Why do people, including Muslims, do not really care for Syria?

by Dr. Aslam Abdullah
Why do people, including Muslims do not really care for Syria? Did they really care for fellow Muslims in Kashmir, Gujarat, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, China, Kosovo, or any other place in the world?

The most we did was to take a few dollars out of our deep or shallow pockets when we found the stench of dead bodies reached our nostrils and became unbearable. Once the dead bodies were out of our eyesight, we went back to our world and those who had suffered and still alive were forgotten. The presence of over 42 million displaced people all over the world is a living testimony of our indifference.

Why?

We tend to be divided into nations and nationalism has become our deity. Within a nation, we are divided into ethnicities and ethnicity has become our deity. We are divided into regions, races, religions, castes into clans, into classes and into parties, oligarchy, and cliques. We become concerned only when someone like us or of us suffers. For the rest, our level of sympathies depends on the volume and the style of killing. Look at the level of our sympathy for the people of Bangladesh, Bosnia, Gujarat or Iraq, Palestine or Syria and evaluate our own attitude. Syrians are the most vocal for Syrians the same way Kashmiris or Gujaratis were most vocal for their folks. We are not born with divisive nationalism. But we are taught that. We are taught that our clan, our tribe, our family, our status, our country, our nation, our religion and our ethnicity are superior or better of all. Why should we bother for those who are less than us? Is this not the logical conclusion of our upbringing?

Now the cries are coming from Syria, of women, children and disabled; cries of girls raped, elderly maimed and brutalized, and cries of children whose parents were killed in front of their own eyes. Disfigured rotting dead bodies, which could not find the grave and shrouds, offer living testimony of the inhumanity of humans to their fellows in the name of politics, security, stability, power, and whatnot.

Similar cries have been heard all over the world from time to time. Sometimes, we heard them in Germany, Bosnia, Tatarstan, and Bangladesh, and sometimes we heard them in Gujarat, Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, Vietnam, Haiti, Brazil, Mexico, China, Uganda, Somalia, and almost everywhere in the world.
Our response is and was simple. From our masajid, we are and were told to make prayers (dua) to God to help them out of the situation. But God has never listened to these prayers in human history. He did not respond to the prayers for those in Spain, who were killed by Christians conducting inquisition. God did not respond to Jews who were tortured to death in Germany by Christian Hitler and his Nazi party. God did not listen to the prayers of Muslims in the Soviet Union, China, and Albania or in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan or in Gujarat. God did not listen to the prayers of Muslims for the victims of rape in Bosnia. Nor did he save thousands and thousands butchered by Orthodox Christians in Bosnia. God does not respond to the continued sufferings of Palestinians who for the last 60 years have been forced to live a life of humiliation an indignity.

Our conclusion to all this continued violence against the creation of God is and was also very simple. God does not listen to our prayers because we do not pray properly, our women do not wear hijab properly, our children do not wear a proper dress, we do not read the Quran properly and our actions are not in line with the divine teachings. God is punishing us, we pronounce this judgment after every calamity, man-made or nature created.

Thus the killings go on, rapists roam the streets, bombs destroy homes and death occupies the streets and we Muslims keep on reminding ourselves to pray more, dress more modestly and live simply.

But this formula is not working. It will never work because the method that we are adopting to get the divine help is not what God recommended or commanded to us.

The divine formula is simple and straight forward.

“And why should you not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)? Men, women, and children, whose cry is: "Our Lord! Rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from You one who will protect, and raise for us from You one who will help!” (The Quran: 4:75)

Muslims have refused to follow this simple divine formula. Bringing down the oppressor, the dictator, his armies, his forces, his resources would cause the collapse of his regime. Even without fighting, this could happen. When the world and the Muslim world would refuse to cooperate with dictators, would seize their bank accounts, would stop delivery of arms and material and technology to manufacture arms, would isolate the regime and would announce that their forces would act in defense of people and protect innocent lives, then only we would see an end to this violence, then only we would see the divine response to our prayers.. Only then our prayers would be answered because this is the only way God has listened to the prayers throughout human history. “(Such was) the practice (approved) of Allah among those who lived aforetime: No change will you find in the practice (approved) of Allah.” (The Quran: 32:62)

Today, in the case of Syria, we are a divided people. There are those amongst us Muslims who are supportive of the dictators, especially the oppressors in Syria for whatever reason. Those supporters of Syrian dictator are not concerned about human life or sufferings. They are concerned about the balance of power in the region, about the Shia-Sunni divide, about the impact of regime change in relations to world politics. They do not care about justice or the rule of law or the divine commandments to save human life.

 If the Muslim world really wants to stop the killings in Syria or in other places of the world, it will have to destroy the bane of nationalism and then act in unison to defend life and dignity of human beings. “On that account: We ordained for the Children of Israel that if anyone slew a person - unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land - it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people. Then although there came to them Our apostles with clear signs, yet, even after that, many of them continued to commit excesses in the land.” (The Quran: 5:32)