The Role of Pakistan in the Organization of Islamic Conference

Abstract

The rise of Western naval power in the world was the consequence of the earlier Iberian discovery of peoples, societies and cultures beyond the seas known to the Europeans of the early fifteenth century. It was indeed these forays and adventures that gradually led to the imposition of Western colonial and imperial rule over what were previously independent societies and cultures in Asia and Africa. The Muslim societies, along with Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Christian and traditional African peoples, were all brought under one European imperial roof, and their societies exposed to the transforming powers of Western industrial might. It was of course this rise of the West and the decline of the East that led to the parcelling out of Muslim lands and to the alteration in the direction and flow of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent and their brethren elsewhere in Dam1 Islam. With such a division of the Muslim lands, each Muslim people living under a given colonial power tried to maintain its Islamic identity against whatever odds there were in that colonial system. Pakistanis were part of this global phenomenon and the creation of their country in 1947 dramatized the Muslim feeling of loss of unity and the urgent need to recover the universal feeling of Islamic solidarity which colonial rule seemingly derailed from the tracks of human history. In this paper I intend to examine and analyze the role of Pakistan in the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). Working on the understanding that Pakistan at the time of the formation of the OIC in 1969, was the most populous Islamic state in the world and that its very creation was occasioned by the Islamic sentiments of the Muslim ...