Bangladesh Should Think Twice Before Joining Mecca Pact
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.
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