James M Dorsey, Award-winning journalist and commentator/
WION News
A disagreement between major Indonesian religious leaders and the government on how to respond to China’s crackdown on Turkic Muslims raises questions about the Islamic World’s ability to sustain its silence about what amounts to one of the most concerted assaults on the faith in recent history.Rejecting a call on the government by the Indonesian Ulema Council, the country’s top clerical body, to condemn the crackdown that has seen up to one million Turkic Muslims detained in re-education camps in China’s north-western province of Xinjiang, Indonesian vice-president Jusuf Kalla insisted that the government would not interfere in the internal affairs of others.
The disagreement could take on greater significance after elections in April next year which incumbent president Joko Widodo is expected to win Widodo’s vice-presidential running mate, Maruf Amin, is the ulema’s council’s chairman. Since joining the presidential ticket, Amin has retained his council position as non-active chairman.
Nonetheless, eager to attract Chinese infrastructure investment, Kalla’s position is in line with a majority of Muslim countries, who have opted to remain silent in a bid not to jeopardise relations with the People’s Republic even if many of them have responded angrily to far less threatening incidents such as the condemnation of British writer Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses; the cartoon depiction in Denmark of the Prophet Mohammed; and the burning of a Quran by an American pastor.
In a similar vein, Mushahid Hussain, chairman of Pakistan’s Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, said the cardinal principle of Pakistan-China relations was to refrain from commenting on anything to do with another other country’s domestic issues even though some 200 small Pakistani businessmen have been campaigning for the release of their Uyghur spouses from Chinese camps and either the lifting of travel bans on their children or being allowed to visit them.
“Given the relationship of Pakistan with China, and in the Muslim world, in particular, the Chinese narrative is apparently being accepted across the board as the one that is correct,” Hussain told Associated Press.By the same token, Turkey with its ethnic and cultural links to China’s Turkic Muslims and past support for Uyghur aspirations has adopted a similar attitude as Chinese investment and financial aid expands.With the exception of a few protests in Bangladesh and India and critical statements by Malaysian leaders, Muslims across the globe have largely refrained from pressuring their governments to speak out about developments in Xinjiang. If anything, China retains its status of Asia’s top tourism destination for Muslim travellers.
Nabeel Shariff, the founder of UK-based halal holiday company Serendipity Tailormade, struggled with the ethical aspects of promoting Muslim tourism to China, but concluded that “In a way, it makes sure the Uygur community are not forgotten.”Shariff’s justification notwithstanding, there is little public evidence of the plight of China’s Turkic Muslims being in the Muslim public eye. Muslim and Chinese leaders appear to be betting that the silence is sustainable. That threatens to be a risky strategy.
For one, the crackdown in Xinjiang is expanding to the Hui, China’s non-Turkic Muslims. The autonomous region of Ningxia Hui recently signed a cooperation agreement on anti-terrorism with Xinjiang in a bid to learn from the crackdown on the Turkic Muslims or in the words of the Global Times, a Communist Party organ, “to learn from Xinjiang’s experiences in promoting social stability.”