ABSTRACT
It has been argued that the membership of international organizations “does not involve [the] repudiation of national interests or subordination to an overriding internationalism, but at most it involves the redefinition of national interest.”1 While this may well be true in both realist and functionalist approaches to inter-state ventures, the OIC experience would additionally suggest the inverse, namely the redefinition of ummatic internationalism in conformity with imperatives of national prudence, a prudence in turn dictated by the constitutive and regulatory mechanics of our contemporary world of states. Although classical sources of Islamic internationalism provide for a mixed, and somewhat malleable, legacy, modern pan-Islamic nationalism (or Islamic pan-nationalism) from the very outset incarnated as a regional strategy of containment vis-à-vis Nasserite revolutionarism and Ba‘athist radicalism. What I have called “aspirationality” (in contrast to unqualified rationality) was, with its projection of international affairs unto a pronounced “Islamic” horizon, the immediate pretext for the inception of the OIC and its ultimate post hoc rationalization, rather than its energizing engine.
