It’s a great honour for Pakistan to host the 48th session of OIC’s foreign ministers, which is being attended by 48 countries plus China as special guest, but that doesn’t change the fact that this group is among the most toothless of its kind all over the world and hardly has any feathers at all in its cap to show for its work for the so-called Ummah.
Islamabad seems pretty upbeat about breathing fresh life into the Kashmiri and Palestinian struggles for freedom, for example, even if all Muslim countries put together haven’t even been able to adopt a common line on them in more than seven-and-a-half decades.
If they still can, more power to them, but it’s unlikely that coming to Pakistan at a time when the PTI is in power was the missing ingredient all this time. There’s also the feeling, for some reason, that Afghanistan’s problems will finally begin to be addressed after this summit.
But since there’s already been a special OIC summit on the issue, also pushed and hosted by Pakistan, and nothing really came of it except a couple of pledges, what is going to change everything this time? Such gatherings aren’t usually good for much except optics, so if Pakistan and its friends really have some special plan for this time, it will have to be truly game-changing. Yet it’s more likely for the usual fanfare to be followed by the same old line; that there are simply too many differences and wide cleavages within the Ummah for it to function as one, fighting unit at this point in time.
Therefore, as much as it is a privilege – and even a challenge, given domestic circumstances – for Pakistan to play host this time, this summit should also provide some food for thought for OIC.
These are turbulent times, after all, and the post-Covid environment, especially the Russia-Nato conflict have effectively stood the predominant international order on its head. The Muslim world needs to both form and present a unified stance since religious and racial differences continue to colour global politics very strongly.
China’s participation is telling, especially if it owes to the iron bond between Islamabad and Beijing. China is a major player in the recent global shift triggered by Russia, and the US is already pushing other countries to take sides between Washington and Beijing.
How clearly the OIC members understand these new realities will become clear in a few days.
