The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

international Islamic organizations

As of 2010, some 33 Islamic organizations were accredited as nongovernmental organizations by the United Nations (UN) Department for Economic and Social Affairs. Of these, five had general consultative status and seven had a narrow or technical focus. Most of them were accredited between 1995 and 2003. The most prominent organizations that had a general status were the World Muslim Congress, the Muslim World League (MWL), and the Islamic Call Society. The World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the Islamic Council of Europe, and 11 other Islamic organizations were, furthermore, associated with the UN Department of Public Information. Two Islamic organizations were considered by the UN as regional intergovernmental organizations according to the law of nations: the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB).

Most of these organizations claim international membership, scope, or presence. In part, they act as representatives of an Islamic identity in relation to a specific global objective (e.g., the environment, drugs, or relief work), and in part, they promote Islam. International Islamic organizations generally follow the pattern of international institutions that have emerged since the middle of the 19th century. In many ways, they look like Islamic versions of the UN; the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); the World Bank; the World Council of Churches; and the YMCA. They often emerged from congresses or assemblies modeled on the congregational practices of 19th- and 20th-century international politics.

The institutionalization of international Muslim “congregational” practice became notable after World War I. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922), the self-declared Byron of Arabia, is often portrayed as having given the decisive impetus for popularizing the idea of a nongovernmental congregation of Muslim public figures. Still, the congress idea was intrinsically tied to the question of the legitimacy of the Ottoman caliphate, which had become the subject of public debate since the early 1880s. It was in this context that, until 1924, various proposals for holding an Islamic congress were brought forward; they were sometimes criticized by Muslim reformers but at times they became part of the reformers’ project. This early idea of a congress created a virtual framework for a transnational Islamic polity that Western observers linked to the notion of Pan-Islamism. In fact, the idea of the congress reflected the reformers’ conception of a transnational Islamic umma (community of believers) that was to help transform local Islamic cultures according to the patterns of a universalistic system of Islamic norms and values and for which the reformers themselves were to act as political representatives. Consequently, they increasingly depersonalized the symbolic caliphal representation of the umma and substituted for the caliph a public normative discourse institutionalized by congresses or congregations. This tendency was further radicalized after the failure of the so-called Caliphate Congress of Cairo (May 1926), when the new king of Hijaz and amir of Najd, Ibn Sa‘ud, convened the first congress of the Islamic world during the hajj (pilgrimage) season in June to July 1926. Though not yet established as a fixed organization, this congress became the progenitor of later congregations (Jerusalem 1931 and Karachi 1949, 1952), resulting in the formal foundation of the Islamic World Congress (IWC). Due to this history, the IWC regarded itself as an umbrella organization of many international organizations established after 1960.

Though Muslim elites who assembled as representatives of the Islamic umma tried to place their international activities within an Islamic public sphere independent of any government, the process of institutionalizing transnational Islamic discourses was mostly in alliance with local regimes. An exception is the General Islamic Congress of Jerusalem (founded in 1952), which was part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s policy to transnationalize their claims to legitimacy. It continued to play a role until 1964. The IWC was attached to the new state of Pakistan, while the MWL, founded in 1962, was part of Saudi king Faisal’s policy of transnational Islamic solidarity. The Egyptian High Council for Islamic Affairs was founded in 1954 as a transnational body to promote Islam in alliance with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (1918–70) regime. The tendency to seek international support for newly established regimes through the creation of international Islamic institutions also became apparent when the Libyan leader Mu‘ammar Qaddafi (1942–2011) initiated the World Islamic Call Society in 1972 and when Iranian politicians formed an International Islamic Information Office in 1980.

In 1969, with the fading of the Egyptian-Saudi conflict that had influenced the foundation of the MWL, a new approach to intergovernmental Islamic organizations became possible. In several steps, the OIC was created with 25 states. Of these, 11 Arab states signed the OIC charter in 1972, and it was registered with the UN in 1974. Headquartered in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, the OIC, with 57 member states as of 2010, considered itself to be the second largest intergovernmental organization after the UN. It consisted of four specialized institutions: the IDB (founded in 1975); the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (founded in 1982); the Islamic Broadcasting Union (founded in 1975); and the International Islamic News Agency (founded in 1972), as well as other subsidiary and affiliated organizations and several standing committees. The internal power position among the member states may be deduced from the list of the main shareholders of the IDB, which are from Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. The OIC and its framework adapted the UN structures to the regional context of the member states. In placing the regional intergovernmental cooperation in an Islamic frame of reference, they interpret Islam as a system of values, modifying those derived from the UN charter where appropriate.

Almost all international Islamic organizations have advocated for what may be called a moral world order. “Islamic unity” and “Islamic solidarity” legitimate the transnational claim of these organizations. In reality, they have essentially translated local expressions of Islamicity into an emerging transnational Islamic public sphere (da‘wa). This common feature, however, has remained abstract, and when it comes to practical policy, national or regional interests have clearly dominated. In this respect, intergovernmental or international nongovernmental Islamic organizations have rarely acted as representative of an independent transnational Islamic public, which had been the original ideal of Muslim reformers of the early 20th century. In certain respects, these organizations still reflect a state-centered approach to Islamic internationalism, which echoes the ideas of a new world order while assuming the possibility of directing and controlling the globalization of Islam “from above.” Yet international Islamic institutions have slowly accommodated themselves to the complex character of transnational Muslim politics, which has created a rather different normative global framework with Islamic points of reference.