Muslim Nations That Claim to Be Defenders of Islam Offer No Protest to The Uighurs Concentration Camps in China
By
Nick Cohen
4 July 2020
When China
imposed trade sanctions on Norway in 2010 for honouring the imprisoned
dissident Liu Xiaobo with the Nobel peace prize, it spat out a word we weren’t
used to hearing from propagandists for an atheist communist regime, but should
get used to today. “It’s a blasphemy,” a party mouthpiece said.
One of China’s ‘re-education’ centres in
Dabancheng, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
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Once,
blasphemy was damning the faithful’s gods and sacred books. Now, criticism of
the world’s largest dictatorship has become sacrilegious. You shouldn’t be
surprised. As some of us tried to say in the 1990s and 2000s, the gap between
the sacred and the profane was never as wide as religious sentimentalists and
liberal multiculturalists believed.
Photo: From the Nation Interest Portal
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They went
along with the argument that it was bad taste at best and racism at worst to
offend believers. You were “punching down” at largely poor and largely Muslim
communities. We thought they were being wilfully blind. They did not understand
how men with real power and malice were manipulating religious outrage to
consolidate their rule over their wretched population. Iran issued a death
sentence on Salman Rushdie in 1989 for satirising Islam’s foundation myths in
The Satanic Verses. Its theocratic dictator, Ayatollah Khomeini, was augmenting
his powers by claiming to speak for the Muslim world, as well as taking aim at
novelists. When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published largely
innocuous cartoons of Muhammad in 2005, to assert the right to mock religion,
the Egyptian and Syrian dictators, Hosni Mubarak and Bashar al-Assad, turned a
local argument into a global campaign against Denmark. The cries of rage
usefully distracted from their corruption and misrule. I could add further
examples but they tell the same story. Authoritarian politics and authoritarian
religion are just two sides of the same debased coin.
China has
stripped away the religious justifications to reveal what was once half-hidden:
unadorned and unstoppable power. In many countries, criticising China is the
new blasphemy. Nowhere can you see the power more nakedly displayed than in
Muslim-majority regimes. Once, they tried to murder blasphemous novelists and
screamed about their desire to defend the prophet from the smallest insult.
Today, they bend their knees and bite their tongues as China engages in
unspeakable atrocities against the largely Muslim Uighur population of western
China.
One of the
great crimes of the 21st century is being committed in front of our eyes. We
see it, yet we don’t register it. The Chinese Communist party is reverting to
type, and reviving the totalitarian fear of the Mao era. To bring down numbers of
the largely Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang, the China scholar Adrian Zenz reports,
the Communists are forcing women to be sterilised or fitted with contraceptive
devices. If they resist, the state sends them to join the one million Uighur
people and other Muslim minorities detained in what the state defines as
“re-education” camps. A BBC investigation found that China was separating
children from their families so they grew up without understanding Islam.
It may be a
cheap point but it remains true that if a western country were to display
one-tenth, one-hundredth or one-thousandth of the brutality that China is
inflicting on Muslims, the global left would be burning with outrage.
If you want
to be charitable, its silence can in part be explained by logistical
difficulties. Reporters are free to cover China’s suppression of democracy in
Hong Kong, for the time being at any rate, but cannot get near Xinjiang without
taking extraordinary risks. With no footage of their suffering, millions can
suffer unnoticed in the dark.
But the
main reasons why Muslims suffer in silence is that the Muslim-majority
countries that raged against Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo have
decided to stay silent. They use the idea of Muslim solidarity only when it
suits them.
In July
2019, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria and
other Muslim-majority states that pose as defenders of the faith helped to
block a western motion at the United Nations calling for China to allow
“independent international observers” into the Xinjiang region. Iran issues
occasional criticisms but wants Chinese support in its struggle against the
Trump administration and so keeps its complaints coded. Their hypocrisy is
almost funny, if you take your humour black. Iran, Egypt, Syria and dozens of
other countries that could not tolerate a magical realist novel can live with
the mass sterilisation of Muslim women. They will give concentration camps a
conniving wink of approval, but draw the line at cartoons in a Danish newspaper.
Many have
been bought off. China is now a more active and influential voice at the United
Nations because so many countries are benefiting from billions of dollars in
Chinese investments through its “Belt and Road” infrastructure programme. As
Norway found in 2010, and Australia found this year when it asked for an
international inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, those who blaspheme against
China face cyber-attacks and sanctions. Better to take the rewards and avoid
the punishments.
Following
the money, however, can lead you into a dead end. In a survey of China’s
growing power, the Economist noted it was making the world safe for autocracy.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, keeps his conservative base happy in Turkey
by posing as an ostentatiously Islamic strongman. But he is not likely to
condemn the abuse of Muslims by China when he is just as keen on abusing the
rights of his domestic opponents. The Chinese world order appeals to the
freemasonry of publicity-shy sadists. You say nothing about what we do to our
subject people and we will say nothing about what you do to yours.
“The idea
of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any
culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change –
into crimes,” said Salman Rushdie when he was in fear of his life in 1990. He
was talking about conservative Islam. China is now turning criticism of its
disastrous record on incubating the Covid-19 virus and its atrocities against
its Muslim minorities into crimes, and the people who should be shouting the
loudest are bowing their heads in reverential silence.
Nick
Cohen is an Observer columnist
Original
Headline: Why do Muslim states stay silent over China’s abuse of the Uighurs?
Source: The
Guardian
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/muslim-nations-that-claim-be/d/122291