The story of the Medusa begins in Paris in the year 1816. The French monarchy had been restored to the throne by the English after they had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. In a show of support for the newly instated king, they offered the French the port of Saint-Louis in Senegal on the West African coast. King Louis XVIII appointed a personal friend, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, as a frigate captain and tasked him to lead the fleet to take possession of the gifted port. He had never commanded a ship, to say nothing of a fleet. Throughout his career, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys had worked only as a customs officer.

Woefully, the Muslim world today represents the tragic story of the Medusa, the ill-piloted French naval ship that ran aground because of its captain’s blunders and his dependence on others for navigational guidance, leaving behind a tale of helplessness, desperation and death. The Medusa’s wreck is still out there, lying stuck on the West African coast, and isn’t going anywhere. The Muslim world today is in no better shape. Like the Medusa’s wreck, it is just lying out there, aimlessly floating like a stricken ship, with no one to steer it out of troubled waters.

Representing one-fifth of humanity as well as of the global land mass spreading over 57 countries, and possessing 70 per cent of the world’s energy resources and nearly 50 per cent of the world’s raw materials, the Muslim world should have been a global giant, economically as well as politically. Instead, rich in everything and weak in all respects, it represents only five per cent of the world’s GDP. As a non-consequential entity, it has no role in global decision-making or even in addressing its own problems.

Poor and dispossessed, Muslim nations emerging from long colonial rule may have become sovereign states but are without genuine political and economic independence. Their trade,