An inability among Muslim states to overcome their differing interests and present a united front is impeding a direly needed solution for the Palestinian cause, according to a professor of sociology.
“Most Muslim nations aren’t able to exert any diplomatic influence in the international state system,” said Sayed Fared Alatas, a Malaysian author and educator specializing in the decolonization of knowledge, Islamization of knowledge, Muslim intellectualism and sociology of Islam.
This powerlessness is evidenced by a recent Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting in Riyadh where members “could not even take a united stand and embark on a policy that would force the hand of Israel or its allies like the United States,” Alatas told Daily Sabah on the margins of the Conference on Contemporary Muslim Thought, organized by the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB) in Istanbul.
Buoyed by billions of dollars in military aid from Washington, Israel has been laying siege to Gaza since the Palestinian resistance group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing at least 1,200 and capturing some 240 people.
Relentless Israeli bombardment from air, land and sea, which killed over 12,000 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children, has drawn worldwide condemnation and mounting calls for an urgent cease-fire as the humanitarian crisis worsened in the blockaded city.
When they convened in Saudi Arabia, 57 OIC member states released a joint resolution urging the international community to exert pressure on Israel to halt its assault on Gaza and calling on the EU to hold Israel accountable for war crimes.
The EU, the U.S. and much of the West classify Hamas as a terrorist group.
For Alatas, a resolution or a call for a cease-fire isn’t the necessity here but “forcing” one is.
“Muslim governments must be able to force the U.S., for example, to desist from selling arms or providing billions of aid to Israel,” Alatas said.
Gulf states are heavily invested in the U.S. and its allies; Türkiye is a NATO member where it has obligations and Iran as an anti-imperialist country that often clashes with Arab states.
“There is a problem of differing ideologies determined by political, economic interests,” the professor said. “And these states aren’t able to transcend these differences to come up with a common vision.”
He lamented a lack of support from the international community and help from the Muslim world for Palestinians who have been “fighting an 80-year war for independence and statehood from the colonial state that is Israel.”
“The crisis in Gaza right now is one among several other wars,” he pointed out.
He believes the Palestinian city’s future remains uncertain regarding whether it will go back to a semi-self-rule or be reoccupied by Israel “but enormous support for Palestinians we find in the West today does reflect in the Western mood with regards to the conflict.”
“The hope is that this pressure from Western people may change the policies of Western governments,” Alatas said.
As for the uptick in Islamophobia, compared to the massive support for Palestine in the West, Alatas argued the trend is “of course bad but quite natural” and parallels a similar upsurge in anti-Semitism with regard to the war in Gaza.
“These xenophobic ideas have been there for decades among Western people,” he pointed out. “They resurface every now and then again when there are certain events like what is happening now. So, the only thing I can suggest is that there ought to be strong laws that protect people from hate speech and violence.”
There are laws against hate speech in the EU but these are said to have an imbalance to them, Alatas added, since they protect Jews from anti-Semitisim but not necessarily Muslims from Islamophobia.
“We live in a world that is still very much colonial,” Alatas went on.
He pointed out a “strong colonial orientation” in culture and knowledge creation in the global south even though the region has been politically decolonized.
There are efforts by different varieties of Muslim movements to bring about some independence or autonomy for the Muslim world, according to Alatas.
“Many movements have generally aimed to ensure military and economic independence and self-sufficiency from forces of imperialism and to liberate Muslim countries from authoritarian or totalitarian governments,” he said. “But in most cases, they have failed.”
“And in some cases where Islamic movements have managed to obtain state power, they have shown themselves to be as totalitarian or dictatorial as the regimes that they replaced. We really do have a crisis in our hands,” Alatas said.
He suggested that there was a lesson to be had from the pre-modern past, namely the Abbasi period when science, technology and culture were flourishing “because Muslim scientists, artists, scholars and other sectors didn’t rely on governments and instead built their own institutions based on charitable endowments.”
“This could be a model for us to follow rather than depend on our governments,” he said.
Likewise, Alatas studies the philosophy of 14th-century Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldun, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages.
His research has delved into the problem of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, and their impact on knowledge creation in the non-Western world, including the silencing of non-Western ideas, concepts and thinkers.
On the first day of the Conference on Contemporary Muslim Thought, Alatas delivered a seminar on the "Decolonization of the Social Sciences and the Muslim Intellectual Tradition."
The conference was a two-day event that sought to dissect contemporary matters affecting Muslim communities worldwide and deepen an understanding of contemporary Muslim thought.
Researchers from all over the world discussed Western cultural hegemony, colonialism, and ensuing political, social and economic movements and Islamic movements that grew in response.
The conference has also premiered an 11-volume book collection titled “Contemporary Muslim Thought Project,” to which Alatas has also contributed a chapter.
The first four books of the collection, released in 2020, concentrate on ideas from Türkiye, Egypt, Iran and the Indian subcontinent. The second quartet covers contemporary knowledge of Muslim communities from northern Africa, Southeast Asia, the Balkans, Western Europe and the U.S.
The last three books in the series, out now, highlight modern inclinations and developments from the Turkic world, the Arab world beyond Egypt and North Africa, as well as sub-Saharan Africa.
