“Regularly the members have a meeting and make very nice speeches on the need for unity, but the problem is that nobody trusts each other.” The first spat to rear its head when the three-day meeting of foreign ministers began on Wednesday was a decades-old dispute between the United Arab Emirates and Iran over three tiny Gulf islands held by Tehran since 1971. Gulf Cooperation Council secretary-general Abdul Rahman ibn Hamad Al-Atiyya, called for the problem to be discussed here, and warned Iran that the territorial dispute would otherwise be taken to the International Court of Justice. But Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi dismissed the matter as a “fringe issue,” and bemoaned that “at a time when the Islamic world is under mounting pressure, it is better not to talk about these subjects in these meetings.”

Incidentally, Iranian officials also insisted on referring to the GCC as the “Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (PGCC)” — in line with an even older dispute over how the water between Iran and the Arabian peninsula should be named. Another sign of little common ground came over the question of how to deal with the situation in post-war Iraq — one of the key issues that was supposed to be up for discussion here.

A joint statement issued by an OIC working group comprising Iraq’s neighbours plus Bahrain and Egypt called for a central role for the United Nations, and emphasized the right of Iraqis to choose their own government “as soon as possible.” But the text was long on generalities and void of any concrete proposals that would suggest the diplomats could agree on any nut and bolt issue related to the foreign occupation of a fellow Muslim state — hardly surprising given that Kuwait was the springboard for the invasion. Another subject where there was a gaping lack of consensus was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and notably on the internationally-drafted road map to peace. Iranian officials have been hostile to the plan, and President Mohammed Khatami called in his opening speech for “steadfast support to the Palestinian resistance, which is an unmistakable example of a liberation movement against organised state terrorism.”

However OIC Secretary-General Abdulwahed Belkeziz had a different spin, as did delegates from around a dozen OIC states — who were no doubt intrigued by the murals across Tehran calling for Israel’s destruction. “We should closely monitor the road map drawn up by the quartet as a solution to the Palestinian issue, making sure that it is not distorted, altered or obstructed by preconditions to its implementation,” Belkeziz said.

“Hence, it is imperative for us to work to ensure wide international acceptance for this plan.” But it was also Belkeziz, a former Moroccan foreign minister, who came up with the stiffest indictment of the state of Muslim unity, something the 57-member pan-Islamic body has failed to fundamentally change.

Telling delegates that they were meeting during “a critical juncture as the Islamic world traverses its most severe crisis,” he said that Muslim states “had utterly failed to act as one Islamic nation.”

“Unhappily, we have not learned the lessons of the colonial era, nor have we been awakened by the political, ideological and economic backwardness that has made us an enfeebled nation, resigned to dependency and despondency until our lands were usurped and our rights hijacked, as has occurred in Palestine,” he said.

“We have merely been content with a somewhat sentimental, ceremonial and ephemeral solidarity.”

The Jeddah-based OIC was founded in 1969 and, according to its charter, aims to enable Muslim states to speak with one voice and combine their resources to achieve common goals.