Any attack on Saudi Arabia is an attack on Pakistan, Religious Affairs Minister Sardar Yousaf says, as religious party leaders rally in solidarity with the Kingdom

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan reads an attack on Saudi Arabia as an attack on itself. That was Religious Affairs Minister Sardar Muhammad Yousaf’s message on Tuesday, delivered after a National Press Club gathering where leaders of the country’s main religious parties and several parliamentarians stood together to express solidarity with the Kingdom. He condemned the Houthi strikes that have hit Saudi civilian infrastructure and, in recent days, Umrah pilgrims — people who, as speaker after speaker noted, had travelled to worship, not to fight anyone.

The context is a hardening set of defence commitments. Sunday’s attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh killed a Pakistani national and injured 11 other people, according to Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation. Yousaf pointed to the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement Pakistan signed with Saudi Arabia last year and to the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement concluded in August by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye; both treat an armed attack on one member as an attack on all. Pakistan, he said, had already backed its words with practical steps and would continue to do so, and he described the Kingdom’s security and stability as inseparable from Pakistan’s own.

The religious leadership spoke in the same register. JUI-F Secretary General Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri said government and people in Pakistan were on one page on Saudi Arabia, which he described not as merely another country but as the centre of Muslims’ religious devotion. Senator Dr Hafiz Abdul Karim, patron of the Pak-Saudi Solidarity Council, called Makkah, Madinah and the Umrah and Hajj pilgrims a red line for all Muslims. Shah Owais Noorani of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan went a step further, urging that the Makkah pact be widened into a broader joint Islamic defence bloc for the protection of the holy land.

Yousaf closed by saying Pakistan’s political leadership, religious parties and state institutions were united behind full support for whatever steps Saudi Arabia takes to secure peace. The unity on display mattered because of who the recent attacks have struck: alongside oil and civilian facilities, they have reached pilgrims in the Kingdom for Umrah — and in Pakistan, that fact alone was enough to put every religious party on the same platform.