The most serendipitous emerging foreign policy event for Pakistan, provided its leadership has foresight, is the ongoing power realignment within the Muslim world, as international engagement with Iran looms on the horizon.

The lid has finally been lifted on the widening cleavage between the US and Saudi Arabia that had been brewing over the last several months.

The final rupture in smooth relations that caused an indignant Prince Bandar, the Saudi chief of intelligence to declare his country was on the precipice of a “major shift away” from the US is the prospect of renewed ties between the US and Iran.

The irony that is lost on many Pakistanis is that Israel and the ‘custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’ are in symbiosis in their geo-strategic vision and objectives.

The Saudi leadership’s fulminations at the prospect of Iran returning to the international fold are only matched by Benjamin Netanyahu’s outbursts of anger and vitriol.

Pakistan today is a deformed version of the peaceful, tolerant, predominantly Hanafi, populace that until recently defined the country. The increasing militancy of the last three decades that has now infected the roots of the country owes its seeding and sustenance to exogenous forces.

The nurturing of an intolerant brand of faith, throughout the Muslim world stretching from the Central Asian republics to Southeast Asia, has been an important Saudi project.

Local traditions, rituals and learning have been overtaken by a fanatical, divisive and strident Islamic style. It is this rapid growth of ‘Islamic’ extremism that has enabled the implosion of the Muslim world. Pakistan in some ways seems to be sliding back in time by adopting increasingly obsolete, and ultra-orthodox narratives, finessed by external financing.

To ensure that our state is never far behind its Muslim ‘benefactor’ in embracing its values and mores, the Council of Islamic Ideology, now led by the Deobandi ‘scholar’, Maulana Mohammad Khan Sherani, recently rejected the use of DNA as primary evidence in rape cases. If this is the state of Islamic practice in Pakistan, moving into the 21st century may take a few decades yet.

However, the House of Saud’s carte blanche to create client Muslim states may dissipate with the advent of a thaw in US-Iran relations. The once faint voices of American scepticism in discussing the kingdom as central to the problem in much of the Muslim world are conspicuously louder.

Since the Saudis and Israelis have teamed up to try and prevent détente between Iran and the West, the US Congress will almost certainly present a challenge in pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran.

There are also powerful constituencies within the US, such as the defence contracting community, that would like to maintain the status quo.

For the first time since the 1979 Iranian revolution, however, the US administration appears keen to break the logjam that has defined US-Iran relations. And European governments look sincere in their efforts to strike a deal.

Despite facing formidable obstacles, the Obama administration seems to assess that potential benefits of engagement with Iran far outweigh the threats. The precarious situation in both Syria and Afghanistan can benefit from a friendly rather than subversive Iran from a US perspective.

Moreover, the players backed by the Saudis in both countries are even more inimical to Western interests than the unpalatable incumbent regimes.

Secondly, with the US forecast to be a large energy exporter imminently, the value of Saudi oil has rapidly diminishing returns. Added to this, Iran’s energy reserves and antiquated energy industry presents enormous opportunities for Western firms.

Lastly, despite its theocratic regime, Iranian society is more progressive, more democratic, better educated, less misogynistic, and less hostile to the US than the Kingdom.

If indeed sanctions are lifted in Iran and the country is allowed economic integration with the international community, the opportunities for its neighbour Pakistan will be providential.

The fastest and most sustained route to prosperity for any country is through nurturing strong economic ties with its neighbours. If the Pakistani leadership is willing to go the extra mile with its historically hostile eastern rival, forging closer ties with our resource-rich western neighbour can yield perhaps even greater dividends.

Energy-starved Pakistan stands to make substantial gains by forging closer ties with Iran, which has amongst the world’s largest energy reserves. While India has a per capita income of $1,500, Iran’s per capita income is $7,000.

Today, in many ways Tehran and Delhi enjoy closer cooperation than Islamabad and Tehran. The future of Pakistan lies in cultivating better relations with Tehran, Kabul and Delhi. No country can escape its geography.

And no country can make tangible, sustained progress with hostile neighbours on all its sides. It is Pakistan’s misfortune that our leaders and strategists for their own institutional benefits chose to cultivate geo-strategic relationships with punitive costs to Pakistan’s social fabric.

Being a satellite of Saudi Arabia has eroded much of our centuries-old Indo-Persian heritage and given us the gifts of extremism and intolerance instead.

It is time for the leadership of Pakistan to correct its course and to reclaim its cultural and historical legacy rather than being held hostage to the interests of a fossilised and increasingly anachronistic regime.

Islam has a wonderfully rich historical and cultural narrative that has been hijacked by a bigoted and oppressive element within and has gained currency across the Muslim world due to the support of petrodollars.

However, with the US gaining energy independence and the rest of the world waking up to the threat posed by their obscurantist ‘friends’, the contours of the Muslim world’s power dynamics will be undergoing serious changes.

It is incumbent upon the leadership of Pakistan to serve the interests of its people by strengthening those geo-strategic relationships that will yield dividends for the progress and prosperity of its escalating population, not those that serve the interests of a narrow few while destroying peace and a decent future for the rest.

The writer is a freelance contributor.