DAKAR, 15 March 2008 — Leaders at a summit of Islamic states agreed yesterday to work with the West to fight religious bigotry and a US envoy pledged support for a dialogue to avoid “a clash of ignorance.”
Delegates at the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Dakar, Senegal, said a final communiqué would focus on the threat of “Islamophobia” facing the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.
But it would recommend cooperation and dialogue with the non-Muslim world to defuse a potential clash of civilizations stoked by Western fears over terrorism and Muslims’ anger at perceived insults against their faith.
“The Islamic Ummah (community) is moving in a moderate direction and almost on a progressive path, we’re all moving in the same path,” said Sada Cumber, who was appointed by President George W. Bush last month to be the US envoy to the OIC.
Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called for a jihad of peace to spark an “Islamic Renaissance.” He favored greater democracy and greater efforts to improve the plight of Muslims worldwide.
“The possibility of an Islamic Renaissance lies before us,” Yudhoyono told the summit, but first, he added: “We need to get our act together as an organization of Muslim nations. When the Islamic Renaissance comes it will be the natural fruit of a peaceful and constructive jihad.”
Yudhoyono said the OIC was “unique” because it covers three continents and “Muslim countries supply 70 percent of the world’s energy requirements and 40 percent of its raw material exports.” But he said the Muslim world must improve its image. “Protracted conflicts in Muslim societies bring shame to the Ummah and tarnish the good name of Islam.”
In many non-Muslim circles “Islam has unjustly been associated with violence,” said Yudhoyono. “We must disabuse the world of this terrible misconception,” he said, calling for greater efforts against ‘Islamaphobia’ in the West but also greater democracy in Muslim nations. “We must strive for good governance and attend to our democratic deficit.”
Indonesia, with more than 230 million people, is the world’s most populous Muslim nation and its third biggest democracy. “History tells us that Muslims in the past contributed immensely to the march of civilization through groundbreaking achievements in the sciences, as well as in arts.” But Yudhoyono added that Islam was now “on the defensive.”
He called for efforts to “improve the plight of the Muslim peoples and empower them. This means extensive economic cooperation among ourselves. This entails pooling of resources and plugging of the development gaps all over the Muslim world.”
‘Salaam-o-Alaikum’
US envoy Cumber said he had held bilateral talks with a number of Muslim leaders at the summit, though not with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“If I bump into our Iranian friends, they are our brothers and sisters in Islam, and I will say ‘Salaam-o-Alaikum’ (peace be with you),” he said.
