The Answer

In the slug of an op-ed at the New York Times by Mustafa Akyol, an important question is asked:

In modern-day “re-education” prisons, Beijing is forcing ethnic Uighurs to forsake their religion. Why don’t Muslim governments rise up in anger?

Here’s how he answers the question:

There are three answers. One is that coziness with China, the world’s second-largest economic power, pays. China is the top trading partner of 20 of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a huge path of commercial and transportation infrastructure intended to pass through much of the Middle East, holds a lucrative promise for many Muslim nations.

Moreover, China does not shy away from offering its economic assistance as hush money. In July 2018, The Global Times, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, ran an interesting editorial suggesting that China’s government would help Turkey secure its “economic stability” — but only if Turkish officials stopped making “irresponsible remarks on the ethnic policy in Xinjiang,” which means stop criticizing China’s human rights violations. (At about the same time, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, was also promising to help the Turkish economy, but only if Turkey corrected its own human rights violations. In other words, Turkey was being pulled in opposite directions, and, sadly, the dark side has proved stronger so far.)

A second reason for Muslim silence is that the Chinese government crackdown on Uighurs is based on a premise that law and order can be restored by eradicating enemies of the government and traitors within a society. This is authoritarian language that most Muslim leaders understand well. It is their own language.

The third reason is that most Muslims who are likely to feel solidarity with their oppressed coreligionists think of the oppressors as “the West,” defined as the capitalist, hedonist, Zionist civilization led by the Great Satan. These Muslims, particularly the Islamists, believe that all of their coreligionists should unite with other anti-Western forces — a stance that evokes Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a “Confucian-Islamic” alliance against the West in his 1993 article in “Foreign Affairs” titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”

Those may be factors but I think the answer is simpler than that. The Uighurs aren’t Arabs. Sometimes things are a lot less than they seem and the “clash of civilizations” may be one of them. For many people in the world tribe remains the highest value.