Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has urged Muslim countries, particularly those in the Gulf, to unite against what he called their “real enemy” and said divisions among Muslims served the interests of their adversaries.
The message was published on Mojtaba’s Telegram account for Islamic Unity Week, which marks the birth anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). It called for Muslim unity, cooperation in various fields and mutual defence, saying anyone who creates divisions among Muslims, “knowingly or unknowingly,” helps Islam’s enemies.
“And how, in these times, can anyone attribute such an act to ignorance or negligence, when the tyrants of the world, led by the criminal US, have now cast aside the deceptive and flimsy masks concealing their ugly colonial aims and their hegemonic and aggressive schemes, removed their deceptive velvet gloves, and revealed their bloodstained claws to the entire world?” the supreme leader said, according to Iran’s Press TV.
He asked whether Palestinians would have been left “so helpless” and “subjected to the oppression and crimes of the occupiers” if Muslims had been united. Mojtaba specifically asked Gulf Arab rulers whether “rogues without identity” would have dared to covet their lands and possessions if the peoples and governments of the Gulf had been “united under the flag of Islam.” “My emphatic and repeated recommendation to the rulers of Islamic countries, especially the countries of West Asia and the Gulf, is to identify your real enemy, understand his plan and confront it,” Mojtaba said. He, according to Iranian media, said that “unity among Muslims is the fundamental cornerstone for achieving a proud and dominant Islamic civilisation.”
This is a message that deserves more than a diplomatic shrug. Coming from Tehran’s new leadership, still recovering after a devastating war with the United States and Israel earlier this year, the call for unity could easily be dismissed as rhetoric aimed at rallying a bruised nation. But dismissing it would be a mistake. Whatever one makes of the messenger, the message speaks to a real and urgent problem: the Muslim Middle East remains fractured at precisely the moment it can least afford to be.
For nearly half a century, the fault line between Iran and the Arab Gulf states has been the region’s defining fracture — sharpened by sectarian rhetoric, proxy conflicts from Yemen to Lebanon, and a deep well of mutual suspicion. That mistrust has never served ordinary people on either side of the Gulf. It has, however, served outside powers very well.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are not simply two more capitals in a crowded regional map. As the pre-eminent centres of Shia and Sunni Islam respectively, they carry an outsized responsibility for the temperature of the entire Muslim world. When Tehran and Riyadh are at odds, the tremors are felt from Islamabad to Jakarta. When they cooperate — as they showed with their 2023 China-brokered rapprochement — the region breathes easier.
That responsibility cuts both ways. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours must stop treating Washington’s security umbrella as a substitute for genuine regional diplomacy with Tehran. And Iran, for its part, must resist any temptation — however tempting confrontation with Washington and Israel may make it — to strike at Arab Gulf states or their infrastructure. Gulf capitals are not combatants in Iran’s conflict with the United States and Israel, and treating them as extensions of that fight would shatter whatever fragile trust has been rebuilt in recent years, hand Iran’s enemies a propaganda victory, and drag the wider Gulf into a war it did not choose.
Equally, Gulf states cannot keep outsourcing their security indefinitely to distant powers whose interests do not always align with regional stability. A security architecture built entirely on foreign guarantees is inherently fragile — it can be withdrawn, renegotiated, or weaponised as leverage. What the region needs instead is a homegrown framework, one that includes Iran rather than encircles it, built on verifiable confidence-building measures, hotlines, incident-avoidance protocols in the Gulf waters, and joint economic projects that make conflict costlier than cooperation.
Turkiye and Pakistan are natural bridge-builders in this effort. Neither is a party to the Iran-Gulf rivalry, both maintain workable relations with Tehran, and both have deep, decades-old defence ties with Saudi Arabia. That combination gives Ankara and Islamabad a credibility neither Washington nor any Western capital can match.
This is not theoretical. Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan formalised the “Mecca Joint Defence Agreement” — following on from Riyadh and Islamabad’s own Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed last September — under which an attack on any one of the three would be treated as an attack on all. Analysts describe it as combining Saudi financial muscle and geography, Turkish defence-industrial capacity, and Pakistan’s military experience and nuclear deterrent. It is not a NATO-style alliance, and its architects have been careful to say so. But it is a genuine step toward a regional order less dependent on any single outside guarantor — and, crucially, one that need not be aimed at Iran if Tehran is engaged rather than excluded. A framework built to reassure Gulf states could, with the right diplomacy, evolve into one that also draws Iran into confidence-building rather than confrontation.
What is too often missing from this conversation is the sheer economic cost of disunity. Every flare-up between Iran and its Gulf neighbours rattles oil markets, spikes shipping insurance premiums through the Strait of Hormuz, delays Gulf states’ ambitious diversification plans, and scares off the very foreign investment those plans depend on. A region that holds a large share of the world’s proven energy reserves, sits astride some of its busiest trade corridors, and boasts a combined population approaching half a billion people should not be defined by insecurity and improvisation.
Worse, disunity is an open invitation. Every rivalry left unmanaged, every trust deficit left unaddressed, gives outside powers — old colonial hands and new great-power competitors alike — an opening to fish in troubled waters, selling arms to both sides of a quarrel they have every incentive to prolong.
The Middle East does not lack the resources, the institutions, or even the goodwill to chart a more stable course. What it has lacked is the political will in Tehran and Riyadh to treat unity as a strategic necessity rather than a seasonal slogan. If that will exists — and the recent flurry of pacts and rapprochements suggests it might — the region’s Muslim states could yet turn the page on decades of mutual suspicion, and deny outside powers the divisions they have so long profited from.