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Tape Ball Star
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2022
- Runs
- 600
Context: I have a good friend who is a muslim from Kerala and has been in the US for decades now. His community is the oldest muslim community of South Asia (please look up Mappila muslims for an interesting read -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappila_Muslims). He is an incredibly smart and kind person, our children are all similar ages so our families spend time together during some weekend days. I recently watched a movie from Kerala in his place (I forgot the name of the movie) and it was about the exploitation of middle east immigrant workers through the Kafala system.
More on the issue: While it was just a movie (well made one I might add), it got me curious and started discussing more about this with my friend. He shared many harrowing racist incidents from his own circle of friends and family, racist incidents by Arab muslims on fellow South Asian muslims. Besides this anecdotal account, I have seen and faced flippant behavior from Arabs myself, and have heard vile behaviors towards Pakistani workers from my extended family. My best friend (also a Pakistani American) and I got into serious fights during my high school with Arab kids who openly called us "Pakistani dogs" and would get into detail of how they had Pakistanis as slaves. I could not grasp the origins of their visceral hatred then, but I started understanding later on. This got me curious (dare I say also agitated) enough to explore more articles and research papers to understand the extent of this hate perversion by the Arabs and man it is shocking. I'm attaching some of the papers I came across for anyone interested and in the spirit of creating a discussion of substance.
My questions/frustrations: Islam preaches equality and nobody can dispute that. How are these vile creatures making peace with their racism while also offering their daily prayers? So we can say humans can be flawed at individual level and the system as a whole should be closer to idealism. Many of the GCC countries are Islamic by constitution, then how do they have a state sanctioned slavery system (Kafala) that goes against the very tenets of equality and creates lawful slavery? How do they (Arabs and Arab nations) then posture towards other muslim nations that they are the arbiters of everything about Islam and expect us to bow down to them? I admit, I have looked down on Hindus due to their religion having a fabric of inequality (caste system) but it is painful and frustrating to see that contemporary Islam has the same malaise with the Arabs looking down on all of us here as "below them sub-humans". This is increasingly making me ask myself if I have any right to critique on the caste system of Hindus when Islam today has such serious fissures due to such corrupted practices.
Reference Links
More on the issue: While it was just a movie (well made one I might add), it got me curious and started discussing more about this with my friend. He shared many harrowing racist incidents from his own circle of friends and family, racist incidents by Arab muslims on fellow South Asian muslims. Besides this anecdotal account, I have seen and faced flippant behavior from Arabs myself, and have heard vile behaviors towards Pakistani workers from my extended family. My best friend (also a Pakistani American) and I got into serious fights during my high school with Arab kids who openly called us "Pakistani dogs" and would get into detail of how they had Pakistanis as slaves. I could not grasp the origins of their visceral hatred then, but I started understanding later on. This got me curious (dare I say also agitated) enough to explore more articles and research papers to understand the extent of this hate perversion by the Arabs and man it is shocking. I'm attaching some of the papers I came across for anyone interested and in the spirit of creating a discussion of substance.
My questions/frustrations: Islam preaches equality and nobody can dispute that. How are these vile creatures making peace with their racism while also offering their daily prayers? So we can say humans can be flawed at individual level and the system as a whole should be closer to idealism. Many of the GCC countries are Islamic by constitution, then how do they have a state sanctioned slavery system (Kafala) that goes against the very tenets of equality and creates lawful slavery? How do they (Arabs and Arab nations) then posture towards other muslim nations that they are the arbiters of everything about Islam and expect us to bow down to them? I admit, I have looked down on Hindus due to their religion having a fabric of inequality (caste system) but it is painful and frustrating to see that contemporary Islam has the same malaise with the Arabs looking down on all of us here as "below them sub-humans". This is increasingly making me ask myself if I have any right to critique on the caste system of Hindus when Islam today has such serious fissures due to such corrupted practices.
Reference Links
- Recruitment of migrant workers -- https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/f...-beirut/documents/publication/wcms_519913.pdf
- Migration in the Middle East -- https://www.iom.int/sites/g/files/t.../mainsite/policy_and_research/gcim/rs/RS5.pdf
- 2020 UN Report on Racism (touching on this Middle East racism) -- https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/44/57/Add.1
- Human smuggling in the Middle East -- https://agsiw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Ubaydli_ONLINE_edits.pdf
- Institutionalized Middle East slavery by withholding passports -- https://www.stopslaverynetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/032.-IHRB_Fees-and-IDs-Report1.pdf