Dr Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu

Secretary General, Organisation of the Islamic Conference

Date of Birth: 26/12/1943
Place of Birth: Cairo, Egypt

Heading the unwieldy OIC, Ihsanoglu needs all his considerable reserves of tact and political determination. It may help that he can draw on his wide-ranging personal history, which straddles Africa and Asia.

Long a resident of Turkey, Ihsanoglu was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1943. He took a PhD from Ankara University in chemistry in the 1970s. In 1980, the professor established the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture in Istanbul, an OIC-funded organisation. He wrote extensively on Islamic culture and science, remaining Director of IRCICA until January 2005, when a concerted push by Turkey saw him selected to succeed Morocco's Abdelouahed Belkeziz as OIC Secretary General.

The OIC leadership has to manage the most important fault-line: between mainstream Islam and the growing pressures from avowedly Islamist regimes such as Iran and Sudan. So, at times the OIC agrees with the other multilateral organisations and sometimes stridently dissents. There is also a fierce debate about whether predominantly Christian Tanzania should join the OIC.

Under Ihsanoglu's leadership, the OIC joined the European Union and African Union in condemning the 6 August military overthrow of President Sidi Ould Sheikh Abdallahi in Mauritania . But at Turkey's first African Cooperation Summit (August 18-21), Ihsanoglu opposed the call by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to indict on charges of war crimes Sudan's President Omer Hassan el Beshir.

Some activists in Sudan and the Middle East accuse the OIC of inconsistency: in July, it welcomed the capture of Radovan Karadzic, a former Bosnian Serb leader who also faces ICC charges. The activists argue that Sudan's Omer is responsible for the deaths of more Muslims in Darfur than Karadzic was in Bosnia.