The Incredible Shrinking OIC

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.

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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.