Editorial
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation was born from a dream, the dream that a shared faith could bind fifty-seven nations into a coherent political force. That dream has long since died, though the organisation itself lingers on, holding summits, issuing statements, and pretending that ceremony is the same thing as solidarity. The reality on the ground tells a crueler story. Member states have launched wars against one another, bankrolled opposing militias in foreign conflicts, and chased geopolitical interests that sit in direct contradiction to the founding charter they once solemnly endorsed. The organisation has never developed a mechanism to hold its own members accountable, because accountability would require confronting the very powers that fund and sustain it.
What the OIC has produced over decades is not unity but paperwork. Its declarations carry no enforcement weight, its resolutions dissolve into diplomatic air, and its summits conclude with communiques that change nothing on the battlefield or in the foreign ministry. The Muslim world it claims to represent is in fact a collection of deeply rival civilisations, divided by the old Sunni-Shia fault line, by Arab and non-Arab nationalisms, by Ottoman nostalgia and Persian ambition, by the competing patronage networks of Riyadh, Ankara, Tehran, and Doha. These are not surface tensions that better diplomacy might smooth over. They are structural fractures built into the geology of the region itself.
The deeper dishonesty of the OIC lies in its language. It borrows the moral authority of Islam to dress what are essentially dynastic and imperial interests in the clothing of religious brotherhood. A genuine institution built on Islamic principles would demand justice for the oppressed regardless of which member state was doing the oppressing. This one does not, and that silence is its most truthful statement.
