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 ...