THE tenth summit of the Organization of Islamic conference attended by 57 states in Malaysia has ended after hearing some disturbing home truths about the state of the Muslim world, the challenge it faces, and after taking some significant decisions.

The heads of states and governments of the Muslim countries have not been wanting in taking vital decisions about the future of the Muslim world in the past, but the decisions were seldom implemented despite the urgency for effective action. But now in the post-9/11 world where the US has been too assertive unilaterally, they have come to a critical crossroads. The future of the 1.5 billion Muslims will depend to a great extent on decisions they make and the actions they take.

President Musharraf, who has been very articulate about the sad state of the Muslim world and the remedies it needs, went there to tell some of the truths about the state of the Muslim world, and the steps needed to galvanize it into an effective force. He told a meeting of businessmen and officials a day before the summit opened that the GDP of the entire Ummah was about 1.6 trillion dollars while Japan’s GDP is roughly 4.5 trillion dollars. The highest GDP of a Muslim country is about 185 billion dollars while that of a tiny European country with no natural resources is above 200 billion dollars.

He said the OIC countries hardly received 15 billion dollars as foreign direct investment, while that China alone received was 50 billion dollars.

The fact is that although the OIC countries received so little foreign investment, a great real of investment from the Arab nations went to the western countries, particularly the US and Europe. However, some of the Arab capital is now coming to countries like Pakistan because of the US discriminatory policies towards the Arabs and the scrutiny of their monetary deposits in the West. This is a healthy development, which began in the banking sector of Pakistan.

Gen Musharraf said that only six OIC countries accounted for more than half the OIC income and that 22 out of the world’s 49 least developing countries are in the OIC. So we have extremes of wealth and excessive poverty in the Muslim countries despite the teachings of Islam against such disparity and injustice.

The Islamic Development Bank was set up over two decades ago to help poor Muslim countries. But it has helped the poor countries less in the area of development and more in the area of modest trade. Since trade between the Muslim countries is small, except in the area of oil which is often traded through western oil companies, the IDB assistance to the poor Muslim countries has been small. The IDB has been talking of enlarging its development aid but in actual practice the quantum of assistance has been small.

Gen Musharraf has hence proposed a new fund for offering development assistance, with each country mandatorily contributing a prescribed share of its GDP. Its funding will in effect be more like that of the IMF, but the purpose will be to provide real development assistance according to the needs of each country and focus more on areas like education, public health, infrastructure, etc.

The richer countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE can provide larger loans to the Fund in addition to their agreed share of the GDP as capital. Gen Musharraf’s suggestion to set up a commission of eminent persons to restructure and revitalize the OIC and make a force to reckon with has been accepted by the OIC. The panel of the commission has not been determined but the commission is to submit its report to the next OIC summit in Senegal by the end of next year.

The summit communique and various speeches made there stressed the importance of human development. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad drove home that point effectively. His call to meet the challenge of Jewish brain with Muslim brain instead of Muslim brawn or raw emotions also demands assiduous steps for human development.

That should not mean only opening of a number of schools, colleges and technical institutes without taking into consideration their quality. The schools would need proper teachers and equipment and should not be of the kind that are run with commercial motives. Governments alone in the Muslim countries cannot do all that. The private sector has to play its part in full and vigorously. The Jewish capital provides the model and the Muslim private sector has to play its part in developing the economy of the Muslim world.

In this regard President Musharraf has suggested a joint commission and a business commission consisting of top officials and businessman to speed up intra-OIC trade. The commission, he said, should be given nine months to complete its task. He also proposed a special public-private economic summit to be convened next year to consider the recommendations of the commission.

He said that after 9/11, a growing anger and a feeling of deprivation in Muslim societies were fuelling extremism and militancy which further diverted resources from economic development. That is a disturbing fact, particularly in the poor Muslim countries. Apart from the large part of their resources already spent on the military establishments which have been expanded, more is spent now on the police and the intelligence set-up and the special anti-terrorist establishments. All that reduces the money available for education and public health and hence human development suffers woefully .

Some of the Muslim countries have natural resources, particularly the oil states, and they have small population. They can certainly employ more workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh and other Muslim countries having surplus labour.

Malaysia is more of a vegetable oil state than a petroleum state and it needs more labour. It is doing well to hire 400,000 workers from Pakistan. Indonesia, for example, needs sugar now and Pakistan has a large surplus. So the export of sugar to Indonesia from Pakistan is under discussion. Iran needs rice and Pakistan has, as usual, a large exportable surplus. Even otherwise Iran’s policy has been to prefer imports from Muslim countries, particularly its neighbours.

At a time when the western countries are preferring western workers and are liberal with visas for them while restricting them for Muslim visitors, the Muslim countries needing more workers should be able to get them from other Muslim states.

When the richest countries in the world are preferring to establish free trade areas with their neighbours and even distant countries, the Muslim states should not hesitate to do that. They should begin with preferred trade areas and end with free trade areas. When the US is seeking free trade areas with Middle East states and North African countries, there is no reason why Muslim countries should hesitate to do the same with other Muslim countries in need of commercial assistance.

Earlier, following the visit of President Musharraf to the US and his meeting with President Bush at Camp David it was said that a free trade area would come in two years. But now we are told by a senior US trade official that it might take more than five years. And this is so despite the policy of the US to sign free trade area agreement with as many countries as possible.

Many Arab countries have serious political disputes with the US. The US in turn promotes disputes and conflicts between them. And the Muslim countries spend more of their money to buy arms from the US and at very high prices. If the US would not openly or legally sell the arms they would reach the Muslim countries through gun-runners or smugglers at very high prices. In the bargain the Muslims lose further.

That is how the Arabs have not really gained by pushing up oil prices steeply from time to time since 1973. On one side the West pays more for oil and on the other, the Arabs pay far higher price for the sophisticated arms they buy from the West. Israel is always there ready to queer the pitch and make the Arab states more uneasy and buy more arms from the West to insure its security. That is why Mahathir Mohammad asks the Muslims to use brain instead of brawn to win wars or get the better of the enemy diplomatically. The US is to spend 87 billion dollars more on the restructuring and rehabilitation of Iraq and Afghanistan. How much of that money will end up in the US through US contractors and managers of the Iraqi economy?

The technological superiority of the US is too helpful to it in every way, while dealing with technologically inferior countries. That was what the first Gulf war proved; the second war, of course, is not going according to the US military score book.

The face of the OIC may not change between now and the 11th summit. It may take at least five years for positive changes to be achieved. Anyway what we need is not only a better and more effective OIC but also a stronger Muslim world with its 1.5 billion people spread over the world particularly on three continents. The need of the hour is quality and efficacy and not proliferation of numbers.

THE world’s biggest Christian ‘sect’ — the billion strong Roman Catholics — was in a mood of celebration last week. Belying reports of his imminent demise, Pope John Paul II was fit enough to participate in a service commemorating his twenty-five years as pontiff.

Hundreds of thousands of Catholics gathered in St. Peter’s Square to watch the lavish ceremony and pray with him. John Paul used the occasion to perform another highly popular act: the beatification of Mother Theresa (a move that places her on way to sainthood).

Twenty-five years is as good a point as any to examine the record of a man who has dominated the Catholic Church for so long. Does the Pope deserve the many accolades that are being showered on him? Has he really been a force for good in the modern world?

Whatever else one might say about his papacy, John Paul cannot be criticized for keeping the Vatican isolated from the wider world. In his twenty-five years as head of the global Roman Catholic community, he has probably visited all the countries with significant Catholic populations. Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Far East — the Pope has been to them all. Even in old age, burdened by Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, the Pope remains active. John Paul’s travels have given the Vatican and the Roman Catholic church an unprecedented public profile and recognition, one that extends far beyond the Catholic community.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of his papacy many also remember the Polish-born Karol Wojtyla’s support for Lech Walesa and Solidarity. This popular movement ultimately brought about the collapse of communist rule in Poland. Other highlights in the career of the Pope are his public apology for the Catholic Church’s past condonement of anti-Semitism, and his attempts to prevent the American war against Iraq. These point to a ‘political’ Pope, well aware of the need for the Church to address contemporary issues.

One of John Paul’s heroines is Mother Theresa. The ‘secular’ world honoured her life of dedicated service in the slums of Calcutta, by awarding her the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. Beatification is the Vatican’s way of honouring her in death. It takes the Mother one step closer to becoming Saint Theresa. Many of those gathered in St Peter’s Square for Sunday’s ceremony had come especially from India, where her work and the institutions she set up continue to help the poorest of the poor.

This then was the public face the Vatican displayed to the world — an activist Pope celebrating a quarter-century on the Catholic throne, a highly popular nun being honoured for her work. But there is another private — and far less benign — face to John Paul II and the Church he heads.

For along side the public charisma, there is intolerance and rigidity. The Pope’s strong political stances are nothing compared to the strength of his ideological convictions, and his determination to enforce them. Along with his public compassion, there is unconcern about some forms of suffering, especially those relating to women. Accompanying beatification is the strong whiff of political manipulation.

Taking ideology first, Pope Paul is rigid about his adherence to the pro-life creed. Ignoring the pressing societal ills of poverty, maternal and infant mortality, malnutrition, illiteracy and AIDS that afflict so many countries, including Catholic ones, John Paul II has doggedly refused to permit the use of birth control or abortion. His rigidity, according to one commentator, has led to large numbers of people falling victim to AIDS, women dying needlessly in childbirth, and children starving in families ‘too large and poor to feed them’. Polly Toynbee goes on: “But it is reasonable to suppose these silent, unseen, uncounted deaths at his hand would match that of any self-respecting tyrant or dictator.”

Then there is the plague of paedophilia, recently exposed among Boston’s Catholic clergy. Child abuse by priests was bad enough, but the cover-up by their bishops and the Church hierarchy was infinitely worse. John Paul II laid the foundations for that cover-up with his centralized control of the Roman Catholic church and his failure to speak out on the issue. What is certain is that Boston is not an isolated case.

Why does no one expose these failings? Because under his leadership the Vatican has become the religious equivalent of an autocracy. Everything is controlled from Rome. The Papal will is hammered home through sermons, papers and edicts. Loyalty is rewarded with promotion, dissent rooted out through excommunication. Twenty-five years of this have silenced all opposition within the Catholic Church.

Anyone expecting that his death will bring a breath of freedom is in for disappointment. Among his acts has been the appointment of 31 new cardinals (taking the total number he has created to over 200), all sharing his conservative views. They join the college of cardinals that will elect his successor. John Paul has thus ensured that even after his departure from the scene, his beliefs will continue to determine Vatican policy.

Pope John Paul II has a penchant for breaking the mould. As well as being the most-travelled Pope in recent times, he is also the one who has made the most saints. Mother Theresa’s claim to sainthood is based not on her service for Calcutta’s helpless and abandoned, but on a miracle that allegedly took place after her death.

A poor Indian woman is asserting that her cancer was cured after she saw a picture of the Mother and felt suffused by her light. Her doctor says she never had cancer — only a cyst that dissolved, thanks to his medication — but the Vatican is putting its faith in the woman. The beatification of Mother Theresa on such grounds also points to a ‘politician’ Pope — one ready to win popular support by handing out saintly status.

There are many who admire the Pope’s determination to go on with his duties despite his frailty. But others, listening to him slur his words to the point where he is barely comprehensible, and watching him slump in his motorized throne, wonder why he has not abdicated. Someone with the best interests of the Catholic Church at heart would make way for a younger, fitter pontiff.

Look beyond the public celebrations, then, and there is much that is disturbing in John Paul’s Roman Catholic Church. Charisma, papal visits, beatification and sainthoods can take the Church so far. Religion in the twenty-first century will have meaning and relevance only if it too lives in this century and addresses this century’s issues. The Vatican has to move away from its agenda of regression and rigidity. It has to start addressing the real issues that affect its followers in their daily lives: poverty, discrimination, disease and distress. Only then can it hope to win the battle for hearts and minds.

THIRTY-THREE years after China launched its first satellite, a high-tech boom-box called “Mao 1” that broadcast a tinny version of ‘The East Is Red’ to an underwhelmed world, it has finally put a man in space.

But the pace is picking up: Beijing is planning to put Chinese yuhangyuan (spacemen) on the moon in just another seven years. If it stays on course, it will soon overtake Russia to become the second biggest player in space — and around 2040, according to a study released earlier this month by investment bankers Goldman Sachs, it will overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy.

Even then China won’t be the richest country in per capita terms, but it certainly won’t be poor any more: in terms of GDP per head, Chinese citizens will be at about the same level as the richer European countries are now by 2050, the cut-off date of the Goldman Sachs’ study. Other big developing countries like India and Brazil will only have reached the same income level as present-day Portugal — but that’s not so terrible either, and there will be an awful lot of Indians and Brazilians by then. The Chinese launch is telling us that the world is changing in a fundamental way.

Five centuries ago, on the eve of Europe’s rise to world empire, average incomes in China and India were about the same as average incomes in Western Europe — and average incomes in the Muslim Middle East were probably higher. Then the Europeans burst out of their continent and overran the planet. They and their overseas descendants ended up far richer than everybody else, partly because of their empires and partly because they took the scientific and industrial lead. The new status quo has been around for so long that it has come to seem natural, but it is ending now.

The Goldman Sachs’ paper is a sophisticated exercise in prediction that takes into account factors like population growth and changing age structures, capital accumulation and likely productivity growth, rather than just doing straight-line projections of current trends. It focuses on what it calls the ‘Brics’: four lower-middle-income countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — that have big populations and already have significant industrial and technological skills and resources. And it tells us where it thinks we will all be in 2050.

The world’s biggest economy will be China’s, of course, with the United States in second place (although America may still be China’s equal in technological innovation). India is not too far behind in size — and then, a long way after the Big Three, come Japan, Brazil and Russia. Bringing up the rear, so far as the major players are concerned, are Britain, Germany, France and Italy. With the exception of the US and Brazil, ‘New World’ countries that were not home to modern mass civilisations five hundred years ago, it is a return to the same list, in almost exactly the same order, that you would have drawn up in the year 1500.

That makes a kind of sense. In a globalized society and economy where the West no longer enjoys absolute political control, you would expect the distribution of global power to return gradually to what it used to be, with the big populations on the large land masses having greater wealth and power than small Western European countries. But it will take a lot of getting used to, especially for the western countries that have had their own way for so long.

Some of these predictions may not come true, of course, or at least they may not happen within the chosen time-frame. China has had two disastrous political adventures in the past forty years, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, each of which cost it at least a decade of growth. What if it has another?

Brazil has been the promised land of the future for at least a hundred years now, but its present never lives up to the promise. India has an abnormally high level of corruption and a ramshackle education system (though it also has the advantage of being the only ‘Bric’ where large numbers of people speak English, the global lingua franca). Even Russia might go off the rails, though it seems least likely to. But these are essentially details: most of the Goldman Sachs’ predictions will come to pass, even if some do not, and the world will still be a changed place.

What conclusions should we draw from all this, apart from the obvious one that the first human beings on Mars will probably be Chinese? One is that the real environmental crisis is coming at us even faster than the pessimists feared: four or five billion people in the ‘Brics’ and other Asian and Latin American countries which will be consuming at current European levels by 2050 will put huge additional stress on the environment. The time for emergency measures is probably now — not that there is any real hope of such a thing.

The second is that we desperately need to revive and refine the kind of multilateral global governance for which the existing United Nations system is a sketchy first draft. The prospect of a world that is highly competitive economically and under acute environmental pressure — and where there are five or six nuclear-armed major powers, no longer contained within the old bipolar system of the cold war — absolutely requires an inclusive international system that works. Rather like the one currently being destroyed in fact.

And the third conclusion? Westerners had better start working on their manners.

THERE’S like a war to bring out the inner George Orwell in a government. In ways little and small, Uncle Sam has been morphing into Big Brother — spinning the news, even, apparently, manufacturing news.

Last week, the Gannett News Service reported that 11 different US newspapers had unwittingly printed identical five-paragraph letters-to-the-editor from soldiers in Iraq. The letters were full of upbeat puff — “the quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored” — the kind that some PR blitzer might dream up.

None of the soldiers contacted by Gannett for comment said that they had written the letter; it had been handed to them for signature, they said, by Army superiors. Indeed, one soldier said he hadn’t even seen the letter before it appeared in his hometown paper.

Somewhere, Orwell’s ghost is smiling grimly. In his novel “1984,” the British writer imagined a Ministry of Truth that would be responsible for manufacturing news of victories and triumphs. Now, it’s no longer fiction; it’s Americans’ tax dollars at work.

Another Orwellian concept was “doublethink,” defined as the ability “to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.” The Bush administration is doublethinking, doubletime, in its effort to justify the Iraq war — and so the inconvenient truth is shipped off to convenient oblivion.

A week ago, for example, President Bush declared, “America must not forget the lessons of September 11th ... We must fight this war until the work is done.” Bush seems to be saying that we invaded Iraq because Iraq was involved in 9/11.

But, of course, that’s not true, as Bush himself admitted in an off-message moment. The truth is that 9/11 gave the neoconservatives who influence Bush the excuse they needed for “regime change,” which they had advocated long before 9/11. Now, after the fact, Bush is asking Americans to make the doublethink leap of faith: the United States was attacked by Al-Qaeda, so we had to attack Saddam Hussein. Got that?

As part of the same “truth” offensive, Vice President Dick Cheney recalled the efforts during the 1990s to stymie Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, such as U.N. inspections and targeted airstrikes.

“All of these measures failed,” Cheney said.

No, actually, all those measures succeeded, which is why we haven’t found anything resembling a weapon of mass destruction in Iraq.

Others, too, are part of this Orwellian tactic, although they sometimes bobble their assignment. Rep. Kay Granger had just returned home from a government-sponsored tour of Iraq when she appeared on Fox News to comment on Sunday’s car bombing in Baghdad. Proving she’s a good listener, she insisted that the suicide attack was actually good news. How’s that? Speaking of the American nation-building effort, she explained: “As it’s working, there are more incidents like this, from people who don’t want it to work.” By that inverted logic, of course, it would be bad news if there were fewer bombings.

But then, undercutting Granger’s case, the interviewer noted that Granger and her fellow visitors had not actually stayed overnight in Iraq while they were visiting the country; each night, they were flown back to Kuwait, some 400 miles south of Baghdad. One might think for a moment about the implications of such a long-distance commute. If all the American security in Iraq can’t make Iraq secure for VIPs, then maybe Iraq isn’t so secure.

Bush insists that America is following a “clear strategy” in Iraq, but it’s about as clear as a kaleidoscope, as explanations and rationalizations rotate in an endless jumble.

And yet despite the best efforts of America’s would-be Ministry of Truthsters to bedazzle and bamboozle the American people, the plain light of reality seems to be shining through. According to a Gallup Poll released last Monday, a majority of Americans, for the first time, disapprove of the way Bush is handling Iraq.

—Dawn/LA-WP Service

READING through the speeches made by the Muslim leaders at the summit and at associated meetings in Putrajaya the sense of an urgent need for reform and for unity, and for breaking out of the mould of torpor and inertia in the Islamic world and the consequent backwardness came through clearly.

Speech after speech pointed to the shortcomings in education, in economic development, in keeping pace with the rapid technological and other changes in the world, in instituting needed political reform, in correcting the misperceptions about Islam and in forging greater unity among the Islamic nations.

President Musharraf speaking at the special leaders forum pointed out that the Ummah could boast of a combined GNP of $1400 billion while Japan alone had a GNP of $4500 billion; the Ummah had only 500 universities and produced 1000 PhDs a year while Japan had more than 9000 universities and tiny England produced 2000 PhDs annually.

Perhaps most forthright in pointing out the shortcomings of the Muslims and the urgent need for change was the chairman of the conference Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad. It was a clarion call for acknowledging the shortcomings of the present-day Muslims, their division into sects, their refusal to “think” before acting and for recognizing that if they did unite, if they did think, if they did utilize, wisely, the resources with which they had been blessed they could overcome their detractors and enemies.

His speech became the focus of attention in the western world but ironically this attention was devoted not to the stern homily he delivered to his Muslim peers but to his reference to the astute manner in which the Jews had managed to acquire the influence to “rule the world by proxy”. A few relevant quotes would however establish that Mahathir’s references to the Jews — couched perhaps in the language that could have been improved upon — were only incidental to the principal thrust which was to point out how far the Muslims had allowed themselves to stray from the path laid down in the Holy Quran and from the example of the Holy Prophet (pbuh).

He observed that “We ignore entirely and we continue to ignore the Islamic injunction to unite and to be brothers to each other, we the governments of the Islamic countries and the Ummah” and prefaced this with the assertion that “From being a single Ummah we have allowed ourselves to be divided into numerous sects, mazhabs and tariqats, each more concerned with claiming to be the true Islam than our oneness as the Islamic Ummah”.

Tracing the history of Islam Mahathir pointed out that the early Muslims acting upon the injunction to acquire knowledge produced great mathematicians and scientists building upon the knowledge of earlier civilizations. They built a great civilization but halfway through “came new interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by the Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology. The study of science, medicine etc. was discouraged. Intellectually the Muslims began to regress”.

He dismissed those who would have us believe “that poverty is Islamic; sufferings and being oppressed are Islamic. This world is not for us. Ours are the joys of heaven in the after-life. All that we have to do is to perform certain rituals, wear certain garments and put up a certain appearance. Our weakness, our backwardness and our inability to help our brothers and sisters who are being oppressed are part of the will of Allah, the sufferings that we must endure before enjoying heaven in the hereafter” pointing out that but this he said was not what the early Muslims, as oppressed as we are today, did. They had followed the injunction to seek Allah’s help to change their fate only when they were prepared to make a determined effort of their own.

He pointed out that “We are now 1.3 billion strong. We have the biggest oil reserve in the world. We have great wealth. We are not as ignorant as the Jahilliah who embraced Islam. We are familiar with the workings of the world’s economy and finances. We control 57 out of the 180 countries in the world. Our votes can make or break international organizations.

“Yet we seem more helpless than the small number of Jahilliah converts who accepted the Prophet as their leader. .... Whether we like it or not we have to change, not by changing our religion but by applying its teachings in the context of a world that is radically different from that of the first century of the Hijrah. Islam is not wrong but the interpretations by our scholars, who are not prophets even though they may be very learned, can be wrong”.

What he said, perhaps with greater pungency and directness, was what every moderate educated Muslim believes but is not able to put into effect because of, to borrow a phrase from President Khatami’s speech, “religious obscurantism”. As regards his reference to the Jews what he said was, “The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. We may not be able to do that. We may not be able to unite all the 1.3 billion Muslims. We may not be able to get all the Muslim governments to act in concert. But even if we can get a third of the Ummah and a third of the Muslim states to act together, we can already do something.”

Perhaps this is an exaggerated view of the influence the Jews wield, perhaps it is an overstatement of the extent to which the Jews are united, perhaps the thought could have been more felicitously expressed but there is no doubt that he was asking the Muslims to emulate the success of the Jews — surely a compliment rather than a denigration.

But what was noteworthy was that there was nothing in his speech, beyond the call for unity, on the concrete steps that needed to be taken to correct this situation or to address the problems with which the Muslim world is currently faced.

And this was the problem also with the huge mass of documents that emerged from the summit. The 106-paragraph joint communique, the declarations on Kashmir, on the occupied territories in Palestine and on the Israeli aggression against Syria and Lebanon contained little that was new or reflective of concrete measures that had been agreed upon. They seemed as in the past to include every member state’s own stance on regional problems or issues. In many ways the formulations denied the need to re-examine old positions in the light of the changes that had come about and the importance of which had been recognized in the speeches.

A telling commentary on how member states felt about the OIC was provided by the inclusion in the communique of two paragraphs that noted the non-payment of contributions by some of the member countries and offered them a special deal of a 50 per cent exemption from payment of arrears if they paid their regular contributions in the coming two years.

In some measure the action plan contained in the Putrajaya declaration tried to depart from the reiteration of old positions and to suggest some concrete measures that could be taken. These included:

* Using the Islamic fiqh academy, duly restructured to enhance a dialogue between Muslim scholars

* Using the troika of the OIC summit and the friends of the chair to initiate a review of the positions of OIC members on various international issues and to see how greater unity and cohesion could be brought about between the OIC members

* Using the troika of the OIC summit and the friends of the chair for a dialogue with other cultures and civilizations with a view to bringing about “enlightened moderation” and greater understanding of Islam as a religion of peace and understanding

* Other measures for promoting greater economic collaboration, cooperation in information and communication technology or even devising alternative payment arrangements for trade between the Islamic countries or on the restructuring of the OIC secretariat were, by and large a rehash of proposals that have been made earlier and have remained largely unimplemented.

It is difficult to think that the planned actions, which are of course commendable and would be helpful if they are carried out, reflect an adequate response to the difficulties of the Muslim world. No other community has been as adversely affected by the consequences of 9/11 as the Muslims. No other community should, therefore, have felt a greater need to unite in implementing the far reaching political, economic and social reforms needed to rectify their internal flaws. Unity in this regard would have served to mitigate if not eliminate the domestic opposition in each individual country.

No other community should have felt a greater need to present to the rest of the world a common stance on how the problems facing mankind needed to be tackled. A united front would have made possible greater progress, in tandem with globalizing the battle against all forms of terrorism, on securing a negation or modification of the dangerous doctrine of “pre-emption”. It would have advanced the prospect for an agreement on making the Middle East a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in tandem with measures to ensure nuclear non-proliferation in the region.

But that was not to be. It seems unlikely that even the group of eminent experts that is being formed as a result of Musharraf’s initiative will be able to come up with proposals that can overcome the present divisions within the Muslim world and which have stymied the brave efforts at Putrajaya to foster unity. Sadly one must conclude that the cynical French saying “Plus ca change, plus ca le meme chose” (the more things change the more they remain the same), continues to apply to the Muslim World.

(Concluded)