This opinion piece in Foreign Policy magazine asks a great question: if Islamic governments and religious leaders have enough outrage to speak out against Danish cartoons, why have they not been vocal in their opposition to China’s repression of the Uighurs? Is this proof that the nations of the Middle East use religion as a convenient means of whipping their populace into a frenzy against their Western rivals, or is there something about China’s relationship with the Middle East that makes Muslims wary of criticisizing them?
A commmentor on the article raised another good question: where are the Islamic terrorist organizations in all this? Does a lack of action by Al Qaeda imply a disturbing level of Middle Eastern government control over their activities?
It’s a very good question. I suspect that it is partially because a culture has built up over the years taking on the Palestinian question that it is hard to change gears. As China continues to grow in stature, they probably will start to see increased attention from the Muslim world.
This is a very interesting question. I don’t have any better ideas than the clerical and political leaders who whipped up frenzy over incidents like the Danish cartoons are fascist, self-serving, hypocritical cunts, and the people who follow them, the guys in the street with a “death to Denmark” sign, are unthinking, brutish, ignoramuses.
ETA: I sent an email to an NYT reporter whose been covering the issue with this question, sans the language of course. I’ll post his response if he gets back to me.
Turkey is the one exception, but as the FP piece points out, they came around slowly and China’s news media came down hard on them for speaking out.
Also keep in mind that China’s repression of the Uighurs is not a new phenomenon. Turkey finally decides to take a stand, and their criticism is relatively weak.
Muslim countries want Chinese money and investment. They’re not going to needlessly piss them off, and they don’t really care about the Uighers, or the Palestinians for that matter.
Aside from that little dust up in Afghanistan, how much protest did the Muslim World(ARR) give to how the Soviets treated their own Muslim population? From my own memory, it wasn’t a lot until the events that lead to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Maybe it’s a historical thing…the Muslims really didn’t have the same historical cycle of confrontation with China (or Russia) as they did with The West (a.k.a. the Western European powers and the US).
Similarly, why don’t more Muslims protest against Shiites and Sunnis killing each other? I really don’t understand the mind of middle-easterners. Maybe it has something to do with the honor code. Killing someone does not insult the honor of your tribe or family, while posting cartoons about Muhammed does.
I think that is why peace in the ME is so untractable. People would rather have war and honor, than peace and the perception they lost honor.
I sometimes see similar differences between the US and China. We get all riled up over the abstraction of freedom, while the Chinese seem more pragmatic and favor stability, full rice bowls, etc.
No matter what the Quran actually says, Muslims have a much bigger problem with Christians and Jews than they do with athiests, Hindus, Buddhists, animists, etc. No doubt because of the historical clashes between Muslim and Western civilization. Most Musllims still believe the West is a Christian civilization. The fact that in Europe there are more people at the mosques than the churches does not faze them.
When Shiites and Sunnis are killing each other, every Muslim is on one side or the other. There is a big deal in Islam about unity, but in practice it means everybody must unite under you version of Islam, or face death. I had loads of Muslim friends growing up in Pakistan, and this is always just below the surface. Basically Sunnis and Shiites (and the sub-sects under each) tolerate each other but they all think that they are 100% right, and other person is guilty of some kind of heresy. Only pragmatism stops them from killing each other all the time. It doesn’t take much to start the killing either.
That’s hardly unique to Muslims. Though I guess in the modern west, the number of people who are prepared to die strictly for a principle may be small.
The Chinese people as a whole (at leat the Han Chinese) are fanatically devoted to the idea of the united hegemonic Chinese nation. It is their primary value, more than freedom or any kind of social, economic or political ideology. This is not just a Communist Party construct. You can go back for a couple thousand years of Chinese writing and find this value being pretty ubiquitous. Most Chinese I know are enamored or capitalism only to the extent that it will lead to a richer, hence stronger, China. Individual rights are almost completely an alien concept in Chinese philosophy.
The worst thing you can call a person or group in China can be best translated as a “splittist” or a person who threatens the unity of China. Even a Chinese person from Singapore, who is living in the United States, somehow maintains some kind of allegiance to the concept of a unified China, which includes in their eyes, not just the Peoples Republic and Taiwan, but also Mongolia, Korea and North Vietnam.
Very intersting post. Maybe this is why Taiwan believed it was the legitimate representative of the mainland as well as the island. Do they still elect representaives from each province?
I disagree with your point that a united hegemonic Chinese nation is not a Communist Party construct. There is certainly a sizeable number of people on the pro-independent camp in Taiwan. There’s probably even more who don’t have any strong feelings about a united China one way or the other. I think most of the younger non-mainland Chinese don’t really care. I would bet many of them wouldn’t care whether the Tibetans and the Uyghurs want to become independent. And the idea that there are any significant number of non-mainland Chinese nowadays who still wants a Chinese hegemony that includes Mongolia, Korea and North Vietnam is just absurd.
Actually no, they have more problems with atheists than they do with Christians, and that is part of the reason they have a big problem with the west. They see us as a bunch of lascivious atheists who spend all of our time and energy planning the next orgy. At least, Osama bin Laden does as well as Sayeed Qutb, they said these things explicitly. How they feel on the streets of Pakistan might be different.
I feel icky coming down in the camp of Lonesome Polecat, but I’m inclined to agree; to wit, they protest Western civilization because we allow free and wholesome protest and tend to think it’s a good thing. The Communist Manifesto was published in London, after all, it’s highly unlikely (IMO) that something similar would be allowed in an actual Communist country.
Muslims do in fact have plenty of problems with Hindus, as Hindus do with Muslims. However I think there’s something endemic about Christianity & Islam, beyond the history, and I’m sure it has a lot to do with the fact that both religions think they are the only path to God, whereas Hinduism isn’t interested in converting anyone. You’ll all get to be Hindu eventually.