Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

Why in News?

• The General Secretariat of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) “condemned and denounced” the comments on Prophet Muhammed made by two erstwhile national spokespersons of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 

About

• The OIC, which was known as the Organisation of the Islamic Conference until 2011, is the second largest inter-governmental organisation in the world after the United Nations, with a membership of 57 countries spread across four continents

• The OIC describes itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world”, and its stated objective is “to safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony among various people of the world”

• The OIC has reserved its membership for Muslim-majority countries

• The Central African Republic, Russia, Thailand, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and the unrecognized Turkish Cypriot “state” have Observer status

• The Organisation of the Islamic Conference was established by the First Islamic Summit Conference held in Rabat, Morocco, in September 1969, to marshal the Islamic world after an act of arson at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that year. The incident had plunged the Middle East into its worst crisis after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war

• In 1970 the first meeting of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers (ICFM) was held in Jeddah, which decided to establish a permanent secretariat in that city, headed by the secretary general of the organisation. The current secretary general of the OIC is the Chadian diplomat and politician Hissein Brahim Taha, who took over from the Saudi Arabian Dr Yousef Ahmed Al-Othaimeen in November 2020