LET US STATE a forthright word from the outset: Islam — from its principal sources and the practice of its most outstanding people – comes down unequivocally on the side of providing emergency relief to those who need it when they need it, if we can reach them:
Whether or not they believe like us
No matter their race, ethnicity, or geography
Even if their political leaders or they themselves express enmity toward Islam or to any of us because our religion is Islam
Allah and His messenger, on him be peace, have taught us to hasten to their aid. This applies even if the ones in dire need are not human at all but, say, animals in peril of death or harm, plants being poisoned, or minerals over-exploited such that they offset the balances Allah set in the earth. We are to do so seeking only God’s Face when providing their emergency relief.
It is for Allah alone to address the affairs of faith and belief for those in dire need or in the throes of calamity. Our responsibility is to do good to them. And not just for the empathy that should strike our hearts when we behold their suffering — but to soothe the yearning within us to be nearer to Allah.
It is not incumbent upon you, [O Muhammad,] to ensure the openness of the hearts of people and their acceptance of divine guidance. Rather, it is God who guides whomever He so wills. And know that whatever good you believers spend, it is for the good of your own souls. So whatever you spend in charity, do so seeking only the Face of God. Thus, whatever good you spend shall be rendered to you in full — and never shall you be wronged in the least (Surat Al-Baqarah, 2:272).
This is Islam. It is “The Peace” or, if you will, “The Submission.”
And who are we Muslims but the ones who humbly seek with our lives to bear this witness?
We seek to restore peace to disturbances in the divine order.
“You are the best Community ever brought forth ‘for’ the good of humankind.”
We seek to return ourselves and the world after misguided defiance to its natural state of this submission.
“You enjoin what is right. And you forbid what is wrong.”
We serve Allah by serving the urgent needs of His servants, all His creatures, and all His creation.
“And you believe in the One God” (Surat Al ‘Imran, 3:110).
We intend, here, to account for why Zakat Foundation of America and other international Muslim relief groups should provide non-Zakat emergency relief to the refugees and displaced of Ukraine, if they have the means, but let’s first acknowledge something crucial:
There is a reason for the natural “Muslim sentiments” of outrage and repugnance for the emergency aid Muslim humanitarian organizations are now rushing to these people.
Ukraine and its neighbors — and most of Europe — have responded in the cruelest and most dehumanizing way for decades to Muslim refugees. And not just to Muslims, but they have also denied and withheld support for others whose skin tones are different from their own, fleeing war and persecution in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), or Sub-Saharan Africa, or South or East Asia, or who are part of long-persecuted peoples within Europe itself, like the Roma. They chose not to take a stand against wars and displacements that these peoples of Europe themselves have mostly perpetrated against Muslims and the races to begin with.
You’d have to have a heart of stone, or lack communal, human emotion altogether, not to feel fury and sorrow after bearing witness to the difference of how Europe, east and west, is reacting to, portraying, and receiving with compassion and dignity-preserving welcome Ukrainian refugees. This is in clear contrast with its years of rejection and persecution of mostly Muslim, but also African and Asian non-Muslim, asylum-seekers. And just months after a new wave of the Afghan refugee crisis began.
Europeans and their global offspring lionize the Ukrainians defending their homes and land against aggression. Even those who’ve blown themselves up in the effort, they’ve hailed as heroes. But the Muslim who defends his rights and honor, his home and family, his ancestral lands and freedoms, they label “terrorist” and assail his faith as a “religion of violence,” such that all Muslims are “fittingly” suspected of terrorism.
Hungary’s notoriously Islam-hating and supremacist prime minister, Victor Orbán, refused to give Muslim asylum-seekers even the compassion of the title “refugees.” He instead marked them “Muslim invaders” and stigmatized them with the newly pejorative political classification of “migrants.” Yet Ukraine’s émigrés he now welcomes with among the most efficient, considerate “refugee” receptions of our times, proving it was possible all along to accept Muslim refugees if not for his abject bigotry.
“We are able to tell the difference between who is a migrant and who is a refugee,” he recently said, with trademark arrogance and hardheartedness. “Migrants are stopped. Refugees can get all the help.”
Kiril Petkov, his Bulgarian counterpart, minced no words about the difference between Ukrainian and Muslim refugees: “This is not the refugee wave we have been used to — people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”
For 11 straight years, European governments and the European Union have executed policies of overt, inhuman rejection, humiliation, and walled-off encampments for tens of thousands of Syrian Muslims fleeing for their lives from horrific, relentless aerial bombardment, poison gas attacks, and military assaults.
The word "displacement" only clinically describes the saga these human beings have been forced to bear. They have been chased relentlessly from hideout to hovel and made refugees on multiple occasions. In desperation, they finally departed — fled — their country and region. They alighted utterly broken among Europeans they had never met.
There, barely clothed, Muslim and non-Muslim asylum-seekers — women, children and babies, just like the Ukrainian ones we’re now seeing tearfully humanized for hours on the nightly news — received only the frigid welcome of water cannons and teargas from Poland in the dead of winter.
Driven by despair into the Mediterranean Sea in over-packed rubber dinghies and scarcely seaworthy boats controlled by exorbitantly charging traffickers, these asylum seekers watched helplessly as Greek, Italian, Spanish and Maltese coast guards and navy ships left them adrift or committed illegal and unthinkable pushbacks of their vessels from territorial waters into open seas. And how many then washed up lifeless on the European shores they were prevented from reaching?
Beginning in 2016 with Italian efforts through fractured Libyan ministries and militias under cover of official Coast Guard status, the European Union has since surreptitiously funded and trained the personnel of a lucrative, for-profit shadow prison system. It centers on structures called Al-Mabani — The Buildings — in Libya to extrajudicially hold African migrants from Eritrea, Sudan, Guinea-Bissau and other countries, and keep them out of Europe. This, along with high-level payoffs to politicians in select African nations, has dramatically curtailed asylum migration from the heart-shaped continent to Europe.
The small percentage of these shrinking numbers of refugees who have found their way into Europe — often to great, self-congratulatory public relations fanfare from these countries’ leaders — came to receptions of isolated detainment, sometimes for years. In Germany, they literally went to Holocaust-era Nazi concentration camp buildings in Dachau, where thousands of Jewish slave laborers died — not refashioned but only renamed in true Orwellian style as “Refugee Center.”
We’ve spoken of Syrian refugees, but what of Afghans suffering 20 years of massive, and massively pointless, American onslaught; or Libyans, Tunisians, and Sub-Saharan Africans, all of whose lands still limp with the dysfunction and crippling intercession of centuries of European imperialism?
What of 5 million Palestinians ground for three-quarters of century under the millstone of unmistakable Israeli apartheid, brought to you by America, and Russia, and Europe, with a like number in permanent diaspora scatter-shot across the world?
Yet even this is insufficient to understand why Muslims feel an infuriated cognitive dissonance when beholding, say, Poland’s or Hungary’s well-organized, red-carpet welcome of Ukraine’s citizen refugees.
It is the blatant mistreatment of Muslim students, and Africans, Indians, and Asians trying to flee from the same life-threatening Russian assault on Ukraine. Ukrainian policemen, guards, and militiamen — people you’d think most sensitive to the shared plight of these scared, displaced young people — instead beat and harassed them in flight.
They physically stopped them — women included — from boarding trains and busses meant to serve precisely this purpose, even when these vehicles had room or the Muslim, African, or Asian students had humbly waited for their turn for hours, days.
Some who did succeed in boarding were forcibly removed from the transportation to safety they had paid for, compelling them at gunpoint to make way for free-boarding Ukrainians. Callously, these armed Ukrainians pointed west. “There’s Poland. Walk.”
Fleeing Ukrainians received the kindnesses of food, water, rides, and services along the way from both Ukrainians and their well-wishers in sympathetic host countries. Yet the Muslims and the displaced of other continents and complexions weren’t allowed to buy food. They were compelled by armed Ukrainians to relieve themselves in the winter woods like animals, though these students stood right outside the doors of available washrooms.
Most of our black, and brown, and Muslim young had to watch their displaced Ukrainian fellows cross into Poland or other countries in minutes — extended asylee visas ready and waiting all across Europe — while these same “hosts” forced them to wait for hours, even days, to gain entry and find services, when all these poor students were trying to do was go home.
But what has sent Muslims even more over the humanitarian edge is the reporting of transparently racist Western journalists from and on Ukraine. This self-blinded display of an obliviously ingrained Ukrainian and European religious prejudice and white supremacism has exponentially compounded the moral sense of Muslim outrage across the world.
Listen to this unconscious “honesty” from an NBC reporter on the difference between Ukrainian and Syrian war victims:
“To put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria,” she said. “These are refugees from neighboring Ukraine. I mean, that is, quite frankly, part of it. These are Christians. They’re white. They are very similar to people in Poland.”
Or how about this from a CBS reporter trying to stay self-consciously cautious:
“This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. You know, this is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”
Ukrainians, Europeans — they represent civility and do not, therefore, merit the victimizations of war. But those Afghans and Iraqi Muslims, they apparently have it coming to them. As supposed barbarians, they deserve all the violence the West could “hope” for.
Here’s the “overarching truth … on glaring display” since Russia’s Ukraine invasion, according to one Canadian columnist who has somehow remained conscious of the humanity of Muslims and non-Europeans: “The lives of white Europeans engulfed by war matter and the lives of everyone else outside that continent engulfed by war do not.”
This long enumeration of the West’s blatant dehumanization and cruelty to Muslims — historically, as well as today in Ukraine and in reporting on its war — is to let our morally offended supporters and others know this: We, too, have the same bruised feelings and trampled sensibilities that have caused some Muslims to denounce organized Muslim humanitarian aid to Ukraine in the face of such fulsome religious bigotry, racist supremacy, and ethno-nationalism.
It’s not that these Muslim donors want to withhold help from the desperate and dislocated. They simply don’t want to see Muslim sadaqah support the racism and Islamophobic governance at work in Ukraine and the European host countries receiving them. To these objecting donors, our aid seems only to abet these empowered perpetrators’ abuse of Muslim and non-European refugees and displaced, to fortify racist, fascist-leaning, fortress Europe.
We understand.
But as the early 20th-century Libyan teacher Omar al-Mukhtar — turned anti-colonialist leader and fighter against Italian imperialist aggression — said to his followers who advocated abuse against captured Italian soldiers like what the Italians did to their Libyan prisoners of war and occupation: “They are not our teachers.”
Indeed. We seek, then, not the counsel of our passions and emotions for guidance in these fraught matters of Muslim humanitarian aid among the people mistreating us, or who have proclaimed themselves adversaries to us because of our religion. Rather, we look to the Quran and the way of Prophet, on him be peace, and their expression in the lives of our knowledgeable and our admirable predecessors in faith.