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:
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.