The 57 Member States of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

What came before it

The OIC was not the first attempt to give the Muslim world a common table. After the Ottoman caliphate was abolished, a Congress of the Muslim World met at Makkah (مكة) in 1926 to ask who now spoke for the Ummah (أمة). A General Islamic Congress followed at Jerusalem in 1931, convened over the future of Palestine; Muhammad Iqbal (محمد إقبال) (رحمه الله) attended it. In 1962 the Muslim World League (رابطة العالم الإسلامي) was founded at Makkah as a non-governmental body.

Each of these was either scholarly or advisory. What 1969 added was states: heads of government, a permanent secretariat, and a charter. That is the difference between a congress and an organisation, and it is why the OIC survived while the earlier bodies either lapsed or stayed outside government.

How it is structured

The charter in force was adopted at Dakar in 2008, replacing the original 1972 text. In 2011, at Astana, the name changed from Organisation of the Islamic Conference to Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, a change of emphasis from conferring to acting together.

• Islamic Summit. Membership: the heads of state and government of all 57 member states. Meets every three years; the supreme authority.
• Council of Foreign Ministers. Membership: the foreign ministers of all 57 member states. It is not a small elected committee; the whole membership sits on it. Meets annually and carries most of the working agenda.
• General Secretariat. The permanent body and administrative centre, at Jeddah (جدة) in Saudi Arabia. It is headed by the Secretary-General, elected by the Council of Foreign Ministers for a five-year term, renewable once. Pakistan’s Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada held the office during the 1980s.

Decisions are taken by consensus rather than by binding majority vote, which is the source both of the organisation’s breadth and of the criticism most often made of it: that resolutions are easier to pass than to enforce.

The standing committees, and who chairs them

Below the summit sit four standing committees, and these are where the organisation’s subject work actually lives. Each is chaired permanently by a named head of state rather than by rotation, which is unusual and is what gives them continuity between summits.

Two further bodies are worth naming. The Executive Committee handles business between sessions, and the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission, created under the 2008 charter and seated at Jeddah (جدة), reports on human rights within member states.

Where the head office is, and everything else

The head office is the General Secretariat at Jeddah (جدة), Saudi Arabia. The charter records it as provisional: the intended permanent seat is al-Quds (القدس), and Jeddah holds the office until then. The rest of the organisation is deliberately spread across member states rather than gathered in one capital.

The milestones

Lahore, 1974

The second Islamic Summit, held at Lahore in February 1974, is the one that most changed what the organisation was taken to be. It drew a larger gathering of Muslim heads of state than anything before it, arriving in the aftermath of the 1973 war and the oil embargo, at a moment when the members briefly held real economic leverage.

It also settled a wound inside the Ummah (أمة) rather than outside it. Pakistan used the occasion to recognise Bangladesh, and the leaders of both states sat in the same hall three years after the war that separated them. Whatever else the summit resolved, that is the clearest instance of the body doing the work it was named for.

The Al-Quds Committee

Because Jerusalem is the reason the organisation exists, it has a standing body of its own. The Al-Quds Committee was formed in 1975 to follow the situation of the city and of al-Masjid al-Aqsa (المسجد الأقصى), and it has been chaired by the King of Morocco throughout. Its funding arm, the Bayt Mal al-Quds Agency, is seated at Rabat and supports housing, schooling, health and restoration work for the Palestinians of Jerusalem.

The committee is also the reason the Jerusalem file never leaves the agenda. Whatever the criticism of the organisation’s effectiveness elsewhere, no summit closes without returning to the question it was founded on.

The institutions it built

The OIC is more than its summits. Several standing institutions were created under it, and these are where most of its practical work sits.

Standards work sits here too: SMIIC, based at Istanbul since 2010, drafts the common halal (حلال) and metrology standards that member states can adopt, which is one of the few areas where the organisation’s output reaches an ordinary shopper.

Joining, suspension, and observers

A state applies and the Council of Foreign Ministers decides. Membership can also be suspended: Egypt was suspended in 1979 after signing at Camp David and readmitted in 1984, and Syria has been suspended since 2012. The working languages are Arabic, English and French.

Observers are counted separately from the 57. They include Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Central African Republic, Russia, Thailand and Northern Cyprus, alongside institutions such as the United Nations, the Arab League, the African Union and the Non-Aligned Movement. Observer status carries a seat and a voice, not a vote.

Pakistan and the organisation

Pakistan is a founding member and has hosted several of the organisation’s larger meetings. The Lahore summit of 1974 is the best known. An extraordinary summit met at Islamabad in 1997, and the 48th session of the Council of Foreign Ministers was held there in March 2022.

That is not merely a list of venues. On each occasion Pakistan used the forum to raise matters that had stalled bilaterally, which is the practical use of a body like this one: it supplies a room where something can be said, even when nothing can be decided.

The criticism, stated fairly

The charge most often made is that the OIC issues statements rather than outcomes. It has a factual basis. Because decisions need consensus, the text that 57 governments can agree on tends to be the weakest one on the table, and the organisation has no enforcement arm: no standing force, no court with compulsory jurisdiction, no power to bind a member that ignores a resolution.

Its record in conflicts between members is the sharpest illustration. It could not stop the Iran-Iraq war, nor the invasion of Kuwait, nor several later disputes among its own membership, because in each case the parties themselves sat at the table.

The fairer reading is that the organisation works where money and institutions do the work rather than declarations. The Islamic Development Bank finances real projects, SESRIC produces the statistics members plan with, the Fiqh Academy issues rulings scholars actually cite, and the Bayt Mal al-Quds funds real buildings in Jerusalem. The gap is not between intention and paper; it is between what an association of sovereign states can compel and what it can only recommend.

Reading the list

Four points make the list below easier to read. First, membership is not the same as a Muslim majority: Gabon, Guyana, Suriname, Mozambique, Uganda, Togo, Benin and Côte d’Ivoire all joined with Muslim minorities or pluralities, because the organisation admits states that wish to associate with it rather than only those above a demographic threshold.

Second, the geography is wider than the phrase "the Muslim world" usually suggests. The largest bloc is African, the second Asian, with Albania in Europe, Türkiye straddling both, and Guyana and Suriname in South America.

Third, Palestine sits in the list as a full member state, not as an observer, which follows directly from why the organisation was founded.

Fourth, the list is not frozen. Syria’s membership has been suspended since August 2012, and the country listed here as Turkey has since adopted Türkiye as its name internationally. Observers, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia, Thailand and the Central African Republic, are counted separately and are not in the 57.

The member states

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (منظمة التعاون الإسلامي) was founded in 1969 and is, after the United Nations, the largest intergovernmental organisation in the world. Its membership spans Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. The 57 member states, in alphabetical order:

• Afghanistan
• Albania
• Algeria
• Azerbaijan
• Bahrain
• Bangladesh
• Benin
• Brunei Darussalam
• Burkina Faso
• Cameroon
• Chad
• Comoros
• Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
• Djibouti
• Egypt
• Gabon
• Gambia
• Guinea
• Guinea-Bissau
• Guyana
• Indonesia
• Iran
• Iraq
• Jordan
• Kazakhstan
• Kuwait
• Kyrgyzstan
• Lebanon
• Libya
• Malaysia
• Maldives
• Mali
• Mauritania
• Morocco
• Mozambique
• Niger
• Nigeria
• Oman
• Pakistan
• Palestine
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia
• Senegal
• Sierra Leone
• Somalia
• Sudan
• Suriname
• Syria
• Tajikistan
• Togo
• Tunisia
• Turkey
• Turkmenistan
• Uganda
• United Arab Emirates
• Uzbekistan
• Yemen

Frequently asked questions

Qur’anic references

• Sūrah al-Isrāʾ 17:1