The Makkah Declaration, issued by the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit, is a historic recognition by the Muslim world that the challenges it faces, most principally the evil of terrorism that feeds so voraciously on poverty and ignorance, are its responsibility and can only be tackled effectively by all Muslim peoples working together.
Never before have Muslim countries spoken with such unity on the urgent problems affecting the Islamic world. The question now is what happens next? How and how quickly can this expressed determination be turned into reality? The Declaration has set a ten-year target to bring about radical change. It will be little short of a disaster if, a decade from now, not enough has been done to achieve the Declaration’s key goals related to poverty, education and the crushing of international terrorism that so perverts the peaceful tenets of Islam. Indeed, the sooner concrete action is taken the better.
The secretary-general, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, has asserted that the Muslim world simply cannot expect others to solve its problems. For too long, Muslim leadership evaded the responsibility for taking their peoples nowhere. They have blamed their nations’ poverty, backwardness, illiteracy and everything else on foreign conspiracies. Perhaps, history may judge, as the most important achievement of the conference, the delegitimization of conspiracy as the fit-all excuse for all failures.
It could be argued that, as presently constituted, the OIC is not set up to produce a key action program to tackle the ills of poverty and education that beset member countries. Many skeptics, from among Muslims themselves, have raised this fear. But they fail to take into account a few facts. The summit itself was the result of a clear recognition that matters cannot be allowed to drift as before. When Ihsanoglu was chosen as secretary-general in June last year, it was because his candidacy was based on the need to reform the organization and make it more relevant.
He was chosen precisely because it was envisaged that 18 months later, the organization would face a task of such magnitude. With political will, it can be equipped to take on this task. Originally founded to give a single voice to the Muslim community, it now needs to become also the single pair of eyes that can identify and assess the mammoth issues at the heart of the Declaration.
In the final analysis, it will be for individual governments, in concert with fellow OIC states, to implement the necessary program of investments in people and education. However, that program needs to have been drawn up and thereafter coordinated by a single body. The clear candidate is the OIC.
In a job this big, there will be many challenges — some harder than others to overcome — and perhaps disappointments. However, if there is real commitment by every OIC member to contribute to its work, the powerful arrow of rhetoric fired in Makkah will be transformed into action and strike its target full on, within ten years.
