Politics & Power Quote by Aly Khan

Aly Khan’s line reads like interfaith idealism, but it’s really Cold War triage: religion as geopolitical ballast. The urgency of “must come, and come immediately” isn’t spiritual impatience; it’s the tempo of postwar anxiety, when decolonization was rearranging borders and loyalties, and “Communist expansion” served as the era’s catch-all menace. In that climate, faith traditions weren’t just belief systems, they were mass institutions with discipline, narratives, and legitimacy across huge stretches of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He’s arguing that Christianity and Islam, often cast as civilizational rivals, should be reframed as strategic partners.

The subtext is transactional. “Unity if achieved” signals he knows how hard this is: centuries of doctrinal disagreement and imperial memory don’t dissolve on command. Yet he offers a common external threat as the solvent, a classic coalition-building move. Communism becomes the rhetorical “third thing” that allows each side to stop litigating the past and start coordinating in the present. That’s why the phrase “defensive measure” matters: he’s not promising a grand synthesis of theology, just a shared front.

There’s also an implicit rebuke to Western policy habits of the time. If anti-communism is the goal, he suggests, you don’t get there by treating Muslim societies as pawns or problems; you get there by taking their moral authority seriously. It’s a pitch for dignity wrapped in strategy: unity not as utopia, but as leverage.