Setting OIC priorities straight

FROM time to time we receive news about some renovations being planned for Masjidil Haram and Mekah, which we usually welcome as they are accompanied by remarks that all are in the effort to ensure greater comfort for the haj pilgrims.

This time, however, the administration may have surpassed even itself when it announced it will be hosting next January an international conference on intelligent cities. A large number of experts from around the world are to discuss then the best ways to apply the intelligent city concept to Mekah.

Such concept which will include a combination of the latest technologies that integrate fixed and wireless broadband networks, fixed and mobile GIS and GPS applications, and user-friendly information and communications points which can greatly enhance visitors' experience, and the city's objective of quality services to the visitors of the holy sites.

The ultimate objective, as described by the organisers, is to transform Mekah into a knowledge-based society and a digital economy as well as a model for other Muslim cities around the world, according to Arab News.

Impressive indeed.

We Muslims are all for technological development and advancement. Ours is after all a civilisation that in the Middle Ages reigned supreme in the field and became the inspiration for the then lagging Western civilisation.

In this month of Ramadhan, however, when we are encouraged to think even more about our less-fortunate brethren across the world, the time may be ripe for us to think whether the rich Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference, or even Brunei Darussalam for that matter, have had their priorities set right.

There are already too many Muslim cities, and countries, which do not have the ability to simply survive, much less to grow into expensive "intelligent" places of dwelling. They need help from their richer fellow Muslims.

Take Bangladesh, for example. Based on geological and other scientific analyses, climate change experts forecast that in the not too distant future, most of the country would be under water. As many as 30 million Bangladeshis could become the so-called "climate refugees" because as the world warms, the monsoon rains in the region will concentrate into a shorter period, causing a cruel combination of more extreme floods and longer periods of drought.

If or when Allah wills that to happen, what would happen to those millions of Bangladeshis? What would we do?

If or when Allah wills that to happen, the rich countries of the OIC have few options to exercise. They could invite the affected Bangladeshis and provide them with financial and other assistance to help them start new lives as new citizens in those countries.

Or they could continue busying themselves with making Mekah and Madinah even smarter cities while joining those who say that it is the developed countries such as the US that have largely brought about the climate change and so let them be held responsible.

Or they could simply ignore the Bangladeshis (much like the way they have ignored the Palestinians who were expelled from Iraq following the US-led invasion there and who are now languishing in the Iraq-Syrian borders) and let them suffer whatever may come, which of course totally betrays the fundamentals of Islam that they claim to believe in and uphold.

Or they could be Islamic and adopt another option: namely to gather the technological know-how, financial and manpower resources at their disposal and to start addressing the impending disaster immediately.

There are possible solutions out there; all that is needed is for the OIC to start looking beyond their own self-interests, get their act together and begin to address this issue.