What OIC is and how it works

The summit at Rabat, and the conference at Jeddah

The charter's preamble names two meetings as the origin of the organisation: the conference of kings, heads of state and government held in Rabat from 22 to 25 September 1969, and the conference of foreign ministers held in Jeddah from 29 February to 4 March 1972. The organisation's own account of its history places the Rabat summit after the arson at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on 21 August 1969, and gives that as the reason the summit was convened. Twenty-five of the member records here carry 1969 as the year of accession, and four of them carry the day as well: 25 September, the last day of the Rabat meeting.

The first charter came out of the Jeddah conference of 1972. The charter in force was adopted by the eleventh Islamic Summit at Dakar on 14 March 2008, and registered with the United Nations under Article 102 of the UN Charter on 22 June 2017.

What Article 3 asks

Membership sits in three paragraphs. The first writes the membership into the charter as a figure rather than as a rule, and provides that other states may accede under the paragraph below it. The second sets the conditions: a state has to be a member of the United Nations, has to have a Muslim majority, has to abide by the charter, and has to be approved by consensus only by the Council of Foreign Ministers, on criteria the Council itself adopts. The third says that nothing in the charter undermines what existing members already hold.

The wording is newer than most of the memberships it governs. Under the charter of 1972 the requirement referred to a Muslim State; the text of 2008 replaced that with a state having a Muslim majority, and the threshold for approval moved from a two thirds majority of the Council to consensus. Nothing in either version asks a member's constitution to name Islam as the religion of the state.

What membership costs, and what it opens

Article 29 makes the budget of the General Secretariat and the subsidiary organs a charge on member states proportionate to their national incomes. Article 34 takes away a member's vote in the Council of Foreign Ministers once its arrears equal or exceed the contributions due for the preceding two full years, and lets the Council restore the vote where it is satisfied that the failure to pay was beyond that member's control. Article 35 allows withdrawal on a year's notice to the Secretary-General, and holds the departing state to its obligations until the end of the fiscal year in which it applied.

Membership also opens a balance sheet. The Islamic Development Bank states its conditions in order: a prospective member country should be a member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, should pay the first instalment of its minimum subscription to the bank's capital stock, and should accept the terms set by the Board of Governors. Joining the group is the first of the three.

Article 38 gives the organisation three languages, Arabic, English and French. The member records line up behind that choice. Arabic is official in 24 of them, French in 10 and English in 7.

A seat the charter itself calls provisional

Article 21 places the headquarters of the General Secretariat in the city of Jeddah until, in the charter's own phrasing, the liberation of the city of Al-Quds, which the same sentence names as the permanent headquarters of the organisation. The seat is written into the founding instrument as a temporary one, and the instrument says what would end the arrangement.

Three changes recorded on the face of the charter

The published text carries its own amendments as footnotes. Resolution 5/38-ORG changed the emblem. Resolution 4/38-ORG changed the name from the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation; both were adopted by the thirty-eighth session of the Council of Foreign Ministers at Astana, sitting from 28 to 30 June 2011, and the second records a decision to preserve the acronym the organisation had answered to until then. Resolution 3/44-ORG, adopted at Abidjan on 10 and 11 July 2017, amends the first paragraph of Article 8 so that the Islamic Summit convenes every two years rather than every three, and submits that amendment for ratification, to enter into force once two thirds of the member states have ratified it.

Suspension, which the charter does not provide for

Neither the charter of 1972 nor the charter of 2008 contains a provision for suspending or expelling a member. Suspensions have happened without one. Egypt's membership was suspended after the peace treaty with Israel signed on 26 March 1979, and was resumed in 1984. Afghanistan's was suspended in 1981. Syria's was suspended at the fourth extraordinary session of the Islamic Summit, held at Makkah on 14 and 15 August 2012.

Where the edges are argued

The grouping reaches well past the two continents its founders sat in. The records here file Albania and Türkiye in Europe and Suriname in the Americas, and eleven of the records carry an accession date after 1990, six of those in Central Asia or the South Caucasus.

Two clauses of Article 3 sit in tension with the membership itself. The article asks for United Nations membership, and Palestine's record here is the one in the group that carries none; the Palestine Liberation Organization attended the Rabat summit of 1969 as an observer, and the seat has been a full one since. The article asks for a Muslim majority, and the entry on the organisation published by Oxford Public International Law notes that the membership includes states with minority Muslim populations, naming Uganda, while the more usual course for such a state has been observer status, naming Thailand, the Central African Republic and Russia. The third paragraph of Article 3 is what holds the two readings together, since it protects what members already have from anything the charter later says. The catalogue records the criterion and the memberships, and settles neither.