The Incredible Shrinking OIC

OIC map

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has fifty-seven member states.

Everyone knows that. That’s what the OIC keeps telling us over and over again. Whenever you hear the OIC mentioned, the number fifty-seven is always closely associated with it. Heinz has its 57 flavors, and the OIC has its 57 countries.

Or does it?

Let’s take a look at the membership roll. I picked up the list of countries and their dates of entry from the OIC’s website, and joined it with a database of population figures from 2004 to construct the table below. It’s not up-to-the minute, but it will serve as a rough guideline to the makeup of the OIC:

Country Population Muslim pop. %   Entry
Afghanistan 29,928,987 29,629,697 99.0% 1969
Albania 3,563,112 2,494,178 70.0% 1992
Algeria 32,531,853 32,206,534 99.0% 1969
Azerbaijan 7,911,974 7,389,783 93.4% 1992
Bahrain 688,345 585,093 85.0% 1972
Bangladesh 144,319,628 127,001,272 88.0% 1974
Benin 7,460,025 1,492,005 20.0% 1983
Brunei 372,361 249,481 67.0% 1984
Burkina Faso 13,925,313 7,658,922 55.0% 1974
Cameroon 16,380,005 3,276,001 20.0% 1974
Chad 9,826,419 5,306,266 54.0% 1969
Comoros 671,247 664,534 99.0% 1976
Côte d'Ivoire 17,298,040 6,677,043 38.6% 2001
Djibouti 476,703 471,935 99.0% 1978
Egypt 77,505,756 70,530,237 91.0% 1969
Gabon 1,389,201 13,892 1.0% 1974
Gambia 1,593,256 1,433,930 90.0% 1974
Guinea 9,467,866 8,047,686 85.0% 1969
Guinea-Bissau 1,416,027 538,090 38.0% 1974
Guyana 765,283 76,528 10.0% 1998
Indonesia 241,973,879 213,469,356 88.2% 1969
Iran 68,017,860 67,337,681 99.0% 1969
Iraq 26,074,906 25,292,658 97.0% 1975
Jordan 5,759,732 5,471,745 95.0% 1969
Kazakhstan 15,185,844 7,137,346 47.0% 1995
Kuwait 2,335,648 1,985,300 85.0% 1969
Kyrgyzstan 5,146,281 4,117,024 80.0% 1992
Lebanon 3,826,018 2,678,212 70.0% 1969
Libya 5,765,563 5,592,596 97.0% 1969
Malaysia 23,953,136 14,467,694 60.4% 1969
Maldives 349,106 348,756 99.9% 1976
Mali 12,291,529 11,062,376 90.0% 1969
Mauritania 3,086,859 3,083,772 99.9% 1969
Morocco 32,725,847 32,300,410 98.7% 1969
Mozambique 19,406,703 3,881,340 20.0% 1994
Niger 11,665,937 10,499,343 90.0% 1969
Nigeria 128,771,988 64,385,994 50.0% 1986
Oman 3,001,583 2,971,567 99.0% 1972
Pakistan 162,419,946 156,491,617 96.4% 1969
Palestine 3,761,904 3,159,999 84.0% 1969
Qatar 863,051 819,898 95.0% 1972
Saudi Arabia 26,417,599 26,417,599 100.0% 1969
Senegal 11,126,832 10,459,222 94.0% 1969
Sierra Leone 6,017,643 3,610,585 60.0% 1972
Somalia 8,591,629 8,591,629 100.0% 1969
Sudan 40,187,486 26,121,865 65.0% 1969
Suriname 438,144 96,391 22.0% 1996
Syria 18,448,752 16,234,901 88.0% 1972
Tajikistan 7,163,506 6,805,330 95.0% 1992
Togo 5,681,519 778,368 13.7% 1997
Tunisia 10,074,951 9,974,201 99.0% 1969
Turkey 69,660,559 68,963,953 99.0% 1969
Turkmenistan 4,952,081 4,407,352 89.0% 1992
Uganda 27,269,482 4,090,422 15.0% 1974
United Arab Emirates 2,563,212 1,948,041 76.0% 1972
Uzbekistan 26,851,195 23,897,563 89.0% 1996
Yemen 20,727,063 20,519,792 99.0% 1969

As you can see, among all the member states of the OIC, there are 1.18 billion Muslims out of 1.44 billion people, or about 82% of the total population.

Of the countries with a majority Muslim population, there are 1.15 billion Muslims out of 1.33 billion people, or about 86% of the population of those countries.

“Wait just a minute, Baron,” you say, “one of those is not a country!”

And you are quite correct. One of the majority-Muslim “countries” is “Palestine”, which is not a country at all. It consists of bits of territory that belong to Egypt and Jordan and have never been assigned by peace treaty to any other states.

So that knocks the number down to fifty-six right there.

There are also eleven non-Muslim countries on the list. They contain a total of 28 million Muslims out of 113 million people, or about 25%. One of them — Gabon — is only 1% Muslim, and five more are at 20% or lower. None of these can properly be called a “Muslim country”, and they should not be members of the OIC.

That brings us down to forty-five.

Of the Muslim majority countries, three (Burkina Faso, Chad, and Nigeria) are hovering close to 50%. Nigeria certainly doesn’t consider itself a “Muslim country”, yet it’s a member of the OIC.

I move to strike all three of them. That leaves us with the real OIC, which has forty-two members, or 26% fewer than it officially claims.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

What’s going on here? Why does the OIC include so many more “Muslim” countries than are statistically warranted?

Part of the reason is surely the well-known Islamic propensity for bragging about the Muslim world and inflating its importance. In Islam, things are always bigger, better, and more accomplished than any realistic analysis would support.

But there’s more to it than that. Take a close look at this table of non-Muslim members of the OIC:

Country Entry % Muslim
Benin 1983 20.0%
Cameroon 1974 20.0%
Côte d'Ivoire 2001 38.6%
Gabon 1974 1.0%
Guinea-Bissau 1974 38.0%
Guyana 1998 10.0%
Kazakhstan 1995 47.0%
Mozambique 1994 20.0%
Suriname 1996 22.0%
Togo 1997 13.7%
Uganda 1974 15.0%

What’s notable about these countries is that they joined the OIC relatively late. None was a founding member in 1969, and the majority of them were admitted to the OIC in 1990 or later.

To make the correlation even clearer, examine the scattergram below. It plots the percentage of Muslims against the year of entry into the OIC, and I’ve calculated a line of regression to make the trend obvious:

OIC Muslim population vs. year of entry

This timeline coincides with the Muslim Brotherhood’s intensified push to dominate the United Nations through the OIC. The OIC is recognized as a corporate entity by the UN, and the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam — which was signed by all members of the OIC — was registered as a formal document with the UN in the early 1990s.

Thus it becomes obvious that the oil-rich Muslim countries of the Middle East used their… ahem… persuasive powers to induce those small, unimportant, and poverty-stricken non-Muslim countries to join the OIC. By signing the OIC’s policy documents, they committed themselves to voting the Islamic party line in the General Assembly. This frequently gave the Islamic bloc a working majority, which it has used to its advantage ever since.

The inflated membership of the OIC is what has given us all those hundreds of “human rights” complaints against Israel. The OIC’s clout in the UN has brought us to the verge of a binding resolution that will require all the UN’s member states to pass laws criminalizing the “defamation of religions, including Islam”.

This strategy was a shrewd move on the part of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Back in the 1990s no one was paying any attention to Islam — they were either enriching themselves in the dot-com boom or laughing about the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress.

“Islam? What the heck is that?”

Well, now we know.


Many thanks to our Flemish correspondent VH for coming up with the idea for this post. I used a different dataset than he did, so my analysis is slightly different, but we are in broad general agreement.
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