GCC Ministerial Council Commends Bahrain's Hosting of Intra-Islamic Dialogue Conference
The Ministerial Council of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), in its 163rd session, held in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, commended the Kingdom of Bahrain for hosting the inaugural edition of the Intra-Islamic Dialogue Conference in February 2024.
The event was held under the patronage of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, King of Bahrain, and was attended by His Eminence Professor Dr. Ahmed Al-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar and Chairman of the Muslim Council of Elders, along with more than 400 scholars and intellectuals representing various Islamic schools of thought and sects.
Article 47 of the final statement of the meeting underscored the Ministerial Council's appreciation for Bahrain's hosting of the Intra-Islamic Dialogue Conference under the theme 'One Nation, One Shared Destiny.'
The conference aimed to foster unity, reject division and discord, uphold the noble values of Islam, and strengthen solidarity and rapprochement among Islamic schools of thought.
The conference, organized jointly by Al-Azhar, the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in the Kingdom of Bahrain, and the Muslim Council of Elders, culminated in the launch of the 'Call for the People of Qiblah' Charter—a comprehensive declaration aimed at fostering dialogue and mutual understanding among all Islamic sects and schools of thought. This landmark document reaffirms the unity of the Muslim Ummah and the importance of collective efforts in addressing contemporary challenges.
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The only exception to this de facto rule was Chedli Klibi, who headed the organisation upon the transfer of its headquarters from its home in Cairo to a temporary base in Tunis between 1979 and 1990 during the Arab boycott of Egypt over its signing of the first ever Arab-Israeli Peace Treaty. According to informed diplomatic sources in Cairo, the nomination of Fahmy was a guarantee for Egypt to maintain the de facto practice that has kept the seat of secretary general for the country that hosts the League's headquarters. 'Fahmy was the only candidate in Egypt that could be sold to all the Arab capitals at a time of increasing debate over the concept of rotating the position of the secretary general,' a source said. The call to rotate the League's secretary general among other Arab countries started in 2000, when several member states proposed the need for different operations of the organisation following a decade of turmoil that had challenged the basic concepts of pan-Arabism due to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent US-led war to liberate Kuwait launched in January 1991. There was also a growing realisation of the changing mandate of the organisation in view of the changing regional dynamics following the Madrid Peace Conference held in October 1991 to pave the way for a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli struggle, with the Palestinian cause at its very heart at the time. 'Despite the clout that [Egypt's former president Hosni] Mubarak maintained at the time, there was a push, jointly designed by some in North Africa and some in the Gulf, for the first non-Egyptian secretary general,' said a former Egyptian diplomat privy to the consultation. A former Yemeni prime minister was initially proposed as a candidate to take over from Esmat Abdel-Meguid who had served two terms starting in May 1991. 'At the time, several Arab countries declined Egypt's proposal for a two or one-year renewal for Abdel-Meguid pending further consultation on his succession,' the same diplomat said. The diplomat recalled that to avert an inter-Arab dispute, on the one hand, and an abrupt end to the de facto policy of keeping the organisation's top job for the country hosting its headquarters, on the other, Egypt decided to nominate the prominent and widely popular top Egyptian diplomat Amr Moussa. Once the nomination of Moussa came out in mid-February 2000, the Yemeni prime minister notified Cairo and other capitals that he was not going to run. This week, sources said that the nomination of Fahmy had come with a similar scenario. With Egypt not wanting to lose the de facto right to the seat, it acted to accommodate two things: the first was the rotation of the top League job, and the second was coming up with a candidate who would be hard to decline or contest. The same sources said that Fahmy was not necessarily the first choice. However, he emerged as the best and most consensual candidate. 'Some capitals indicated that it was only if Fahmy was nominated that they would condone the continued Egyptian de facto right to the seat of secretary general, at least for this upcoming term,' they said. F AHMY'S TENURE: It was not immediately clear when Fahmy will be appointed. Technically speaking, Abul-Gheit's second term ends in mid-May 2026. However, given the fact that the standard practice is for the new secretary general to be approved by an Arab summit, the end of Abul-Gheit's tenure and the beginning of Fahmy's might have to wait for the next regular Arab Summit in March 2026. At least three sources said that this would be the case. A couple of others said that the nomination of Fahmy might be passed through either of two ways: the first would be the ordinary autumn foreign ministers' meeting due to convene in the first week of September; and the second would be at a possible emergency Arab summit over developments in Gaza. The situation there seems slated to deteriorate as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems determined to move on with a plan to displace half of the Gaza population into the southernmost part of the Strip. For his part, Fahmy has declined to make any direct comments. Answering journalists' questions that started upon the publication of the story in Al-Majalla, the former top diplomat said that the issue was the prerogative of the Egyptian Foreign Service. However, unlike Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli, speculated about as the leading nominee, Fahmy did not deny the news of the nomination. A source at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said that there was no room either for speculation or anticipation. 'Fahmy is the consensual candidate. He has the support of most Arab capitals, including one that was considering running a candidate itself in order to start the practice of rotation,' the source said. He added that it is a formality for the nomination to be endorsed and for Fahmy to find his way to the office of secretary general at the League's Tahrir Square headquarters. Several sources, including some close to Fahmy himself, said that Egypt's former top diplomat, who was born in New York in 1951 and graduated from the American University in Cairo, was not expecting the nomination. Throughout his career in the Egyptian Foreign Service that started in the 1970s, Fahmy has seemed eligible for certain posts, including for his long-term post as Egypt's ambassador to Washington that started in 1999 and ended in 2008. When he came back from Washington, with an impressive performance in containing one of the highest periods of tension in Egyptian-American relations under the rule of former president Mubarak and during the two terms in office of US president George W Bush, Fahmy was expected to be appointed as foreign minister to succeed Abul-Gheit, who served as foreign minister from 2004 to 2011. However, with the January Revoulution things took a different path and it was only in June 2013 that Fahmy found his long-anticipated path to the office of Egypt's foreign minister overlooking the Nile prior to the move of government bodies to the New Administrative Capital. T OUGH MISSION: Fahmy came to the office at a crucial political moment, with considerable international speculation about the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi after the 30 June 2013 revolution and the suspension of elements of Egyptian-American military cooperation and also the holding up of Egypt's membership of the African Union. At the time, Egyptian diplomats were saying that the country's diplomacy was on 'thin ice' following the political changes in 2013. During his almost one year in office, Fahmy told his aides that the key aim was to relaunch Egypt as a major regional power following two years of internal hiccups that had started with the 25 January Revolution and been followed by the 2013 ouster of Morsi in June 2012. One of Fahmy's closest aides at the time said that 'it is a very tough challenge that Fahmy is facing, since our foreign policy has been on the decline for a while. It did not start with Morsy. It had been this way during the last few years of Mubarak.' In his memoir, published originally in English in 2020 under the title Egypt's Diplomacy, in War, Peace and Transition and later in Arabic in 2022 under the title of Fi qalb al-ahdath (At the Heart of the News), Fahmy details the complexities of the 2013 moment that went beyond the international perception of the nature of political change in Egypt to include pending challenges and especially the dispute between Egypt and Sudan, on the one hand, and Ethiopia, on the other, over the construction, filling, and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Fahmy used his 12 months in office to remove the suspension of Egyptian membership in the AU, impose a ban on the financing of the GERD, and maximise the use of the support offered by some Arab Gulf capitals to open doors that were being shut in several world capitals. In conducting his mission as Egypt's top diplomat, Fahmy also kept an eye on some crucial files that he was very well informed about, especially as a member of Egypt's diplomatic mission in Geneva, and notably with regard to the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. He was also very much aware of the centrality of the Palestinian cause, which he had worked on extensively during his years as political adviser to foreign minister Amr Moussa in the 1990s and during which he took part in the Egypt delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference and followed a sequence of Palestinian-Israeli talks from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords onwards. Reaching out for international cooperation was also a top priority that Fahmy was well aware of owing to his two ambassadorial terms in Tokyo and Washington. However, unlike the previous steps in his diplomatic career, Fahmy was working under very stressful conditions. He kept in close contact with then minister of defence Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, whose political rise was already charted. The coordination between the Foreign Service, on the one hand, and security and economic officials, on the other, is referenced in his memoir as part of the national sharing of responsibility regarding top foreign policy and national security issues. U PHEAVAL: 'Upheaval in the Middle East' is the title that Fahmy chose for the section of his book on the Arab-Israeli struggle. The starting point of the story, as perceived by Fahmy, was the devastating defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 War that allowed Israel to occupy all of historic Palestine, all of the Sinai Peninsula, and large parts of Syrian and Jordanian territory. A second equally unsettling moment that Fahmy's book moves to after the 1967 War is another war and a 'moment of tectonic change in the Arab region [that] came with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990.' This war, Fahmy, then a diplomat at the Egyptian mission in New York, had earlier seen signs of and had feared its overwhelming impact on the region. 'The Iraqi invasion entailed drastic and traumatic regional repercussions in the Arab world. It divided the Arab world, but most importantly it also prompted the Arab Gulf states to focus on sub-regional cooperation and become fully dependent on American security,' Fahmy wrote. 'For them, this was not simply a territorial disagreement between neighbouring Arab states but a fully-fledged existential invasion from within the Arab world itself, which was an anomaly in contemporary political relations.' Theories about connections between the October 1973 War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait are neither overlooked nor embraced by Fahmy. He writes that 'some Middle East experts suggest that after being shocked by the Arab oil embargo in 1973, the United States intentionally encouraged [former Iraqi president Saddam] Hussein to invade Kuwait in order to decimate the burgeoning Iraqi military capacity and emerging nuclear programme.' 'This was perceived by them as an attempt to preempt the emergence of a strong, more independent Arab regional player with control over substantial oil reserves and the potential to pose a security threat to Israel.' However, Fahmy's book is more about dissecting what happened on the ground than what the experts thought at the time. According to this part of his book, the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait crushed whatever semblance of pan-Arabism had survived the crushing military defeat of 1967. Consequently, he argued that a new regional order was in the making along with the pursuit of a political settlement to the Arab-Israeli struggle, with the participation of all the countries that had boycotted Egypt after former president Anwar Al-Sadat's peace-making with Israel. Today, as he prepares himself to enter a new chapter in his diplomatic career, Fahmy is only too aware of the crucial moment that the region is passing through. In an article published on the opinion pages of the Egyptian daily Al-Shorouq on 5 August under the title of 'The Necessary Choices for the Arab World,' Fahmy wrote that 'the Middle East is not stable and is going through a reshuffle moment.' Some of the changes that are unfolding today, he argued, are inevitable due to the natural evolution of political and economic dynamics, while others are being forced on it, especially as the aspirations of non-Arab members of the region, especially Israel, assume a dominating role. This, he wrote, is happening as the world order is going through a transition towards an undefined destination that may or may not take it from a single-polar to a multi-polar regime, with many countries building their policies on a zero-sum approach. With such changes happening, Fahmy wrote, the Arab World needs to live up to the challenges it is facing and to pursue development and reconstruction. Given the date of the publication of his piece, it is not hard to conclude that these are going to be the defining concepts that Fahmy will have in mind for his overall agenda for the future of the Arab League. It is no secret that he will need to use all his expertise on the Palestinian cause to help reconcile the conflicting views of the Arab capitals on the way forward in view of the genocidal war that Israel is conducting against the Palestinians in Gaza along with the resumption of aggressive and illegal settlement policies in the West Bank. In so doing, Fahmy will lean on his long years of bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, especially his close-to 10 years in Washington where he built solid ties in the capital of world politics. Meanwhile, there are also many other pressing challenges that he will need to attend to, including the current armed conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, and Syria, inter-Arab tensions in North Africa and the Gulf, and the expanding weight that non-Arab neighbours have taken in the Arab countries. In his piece, Fahmy spoke clearly against attempts to water down the Arab identity of the region. In an article published earlier this summer in the Saudi-owned Independent Arabia, he wrote about the need to fully re-integrate Syria into the Arab world and for a coordinated Arab position to face up to Israeli plans against Palestinian rights. According to diplomatic sources informed on the dynamics of the secretariat of the Arab League, one of Fahmy's tougher missions will be the creation of a sense of collective ownership, away from any sense of entitlement, towards this pan-Arab organisation that has come under much criticism, especially as a result of the genocidal war on Gaza. Those who know Fahmy well say that he will not just seek harmony but also innovation and creativity. His years as founding and long-serving dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo, they say, testify to his commitment to promoting modernisation. They also say that as much as Fahmy was very keen during his career to be credited for his own work rather than for being the son of a renowned foreign minister, Ismail Fahmy, he will be also keen in his new post to dispel concerns that his Egyptian nationality could impose an Egyptian perception on the agenda of the collective Arab regime. * A version of this article appears in print in the 21 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
