KUALA LUMPUR, 1 June 2005 — The world’s biggest Muslim grouping, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, will be renamed and restructured to make it more progressive and to dispel the notion that Muslims support extremism, Malaysia said yesterday.
Foreign ministers from the 57-country OIC will meet in late June in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, to endorse the restructuring plan, Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said.
“We want to make sure that the fate of the Muslims as nation states and the community can be uplifted,” Syed Hamid told a news conference after returning from an OIC meeting in Islamabad, where the restructuring plan was set in motion.
Malaysia, a progressive, wealthy nation that has often been held up as a model for other Muslim countries, is the current chair of the Jeddah-based OIC.
Syed Hamid said the OIC charter will be overhauled to specifically encourage Muslim countries to practice “enlightened moderation” and progressive democratic governance.
The OIC was started 35 years ago as a means of expressing the collective Muslim voice of support for the occupied and uprooted Palestinian people. Since then, the issues facing the Muslim world have magnified manifold, Syed Hamid said.
The OIC charter will also be expanded to include the problems of Muslim minorities and other current issues facing them such as poverty, he said. “There should be core changes, big changes to the OIC. We must improve our image. We must project Muslim states to be seen as moderates to operate in the international context and be mainstream,” he said.
Officials also want to set up a bigger, more professional OIC secretariat to handle tasks such as liaising with the media and promoting inter-religious dialogue, Syed Hamid said.
He said several new names for the OIC have been proposed such as the Organization of Muslim Countries and the Organization of Islamic States but no final decision has been made. Once the restructuring plan is endorsed by the foreign ministers, it will be sent to an OIC summit in Makkah in late 2005 for final approval.
