Islamic cohesion is pursued through rival power centers competing for leadership

Evidence

First, Islam is divided among competing power centers each attempting to capitalize on Muslim identification with the ummah in order to promote Islamic cohesion under its leadership. This competition goes on between the established regimes and their organizations, on the one hand, and Islamist regimes and their organizations, on the other. Saudi Arabia took the lead in creating the OIC in part to have a counter to the Arab League, which at the time was dominated by Nasser. In 1991, after the Gulf War, the Sudanese leader Hassan al-Turabi created the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference (PAIC) as a counter to the Saudi dominated OIC. PAIC’s third conference, in Khartoum in early 1995, was attended by several hundred delegates from Islamist organizations and movements in eighty countries. In addition to these formal organizations, the Afghanistan war generated an extensive network of informal and underground groups of veterans who have shown up fighting for Muslim or Islamist causes in Algeria, Chechnya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bosnia, Palestine, the Philippines, and elsewhere. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 478