The Organization of Islamic Cooperation

Politics, Problems, and Potential

Turan Kayaoglu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317615224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the world's leading international Islamic organization. Turan Kayaoglu provides the first accessible and concise introduction and overview of this important organization.

This book details the OIC's struggle to address popular Muslim demands balanced against the member states' reluctance to support the OIC politically and materially. Despite this predicament, the organization has made itself increasingly relevant over the last decade through increasing its visibility as the representative body of Muslim unity and promoting its role as a reliable interlocutor on behalf of Muslims in global society. Outlining the history, workings and goals of the OIC, the book also highlights key issues that may influence the OIC's ability to realize its potential in the future.

This will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international organizations and islamic studies.

1 The origins and history of the OIC

• Umma and the Caliphate

• Pan-Islamism

• The establishment of the OIC

• The OIC’s growth

• The 2005 reforms

• Conclusion

Two concepts in Islamic political thought—umma, the worldwide Muslim community, and the Caliphate, the umma’s leadership—are key to understanding the origins of the OIC. The abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 left some Muslim intellectuals and leaders in search of an organization that could represent the symbolic—if not political—solidarity of Muslims. I argue that the OIC’s biggest success is that it has brought Muslim states together despite their deep ideological, national, and economic differences. This historical overview will also describe the immediate political context surrounding its creation in 1969, namely the Arab–Israeli conflict and, in particular, the 1967 War and Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem.

Umma and the Caliphate

The OIC appeals to Muslims with a powerful claim: in a new organizational form, it embodies the aspirations of Muslim unity. To this end, it invokes the notion of umma: that Muslims are a unified religious—and presumably political—body, transcending ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. Muslims trace the notion of umma to the Prophet Muhammad’s time (570–632) and the Quran’s teachings. With this religious claim, the OIC differentiates itself from other intergovernmental organizations such as the UN and the EU, whose claims of legitimacy rest on their members’ consent. However, since the OIC is state centric, it ends up legitimizing the nation-state system, despite its initial invocation of the cosmopolitan umma as its legitimizing principle. This new organizational form conceptually merges the worldwide umma with the collective of its member states, and so doing it presents itself as a Caliphate-like institution.

As a central tenet in Islam, the umma holds a powerful religious resonance for Muslims. The term appears 64 times in the Quran, and even more frequently in the Hadith literature, the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds. For example, the Quran (2:143) praises Muslim unity by calling the umma a “bearer of witness to the truth before all mankind.” The concept is related to Islamic monotheism, tawhid, the oneness of God. It denotes a common spiritual bond among believers. More than just an abstract religious doctrine, the central Islamic practices require Muslims to act out the notion of Muslim unity. Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan emphasizes that each of Islam’s four pillars (ritual prayers, fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimage) has a dual dimension—individual and collective. The individual dimension aims to cultivate personal spirituality; the collective dimension elevates these practices into communal worship, thereby creating a strong sense of Muslim unity.¹

Although central to Islam, the umma is also an elusive concept, appearing in the Quran and Hadith with different meanings. While the most frequent usage of the term refers to a specific community of believers ruled by the Prophet Muhammad during his period in Medina (622–632), this usage coexists with others where it refers to the Islamic community, a religious community, and the early community in Medina that included Muslims, Jews, and pagans.

The political implications of the umma, in particular its relation to political authority, are also ambiguous. Some reject the idea that the umma denotes a political unit, claiming instead that it compromises a merely spiritual one similar to the communities of Jews, Christians, and Hindus.² Many, however, claim that the umma is similar to a nation, composed of Muslims searching for a defining political authority.³ According to Fred Halliday, “the very definition of umma, a community of shared values, religious or not, has political implications.”⁴ Some even argue that the umma includes a sense of nationhood created on Islamic creed, and demand the reorganization of the cultural, social, political, economical and intellectual lives of Muslims to reflect this Muslim unity.⁵

For most Sunni Muslims, the Caliphate emerged out of the notion of umma; the unity of the umma necessitated a single ruler. The Prophet Muhammad was both the spiritual and temporal leader of a belief-based community, the umma, challenging and transcending the existing tribal order. Upon his death, the umma needed a political successor, the caliph. In Sunni political teachings, the caliph should be a pious Muslim who is elected through (elite) consensus, rules with justice, and, in earlier formulations, comes from Quraysh, the prophet’s tribe. (Imam in Shia teachings refers to both a political and religious successor from the prophet’s family.) The Sunni view of the caliph reflected the perception of the qualities of the Prophet Muhammad’s four immediate successors who are considered to have ruled in accordance with the Quran and the prophet’s example. These successors are known as the rightly guided.

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Box 1.1 The Sunni–Shia split

The split between Sunni and Shia Muslims dates to the early years of Islam, specifically with the succession crisis following the death of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632). Some of the Prophet Muhammad’s followers argued that he did not name a successor. Thus, the community elders selected the prophet’s close friend and father-in-law, Abu Bakr, as leader. Supporters of this group came to be known as Sunni Muslims. However, other followers argued that the prophet had named his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, as his successor. Supporters of this latter group came to be known as Shia Muslims.

Sunnis consider Abu Bakr and three subsequent leaders—the prophet’s friends Omar and Othman, and the prophet’s son-in-law Ali—as the rightly guided caliphs, meaning that they see these leaders as legitimate and righteous rulers. Shias consider Ali, who eventually came to power in 556, as the first imam. Most Shias see the time between the Prophet Muhammad and Ali as a period of illegitimate usurpation of power by the caliphs.

Making matters worse, when Ali finally took power, several leading Muslims, such as the prophet’s wife, Aisha, and the governor of Damascus, Mu’awiya, challenged Ali’s rule. The ensuing civil war resulted in Mu’awiya’s control of the leadership of the Muslim empire and then Ali’s assassination in 661 by a splinter group. The brutal murder of Ali’s son, Hussein, in Karbala (in modern-day Iraq) in 680 by the forces of Mu’awiya’s son, Yazid, established a powerful historical memory for the Shia, solidifying their belief in the righteousness of their cause.

Although the genesis of the divide was a succession problem, Sunnis (sunna means tradition in Arabic; Sunni means the followers of the tradition, the example of the prophet) and Shias (shia means faction in Arabic; Shia means the faction of Ali, and Shias are the followers of the prophet’s household, or ahl-i bayt) developed divergent political theologies about legitimate authority.

The Prophet Muhammad’s authority was both spiritual and temporal. Since the death of the prophet sealed the prophethood, the key question was legitimate authority in a post-prophet world. Sunnis accepted the authority of the ulama (religious scholars) on spiritual matters and the authority of the caliphs on temporal matters. Sunnis believe in the ability of the ulama to answer religious questions authoritatively based on the Quran, the knowledge of tradition (Sunna), and logical reasoning. Sunni tradition has resulted in several schools of thought, each based on different scholars’ emphasis on the Quran, Sunna, and logic. Each school of Sunni thought is named after its most distinguished scholar: Hanifi, Shafi, Maliki, and Hanbali. For Sunnis, temporal authority after the Prophet Muhammad was represented by the Caliphate. Sunnis have developed criteria for the legitimacy of the caliph and his temporal authority.

Shia political theology is rooted in doubts about Muslims’ ability to find authoritative answers to spiritual questions and establish a just order without divine guidance. For Shias, this divine guidance is found in the family of the Prophet Muhammad. Imams, Ali and his children (Hasan and Hussein), and then their closest male descendants, have the right and duty to lead the Muslim umma. Only that divinely ordained and descended leadership can solve religious problems and establish a just order for Muslims. Disputes related to the genealogical tracing of the prophet’s descendants have resulted in different Shia groups, such as Ithna Ashari (Twelvers), Ismailis (Seveners), and Zaydis (Fivers). Ithna Ashari, the largest Shia group, believes that the Twelfth Imam went into hiding and will return as Mahdi, the awaited one. This absent leader has created an authority problem. Most famously articulated by Khomeini (d. 1989) in his velayat-e faqih (the guardianship of Islamic jurist), one powerful form of modern Shia political thought solved the problem of the absence of the imam by delegating the divine authority to Islamic jurists because of their exemplary piety and religious knowledge.

While the succession crisis and theology are important for understanding the Sunni–Shia split, the Ottoman–Safavid struggle in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European colonial policies in the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and political rivalries among Muslim groups, are largely responsible for the current Sunni–Shia map and relations. About 85–90 percent of Muslims are Sunni, while the rest are Shia (excluding smaller groups, such as the Ibadis in Oman). Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and Azerbaijan have Shia majorities while the rest of the Muslim majority states have Sunni majorities. Some of these Sunni majority states, such as Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, have substantial Shia minorities.

As elaborated in Chapter 3, the Sunni–Shia split often manifests itself in OIC politics as distrust and confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

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The status and authority of the Caliphate evolved over time.⁶ When the first civil war brought the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) to power, the position of the caliph became a dynastic ruler’s prerogative. The Abbasid dynasty (750–1258) followed this practice, but also faced competitors for the title, such as the Umayyads of Spain. Toward the end of Abbasid rule, the institution of the Caliphate lost much of its authority. For many, the institution formally ended when the Mongols destroyed the Abbasid capital of Baghdad in 1258. Some, however, believed that a descendant of the Abbasid dynasty escaped to Cairo and presented the title to the Mamluk sultan. When the Ottomans defeated the Mamluks in 1517, the Ottoman sultans assumed the caliph’s authority. As I describe below, no sultan invoked his authority as caliph more than Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Pan-Islamism

With strong textual and historical authority, and supported by Muslim religious practices, the concept of umma has always been a powerful articulation of Muslim unity. While the actual political nature of the concept of umma and its boundaries in the early Islamic period are contested, Muslim intellectuals and leaders have invoked the concept with strong political connotations since the nineteenth century.⁷ In response to European rule, the umma became the foundation of pan-Islamism, a political movement envisioning Muslim unification and mobilizing the Muslim masses.

Several factors account for the rise of pan-Islamism: 1) the spread of nationalism among Muslims; 2) increasing knowledge among Muslim societies about each other; 3) shared grievances against European rule; and 4) the spread of ethnic movements that spanned national boundaries—pan-ideas, such as pan-Slavism, pan-Arabism, and pan-Turkism. All of these factors contributed to Muslim elites adopting pan-Islamism as a form of religious—as opposed to ethnic—nationalism with the power of uniting Muslims against European rule.⁸

Pan-Islamism came in two forms: traditionalist and modernist. Each form was identified with a powerful Muslim historical figure. On the traditionalist side, the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, who frequently invoked the title of caliph during his reign, followed a policy of pan-Islamism (1876–1909).⁹ Article 3 of the short-lived 1876 Ottoman Constitution, Kanun-u Esasi, identified the Ottoman sultan as caliph by codifying the sultan’s claim for universal leadership of Muslims; article 4 granted him the responsibility of protecting Islam.¹⁰

Abdülhamid II’s pan-Islamism viewed the Caliphate as an institution of tradition—with historical evidence, however tenuous, to support Abdülhamid II’s claim of linkage to the Prophet Muhammad. Abdülhamid II’s invocation of the Caliphate empowered him to ask Muslims worldwide to pledge their political loyalty to the Sublime Porte. This position merged pan-Islamism with the institution of the Caliphate. This locus of power was centered in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which while in decline was still the most powerful Muslim empire in the nineteenth century.

Pan-Islamism was a useful political tool for Abdülhamid II. Domestically, he invoked it to boost the loyalties of the empire’s Muslim subjects, loyalties that were increasingly threatened by nationalist and ethnic sentiments. In addition, Abdülhamid II used it to move away from the Tanzimat elites’ Ottomanism, which attempted to de-emphasize Islam in the public sphere and promoted the equality of all subjects, regardless of religion, to counter nationalism among the empire’s non-Muslims. Internationally, Abdülhamid II used the title of caliph to compensate for the lost stature of the empire. He claimed authority over all Muslims, including those living under European rule, such as those in France, Britain, and Russia, to gain influence in international politics.¹¹

In contrast to Abdülhamid II’s approach, pan-Islamism also had a modernist version, which reconciled it with nationalism rather than to the Caliphate. Articulating popular sentiments against West...