Our selective moral outrage is shameful

This is a guest-post by Ibn Khaldun

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Muslims living in Britain and around the world are often outraged when Muslims are killed or Muslim holy sites attacked. This is a normal and often admirable reaction. However, I am increasingly frustrated that this moral outrage is often highly selective and is only ignited when it is non-Muslims who are doing the killing and attacking.

In the mid-90s, I remember the outrage amongst Muslims in Britain when the Bosnia tragedy was unfolding. There were street protests, leaflet campaigns, conferences and a great deal of activism and mobilisation against the war. Muslims were equally vocal about the war in Chechnya and yet there was total silence about the simultaneous events in East Timor. Here we had Indonesia – the world’s most populous Muslim country – organising and arming militias to conduct an armed campaign which left 1400 dead and made 300,000 into refugees. This followed a 24 year occupation by Indonesia in which an estimated 102,800 died. Did the fact that this time it was Muslims doing the killing make a difference?

The same applies to the situation in Darfur today. For decades, the people of Darfur have suffered years of intense racism and neglect at the hands of Sudan’s Arab-dominated government. Because they were Black Africans, they were looked down upon as not worthy of the same rights to land and government help as their Arab compatriots. Years of frustration and anger boiled over in 2003 as militias from Darfur clashed with Sudanese government forces. What followed was a campaign of rape, theft and systematic genocide. Sudanese government forces and Janjaweed militias attacked villages in Darfur, slaughtering men, raping women and burning down entire villages. It is estimated that up to 300,000 people have been killed to date with a further 2 million made homeless. Many Darfurian women were kidnapped by the Janjaweed and kept as sex slaves for weeks on end. Has there been moral outrage amongst Muslims in Britain? Have there been street protests in the Arab world? Have there been effigy burnings in Pakistan? No. No. And No!

The deafening silence over Darfur is no isolated incident. During Bangladesh’s Liberation War of 1971, Pakistani troops are believed to have killed between 300,000 and 3 million civilians and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 women. Again this was met with very little protest in the Muslim world and continues to be a taboo subject that is often denied in Pakistan today. Similarly since 1975 Morocco has illegally occupied Western Sahara whilst the indigenous Sahrawi people remain exiled in dust-blown refugee camps in neighbouring countries. The plight of the Kurds, the single largest ethnic group in the world without a state, continues to be ignored by Muslims across the world. Discussions about the conditions in the Palestinian territories continue to ignore the abject poverty and squalid refugee camps across the Arab world that the home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The bloody Muslim-on-Muslim violence that erupted in Afghanistan after the USSR’s retreat as well as the Taliban’s brutal treatment of women and political opponents have also incited very little outrage.

However, when a small Danish newspaper decided to publish offensive pictures of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, Muslims around the world reacted with fury. Embassies were attacked, nuns were killed and Christians living in Muslim majority countries feared for their safety. Yet the Saudi destruction of holy sites in Mecca and Medina continues to go largely ignored by Muslims around the world. Since occupying the Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula, our great allies the Saudis have gone on a rampage that has included the destruction of homes, graves and mosques that belonged to the Prophet Muhammad’s family and companions. This has included the destruction of the house of Khadija (the first wife of the prophet) to make way for public toilets, the bulldozing of the Prophets daughter Fatima’s grave, the destruction of the home of one of the Prophets closest companions and even the home of the Prophet himself. If this destruction had been undertaken by a Western army the entire Muslim world would have exploded with outrage. Yet on this subject – like so many others – the Muslim world is almost silent.

The often selective nature of Muslim activism is not healthy and is not in line with the principles of Islam or universal moral values. Leftists who encourage Muslims to pursue such selective activism are guilty of the racism of lower expectations. It’s as if these people look at Muslims and say to themselves that ‘of course Muslims will only care for their own, we can’t expect them to have concerns for the whole of humanity, After all, they’re just Muslims’. We need to stop feeding the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ mentality by viewing the world in terms of two zones and only caring for the side we see ourselves as belonging too. The Al-Qaida narrative of ‘they are killing our people and therefore we should fight back’ is the exact same argument that Kind Ferdinand of Spain used to expel Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. He cited the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmud the conqueror and the subsequent oppression of Christians in the former Byzantine territories as the reason why the Muslims of Spain should be fought and driven out. It was also the same argument used by Pope Urban the second to galvanise the first crusades.

Now of course Muslims and all sound-minded citizens should continue to speak out against that which we find objectionable in the world. The US invasion of Iraq is just one example of this. But moral outrage should not be limited to non-Muslim actions alone nor should we only object to non-Muslim silence in the face of evil. We as Muslims must condemn actions because they are wrong in themselves – not just because they were they were done by the West. When, for example, will we begin to acknowledge the very little known fact that Hitler’s SS had a Muslim unit, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem? This unit recruited largely from the Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosovo and helped the Nazi regime to exterminate 60,000 Jews and 20,000 Roma gypsies. If we as Muslims want the world to take our moral outrage seriously we need to stop being selective and instead to begin following the Quranic injunction that we should “enjoin the good and forbid the evil” regardless of who the perpetrators of violence or its victims are.