Who the hell is the OIC?

I'm feeling too fuzzy headed with some virus to write any analysis, but I was watching daytime TV and saw that the secretary of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation giving the talk to the National Press Club this week, and I wondered who the hell that was. A little wiki/googling shows my ignorance to be a little embarassing. It's the largest club of nation states outside of the UN, and has 56 member states, almost all of them majority Muslim countries.

The secretary came over all Kofi Anan, and was addressing issues of overthrow of Arab dictators (he calls it the Arab Autumn for Dictators), and Islamophobia in the West. I went to look for some third parties' points of view on the OIC, and found out about their alternative (what they call complementary) to the UN's charter of human rights called the Cairo declaration here (on what you might call a "liberal" American blog). Having read that I recalled some of the issues raised about Blasphemy laws by the OIC in current affairs over the last few years... in particular their role in trying to ammend the UN charter to defend religions as whole, rather than believers, from negative speech... but hadn't noted the role of the OIC. In short, the parallels with the UN are quite obvious - the heads of both organisations representing the more progressive views of the member states, while being hamstrung by the real power players in their membership, and their more Realpolitik concerns.

Side note: I always balk at the term Islamophobia, because it's such a catch all... so I'm going to coin a new term for my main phobia related to Islam: Shariaphobia - the fear of being subjected to Sharia law.

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