Last week, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman told parliament that the country would view an invitation to join the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement “positively.”
Then he also went on to add that an expanded pact could essentially become a self-defense mechanism for the world’s Muslim-majority states, and described Bangladesh’s possible membership as “an internal matter of our family, the Muslim family,” on which outsiders had no basis to raise issues or concerns.
So, the invitation may or may not come from Riyadh, but the “Muslim family” argument has already come from Dhaka – and that is where the trouble starts.
Nobody asked Bangladesh to define a military alliance in terms of religious kinship. The question was whether joining a collective-defense arrangement with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan would serve Bangladesh’s interests.
Turning that into a matter of the Muslim family does something rather convenient: it makes scrutiny sound like an insult to faith, when it is actually the most basic responsibility of foreign policy.
If Bangladesh is going to assume obligations under a military pact, its government should be able to explain why, since religion in itself cannot be an explanation.
Bangladesh is a People’s Republic, not an Islamic Republic. While its Constitution recognizes Islam as the state religion, secularism also remains one of its fundamental principles of state policy.
More importantly, the Constitution’s principles governing international relations speak in the language of sovereignty, equality, non-interference and peaceful settlement of disputes.
That does not require Bangladesh to keep Muslim-majority countries at arm’s length. Quite the opposite: there is nothing wrong with deep relations with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan or any other Muslim country. But friendship between states is one thing; turning a religious identity into the basis for military commitments is quite another.
Among the three countries that signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement on August 7, Pakistan is a self-declared Islamic Republic, Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy whose political identity is inseparable from its custodianship of Islam’s two holiest sites and Turkey remains constitutionally secular, though the AK Party that has governed it for two decades emerged from the country’s Islamist political tradition.
These countries have their own reasons for wanting closer security ties, but Bangladesh must decide whether those reasons are also its own. Saying that the matter belongs to the “Muslim family” neatly avoids that question rather than answering it.
The agreement itself is not a ceremonial declaration of brotherhood. Its central provision says that an armed attack against one member will be regarded as an attack against all. That is an Article 5-style collective-defense commitment, even if nobody should pretend that the Mecca pact has NATO’s institutions or military machinery.
Pakistan Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar has called the agreement “purely defensive”, while Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has compared its central provision with NATO’s Article 5.
There is no contradiction in calling a collective-defense arrangement defensive while acknowledging that it can create obligations that pull members into a war that starts elsewhere. That is precisely why the details matter before, rather than after, a country signs.
And the pact’s details remain thin. The three countries have spoken about political and military coordination, joint exercises and defense-industry cooperation and plans for mechanisms to coordinate their senior officials and armed forces.
But there is still no publicly disclosed integrated military command comparable to NATO’s, and the precise obligations of a future member in a crisis are not nearly as clear as they would need to be before Bangladesh voluntarily takes them on.
There is another problem. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan do not have identical security maps. Saudi Arabia’s immediate concerns include the Houthi threat in Yemen and the wider confrontation involving Iran.
Turkey’s security calculations are shaped by Syria, Kurdish militancy, the Black Sea and its own regional ambitions, alongside its longstanding territorial disputes with Greece. Pakistan’s security concerns are concentrated on Afghanistan and, much more consequentially, India.
These countries may have found useful common ground, but their strategic problems are hardly interchangeable. Whether they can turn that political convergence into a coherent collective-defense system remains to be seen.
Bangladesh, meanwhile, has an entirely different neighborhood. Its immediate security concerns involve India, Myanmar, the Bay of Bengal, maritime security, the Rohingya refugee crisis and the protection of its trade and energy routes.
None of those problems suddenly becomes easier because Dhaka acquires a mutual-defense commitment with Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad. Also, Bangladesh does not need a promise to fight somebody else’s war to maintain friendly relations with any of the three.
Other prospective members are treating the invitation with caution rather than solidarity. Pakistan has said the agreement is open to other regional countries, while Turkey has discussed expansion.
Egypt is examining the legal and constitutional implications of joining. Other major Gulf states have yet to sign on. Their restraint is not necessarily rejection, but it shows that countries far closer to the region’s actual security flashpoints are weighing membership as a strategic choice, not a family obligation.
For Bangladesh, the biggest complication is not thousands of kilometers away in the Gulf. Rather, it is across its western border. Pakistan is one of the three pillars of the pact, and Pakistan’s defining strategic rivalry is with India.
Bangladesh does not need to take India’s feelings as a commandment. But pretending that New Delhi’s interpretation of such a move is irrelevant would be dangerously naive.
Bangladesh-India relations are already strained over Dhaka’s extradition request for toppled ex-leader Sheikh Hasina, allegations of forced push-ins along the border and the unresolved renewal of the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty.
Putting a formal defense pact with Pakistan into that already perilous mix would change the political meaning India attaches to Bangladesh’s subsequent choices, whether Dhaka likes it or not.
This is not an argument for making Indian displeasure the compass of Bangladeshi foreign policy. Bangladesh’s water, trade and border-security interests are deeply entangled with India in a way they simply are not with Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Pakistan.
Riyadh can provide investment and employment opportunities. Ankara can provide defense technology and political support. Islamabad can offer historical and diplomatic links that Dhaka may want to strengthen.
None of that changes the fact that India is Bangladesh’s neighbor, its largest immediate security counterpart and the country with which many of Bangladesh’s most consequential bilateral disputes must eventually be managed.
History also suggests caution. In 1955, Turkey, Pakistan and Iraq joined the Baghdad Pact, a Western-backed collective-security arrangement meant to contain Soviet influence. Iraq’s withdrawal after the 1958 revolution ended the original pact; its successor, CENTO, lasted until 1979, but never developed anything resembling NATO’s integrated military structure.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh has spent decades trying, with varying degrees of success, not to become an appendage of somebody else’s strategic rivalry. Joining the Mecca pact would make that harder.
It would place Bangladesh closer to a security arrangement built around three countries whose relations with India, Iran and the wider Middle East carry consequences that have little to do with Bangladesh’s own security needs.
Iran’s relevance to Bangladesh is economic, not strategic. Bilateral trade stood at roughly $15.89 million in FY2023-24 against nearly $2 billion with Saudi Arabia. Tehran is not Riyadh’s equal in Dhaka’s calculus. That is exactly why Bangladesh has no interest in inheriting someone else’s security antagonisms.
It can maintain working relations with countries on opposite sides of regional rivalries without formally attaching itself to one side. If the Mecca pact comes to be read as a hedge against Iran, Dhaka gains little by joining the contest.
None of this, however, requires Bangladesh to turn its back on the pact’s founders. It can expand defense training, military exchanges, trade, investment, labor agreements and defense-industrial cooperation with all three.
It can welcome Saudi support, buy Turkish defense equipment, work with Pakistan on various grounds and maintain warm political ties without signing a collective-defense clause that could one day oblige Bangladesh to take sides in a conflict that has nothing to do with its own territory or people.
The question Dhaka should therefore answer is embarrassingly simple: what specific security threat does joining the Mecca pact address for Bangladesh that its existing bilateral relationships cannot already address?
If the answer is a credible threat in the Bay of Bengal, along the Myanmar border or somewhere else directly affecting Bangladesh, the government should name it. If the answer is that Bangladesh belongs to the “Muslim family”, that is not a security assessment but an identity argument dressed up as foreign policy.
Jannatul Naym Pieal is a Dhaka-based journalist, writer and researcher with over a decade of experience in professional journalism. He is also the author of 10 published books and a researcher focusing on Bangladesh’s media industry and its intersections with broader social and academic fields.
