The Germans criticized it. The British voiced their discomfort. The French, the Canadians and even some Republican senators in Washington stood in open opposition.
However, in Cairo and Riyadh, in the heart of the Muslim world, US President Donald Trump’s decision to bar millions of refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from the US was met with a conspicuous silence.
King Salman of Saudi Arabia, home of Islam’s holiest sites, spoke to Trump by telephone on Sunday, but made no public comment.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, whose capital, Cairo, is a traditional seat of Islamic scholarship, said nothing.
Even the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a group of 57 nations that considers itself the collective voice of the Muslim world, kept quiet.
Leaders in Iran and Iraq, two of the countries targeted by Trump’s order, on Sunday issued furious denunciations and vowed to take retaliatory measures.
However, the silence in the capitals of Muslim-majority countries unaffected by the order reflected a lack of solidarity and an enduring uncertainty about the direction Trump’s foreign policy might take in some of the world’s most volatile corners.
Will he move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? Designate Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization? Fall in line with Russia in dealing with the conflict in Syria?
“Trump has promised to do all kinds of things, but it’s not clear what he will move on immediately,” said Nathan Brown, a Middle East expert at George Washington University. “Nobody seems to know. It’s not even clear if Trump knows.”
The lack of political solidarity may be a sign of the enduring weakness of Muslim leaders who frequently pay lip service to the ummah, or global community of Muslims, but are more often driven by narrow national interests — even when faced with grave actions seen as an affront to their own people.
“They don’t have a strong basis of legitimacy at home,” said Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut. “They are delicately perched between the anger of their own people and the anger they might generate from the American president.”
Trump’s executive order — which froze all refugee arrivals in the US and barred the entry of citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days — has sent a whirlwind of confusion, anxiety and fury across the Middle East and Africa.
Refugees have been turned back at airports, families separated indefinitely and long-planned trips upended.
“I thought in America, there were institutions and democracy,” said Fuad Sharef, 51, an Iraqi Kurd bound for New York who was turned away from the Cairo airport with his wife and three children on Saturday morning. “This looks like a decision from a dictator. It’s like [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein.”
In a Facebook post on Sunday evening, Trump insisted that his policy was not a “Muslim ban” and accused the news media of inaccurate reporting.
Hours earlier, he had characterized the conflict with the Islamic State group in starkly sectarian terms, asserting on Twitter: “Christians in the Middle East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!”
In fact, a majority of the Islamic State group’s victims have been Muslims, many of them shot, burned or beheaded.
Among the Muslims who managed to escape the group’s territory are the refugees Trump has now excluded.
In a telephone conversation with Trump on Saturday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel cited the 1951 Refugee Convention, which calls on signatories to take in people fleeing war, according to Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s spokesman.
Yet in much of the Middle East, Trump is less likely to get such a scolding.
He has drawn close to al-Sisi, whom he called a “fantastic guy,” and is considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Sisi’s sworn enemy, a terrorist organization.
In his order, whose stated aim is to keep extremists out of the US, Trump invoked the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks three times. Yet Saudi Arabia, which was home to 15 of the 19 attackers, was not included on the list of countries whose citizens would be shut out.
That reflects the deep economic and security ties between the US and Saudi Arabia.
Trump also has a personal financial link: In August 2015, just as his campaign was gathering steam, the Trump Organization registered eight companies in Saudi Arabia that were linked to a hotel development in the city of Jeddah.
Pakistan, another country whose citizens have carried out attacks in the US, also ducked Trump’s list.
Although Trump had a chummy phone call with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif shortly after the US election in November last year, Pakistanis are nervously waiting to see if Trump will pull US troops from Afghanistan.
“There’s a lot of concern,” said Zahid Hussain, a political analyst in Islamabad. “For now, they want to keep quiet and see how things go.”
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