Organisation of Islamic Cooperation
The Collective Voice of The Muslim World
Date: 15/11/2012
The OIC Observatory on Islamophobia released its Fifth Annual Report covering the period from May 2011 to September 2012, at the commencement of the 39th Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers in Djibouti today. In his foreword to the Report, the Secretary General, Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, reiterated that Islamophobia formed a contemporary manifestation of racism and discrimination. The Secretary General further underscored that if the current trends are ignored, the long term implications of intolerance and discrimination against the Muslim world be far more intense than those witnessed recently and were highlighted in the Report. The Report includes five chapters that have catalogued and analyzed Islamophobic incidents in different categories providing with an update on the state of play. It clearly comes out that revered Islamic symbols and personalities continued to be violated and incidents including the burning of copies of the Holy Qur’an in Florida and elsewhere, the release of ‘Innocence of Muslims’ video on YouTube, and caricatures insulting Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) by a French magazine, continued to hurt the sentiments of Muslims around the world, during the period under review. The Report indicates that in the wake of such events of incitement and advocacy of hatred against Islam, intolerance and discrimination have surpassed the severity and gravity documented in the Observatory’s previous reports. The concluding part of the Report underscored that a lot more needs to be done to effectively combat the anti-Islam phenomenon and correct the misperceptions against it and its followers, and that all stakeholders need to be politically and socially involved with an honest sincerity of purpose towards result-oriented reconciliation among different faiths and civilizations. The Report, now into its fifth year, has been widely acknowledged as a correct and precise update on trends pertaining to intolerance and discrimination against Muslims that continue to pose a clear and present danger to peaceful coexistence. The Report is available for download here.
