Saudi Airlines to jointly operate all hajj flights between these countries,30 and Karachi’s shipyards began to manufacture harbor tugs and coastal craft for Abu Dhabi.31
It was as an extension of this vision of a regional economic order that Bhutto proposed that the convention of the second summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference be held in Lahore. The summit had been called to discuss the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War and the oil embargo and was to be bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, flush with petro-dollars in the aftermath of the embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).32 The Islamic Summit openly and somewhat transparently set an agenda for Pakistan’s policy position toward the Middle East, something I will discuss in more detail in the next section.
At a different level, the events of 1972–1974 allowed Bhutto to initiate personal relations with heads of Muslim states. Bhutto struck up close relations with Sheikh Zayed of the newly independent United Arab Emirates and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. As chairman of the Islamic Conference, Bhutto was able to receive more controversial heads of state, including Muammar Al-Qaddafi (only recently come to power in Libya in 1969) and Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.33 Where Ayub Khan provided King Hussain of Jordan with military support in putting down the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Jordanian refugee camps,34 Bhutto gave commitments of military support to Arafat and, in 1976, flew air ambulances and military support in to the Palestinian enclaves in Lebanon, in response to a request for help directed through the embassy staff in Beirut.35
Bhutto began to develop Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Gordon Corera describes the beginning of the quest for nuclear weapons as an aspect of the showmanship of Bhutto in a post-1971, defeated Pakistan.36 The inception of the nuclear program was concurrent with Bhutto’s attempts to reach out to Middle Eastern countries and gain monetary support for his government and his programs. Corera surmises that support for and interest in the bomb could have encouraged the monetary support committed by Saudi Arabia as well as Libya and other Gulf states in this sensitive period.37
Economic aid began to flow into Pakistan from the Middle East after 1974. General Muhammad Zia ul Haq—judge, jury, and executioner of Bhutto and his politics—took control of this relationship as the Afghan jihad began. In 1979, Iran and Pakistan agreed that in light of the failure of the organization to maintain peace in the region, their continued membership in CENTO did not serve national interests.38 The period that followed, 1979–1999, marked an era of economic growth, urban development, and institutional transformation in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Conversely, the revolution in Iran, the imposition of sanctions, and the Iran–Iraq War isolated it from the wave of labor migration and capital flows, which brought Pakistan into closer relations with the Arab states.
In 1981, Zia ul Haq first engaged diplomatically with postrevolutionary Iran in an official state visit. Following this visit, reports of Iran using “backdoor” trading routes through Pakistan to import essential goods began to filter into the press.39 Pak–Iran relations remained on an even keel through the period of the Iran–Iraq War, harmonized through their policy toward Afghanistan. As the Afghan war drew to a close, Pakistan and Iran signed trade agreements that doubled Pakistan’s oil import from Iran in return for increased rice, wheat, and sugar exports. The two governments also agreed to raise a previous cap on transit trade across the Baluchistan border.40
In 1982, Pakistan signed a protocol with Saudi Arabia by which Pakistani troops would be stationed in Saudi Arabia to defend the holy sites.41 The troops remained there until 1987, when Saudi Arabia sent back the 20,000 Pakistani soldiers troops stationed there because they included Shias, and the Saudis were not comfortable with this presence in the aftermath of the events of the hajj of 1987.42 Saudi Arabia was said to have supported the Sunni politics of the Jamaat-e-Islami in the 1988 elections in which Benazir Bhutto came to power. Her election heralded the beginning of a period of relatively cool relations between the two countries, which ended in 1990, when Saudi followed Iran in issuing a statement of support for Pakistan’s position on the escalating conflict in Kashmir. Benazir Bhutto made a visit to Saudi in the same year and discussed increased Saudi aid for Pakistan.43 After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Pakistan sent a mechanized brigade of close to 6,000 men to Saudi and another 1,000 to the United Arab Emirates under the 1982 agreement.44 However, over time, Saudi Arabia’s own internal recruitment and training made it less dependent on this sort of military assistance.45
Pakistan’s return to democracy after the death of Zia ul Haq marked the next phase of relations between Pakistan and the Middle East. Benazir Bhutto’s first and second terms as prime minister of Pakistan were positive periods of engagement with Iran. In 1995, in her second term, Benazir Bhutto visited Iran and opened discussions on the import of natural gas from Iran as a feasible alternative to import from Qatar and Turkmenistan.46 Later that year, an agreement was signed to build a gas pipeline connecting the South Pars gas field to Pakistan and potentially onward to India. In 1996, discussions began over pricing of the gas, finance, and building of the pipeline. Both countries remained committed to the project, although the dimensions and viability of the project, including the question of whether it would link to the Indian market, continued to be debated.47 During the same period, Iran acquired designs that allowed the country’s nuclear scientists to build a pilot centrifuge. The UN International Atomic Energy Agency later discovered that the designs were from Pakistani laboratories and were received as early as 1995.48 The extent to which the army (under General Mirza Aslam Beg) and the government were involved in these transfers remains unclear.49
During Nawaz Sharif’s second term as prime minister, from 1997 to 1999, tensions between Iran and Afghanistan began to escalate as the Taliban extended their control across Afghanistan. In September 1998, forty Iranian citizens, including diplomatic staff, disappeared in the violent Taliban capture of Mazar-i Sharif. Pakistan’s mediation led to the release of five Iranian truck drivers, but the nine diplomats were later found dead. Pakistan’s continued support of the Taliban during this period soured Pakistan–Iran relations.50 Pakistan’s insistence on the right to host the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) summit meeting in 1997 at the 50th anniversary of Pakistan’s creation was also seen as a deliberate snub to Iran, whose turn it really was.51 However, enhanced U.S. sanctions on Iran and U.S. strikes in Afghanistan in 199852 may have muted Iran’s position toward Pakistan at this time.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ relevance for Pakistani domestic politics took a new turn in the 1990s when political leaders chose these countries as their homes during periods of exile. Benazir Bhutto setup her base in Dubai after the dissolution of her first government in 1990 and after her second ousting in 1996. Nawaz Sharif chose Saudi Arabia as his home in his period of exile from Pakistan from 1999 to 2007. Pervez Musharraf made his first out-of-state visit to Saudi Arabia to seek legitimization after the coup in which he overthrew Nawaz Sharif. Asif Zardari also spent time in his personal residence in Dubai after his release from jail in 2004.
In 2008, the PPP led by Asif Ali Zardari took power, completing a full term amid allegations of corruption but also overseeing the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Whereas the PPP strongly maintained the importance of diplomatic and economic ties with Iran, the 2013 elections, which brought Nawaz Sharif in as prime minister for a third term, were followed almost immediately by announcements of government intentions to seek financial support from Saudi Arabia.53
As the subsequent section will explore, Pakistan’s diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia and Iran developed alongside the economic vision of successive governments. This economic relationship, affected by events such as the end of the Cold War, provided opportunities both for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to step into a role of patrons of Pakistan’s political elites and for the imagining of large collaborative projects, such as the Iran–Pakistan gas pipeline.
TRADE, CAPITAL, AND MIGRATION
During the colonial period, trade between South Asia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia was channeled through British maritime shipping routes and land trade routes, taxed at the colonial borders of India, and denominated in pounds sterling. Oil was transported between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the Indian colonial market by British- and U.S.-owned oil marketing companies. In the early years of Liaquat Ali Khan’s and then Khwaja Nazimuddin’s leadership, Pakistan determined its national developmental agenda. From early on, no less than fifty percent of total revenue was allocated to defense and the remainder to railways, electric power, agriculture, telecommunications, and new industries. Commonwealth membership, commodity aid from the United States, and the demand for Pakistani products during the Korean War54 led Pakistan to continue to focus on trade relations with the United Kingdom and United States in the early years after Partition.
Between 1947 and 1957, Pakistan imported petroleum products from a variety of sources, including Iran, the USSR, Malaysia, and Burma, but the bulk was imported from the United Kingdom.55 Owing to the controls on the price of oil, Pakistan’s low level of industrialization and electrification, and limitations on the use of foreign exchange to finance imports, petroleum products accounted for under 10 percent of total imports up to 1973. The OPEC embargo on oil in 1973 multiplied the cost of oil in the budget of the government of Pakistan while simultaneously transforming the economic position of the oil-producing countries. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s management of the OIC summit at this crucial moment directly linked Pakistan to the economies of the oil-producing countries of the Middle East.
The OIC summit allowed for the continuation of a debate that had begun in 1970 at the Karachi conference of Foreign Ministers of Muslim Countries. Then, the participants had opened up the discussion of economic, social, and cultural cooperation between Muslim countries and agreed to explore the creation of a regional system of banking based on Islamic methods for the management of “Moslem capital.” The Egyptian economist Mohamed Hassan al Tohami went on to write a study entitled “Egyptian Study on the Establishment of an Islamic Banking System (Economics and Islamic Doctrine).” This paper was the basis for the establishment of the Islamic Development Bank in Riyadh in 1973.56 Al Tohami served as secretary general of the 1974 OIC summit in Lahore at which he presented his ideas about the “Islamic economy,” which would “safeguard the interests of Islamic countries and their peoples” and allow for the “investments by states and individuals alike of surplus capital … with the purpose of augmenting it for the good of all Islamic states and people.”57
The idea of the Islamic economy was based on three principles. The first was that many Muslim countries were economically strong but might enter the world economy on disadvantageous terms. The second was that morality demanded that surplus capital of wealthy countries be invested to benefit all Islamic states and people. The third was that Muslim financial ethics differentiated Muslim peoples and Muslim states within the world economy, and these ethics were best understood through the sharia.
As secretary general of the OIC summit, Tohami called for development and planning that would allow for the investment of surplus capital in the region, thereby shoring up the economies of poorer Muslim states and upholding the moral principles of Islam by creating interest-free banking models. This proposal was a reversal of Pakistan’s earlier position on leadership in the Muslim world as from 1947 Pakistan had claimed to champion Islam in the postcolonial world. From 1974, Pakistan deferred to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Libya—the Arab oil-producing countries—stating that they were the rightful guardians of Islam and of the umma.58
The Islamic Summit set the stage for a new era of professional and economic alliances between Pakistan and the Arab world. Up to 1972, the only Arab Gulf country that extended loan facilities to Pakistan was Kuwait.59 Between 1973 and 1978, Pakistan received aid commitments of $971 million from Libya, Iran, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the OPEC fund. These funds were used for balance-of-payments support for petroleum imports, for setting up oil refineries, and for other communications and capital investment projects.60
The most important relationships that grew out of these aid commitments were those with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Largely owing to the increase in price of oil, imports from Saudi Arabia accounted for close to 60 percent of total petroleum imports in 1973–1974, whereas they had accounted for only 11 percent of imports in 1970–1971. Pakistan began importing oil from the United Arab Emirates in the same year, supported by a $100 million loan facility received from Abu Dhabi and a $15 million facility for the import of crude oil from Abu Dhabi National Oil Corporation (ADNOC).61 Iran made aid commitments of $580 million in 1974 and a further $150 million in 1976.62
Earlier balance-of-payments and project support had come from the United Kingdom, United States, USSR, and China. Arab aid commitments of the 1970s led to the establishment of several jointly funded projects including the Pak-Arab Refinery and Pak-Arab Fertilizer Project at Multan, funded by Abu Dhabi; the Tarbela hydropower project, funded by OPEC; and fertilizer, cement, and thermal power plants, funded by Saudi Arabia. Joint investment and holding companies were also set up with financial commitments from Kuwait and Libya.63 Earlier refineries, such as Pakistan Refinery, incorporated in 1960, and National Refinery, incorporated in 1963, were built to refine Iranian crude oil. In contrast, the Pak-Arab Refinery Limited, 60 percent owned by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Corporation and finally completed in 2000, was built to refine the Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabian crude products.
Saudi Arabia’s (and the United Arab Emirates’) economic growth and urban development onward had great implications for Pakistan. Pakistani migrant workers in Saudi were remitting over $500 million annually—over 40 percent of total foreign remittances—from the late 1970s.64 By the turn of the century, an equal amount was being remitted from the United Arab Emirates.65
In addition to direct economic assistance, a second profound influence on Pakistan’s economics emerged in the growth of capital markets and banking in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The Dubai Islamic Bank was established in 1975 in the United Arab Emirates and was owned by the Dubai government, and the Islamic Development Bank was established in Saudi Arabia in 1975 through a joint declaration by member countries of the OIC.66 Both organizations were intended to create sharia-compliant banking models that could serve investors and borrowers through the region. Professionals also built on the access to capital to fund banking, commercial, infrastructural, and financial projects in Pakistan.67 The Bank of Credit and Commerce International set up by Pakistani banker Agha Hassan Abedi and funded by the Abu Dhabi royal family has been relegated to ignominy,68 but more recent collaborations have been closely regulated under international trade and banking laws and are, by all accounts, successful enterprises. Together, these influences suggest a prevailing vision of a morally construed Islamic region within which a mutually profitable mobilization of capital is seen as possible.
The idea of the Islamic economy influenced taxation and banking practices in Pakistan as well. In February 1979, Zia ul Haq declared that Pakistan was going to follow an interest-free finance model, applying the principle to the activities of public-sector investment corporations.69 The assessment of zakat was to follow the example of Saudi Arabia, which had been levying zakat since 1956, as is suggested in an 1980 Urdu publication, translated from a 1977 work by a scholar of the Abdul Aziz University (of Sharia) in Riyadh. The author argues that zakat must be applied equally to savings and assessed on commerce and industry.70 The book also accounts for the history of zakat regulation through oversight, banking, and auditing in Saudi Arabia, suggesting the methods by which zakat could be assessed and charged by the government in Pakistan.71
The interest-free models of banking, first developed by Faisal Islamic Bank and ADNOC, have been picked up by international banks operating in the region72 and have, since 2001, inspired the extension of “sharia-compliant” banking services by a number of Western and local banks in Pakistan, overseen by the State Bank of Pakistan.73
Although the burgeoning of sharia-compliant banking services suggests that Pakistanis are ethically interested in the Islamic finance model, the low rate of governmental collection of zakat funds and almost negligible value of voluntary zakat payments into the government fund establish that governmental regulation of this sector is not widely appreciated by the Pakistan public.74 The idea of the Islamic economy therefore has its greatest salience for the private sector rather than for a state-sponsored Islamism.
The events of the 1970s led to an increase in imports from Iran as well, but trade with Iran both before and after the revolution of 1979 occupied a more modest portion of Pakistan’s trading account than that with Saudi Arabia (table 10.1). The trading relationship with Iran has always had important consequences for the economy of Baluchistan, where an undocumented trade in fuel subsidizes the local economy.75 Documented and undocumented trade in dry goods, vegetables, fruit, livestock, electricity, and labor fills the markets on both sides of the border. The Iranian government has shown a great interest in the border relations with Baluchistan, and many of the projects funded by Iran in the 1970s supported industry based in Baluchistan.
At a national level, Pakistan imported petroleum and petrochemicals as well as food and ore from across the border. Imports from Iran to Pakistan were encouraged through loan agreements and trade agreements in the pre-1979 era, but the trade relations of the 1980s were far more significant because of the international trade sanctions on Iran, under which Iran exported oil and imported essential commodities from across the Pakistan border. Between 1981 and 1983, total imports from Iran increased from Rs 23 million to Rs 1.1 billion, and exports to Iran increased from Rs 823 million to Rs 4.2 billion. In 1986, the two countries set up a Joint Economic Commission to manage trade across the border.76 After a period of tensions over Pakistan’s Afghan policy in 1997–2001, Pak–Iran trade was renewed along with efforts to regularize the undocumented economy.77
In 2003, diplomacy toward actualizing the Iran–Pakistan gas pipeline was renewed, and in 2010, a deal was signed to start construction of the route.78 Despite overt U.S. pressure and threats to extend sanctions against Iran to any financier of the project and the withdrawal of a Chinese consortium, which was going to lead the financing, both countries remained committed to building the pipeline, and it became a key point in the articulation of regional self-interest and defiance of the United States under the PPP government of 2008–2013.
Between 1973 and 2000, two different sets of interests came to define Pakistan’s relations with the Arab world and relations with Iran. Relations with the Arab world had ballooned with the petrodollar economy. Relations with Iran, while also deeply significant for regional economic growth and resource sharing, were not seen as buoyant or as lucrative and were sidelined, particularly after the end of the Iran–Iraq War. Yet the benefit to Pakistan’s domestic economy from economic ties with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf has yet to be fully quantified. While remittances of foreign exchange strengthen the domestic economy, other ties may be detrimental to Pakistan’s national interest. Arab investors have blocked attempts to develop coal-fired power plants, encouraging Pakistan to remain dependent on expensive imports of furnace oil. Saudi Arabia made a credit facility for oil purchase available to Pakistan on a deferred payment basis just after the nuclear tests in 1998. These aid relations became more complicated under the PPP government when Saudi Arabia refused to sell oil to Pakistan on anything other than commercial terms despite the crisis state of the Pakistani power sector during the recent PPP tenure.79
TABLE 10.1 PAKISTAN TRADE WITH SAUDI ARABIA AND IRAN, 1955–2010
NOTE: THIS TABLE IS BASED ON INFORMATION FROM THE PAKISTAN ECONOMIC SURVEYS FROM 1956 TO 2011. MANY HISTORIC FIGURES ARE REVISED FROM YEAR TO YEAR TO ACCOUNT FOR CHANGES IN EXCHANGE RATES OR TO CORRECT ERRORS. BECAUSE THIS TABLE DOES NOT ADJUST ALL THE FIGURES TO CURRENT EXCHANGE RATES, IT SHOULD BE UNDERSTOOD TO INDICATE GENERAL TRENDS.
PLACING ISLAM IN REGIONAL RELATIONS
Ideas about the political salience of a transnational Islamic community in a world of nation-states first began to be articulated in the late nineteenth century. This idea—that Muslims of the world constitute a composite called the umma—inspired both Shia and Sunni political-religious movements. In addition to invoking the idea of a moral community, the idea of the umma relies on a shared regard for the history, languages, knowledge, and sites of Islam. For Sunnis, these are the Arabic language, the Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi, and Maliki legal traditions as certain hadith compilations, and the sites of Islam in the Arab world, including Mecca, Medina, and Al Aqsa. For Shias, this list includes the Persian language, the legal compendium of Imam Jafar, and the sites of Karbala and Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran.
Intellectual relations between South Asian Muslims and Iran and Saudi Arabia are rooted in a long history of travel and learning. Both before and after 1947, some Sunni scholars in South Asia often traveled to Mecca and Medina for initiation into hadith and fiqh studies and Arabic language study,80 and Shia scholars often traveled to Iraq.81 This sort of training was received in addition to knowledge traditions and education from South Asian teachers. Students would spend several years in Saudi Arabia participating in study circles and sometimes setting up their own. They studied and taught in ethnically diverse groups of students linked by their subject of study and the language of study, which was Arabic. In the late colonial period, Sunni scholars from the organization called the Ahl-i Hadith and those connected to the madrasah Darul Ulum Deoband most often traveled to Saudi for study. This continued in the postcolonial period, and some Pakistani scholars who came to great prominence remained in Saudi Arabia as teachers or in other professional capacities.82 The same is presumably true of the teaching and learning experience of Shia scholars in Najaf and later in Qom.83
Pakistan’s cultural relations with the Muslim world have been affected by the fault line between Arab Sunnism and Iranian Shiism. Pakistan’s earliest relations with Iran were premised on its historic cultural connections to the Persianate cultural world while Pakistani ulama looked toward the institutions of Islamic legal studies in Saudi Arabia.
During the period of the CENTO accords, Iran sought collaborations in petrochemicals research and development and engineering,84 while Pakistan sought to enhance a Persianate cultural heritage through education programs and sharing of expertise about art, archaeology, anthropology, and architecture. Iranian cultural centers were established in cities across Pakistan, including Quetta, Peshawar, Islamabad, Karachi, and Lahore, and an Iran–Pakistan Language Authority was established in 1969 to foster Persian research, writing, and publishing in Pakistan.85 Iran sponsored a cultural center and digital library mostly focused on manuscript preservation at Punjab University Library,86 and the Iran–Pakistan Persian Research Center, established in 1971 and now located in Islamabad, maintains a collection of manuscripts and a research library.87
Both before and after 1979, Pakistan and Iran have had agreements for student exchange programs. The earliest of these involved each country offering ten postgraduate scholarships to the other.88 Under more recent agreements, Pakistan reserves small quotas at public universities for Iranian students, and Iran does the same for Pakistani students. Pilgrims intending to visit Sufi shrines and Shia sites in Iran (or, for that matter, in India) have not received the same attention as hajjis, although visa policies for religious tourists have been discussed between the two states. Instead, travel to holy sites in Iran is managed by private tour operators.
It was only after 1979 that Qom became a major center for Shia theological study, and the example of Iran began to inspire Shia intellectualism and politics in Pakistan.89 A recent publication from Islamabad’s Al Basirah Trust, a research organization for the study of Islam in the light of ijtehad, describes this inspirationalism as pivoting on the personality and then memory of Imam Khomeini and the possibilities for engaging in scholarly and political debates in a religious idiom.90 Equally, Iran’s clerics have regularly spoken out in the Iranian press about the condition of Pakistan’s Shia and have extended moral and personal support to Pakistan’s Shia activists.91
Mariam Abou Zahab’s work on the “new Shias” inspired by postrevolutionary Iran describes the politicization of the Shia identity through the emergence of transnational connections between Shia clerics in Pakistan and those in the Middle East (including Lebanon) and through the establishment of new teaching and congregational spaces in Pakistan, which transferred a distinctly Iranian Shiism into Pakistan.92
In contrast, the Arab world has long occupied an undisputed position as a cultural, intellectual, and moral wellspring for Sunni Islam. In overt attempts to bolster this position, Saudi Arabian ulama have sought to modernize religious institutions in Saudi Arabia in line with other educational and institutional developmental objectives. Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s recent work, Modern Islamic Thought, identifies the national and transnational ambitions of Salafi ulama in institutionalizing the loci for issuing fatwa.93 Modern colleges offering government-recognized degrees for the study of sharia and the Arabic language were set up in Riyadh in 1951 and Medina in 1961 in an attempt to institutionalize and monitor religious study. In 1953, the Dar al-Ifta was established and grew to be a single centralized source of religious interpretation and injunction in the Saudi state.94 These colleges and institutions enroll international students and invite theologians from around the Muslim world, including Pakistan.
Patronage of Pakistani ulama by Saudi ulama is suggested by regular visits of Saudi theologians to Pakistan. Such visits are strongly encouraged in Pakistan and both official and unofficial levels. When the imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque visited Pakistan during the Lal Masjid crisis, he was allowed to meet with Abdul Rashid Ghazi and heard his demands for the establishment of Saudi-style sharia.95 In other cases, meetings between the religious parties and Saudi officials have been facilitated by Pakistani politicians.96 Saudi Arabia provided the campus for the International Islamic University established in Islamabad in 1980. In 1985, three Islamic and Arabic studies centers funded by and named for Sheikh Zayed, president of the United Arab Emirates, were opened at the University of Karachi, Peshawar University, and Punjab University.97
Official cultural relations opened possibilities for Pakistan to receive other forms of religious support as well. In the 1960s, King Faisal provided funds to build the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad to which he added $10 million to support the creation of an Islamic educational center on the mosque grounds.98 The International Islamic University was set up in 1980 through this donation,99 and the mosque was completed in 1986.
Other instances of expansive Arab financial support for projects in Pakistan seem greatly inspired by personal interests, connections, and largesse on the part of Arab royals. The Sheikh Zayed International Airport and the Sheikh Zayed Medical College and Hospital, both at Rahim Yar Khan in Sindh, were both projects funded personally by Sheikh Zayed because the area is a favorite hunting destination of the UAE sheikhs. The Sheikh Zayed Medical Complex in Lahore, the Civil Hospital at Nagarparkar in Sindh, and the Sheikh Zayed International School in Islamabad, all commissioned in 1986, were also described as personally motivated charitable projects.100
The architectural monument of the Faisal Mosque, Pakistan’s biggest mosque and briefly the largest mosque in the world, has drawn great attention the fact of Saudi support for Sunni practice in Pakistan’s intolerant religious environment.101 Its grounds house Zia ul Haq’s mausoleum, and its image has been replicated on the Rs 5,000 note since 2006. Faisal Mosque has broadened Pakistan’s definition of its architectural heritage, which includes Naulakha pavilion, the Badhshahi mosque, Mohenjodaro, and the tomb of Jahangir—all sites signifying a regional territorial heritage and a predominantly Persianate one. However, Faisal Mosque, built at the same time as Islamic world–funded large power projects, refineries, and factories, is intended to be symbolic of national economic development. As many commentators have pointed out, Faisal Mosque demonstrates the confluence of Pakistan’s national religious self-representation and Saudi Arabia’s interests in religious patronage.
Pakistan interacts most directly and regularly with Saudi Arabia on the question of the hajj because of the close intergovernmental collaboration required to make arrangements for pilgrims and the demands for transparency in the allocation of hajj permits on the part of Pakistanis. Between 1948 and 1974, the number of Pakistanis who performed hajj each year increased from 12,300 to 58,743.102 By the end of the century, that number crossed 100,000, and the number of Pakistani hajis anticipated for 2012 was 190,000.103 Since the 1960s, each country has been awarded a quota under which its citizens’ participation in hajj is managed.104 Robert Bianchi notes that Pakistani participation expanded dramatically and was managed under a new and highly efficient hajj administration during Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s premiership, peaking at the time of the 1974 Islamic Summit.105 The quota systems and the sheer size of Pakistan’s annual hajj contingent has made the hajj a major point of issue in Pakistan–Saudi relations. Each year, Pakistan bargains for an increase in the quota, and any success is widely publicized.106 Hajj training schemes, which discipline pilgrims and prepare them for the strenuous rites, have been in place since Bhutto’s time. The Pakistani state, in supporting the Saudi state in its hajj management objectives, implicitly supports the view that Pakistanis as Muslims have no claim on Mecca except as worshippers.
Bianchi argues that Saudi Arabia’s management of the hajj is deeply affected by a perceived threat from pilgrims expressing any political motivation. In 1979, the Saudi dissident Juhayman al-Otaibi, along with 400 supporters, occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca right after the conclusion of the hajj. It was rumored that a prominent Pakistani Ahl-i Hadith member who was studying and teaching in Saudi Arabia participated in the events of 1979, and the Iranian government openly appealed to other Muslims to mobilize politically in Mecca.107 In 1987, at least 400 Iranian pilgrims were killed when Saudi security forces began shooting at Iranian pilgrims who had staged a “demonstration” in Mecca.108
Saudi Arabia’s position is clear: Mecca and Medina belong to the Saudi state, and worshippers enter at the regime’s behest.109 Pakistani pilgrims are closely scrutinized for links either to Iran or to dissident religious factions, and Pakistani migrant workers are subjected to close surveillance and state monitoring in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In June 2012, Saudi Arabia’s arrest of the Indian Muslim militant and Lashkar-e-Taiba member Abu Jindal on passport violations and his extradition to India to stand trial and give evidence against Pakistan for the November 26 Mumbai attacks confirm Saudi Arabia’s intolerance of religious activism on its own soil.110
There is as yet little evidence of direct Saudi support to religious extremist groups in Pakistan, a fact that should caution us against drawing too many inferences about Saudi Arabia’s role in Pakistan. But Saudi Arabia’s recent commitment to build “100 wells, 100 mosques and 2,000 eye surgeries” in Pakistan, its sponsorship of Koran recitation competitions, and its gift of a Rs 30 million carpet to the International Islamic University in Islamabad are the most recent of many “gifts” from Saudi Arabia in support of Sunni interpretations of Islam in Pakistan.111
At an official level, most relations between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have rationalized a Sunni Muslim politics managed by governments and institutions and are marked by attempts to check mobile and transnational Islamist politics, which are perceived to compromise the interests of government. The most obvious cultural spillover of the official Saudi–Pakistan relationship is the proliferation of private tourism companies that have sprung up across Pakistan, putting together not only hajj and Umrah packages for religious travel to Mecca but also packaging tours for tourists and airline tickets for migrant workers to Dubai, Jeddah, and Doha. The religious transference of ideas inspired by such travel alone is no more and no less significant than the abaya and sheila, the woman’s cloak and veil, which is fashionable in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and increasingly preferred by religiously observant Pakistani Muslim women over the burka.112
During the Afghan war, Arabs committed to the preservation of the umma found their way to Pakistan’s northwest and from there into Afghanistan and did so with the complicity of Zia’s government in Pakistan and presumably the knowledge and approval of the governments of their own countries—among these, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. During the 1990s, participants supported the rise of the dogmatic Sunni Taliban movement. Afghanistan therefore became an incubator of a Sunni transnationalism, taking shape around theological ideas about state, governance, sharia, and in opposition to Iranian-sponsored Shiism. Pakistan received the product of both Afghanistan’s militarized Sunni dogma and Iran’s newly politicized Shia identity.
Through the same period, Iran remained committed to speaking for and defending the interests of the Shias of Afghanistan. It supported the Bonn agreement and invested in construction projects in Afghanistan, offered aid and loans, and urged all parties to participate in a broad-based representative government at Kabul.113 Shortly after the revolution in Iran, a Shia political front was established in Punjab as the Tehrik-e Nizaf-e Fiqha Jafaria (Movement for the Protection of the Jafari Fiqh).
By the middle of the 1980s, many of the Sunni groups that had been involved in the Afghan war began to set up militant and anti-Shia organizations in Pakistan, the first of which was the Anjuman-i Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (Society of the Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet) established in 1985 in the Punjab. This group was implicated in attacks on Iranian interests in Pakistan from the 1989 to 2001. In 1990, the cultural attaché at the Irani consulate in Lahore was killed by Haq Nawaz Jhangvi of the Sipah-e-Sahaba. In 1997, Riaz Basra of the offshoot group Lashkar-e Jhangvi claimed responsibility for an attack that killed five Iranian cadets visiting Rawalpindi.114 Sunni extremist groups claimed responsibility for attacks on the Iranian cultural center in Multan in 1997 and 1998, claiming that the center was advocating Shia militancy in Pakistan.115
Mariam Abou Zahab argues that the rising conflict between Sunnis and Shias in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s should be read as an extension of Saudi–Iran tensions in Pakistan because of the material support extended to Sunni extremist groups by Arab benefactors and selective targeting of the Ithna ‘Asharia Shias of Pakistan over Bohris and Ismailis.116 That the Pakistani establishment—particularly the military intelligence—showed itself willing to suffer the proliferation of Sunni militant groups in Pakistan and their targeting of Shias and Iranian interests in the country suggest its complicity in the regional competition. From all accounts, this forbearance was linked to the ability of religious extremists to penetrate the borders of Afghanistan and Kashmir rather than to particular ideological preferences.
A popular understanding of Islamic regionalism has been supported in Pakistan by both the Urdu- and regional-language press and by preachers. This trend emerged first in response to Pan-Arabism and was invigorated during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Israeli state, and prevailing Western interests in the oil-rich Middle East. Transnational Islamic discourses critique government action in pursuit of what are seen to be American-directed policy ends and often propose an empathy with Islamist movements. After September 11, 2001, the politics of religion in Pakistan became increasingly colored by sectarian rivalries. Pervez Musharraf’s government banned several religious sectarian groups, among them Lashkar-e Taiba, Lashkar-e Jhangvi, Sipah-e Mohammad, Jaish-e Mohammad, and Sipah-e-Sahaba.117 However, these groups continued to operate, often under new names, claiming responsibility for massive attacks on Shia communities across the country and inspiring, if not directly carrying out, isolated attacks on Shia professionals. Saudi and Gulf Arabs were implicated in providing funding for religious extremists through “cash couriers,” suggesting Al Qaeda–inspired Islamist organization.118
Significant though these events have been, the war on terror, the occupation and subsequent fall of Iraq to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), and efforts to rebuild Afghanistan alongside an American withdrawal have had a tremendous impact on regional infrastructure, militarization and arms production, diplomacy, aid and development, and telecommunications, the consequences of which for Pakistan have yet to be fully explored. Theoretically, the study of Islamism in Western Asia since 2001 has yet to propose viable frameworks for understanding the evolution of political Islam, its possibilities, and its dangers. Asef Bayat’s important volume exploring post-Islamism suggests attentiveness to movements and discourses that seek to reconcile Islamic piety and democratic practice,119 but Shadi Hamid warns against the assumptions of post-Islamism, stating that Islamist movements moderated under conditions of repression and not those of political participation.120 A continued attention to the sorts of relationships engendered by such movements is essential alongside study of state-centered politics of Western Asia.
PAKISTAN AND WEST ASIA SINCE 2008
In the period since 2008, we have also seen the completion of the full term by the PPP-led Parliament in 2013 and the inauguration of a Parliament led by the Pakistan Muslim League—Nawaz (PML-N). Rather than military leaders, political parties and parliamentary consensus directed Pakistan’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran through this period, and it may be anticipated that they will continue to do so.
The needs of Pakistan’s ailing power sector dominated policy concerns regarding relations with both fuel-rich countries during this period. From 2008 to 2013, the PPP championed the building of the Iran–Pakistan pipeline and was snubbed by the Saudi government, which had long professed a dislike of the PPP leadership. On the PML-N’s assumption of power in 2013, the progress over the gas pipeline immediately slowed, and local news was dominated by Nawaz Sharif’s immediate appeal to Saudi Arabia for aid, suggesting a repetition of his policies of the 1990s, which led to greater closeness to Saudi Arabia at the expense of economic ties and diplomatic ties to Iran. Nawaz Sharif’s approach envisages aid primarily in the form of deferred payment for furnace oil imports. Other forms of financial support offered by Saudi Arabia, such as funding for the Neelum Jhelum Hydropower Project, are for small amounts.121
Pakistan’s balance of payments has continued to be affected by worker remittances from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the most recent figures reporting that of $13.9 billion in worker remittances over the financial year July 2012–June 2013, $4.1 billion came from expat workers in Saudi Arabia and $2.7 billion from the United Arab Emirates.122 The news that Saudi Arabia intends to regularize and reduce its expat workforce by fining and jailing guest workers violating the conditions of residency and work authorization in order to give a relative advantage to its own citizens was met with some concern in Pakistan, which estimates that thousands of low-wage Pakistani workers in Saudi Arabia will be affected by this.123 The boost to the budget from remittances, however, does little to correct a growing deficit in its balance of payments with Saudi Arabia.124 Weinbaum and Khurram describe a series of high-level meetings that cemented Nawaz Sharif’s government’s relationship with the Kingdom in early 2014 and began to tilt the balance of Pakistan’s Western Asian relations in favor of Saudi Arabia.125
In addition to its economic concerns, Pakistan faces worsening sectarian tension in the country, which both of the country’s main political parties seem unwilling or unable to confront. Despite the Shia background of the Bhutto-Zardari family and the secular professions of the party, attacks on the Shia Hazaras in Baluchistan126 and on urban Shia communities in other parts of the country127 suggested little in the way of government efforts to stem sectarian tensions from 2008 to 2013. The popularity of leaders campaigning for negotiation with the Taliban in the 2013 election and the fact that the PML-N has links with anti-Shia Sunni extremist individuals and organizations in the Punjab indicate a mainstreaming of a pro-Sunni political agenda in Pakistan.128
Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have also escalated over the last decade. This tension has played out most directly in Bahrain, where Iran supports the local disadvantaged Shia population, while Saudi Arabia has lent men, arms, and money to defend the royal family and Sunni interests on this island.129 Increasing international isolation of Iran and the political uncertainty in Egypt, Syria, and Libya have increased the determination and ability of the Saudi government to resist political challenge in its own country and in the region.
In Pakistan, the rise of the Sunni extremist group Jundallah in Baluchistan,130 attacks on Iran’s consular staff in Peshawar, and attacks on Shia pilgrims either traveling to or returning from visits to Iran131 suggest that the Saudi–Irani competition continues to spill over. Although there is no identifiable single source of rising anti-Shia sentiment and militancy across the country, the impunity with which madrasahs and mosques across the country may preach anti-Shia sentiment and the links of Arab patrons to such institutions have indicated to many observers of the region that such institutions are the linchpins for Arab sponsorship of a sectarian agenda.
CONCLUSION
Pakistan’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran were driven primarily by military and security concerns and management of relations with the United States until 1973, when the change in the price of oil alongside new ideas about economic regionalism made regional trade, capital flows, and economics the primary motivating factors behind these relationships. Curiously, during both these periods, an idea of Islamic transnationalism was employed in different ways—first to cement anti-Soviet and anti-Israeli cooperation and then to formulate an ethically derived system of economic cooperation.
Through both these periods, a Sunni- and Arab-centered Islamic vision prevailed, with some key differences. Until the 1970s, the Arab center of regional pan-Islamism was Egypt, a center of Salafi revivalism and transnational religious debate fostered at Al Azhar while cultural and intellectual relations with Iran were strongly supported for historic and linguistic reasons.132 However, with the circulation of capital, the growth in hajj travel since the 1970s, urban development, and increase in economic migrations from Pakistan to the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, these countries have become the embodiment and center of an Arab world as seen from Pakistan.
Relations with Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser extent the United Arab Emirates, emerged through regional bilateral alliances and were closely controlled by governmental oversight on both sides. But the Arab economy and relations with Pakistan have incubated a Sunni, Arab-centered regionalism, which has implications outside the sphere of bilateral relations. The agents of this regionalism are the moneyed sheikhs and the oil industry of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have acted as patrons of Pakistan’s Sunni worshippers, students, ulama, military, politicians, and professionals. Largesse, distributed through personal and diplomatic gestures of “friendship,” have simultaneously incubated a Sunni identity and oil dependency in Pakistan.
Military exigencies in the Middle East, Nawaz Sharif’s political leanings, and Iran’s continued refusal to give up nuclear technology will only increase the importance of Pakistan to Saudi Arabia as a source of arms, military training, and nuclear technologies. Yet it is important to note that while the political tensions created by Pakistani Baluch interest in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan and Iran’s interest in Afghanistan have not been resolved and the fate of the gas pipeline remains uncertain, tensions between the two countries have not escalated and Iran’s own political, cultural, and religious ambassadors in Pakistan continue to exert a quiet influence. Pakistan’s relations with Iran have survived dramatic political change in both countries, and there is little to suggest that Pakistan wants another hostile neighbor. Like many others in the region, it is most likely that Pakistan will wait to see how its two allies will confront ISIS and respond to American concerns and that it will continue to work with both of them militarily and diplomatically as they do so. Historically, such realpolitik has clearly marked Pakistan’s foreign relations position in Western Asia, over religious interpretative considerations.
