The initial intent was to caption this article as “Ummah in Disarray” but then dawned the realisation that there is no Ummah as such, so how can such a title can be justified.

We have a Muslim population of over one billion; some liberal guesstimates put the number at 1.5 billion. This population is spread over 57 countries of the world, mapping a geographic area from the shores of the Atlantic to the farthest islands of Indonesia. There is no unity between these 57 motley crowd of States, except common allegiance to the faith of Islam.

The subscription to the faith is devoid of its essential teaching of universal brotherhood. This binding had the potential to be a formidable union, but narrow minded, country (false nationalism) perspective has dismantled the foundations of such thought and possibility. This happened almost a century ago with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The colonial powers then set up to divide the Ummah into countries and nations, by redrawing maps and creating new lines of demarcation. The binding factor was systematically defused and undone, permanently. The Muslim nation hasn’t recovered nor has it made any serious attempt to regain — the glory of Ummah, that was laid to tatters in Constantinople/Istanbul, inviting an epitaph of demeaning import, ‘sick man of Europe’.

In 1967, when Israel belligerently attacked and occupied Jerusalem — there were only riots. Nothing more. Led by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, an organisation was formed to bring all the Muslim countries under a single banner or a single platform. This entity was christened as “Organisation of Islamic Conference” (OIC). This organisation has over time become the hand-maiden that obeys the dictates of countries, considered powerful, purely due to the economic plenty that they have amassed.

In the third year of my teen years I witnessed history, when Pakistan hosted an Islamic........

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