A tale of Muslim Minorities

 A recent Research Center report documented the highest level of government restrictions on the free practice of religion worldwide in more than a decade. The Middle East and North Africa, continues to have the highest prevalence of government restrictions, while Asia showed a sharp increase in the use of force against religious groups, including property damage, detention, displacement, other forms of abuse, and killings.

While Christians were targeted in 145 countries worldwide in 2018, according to the study, Muslims came in close behind, facing harassment in 139 countries. But while Christians face serious repression in much of the world, government actions against Muslims were greater in scope and scale, impacting hundreds of millions of people.

 It is clear that no other community faces as high a level of government repression as Muslims—not just in certain countries where they are a minority, such as China and India, but also in places where Islam is the state religion and its practice is strictly enforced. In these countries, governments rarely tolerate dissident interpretations of Islam, let alone a citizen’s right to abandon the faith into which they were born.

China aims at nothing less than destroying Islam in its western province of Xinjiang, where more than 10 million Muslims live. The communist authorities have forced more than 1 million Uighur Muslims into more than 1,000 “reeducation” camps. The crime of “religious extremism” can include everyday tenets of the faith such as wearing a beard, refusing to drink alcohol, or fasting during Ramadan. Internal Chinese documents have confirmed the repression campaign, as has drone footage that shows Uighur Muslims bound and gagged.

In Myanmar, the government has perpetrated genocide against Rohingya Muslims, as experts have confirmed. Myanmar soldiers have been ordered to “kill all you see” in their massacre of Rohingya Muslims. While the Rohingya are also an ethnic minority, the mass atrocities—people killed, women raped, villages destroyed—that have led around 850,000 people to flee to neighboring Bangladesh would likely not be happening if they were Buddhists.

But it is not only authoritarians who target Muslims. In democratic and pluralistic India, which has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, government policies could conceivably force millions of Indian Muslims into statelessness with no recourse to regain their citizenship. The enforcement of laws restricting the slaughter of cows penalizes Muslims for offending against certain Hindu dietary restrictions. Across India, some authorities have turned a blind eye to mob violence against Muslims, including lynching. The revocation of the autonomy of the Muslim-majority state Jammu and Kashmir, along with the long-running lockdown there, has strong anti-Muslim undertones. And India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, recently established criminal penalties for alleged forced conversions in interfaith marriages, a law that grew out of the widespread “love jihad” conspiracy theory.

Muslims also face severe restrictions on their rights in Muslim-majority countries, where many governments deny their citizens the freedom to explore interpretations of their faith, change their religion or sect, or choose not to practice a religion at all—sometimes on the penalty of death.

With the exception of the Rohingya, persecution of Muslims has generally failed to garner high-level attention from governments and civil society. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and its members have been noticeably silent on China’s oppression of Muslims, losing their voice out of fear of China’s might. Some have even publicly supported Beijing’s measures against their co-religionists in Xinjiang. When Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited China in February 2019, he expressly supported Chinese “anti-terrorism” policies. In July 2019, many OIC members signed a letter celebrating China’s “remarkable achievements” in human rights and backing its Xinjiang policies.

The plight of Uighur Muslims who are subjected to the worst ever ill-treatment by China is heart wrenching. Muslims are forced to eat and drink during the day time at their workplaces. They are compelled to keep their hotels and eateries open despite their resistance. They are not allowed to perform their religious obligations. It goes without saying that reports about the treatment of Muslims by Chinese government in Uighur are quite disturbing. Even as there is little media access to the region, however, the information leaking out through the controlled media suggest these Muslims are currently the most oppressed people. Their plight is in many ways stated to be worse than Rohingya Muslims. Whatever limited information available through international media outlets say that at least one million Uighur Muslims have been kept in concentration camps which have been named as re-education centers—a euphemism for being forced to learn Mandarin and renounce their faith. They are deprived of their basic religious rights. They are forced to give up Islamic norms and customs. They are facing religious restrictions, detentions and even execution at the hands of the Chinese authorities. Uighurs from all walks of life have been denied the right to fast during Ramadan and been forbidden to wear traditional dress. The Chinese government has declared them outlaws and terrorists.

The Rohingya had suffered mass murder, confiscation of their property, the removal of their civil rights and freedoms of expression, rejection and spurning from a land they sought refuge in, arbitrary denial of return to their homeland and ethnicity based inspections. Or as Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies the American University of Washington phrased, the Rohingya were forced from “Kings to refugees.” It was the devastating Citizenship Law passed 15th October 1982 that formally denied the Rohingya citizenship in their own country.

One can find many similar practices between Myanmar and China. Both governments target and persecute ethnic minorities that do not conform to their artificial ideals. Both vehemently deny the allegations while deploying similar strategies and forms of punishment. Both authorities label their genocidal campaigns internal security matters and reject public criticism from democratic countries. Both governments have justified their actions by claiming that the ethnic minorities are extremists, legitimizing ruthless human rights violations under the guise of counterterrorism.