The Role of Pakistan in the Organization of Islamic Conference

The rise of Western naval power in the world was the consequence ofthe earlier Iberian discovery of peoples, societies and cultures beyond theseas known to the Europeans of the early fifteenth century. It was indeedthese forays and adventures that gradually led to the imposition ofWestern colonial and imperial rule over what were previouslyindependent societies and cultures in Asia and Africa. The Muslimsocieties, along with Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Christian and traditionalAfrican peoples, were all brought under one European imperial roof,and their societies exposed to the transforming powers of Westernindustrial might.It was of course this rise of the West and the decline of the East that ledto the parcelling out of Muslim lands and to the alteration in the directionand flow of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the Muslims ofthe Indian subcontinent and their brethren elsewhere in Dam1 Islam.With such a division of the Muslim lands, each Muslim people livingunder a given colonial power tried to maintain its Islamic identityagainst whatever odds there were in that colonial system. Pakistaniswere part of this global phenomenon and the creation of their country in1947 dramatized the Muslim feeling of loss of unity and the urgent needto recover the universal feeling of Islamic solidarity which colonial ruleseemingly derailed from the tracks of human history.In this paper I intend to examine and analyze the role of Pakistan inthe Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). Working on theunderstanding that Pakistan at the time of the formation of the OIC in1969, was the most populous Islamic state in the world and that its verycreation was occasioned by the Islamic sentiments of the Muslim ...