Out of Senegal: A Muslim voice speaking across the continents

DAKAR - Hamid Algabid slipped barefoot across his hotel suite in a billowing white robe and allowed that while he might speak for the world's 1 billion Muslims, the post of secretary-general of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) made him neither a caliph nor a sultan.

Indeed, Mr Algabid's officials have a hard time reminding people of the OIC existence, let alone its role as the only group linking all the countries of the Muslim world. It is not in Whitaker's Almanac or even The Statesman's Year-book.

'Just think of the OIC like this,' joked a Tunisian functionary at the latest mini-summit of its governing body in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. 'Oh, I See.'

Not many people see much in the 21-year-old OIC, for all the charm of the articulate Secretary-General, a Paris-educated lawyer and former prime minister of the West African state of Niger.

To outsiders, the group may seem a toothless talking shop, a mini-UN, recycling the wordy condemnations of its 51 members - mainly used to persuade domestic audiences that 'something has been done'. Divisive issues in the Islamic world are usually not addressed. The Western confrontation with Iraq, for instance, had no place in a 34-point declaration from Dakar.

Islamic radicals also accuse the OIC of acting as a cover for not very Islamic acts. The group has legitimised Saudi Arabia's limitating the number of pilgrims to Mecca and, to help peace talks with Israel, it dropped the advocation of jihad (holy war) for the liberation of Palestine.

But the world may be hearing more of the OIC as the only voice for Muslims on three continents, who are increasingly angered by what they see as unfair and brutal attack by Christians, Jews and Hindus.

If peace talks over the former Yugoslavia break down or Serbian 'ethnic cleansing' reaches Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, a new Islamic summit is almost certain to bring pressure for strong UN intervention. The large Islamic bloc is working with greater, more effective, unity than ever at the UN, its only course of action in the absence of any executive organ of its own.

Also pulling more weight on the Islamic scene are Turks and their new Turkic friends from former Soviet Central Asia, proponents of a pragmatic Islam. 'People have missed a fundamental change in the Islamic world since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf war,' said a Turkish columnist, Cengiz Candar. 'Arab states and the Arab League have divided and declined. The non-Arabs now predominate.'

That may be the trend, but Saudi Arabia is still the paymaster and the OIC's main base, with 200 staff is in the Saudi city of Jeddah. When it comes to venues for meetings, it takes pockets as deep as a Saudi king's to build palaces like Dakar's pounds 100m Meridien Hotel and labyrinthine King Fahd Centre.

'The Saudis have got the OIC down to a fine art now. When they want a statement, they push a button and out it comes,' said one insider, adding that control was kept tight by keeping the OIC's budget down to an annual pounds 5m, one-sixth of that of groups like the Arab League or the Organization of African Unity.

The OIC may now act as a unique group of Islamic governments, but Islam itself plays little role in conference debates. They are more to do with horse-trading between blocs of Arabs, Africans, South East Asians and now the Turks. In Dakar, apart from opening and closing chants from the Koran by a Senegalese boy, Muslim morals came up only when Pakistan wanted to condemn massacres in India with reference only to Muslims. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, insisted that the deaths of all the victims be deplored.

The OIC was born in 1971 of the Muslim sense of injury after the burning of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, and 'the blessed Palestinian intifada' is still high on the agenda.

An edge came into the voice of the Saudi State Minister, Mohamed Ibrahim Masoud, as he condemned Israel's derailing of Middle East peace talks by expelling more than 400 Palestinians last month. 'We are trying to negotiate peace,' he said in an interview. 'Why the hell do they take such an action?'

Islamic radicalism only benefited from such confrontation, an Arab delegate warned. Leaving unanswered the pleas of mostly moderate Muslim states of the OIC could only feed a growing fundamentalist storm, he said.

The West's insensitivity already risks a rift with the Islamic world and an intensification of religious misunderstanding, that is so far unwarranted, if the meeting in Senegal was anything to go by. The hotel bar was left open, reflecting a tolerance and diversity of Muslim cultures of the OIC, in which Islamic radicals like expansionist Iran or the more inward-looking Saudi Arabia are still in a small voting minority.

'I pray five times a day. I am a modern Muslim,' said a Senegalese journalist. 'But I drink beer in the bar of Le Meridien, built with the money of King Fahd.'