Media365
5 min readOct 12, 2026 12:25 PM IST
First published on: Oct 12, 2026 at 12:25 PM IST
There are countless Shiite traditions concerning the sanctity of Mecca, the Kaaba and Medina, just as there are in Sunni literature. That simple fact has become politically relevant. As Saudi Arabia engages in another confrontation with the Houthis (a Shia offshoot), an increasingly potent narrative is emerging: The Houthis are not merely an armed Yemeni movement, nor simply a regional adversary aligned with Iran. They are being presented as a force threatening the holiest places in Islam.
Saudi Arabia has accused the Houthis of attempting to strike Mecca and, more recently, of attacking a power-distribution facility in Medina that supplies the Prophet’s Mosque. The Houthis have denied responsibility for the Medina attack and have also rejected accusations that they deliberately targeted Mecca. If the allegations are established, they would obviously be grave. No political argument can justify attacking pilgrims, civilians or Islam’s sacred sites. But there is a crucial distinction between establishing that a holy site has been attacked and constructing a theological identity around the alleged attacker.
The language surrounding the conflict has increasingly acquired a religious charge. Saudi military chiefs, meeting with their Pakistani and Turkish counterparts in September, condemned what they described as Houthi attacks on Mecca and Saudi infrastructure. This matters because Pakistan has just entered a new strategic arrangement with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed on August 7, declares that an armed attack on one member is to be regarded as an attack on all three. Islamabad insists that the agreement is defensive, not directed against any particular country, and grounded in collective self-defence and international law. Yet the agreement creates a dilemma. What happens when the Saudi adversary is the Houthi movement?
Pakistan has historically had to tread carefully around the sectarian dimensions of the Yemen conflict. Its own society contains significant sectarian sensitivities (approximately 25 per cent of the population is Shiite or other denominations), and Islamabad has previously resisted being drawn wholesale into Saudi-Iranian competition. The Mecca Pact changes the strategic equation. It also creates an incentive for a new narrative.
If the Houthis can be portrayed not simply as a military threat to Saudi Arabia but as enemies of Mecca and Medina, then the political meaning of a possible Pakistani response changes. What might otherwise look like participation in another Arab war can be recast as solidarity with the custodian of Islam’s holiest places. An alleged attack on Saudi territory becomes an attack on the Muslim world. An alleged attack on Mecca becomes an attack on Islam. And military intervention begins to acquire something approaching religious sanctification.
That is precisely where caution is needed. Because the sectarian implication of this narrative rests on a historical falsehood: That Shiites (or Zaydis, or Houthis) somehow stand outside the Muslim reverence for Mecca and Medina. They do not. The Shiite hadith literature is unequivocal in its reverence for the Kaaba. Al-Baqir’s statement is not an obscure theological footnote. Al-Kafi contains an entire chapter on the merit of looking at the Kaaba, including the declaration that looking upon it is an act of worship. This is not a theological concession to Sunnism. It is Shiite Islam’s own religious inheritance.
The most effective wartime propaganda does not merely tell people that the enemy is dangerous. It tells them that the enemy is morally alien. Better still, it tells them that fighting the enemy is itself a moral obligation.
Saudi Arabia needs regional legitimacy for a potentially major military confrontation with the Houthis. Pakistan, after signing the Mecca Pact, has a new obligation to demonstrate what collective defence actually means. And religious language surrounding the Two Holy Mosques offers an exceptionally powerful bridge between those two imperatives. Indeed, the timing is striking. The Pakistanis have admitted that they will supply military equipment and advisers to provide defensive support to Saudi Arabia.
There is a legitimate question to ask: Is the sanctity of Mecca being defended, or politically mobilised? The Mecca Pact is officially described by Islamabad as defensive and committed to peace, restraint and international law. Its first strategic test should therefore not be whether Pakistan can find a religious justification for war, but whether it can maintain that distinction when confronted with an increasingly emotional narrative about the holy cities.
Mecca and Medina are too sacred to become political property. They belong to the shared religious imagination of more than a billion Muslims, that is, Sunni and Shiite, Arab and non-Arab, Saudi and Yemeni, Pakistani and Iranian. The Kaaba is the direction toward which Muslims turn. And there is something especially tragic about invoking the universality of Islam’s holiest places to construct a sectarian definition of who counts as a legitimate Muslim. The sanctity of Mecca should be beyond politics.
The writer is a retired lieutenant-general and former L-G of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry
