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Where is the OIC? ‘Collective voice of the Muslim world’ can’t disappear after a statement

The organisation was not founded merely to issue statements after the damage is done. Its Charter rests on sovereign equality, territorial integrity, peaceful settlement of disputes.

The most telling absence in the current war is not military. It is institutional. As conflict among Iran, Israel and the United States spreads across the Gulf, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has remained curiously peripheral. That should be more troubling than it sounds. The OIC is not a minor forum. It represents 57 member states and describes itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world.” In a crisis that now threatens Gulf security, energy flows, maritime trade and inflation far beyond the region, that claim ought to carry visible political consequence.

The organisation was not founded merely to issue statements after the damage is done. Its Charter rests on sovereign equality, territorial integrity, peaceful settlement of disputes, and the use of negotiation, good offices and mediation when peace is endangered. In simple terms, the OIC exists so that turmoil affecting Muslim states need not be left to scattered national responses and delayed expressions of concern. The point of such a body is to provide a recognised political framework for restraint.

That is not just theory. At key moments in its history, the OIC has been more than a platform for speeches. In the southern Philippines conflict, it backed negotiations around the 1976 Tripoli Agreement and remained engaged through its Quadripartite Committee. The precedent matters not because history repeats itself neatly, but because it shows that the organisation has, when it chose to, acted as a diplomatic actor rather than a recorder of........

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