NUSA DUA, (Indonesia) May 13: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Saturday called for ensuring greater unity within the Muslim world by sharing resources and collectively responding to global challenges.

“We must recognise that it will be only through sharing our best practices and resources, and collectively responding to global challenges that we can help each other to help ourselves.

“We must build interdependencies and complementarities to create a win-win for all. No matter how wealthy and powerful be any nation amongst us, individually it will always be at a disadvantage. Our strength lies in unity and collective action,” he said while addressing the 5th D-8 summit.

The prime minister analysed the challenges that prevented the Ummah from achieving its true potential and shared his vision with D-8 leaders to overcome those challenges to attain peace, progress and prosperity of their people.

He described the negative image about Islam and Muslims as one of the challenges while regretting that actions of a few extremist elements had been wrongly used to tarnish the entire community.

He urged the Muslim countries to work collectively to change this misperceived image of Islam in the rest of the world.

“We need to project Islam in its true perspective as a religion of peace, harmony and tolerance and emphasise that the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world are peace-loving, hardworking and law-abiding people.”

Mr Aziz asked the Muslim world to provide their people with better governance, economic prosperity and social justice, saying it was essential to ensure progress.

He called for reviving the spirit of learning that had laid the foundations for the glorious Islamic civilisation and said: “The D-8 should set an example for promoting greater trade and investment opportunities within the Muslim world.”

Mr Aziz urged the Muslim countries to restructure their economies to benefit from international capital flows and Foreign Direct Investment.

He said: “Cooperation in other areas such as tourism, especially eco-tourism, cultural and student exchanges and people-to-people contacts should also be increased between our countries and the Islamic world as a whole. This will require a more liberal visa regime amongst ourselves which is also necessary to facilitate trade and commerce between us.

“The Developing-Eight provides the institutional framework for achieving our shared vision, which I have presented before you. I am glad that we have reached agreement to strengthen the secretariat by upgrading the post of executive director to the secretary-general level. In my view it will be imperative to further strengthen this institution in order to achieve our common objectives”.

The premier said he was happy to announce that Pakistan had now ratified the visa facilitation agreement for businessmen. He hoped that other countries would also ratify that agreement soon.

He sought investment from energy-rich Muslim countries to the capital-deficient Muslim nations, saying there should be a greater emphasis on investment and transfer of capital among Muslim countries.—Online/APP