Introduction Marie Juul Petersen and Turan Kayaoglu "The United Nations of the Muslim world" is how the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) often refers to itself. The OIC is an intergovernmental organization, established in 1969 with the purpose of strengthening solidarity among Muslims. Headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the OIC today consists of fifty-seven states from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The OIC''s longevity and geographic reach, combined with its self-proclaimed role as the UN of the Muslim world, raise certain expectations as to its role in global human rights politics. However, to date these hopes have been unfulfilled. This volume sets out to demonstrate, by way of various methods of analysis, the potential and the shortcomings of the OIC and the obstacles (sometimes set by OIC members themselves) on the paths this group has navigated. Historically, the OIC has had a complicated and conflict-ridden relationship with the international human rights regime and with the concept of universal human rights. Palestinian self-determination--a political problem with a strong human rights dimension--was an important catalyst for the founding of the OIC in 1969.

Nonetheless, the OIC did not develop a comprehensive human rights approach in its first decades. In fact, human rights issues were rarely, if at all, mentioned at the organization''s summits or the annual conferences of foreign ministers. Instead, the OIC tended to focus on protecting Islamic holy sites and increasing economic cooperation among member states. As other international and regional organizations expanded and strengthened the international human rights system in the 1990s, the OIC began to pay greater attention to human rights, although not always in a way that aligned with Western states'' conceptions of human rights. In particular, two initiatives came to shape the organization''s human rights agenda and its (reactionary) human rights image in the eyes of the West throughout the 1990s. First, in 1990, the OIC introduced the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which presented a set of religiously defined human rights. The OIC often argued that the declaration was complementary, not a substitute or alternative, to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and true to Islamic principles. At the same time human rights activists and Western states widely denounced the declaration.

These detractors argued that subjugating human rights to religious limitations, as promoted in the Cairo Declaration, conflicted with essential principles of the UDHR, including the core principles of equality and nondiscrimination, thus undermining it. Second, in 1999, the OIC introduced the first of a series of UN resolutions to the Human Rights Commission, asking governments to combat "defamation of religions" by limiting freedom of expression and criminalizing defamatory statements. According to the OIC, this was a much-needed step in the fight against rising Islamophobia in the West. Specifically, the OIC claimed that the defamation of Islam often led to anti-Muslim discrimination. Western states considered the resolutions contrary to freedom of expression and saw such efforts as an attempt to universalize anti-blasphemy laws. Coupled with harsh human rights violations in many OIC member states and the OIC''s unwillingness to address these violations either through its own protocols or as a participant in international human rights proceedings, the OIC gained a reputation as a spoiler organization in the international human rights system. The mid-2000s saw the OIC engaging with international human rights in a slightly more constructive manner. Internally, as part of a larger reform of the OIC, its Ten Year Program of Action (TYPOA) was published in 2005, introducing an explicit focus on universal human rights and highlighting the importance of incorporating human rights concerns into all programs and activities.

Notably, the plan also stressed "the responsibility of the international community, including all governments, to ensure respect for all religions and combat their defamation." The new approach was most clearly manifested in the 2011 establishment of an OIC human rights mechanism, the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission (IPHRC). The IPHRC was charged with supporting member states in their implementation of international human rights obligations. A number of other initiatives also had the potential to positively influence the OIC''s human rights agenda, including the establishment of the OIC Humanitarian Affairs Department, known as ICHAD (2007); mechanisms for cooperation with humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (2012); the Peace, Security and Mediation Unit (2013); and the Women''s Development Organization (2013). Externally, the OIC also showed signs of a more constructive approach at the UN. In 2011, the organization cosponsored a UN resolution that linked religious discrimination with combating hate speech. At least on the surface, this resolution signaled a move away from the anti-defamation agenda and, more generally, a willingness to engage positively with mainstream human rights conceptions rather than promoting a parallel system of religiously defined human rights. Simultaneously, however, the OIC has continued to voice its criticism of certain human rights.

Either as an organization or through the voices of its members, the OIC has opposed efforts concerning the rights of LGBTI people as well as certain women''s rights, such as reproductive rights. Together with Russia, the OIC has cosponsored a set of resolutions on "traditional values," emphasizing the importance of conservative religious values in the interpretation of human rights. Furthermore, the OIC''s internal organizational developments also invite serious questions regarding its commitment to their stated 2005 agenda. The OIC''s main vehicle for human rights advancement, the IPHRC, was born with a severely restricted mandate and a minimal budget. Other instruments with the potential to impact the OIC''s human rights agenda--such as the Peace, Security and Mediation Unit and the Women''s Development Organization--took years to establish. The OIC''s weak embrace of the organs that could further its human rights agenda reflects a lack of support by member states, testifying to the fact that state sovereignty and noninterference are still the defining features of the OIC. These developments reveal the OIC to be an increasingly important actor in the field of international human rights but show that its human rights involvement is inconsistent, contradictory, and at times counterproductive to the promotion, protection, and further development of human rights. This makes it necessary to better understand the OIC, its actions, its motivations, and its organizational framework.

In recent years, a number of scholars have begun to study the organization''s engagement with human rights issues, including analyses of the Cairo Declaration and the Covenant of the Rights of the Child in Islam (Mayer 2012; Farrar 2014), the defamation of religion agenda and Resolution 16/18 (Rehman and Berry 2012; Petersen and Kayaoglu 2013; Bettiza and Dionigi 2014; Kayaoglu 2014; Langer 2014; Limon et al. 2014; Skorini and Petersen 2017), the IPHRC (Petersen 2012; Kayaoglu 2013), civil society cooperation (Ameli 2011), humanitarianism (Svoboda et al. 2015), counterterrorism (Samuel 2013), the OIC''s status in international law (Cismas 2014), and the OIC and LGBTI rights (Chase 2012). Expanding on much of this work and presenting new analyses, this book aims to provide a comprehensive examination of the OIC''s human rights approach with a focus on both the factors shaping this approach and the OIC''s influence on wider human rights developments. Human Rights, Intergovernmental Organizations, and Global Islam Presenting a nuanced and detailed case study of the OIC, the book not only provides essential empirical and theoretical insights on the OIC and human rights, it also contributes to the broader scholarly discussions centered around contemporary challenges to human rights, intergovernmental organizations, and global Islam. Earlier literature on human rights was premised on an (implicit) assumption that human rights diffusion is a linear process resulting in institutionalization and "closure." As such, this literature has difficulties accounting for challenges to human rights. Contemporary research--emerging from international relations, anthropology, and sociology--has shown that human rights are not definitively accepted when internalized in hard law and institutions (Redhead and Turnbull 2011:186) but remain contested even after their internalization.

As such, human rights are better conceived as open-ended processes in which "co-optation, drift, accretion and reversal of a norm--including disputes over whether it is a norm at all--are constant possibilities" (Krook and True 2012:104) and the risk of decay and erosion is ever-present (Panke and Petersohn 2012). Recent research has explored processes of norm reconceptualization (Krook and True 2012), localization and vernacularization (Merry 2006; Acharya 2011; Zwingel 2012), and contestation (Wiener 2012). Questioning conceptions of human rights as fixed and static norms, this literature instead directs attention to the various ways in which human rights are constantly challenged, appropriated, co-opted, and rejected. As such, human rights discourses and practices are best conceptualized as "politics" in the sense of power struggles to fix meaning, decision-making, and resource allocation, or as attempts to constitute the social in certain ways (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Through an examination of the OIC''s engagement with human rights discourses and practices, this volume explores the ways in which hu.