“Saudi-Pak-Turkiye Axis: The Mecca Pact Proves Huntington Half Right, And That Half Is Bharat’s Problem”, Swarajya, Aug 09, 2026.
“Sunni identity, not shared enemies, is what makes the Mecca pact legible. That tells us something uncomfortable about India’s position.
The signing of a mutual defence pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan, all Sunni Islamic countries, is a small signal that there is something to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations thesis.
The defence pact, while not clear on when one country will go to war if another is attacked, is probably driven by a sense of common threat from Shia Iran and the Jewish state of Israel, both mortal enemies to each other themselves.
Sunni religious identity is the basis of this pact, for none of the three shares any common enemy that is existential in nature for all of them. Each one has a different enemy: Iran for the Saudis, India for the Pakistanis, and possibly Greece and Armenia for Turkiye, though both are minnows compared to Turkiye.
What Huntington Actually Argued
In 1993, Samuel Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilisations in Foreign Affairs magazine, where he hypothesised that future conflicts and wars would be fought not only between countries but on the edges of “civilisations”.
Huntington, a professor at Harvard, died in 2008, but his thesis seems to find some kind of traction at least partially at some time or the other.
Huntington defined a civilisation as a broad cultural collective of people who subscribed to some form of common identity shaped by religion, history, language and inherited cultural experience and symbolism…………….”
Read the full article at Swarajya.
