A proto-Caliphate: the O.I.C.

Introduction:

Slowly over the decades since its inception in 1969, the Organization of Islamic Conference (recently renamed "Organization of Islamic Cooperation" perhaps with an eye to make it sound friendlier) (O.I.C.) representing all Muslim nations of the world (52 out of its 57 member nations being Muslim-majority, with the 57th entity being the viciously fictitious “Palestine”), has been growing the anticipatory structures of a virtual Caliphate.

This process serves either as a stepping-stone to the revival of an authentic Caliphate in the near future, or as a kind of functional proto-Caliphate in the practical and indefinite absence of an actual Caliphate, that would achieve many of the goals that the actual Caliphate would make possible. Or, it could be both: These two possibilities need not be mutually exclusive in the Muslim mind, just as a peace treaty and overarching jihad are not mutually exclusive in the Muslim mind, since the former is a temporary expedient due to the resistance of reality (i.e., a temporarily superior enemy) while the latter is the ultimate, ongoing exigency of a higher reality (the eschatological desideratum encoded in the blueprint of Islam to conquer the world) beyond the limitations presented by the enemies of Islam.

To quote the unremarkably mainstream scholar of the history of Islam, Bernard Lewis (my comments in square brackets):

...the political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy...[I]t was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law. In the great days of classical Islam [which, we remind the reader, ended only with the dissolution of the Caliphate by the West in 1923] this duty was only owed to the lawfully appointed caliph, as God's vicegerent on earth and head of the theocratic community, and then only for as long as he upheld the [Islamic] law...

Background:

The Caliphate is the traditional Islamic institution of supreme fusion of church and state, a kind of super-Caesaropapism. In the West (and more pointedly, in the eastern West, Byzantium), what has been called Caesaropapism functioned more as the ongoing concrete tension unfolding from Matthew 22:21—later resolved, for the most part, in the modern era by the dissolution of theocratic structures. In Islam, it has always been the natural extrapolation into ongoing historical-political existence from the vicarial regency of God on Earth through the Islamic demigod and superman, Mohammed.

After Mohammed died, the Caliphate was the mechanism by which individual successors, the Caliphs, would carry on Mohammed’s unique role as the sacred-imperial crux of Islam and of Islam’s function as the eschatological engine of ending history through military expansionism that would serve to usher in the apocalyptic transfiguration by God of Creation into eternal Paradise for Muslims and eternal Hell for non-Muslims. Of course, needless to say, history and human nature turned out to be recalcitrant to the eschatological efficiency and urgency of Muslim armies, and hence the Caliphate became, in practical terms, a perpetual motion machine perpetuating oppression and bloody history, rather than ending it.

Since Mohammed had no sons to whom lineage could be transmitted, the role was passed on to individuals who were closest to him in terms of religious, political and military vision—the so-called “Rightly-Guided Caliphs”. This does not mean, of course, that this institution enjoyed a trouble-free existence throughout Islamic history; indeed, it was plagued with problems from the beginning, when disputes over Mohammed’s successorship triggered the beginnings of the Sunni-Shiite schism, and those problems continued through the centuries, with various constellations of internecine tensions and conflicts characterizing the nature of Islamic sociopolitical existence as a whole.

Thus leadership of the Islamic Umma shifted from locus to locus over the centuries, finally located in the Turkish orbit for the last approximately half millennium up to the 20th century. Even under the Ottoman aegis, there were centrifugal forces within Islam, particularly with resentment brewing in and around Arabia, finally erupting in outright rebellion at the turn of the 20th century, further facilitated by Western intervention coinciding with the First World War. It was in the aftermath of that cataclysmic Western event, in fact, when the unprecedented shock to the Muslim mind and world devolved: the dismantling of the Caliphate altogether in 1924.

After being the bedrock of Islamic theopolitics for over 1,100 years, the Caliphate was shut down largely because of the overwhelming geopolitical superiority of the West, and considerably galvanized by the pro-Turkish, anti-Islamic activism of Kemal Ataturk who took supreme advantage of the situation of the carving up of the Ottoman Turkey. It is noteworthy too that Ataturk had been profoundly influenced by his education in Western philosophy in Switzerland and learned to supplant the Islam in his veins with a fusion of Enlightenment ideas and a mythologization of more or less non-Islamic Turkish jingoism.

Conclusion:

The development of a proto-Caliphate as embodied in the Organization of Islamic Conference (O.I.C.) is—in keeping with my previous thesis of the coordination of stealth jihad and violent jihad—a movement parallel to the goal of various Islamic terrorist groups around the world to revive the Caliphate.

This coordination enacts, on a macro-global level, the “good cop”-“bad cop” synergy between the violent jihadists and the stealth jihadists. The violent jihadists elicit a two-pronged fear in the politically correct multi-culturalists (PC MC) of the West, who are dominant and mainstream: the basic dread of terrorist attacks and the subtler, corollary fear of any Western reaction that might hint of being “racist” and “Islamophobic” with horrible premonitions of going down the “slippery slope” toward genocide—whose perpetrators, according to the paradigm of PC MC, can only be white Westerners, and whose victims can only be non-white non-Westerners: particularly those non-white non-Westerners most privileged in the 21st century: the Muslims.

Meanwhile, the stealth jihadists on the world stage, the O.I.C., exploit this double-pronged fear which manifests itself in extraordinary solicitousness on the part of the PC MC West and an anxious effort to redouble their protection of Muslims from anything that hints of discrimination and criticism. Thus the O.I.C.—with special influence on Europe and on the geopolitical policies of the U.N.—enjoys an advantageous climate, paradoxically augmented (rather than limited) by its violent jihadist brethren around the world, conducive to its grand plan to make Islamic Sharia protected not only from scrutiny, but from the censure and penalties it deserves and would suffer, were it the ideology of a white Western religion, polity or organization.

While Islamic theologians and jurists (one and the same in a religion that fuses church and state) claim that the traditional duty of offensive jihad to facilitate the divinely mandated supremacist expansionism of Islam can only be conducted with the return of the Caliphate—and thus the O.I.C. functioning as a proto-Caliphate would not be religiously sanctioned to resume that expansionism—it seems that, with the coordination between the O.I.C. and the violent jihadists, there may be room for hope that a Caliphate will be restored, by hook and by crook. And even if it will not, or cannot, be restored, there is always the fall-back position of Muslims in what they Orwellianly call “defensive” jihad, which does not require a Caliphate to legitimize. Either way, the continuing symbiosis between the O.I.C. and the violent jihadists—merely in pursuing their goal without being successful—will be in the decades ahead causing virtually as much mayhem, murder and misery as any revived Caliphate would anyway.

An afterword on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

A major aspect of this phenomenon revolves around the unanimous opposition of all the Muslim member states of the O.I.C. to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)—developed by the nascent United Nations in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and promulgated in 1949—and its substitution by the Islamic alternative: the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights promulgated in 1990, which in several of its clauses specifically enshrines and protects Sharia law.

Let us compare key parts of these two documents:

UDHR: Article 16 (1): Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.

Cairo Declaration: Article 5 (a): The family is the foundation of society, and marriage is the basis of making a family. Men and women have the right to marriage, and no restrictions stemming from race, colour or nationality shall prevent them from exercising this right.

UDHR: Article 18: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Cairo Declaration: Article 10: Islam is the religion of true unspoiled nature. It is prohibited to exercise any form of pressure on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to force him to change his religion to another religion or to atheism.

UDHR: Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Cairo declaration:

Article 19 (d): There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Shari’ah.

Article 22 (a): Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari'ah.

Article 24: All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari'ah.

Article 25: The Islamic Shari'ah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration.

A parallel document is the Arab Charter on Human Rights (2004), which employs some sophistical loopholes to endow universal human rights with one hand while leaving the way open to deny them with the other.

Example: Article 3 (1) professes a seemingly universal sentiment: “Each State party to the present Charter undertakes to ensure to all individuals subject to its jurisdiction the right to enjoy the rights and freedoms set forth herein, without distinction on grounds of race, colour, sex, language, religious belief, opinion, thought, national or social origin, wealth, birth or physical or mental disability.”

Article 2 (1), however, contains the loophole: “All peoples have the right of self-determination and. . . the right to freely choose their political system and to freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

If the “political system” and “cultural development” of a given “people” happens to include fundamental provisions that deny equality to certain classes of subjects on the basis of religion (i.e., on the basis of Islam through Sharia), and if that denial is based on the “right of self-determination” set forth in Article 2(1), then it would override any appearance in Article 3(1) of universal guarantees—particularly when we focus more closely on the weaselly language utilized therein: “. . .to ensure to all individuals subject to its jurisdiction the right to enjoy the rights and freedoms set forth herein. . .” Notice what is being said here: The Arab Charter is not meant to ensure to all individuals rights and freedoms in a universal sense, but specifically qualified by those rights and freedoms “set forth herein”—i.e., limited by the Arab Charter and its ulterior sharia.

And this inherent duplicity of the Arab Charter is reflected in their essentially self-contradictory preamble, where a simultaneous regard for the UDHR and for the Cairo Declaration is avowed.

The logic of the Arab Charter represents in microcosm the overarching conceit of the Islam apologists and their PC MC enablers: Namely, that Muslims deserve the right to practice their religion freely, even if that free practice has the concrete effects of abusing various rights of non-Muslims as guaranteed in the UDHR.

Increasingly, we are seeing that the main principle of PC MC—namely, that all non-white ethnic cultures must be respected and therefore allowed complete freedom to express themselves—has been transmogrified by the elevation of Muslims to the Most Privileged Ethnic Minority of the World. In this new form, the principle trumps all other PC MC values—even that value that one would think would be sacrosanct in PC MC: namely, the protection of the rights of those non-whites who, because they are non-Muslim, are oppressed in one way or another by Muslims.

This agenda of strengthening Sharia amongst the Muslim nations, and the corollary agenda of increasingly crystallizing the Muslim world as a distinct geopolitical entity apart from other nations of the world, was reaffirmed by the highest policy-making organ of the O.I.C., the Islamic Summit, when in 2005 and 2007 that body called for establishing an independent permanent body to promote “human rights” (i.e., Sharia law) in its member polities as well as the preparation of an “Islamic Charter on Human Rights” in accordance with the provisions of the Cairo Declaration.

Further Reading:

Fjordman's essay at Jihad Watch is a good overview of one major agenda of the O.I.C. in recent years—namely the subversion of international law through the increasing insinuation of the politico-legal concept of blasphemy, and its punishment, in Islam; and closely corrolary to this, the increasing protection of Islam from individual and international scrutiny and from the application of modern human rights to their abuse by Muslim countries.

The work of the indefatigably meticulous David Littman in the realm of human rights, the increasingly effective attempts by the O.I.C. to circumvent the politico-legal apparatus set up since the end of World War Two to enforce international human rights, and the nexus between the O.I.C. and the amorphous entification of a Eurabia through both the European Union and through the O.I.C. growing influence in the U.N., may be substantively pieced together by reading this recent report, which painstakingly documents the nascently successful program of the O.I.C. to penalize any criticism of sharia law in order, precisely, to protect sharia law wherever and to whatever degree it is being practiced by various Muslim countries. Other Littman reports should be read as well, to begin to grasp the truly monumental proportions of this pan-Islamic phenomenon and its crystallization as a proto-Caliphate.

This article, Pandering to the Islamic Conference, by Claudia Rosett, is a good analysis from a more recent Obama-era perspective, surprisingly published in a mainstream source, the online Forbes magazine.

Other good sources for this are:
A letter to the editor of the International Tribune in Paris on December 24, 2007, by David Littman.

This report by a "reformist" Muslim, Raheel Raza, who described her conversation with Roy Brown, of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) (strangely enough, all links to that organization are broken, as far as I can tell).  According to Raza, in addition to many other impressive credentials in the field of international human rights, Roy Brown from 2004 to 2008 served as IHEU Main Representative at the UN, Geneva, working with the UN Commission on Human Rights and its successor, the Human Rights Council.  In Raza's report she mentions this telling exchange she had with Brown:

"We got chatting and he mentioned that he lives in Geneva where IHEU is accredited with the UNHRC but they hardly get a word in edgewise because as soon as a non-Muslim critiques anything to do with Islam, the 57 member Organization of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) flexes its hefty muscles and stops them from speaking, claiming Islamophobia."

An essay by David Littman, Universal Human Rights and "Human Rights in Islam".

An undercover report of a recent conference (16 August, 2008) on the revival of the Caliphate, held in London and organized by the Islamic association Hizb ut Tahrir.

And, more recently, a story from September of 2012 on the OIC's official attempts to make insults against religions an international criminal offence; and on September the OIC adopted a resolution calling for legislation against sacrilegious acts exemplified by the recent Mohammed film.