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and it has been advocating a pan-Islamic bloc which could provide an
institutional framework to counter India’s influence in the region. Nehru
referring the Kashmir question to the UN added a sense of urgency as
Pakistan could count on the support of the Arab-Islamic countries in the
world body; from 7 in 1945, the number of the Muslim-majority coun-
tries in the UN stands at 49 in 2017.
The first step in this direction was the World Muslim Congress held in
Karachi in February 1949, a few months after the UNSC resolution on the
Kashmir which among others advocated plebiscite. This was aimed at
reviving the Motamar Al-Alam Islami (World Islamic Conference) which
was set up in Mecca in 1926 after the abolition of the caliphate (Pirzada
1987 , 21). This was followed by the International Islamic Economic
Conference in the same city in November–December that year. In 1952
Pakistan unsuccessfully tried to organize a conference of Muslim countries
“to examine the possibility of establishing a system of high-level consulta-
tions on matters of common interests” (Pirzada 1987 , 25). As these efforts
did not result in institutionalizing an Islam-centric political body, Pakistan
shifted its attention to the decolonized Muslim countries of Asia and the
Middle East and took an active part in the Islamic conferences of
Mogadishu (December 1964) and Mecca in April 1965.
The turning point for the Pakistani endeavours came with the Arab
military defeat in the June War and the fire incident in the al-Aqsa Mosque
on 21 August 1969 (Lieber 2016 ). The latter spurred King Faisal of Saudi
Arabia and King Hasan of Morocco to organize an Islamic response to the
incident that affected the Muslim masses across the globe. Coming in the
wake of the June War, the fire infuriated the Arabs over the Israeli control
of the Islamic holy sites in the old city of Jerusalem. In early September six
countries met in Rabat to finalize the agenda and modalities of an Islamic
summit and interestingly Pakistan was not among the participants.^1 The
disappointment over its exclusion from the preliminary meeting partly
explains Pakistan’s assertive position in the full conference later that month
over the participation of India.
As subsequent events proved, though the al-Aqsa fire spurred the
meeting, the first Islamic summit symbolized and has been remembered
more for the Indo-Pakistani political contest in the Arab-Islamic world.
There are controversies and discrepancies over the Indian presence at
(^1) The six countries were Morocco and Saudi Arabia representing the Arabs, Niger and
Somalia representing Africa and Iran and Malaysia representing Asia.
P. R. KUMARASWAMY AND MD. M. QUAMAR