By: IBRAHIM Jaafar
German-Turkish football player Mesut Ozil shared a heartfelt prayer for the Uighur Muslim minority in China three weeks ago, expressing his outrage at the lack of action from Muslim countries.
"The Muslim community is mute," Ozil wrote in the tweet, which shared a sincere prayer written in Turkish over the blue Uighur flag.
The Uighur community in Xinjiang, northwest China, has faced an unprecedented crackdown in recent years, with at least one million mostly Muslim ethnic minorities held in internment camps that authorities downplay as "vocational education centres".
Ozil wrote: "Oh East Turkestan," he said, using the name Uighur activists use for the independent state they want to see established in Xinjiang.
"Don't they know that years later what our brothers and sisters will remember of these bitter days is not the torture of the oppressors but the silence of their Muslim brothers?" the football star asked.
"Oh Lord, please help our brothers and sisters in East Turkestan."
He then slammed the Muslim community for its silence.
"The Muslim community is mute," the Arsenal midfielder wrote in the tweet, which shared a sincere prayer written in Turkish over the blue Uighur flag.
"They are burning Qur'ans, they are closing mosques, they are banning madrasas [religious schools], religious leaders are being killed one by one, they are forcing our brothers into camps and in their places they are placing Chinese men with the families, forcing sisters to marry them," he wrote, listing a series of alleged human rights abuses by the Chinese government.
"Despite all this, the Muslim community is mute."
The international community has largely been silent on the issue and Muslim countries were among thirty-seven states which cosigned a letter in the United Nations defending China's treatment of Uighur Muslims in July.
China initially denied the existence of these camps, but now claims that its detention centres are not concentration camps but "re-education camps" where "students" are trained to successfully reintegrate into Chinese society. It claims the camps are a necessary measure to counter Islamic extremism.
Earlier this year, detained Uighur women in China's western province of Xinjiang said they were released by proving their "adaptability to Chinese society" by drinking alcohol and eating pork.
That comment has stuck with me since, (the plight and pains of Uighurs). It brings to my mind the story of the Muslim woman, held captive and humiliated by the Romans, who cried out “Wa Mu’tasima!” , calling the name of the Muslim king thousands of miles away. Her captors laughed at her, asking her why she was calling out to the king – did she think he would mount a black and white horse and come defend her from so far away? News of her cry reached Al Mu’tasima, and he did indeed mount a black and white horse, gathered his army and declared the famous line,“When the first person of my army reaches the land of the Romans, the last of my army will have left here (the Muslim barracks)”. With an entire army of soldiers on black and white horses, he reached the area where the woman was held and freed her, acknowledging that he had come in response to her cry.
Who will be the new Mu'tasim of today?