Between Friday's stop in Islamabad and the next leg of his international tour, President Macky Sall performed the Umrah in Mecca on Saturday 11 July. A moment of quiet reflection, shared with Gambian President Adama Barrow and former Bissau-Guinean President Umaro Sissoco Embaló, and widely covered by the Senegalese press. No official programme: a spiritual pause in the middle of a dense diplomatic calendar.
The image says something about the country the candidate for United Nations Secretary-General comes from. Senegal, whose population is about 95 percent Muslim, is regularly cited as an example of religious harmony. Its first President, Léopold Sédar Senghor, was a Catholic; he led the country for twenty years, re-elected by an overwhelmingly Muslim electorate. Families often bring together both faiths, the State supports the pilgrimage to Mecca as well as Christian pilgrimages, and the festivals of both calendars shape public life. This everyday religious dialogue is not a slogan: it is a school. President Macky Sall is one of its heirs.
That foundation has carried over into international institutions. Senegal is a founding member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which brings together 57 states across four continents, and Dakar has hosted two of the Organisation's summits, in 1991 and 2008. In August 2012, a few months after taking office, President Macky Sall addressed the OIC's 4th extraordinary summit, in Mecca already: Senegal then held the rotating chairmanship of the Islamic Summit, inherited from the Dakar summit, and he used that platform to press the issues of the day, first among them the crisis in Mali. In May 2019, he took part in the 14th ordinary Islamic Summit, in the same city. In November 2023, he attended the first Saudi-Africa Summit in Riyadh, where a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reviewed cooperation between Dakar and Riyadh.
In Manama a few days earlier, his talks with Bahrain's chief diplomat had already touched on the dialogue of civilizations. It is the same conviction, carried to the scale of the world: the great challenges cannot be settled among a few capitals, they require listening to every culture and every member state. The facilitator and bridge-builder profile the candidate sets out in his official vision comes from there.
The tour, meanwhile, goes on. The Security Council's private consultations have been open since 30 June, and the first straw polls are expected in the last week of July. In thirteen days, the candidate has linked Beijing, Athens, New York, Manama and Islamabad, before this stop in Mecca.
The full vision statement is available at www.mackysall.net.