Muslims face dehumanization when Western countries apply double standards, the wife of the former emir of Qatar has warned, in an unusual and critical public intervention from a senior royal in a wealthy Persian Gulf state.
Sheika Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned, one of the most influential and high-profile women in the Arab world, also questioned distinctions between “moderate” or “liberal” and “conservative” Muslims and insisted that it was wrong to say that Islam was “stuck in medieval times.”
“Why is it that world leaders gathered to march in defense of Charlie Hebdo, while the Chapel Hill murders were shrugged off as a parking dispute?” she said in a reference to the killing of three Muslim students in North Carolina in February.
She was speaking at St Antony’s College, Oxford, on Tuesday.
“At the same time we are confronted with double standards. Why is it that apologies are offered when Europeans are mistakenly killed by drones, but only silence follows when innocent Yemeni and Pakistani children and civilians are killed by the same drones? Why do Muslim lives seem to matter less than the lives of others? If they matter at all. I believe this dehumanization is cultivated through a process of Muslim-phobia,” she said.
Mozah is the second of the three wives of the former emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and the mother of the current emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad. She also heads of the Qatar Foundation.
Alongside a genuine interest in Islamic civilization, there existed a fear of real, living Muslims, she said.
“For example, a Muslim is first and foremost identified as a Muslim, rather than simply a human being. Whether they are Pakistani, Malaysian, Senegalese or even British-born, their multiple identities are leveled under a constructed monolith of Islam,” she said.
“Let me remind you, however, that Islam has never been monolithical, but has from the start been a vast container for diverse cultures and ethnicities. The homogenization of Muslims into a fearful and unknowable ‘other,’ separate from the beauty and nobility of Islam and its civilization, is at the root of Muslim-phobia,” she said.
Islam had been used from all sides, she said.
“The radical militants put forth a version of Islam devoid of its spiritual content and subtlety of interpretation, nothing more than a violent political slogan,” she said.
However, neo-orientalists and libertarians “defame Islam, and the prophet, in particular,” she said.
It was wrong to use the word “medieval” to describe the actions of radicals, she said.
“But why do we insinuate that somehow those who are perpetuating certain acts of violence do not belong to our age? That somehow they are not modern? It is a naive refusal to accept our collective responsibility. ISIS is as modern as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are all products of our age,” she said, referring to the Islamic State by one of the many acronyms it is known by.
She also issued a stark warning about how “activism can quickly change to militancy” in the wake of the failure to replace autocratic leaders in the Arab spring uprisings.
“Debate is needed,” she said. “Violent repression is not.”
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