From Europe to the Middle East to Africa, Muslim diplomats are stepping into the vacuum left by the West and leading international deal-making efforts.
Ian Proud
THE 21st century has seen a surge in Islamophobia in Western nations, which have, at the same time, sought to impose Western values and pick sides in ever more violent global disputes.
The big irony is that Muslim diplomats have stepped into the statesmanship vacuum and are proving to be the world’s great peacemakers.
Following a flurry of negotiations brokered by Türkiye, five Thai hostages were recently released by Hamas in Gaza. This was the latest example of an Islamic country stepping up to provide vital diplomacy and fill the statesmanship vacuum created by the US and its Western partners.
Barely two months ago, in December, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a “historic reconciliation” between Ethiopia and Somalia following Ankara-mediated peace talks.
In 2022, Türkiye hosted the Istanbul Peace talks, which almost ended the Ukraine war just one month after it started, but that effort was blocked by the US and the UK.
Türkiye brought Russia and Ukraine together to agree on a Black Sea Grain initiative to protect much-needed shipments of food and fertiliser, including to the developing world.
Other Islamic nations are doing their bit. Together, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye brokered the release of Western prisoners from Russia in September 2022.
Saudia Arabia hosted an early Ukraine Peace summit in Jeddah in 2023. The United Arab Emirates has played perhaps the leading role in negotiating the two-way release of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war and the remains of killed service personnel.
Qatar recently brokered the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire and has reportedly hosted the early talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials aimed at ending the three-year war.
Qatar, for many years, was the meeting point for talks between the US and the Taliban before the West’s bungled evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021.
Islamophobia and the West
The greater prominence of diplomatic leadership from the Muslim world sits in stark contrast to the growth in Islamophobia in the twenty-first century.
Islamophobia wasn’t invented in 2001, but the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and Washington DC stimulated its growth in the US and in the Western world.
Islamophobia uses harmful and untrue stereotypes to damage Muslims and the reputation of Islam, often propagated through right-wing misinformation. In the week after 9/11, three people were killed in the US, one of whom was actually a Sikh, gunned down because he was mistaken for an immigrant Muslim because of the colour of his skin and beard.
The trend continues till today. A report by the Pew Centre indicated that hate crimes against Muslims in America surpassed 2001 levels in 2016. After the war between Hamas and Israel started in October 2023, they surged further.
Anti-Islamic sentiment triggered, and no doubt bolstered, public support for the US-led global war on terror which started after 9/11, first with the invasion of Afghanistan and the second Iraq war in 2003.
This is estimated to have cost the US $8 trillion and to have led to the deaths of 900,000 people, most of whom were innocent.
It prompted an acceleration of the process of extraordinary rendition, by which suspects were extra-judicially kidnapped to foreign countries and rendered to US detention facilities for interrogation and trial. In 2008, the UK government was forced to issue an apology for its complicity in and support for US rendition flights.
Islamophobia appears widespread in British politics. The governing UK Labour Party has been accused of Islamophobia in the past by its own membership.
The UK Conservative Party – in power from 2010 to 2024 – was forced to apologise in 2021 when an independent report suggested that “anti-Muslim sentiment remains a problem”.
On the global stage, Islamic countries are often criticised for their perceived democratic failings and allegations of a weak record on human rights.
Human rights and democracy are the go-to arguments deployed by European bureaucrats to halt Türkiye’s progress towards EU membership, which seems permanently on ice.
Yet Turkish labour helped drive the West German economic miracle, yet their presence under the system of Gastarbeiter (guest workers) can be viewed in the context of an exploitative relationship rooted in racial superiority.
From Sporty Spice to Rod Stewart, Western celebrities and so-called influencers were queuing up to denounce the very successful football World Cup in Qatar in 2022.
It is common for Western media to report on Saudi Arabia’s multi-billion dollar investment in the sport as a way to rebrand its image against claims of human rights abuses – called sportswashing – or to cover up the environmental impact of its oil extraction activities – called greenwashing.
Islamic countries are likened to so-called dictatorships in China and Russia to confirm that they are essentially the same, un-Western, furthermore, un-Christian, and therefore unappealing.
Western citizens have been overwhelmed with a tidal wave of government-led efforts to promote diversity, inclusion and equality.
And yet, the avalanche of negative reporting about Islamic nations lacks any sense of value for their cultural and religious diversity, nor any effort to make Muslims feel accepted and valued within the UK or elsewhere.
Western double-speak
A new term has seeped into the Western lexicon over the past twenty years – rules-based international order.
Those rules have never been defined or codified in a document like the 1945 United Nations Charter, which genuinely seeks peace, dignity and equality on a healthy planet.
Western diplomacy has instead sought to pick winners in international disputes.
The rules-based international order is a term exclusively used by a narrow and prejudiced Western club, led by the United States, to decide which states are “with us or against us”, to paraphrase George W Bush.
The 21st century has seen an almost wholesale departure from conventional diplomacy by Western powers.
The UK and an every-centralising European Union no longer see themselves as benign, convening moderators in global disputes. Instead, they have repudiated dialogue, seeking only victory against whichever side in the dispute is considered their enemy.
We see this in the war between Ukraine and Russia, with Western powers believing that an impossible victory by Ukraine is preferable to an imperfect peace.
And during Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which killed over 48,000 innocent people, the US and the UK, in particular, have been half-hearted, at best, in trying to rein in an ever more dangerous Netanyahu.
Indeed, newly-elected President Trump has sought to insulate Netanyahu from accountability by sanctioning the International Criminal Court and threatening anyone who might seek to put Israel’s Prime Minister on trial.
Into this vast global statesmanship vacuum have stepped Islamic countries.
How ironic that following a two-decade surge in Islamophobia and a departure of moralising Western nations from conventional diplomacy, Muslim diplomats are emerging as the world’s peacemakers.
c. TRT World
