Is China Courting American Muslims?
The legitimization of political discourse against Muslims is on the rise in the United States, while Beijing—an ostensibly socialist, secular government—builds mosques, in a paradoxical soft-power pitch to the Muslim world. Will Muslim business interests look East?
In little over a decade since 9/11, China built a mosque to welcome Muslim guests from countries like neighboring Kazakhstan, a major supplier of natural fuels, to Guangzhou for the 2010 Asian Games. Chinese state-owned construction companies finished a railway allowing Muslims to travel between pilgrimage sites in Mecca and Medina in the same year and broke ground in the construction of a monumental Grand Mosque of Algiers in 2012.
Hong Kong is pushing for legislation to establish “a wholesale Islamic capital market in promoting Islamic finance,” a move to draw more Muslim capital and business to China’s Special Administrative Region, according to its Financial Services and Treasury Bureau.
Meanwhile, in the post-9/11 United States, a Baptist church inaugurated a day to burn Islam’s holy book in 2010; Herman Cain, in a bid for the Republican Party presidential ticket, proclaimed he would not appoint Muslims to his administration and suggested Muslim Americans take a loyalty oath in 2011; and roughly two dozen state congresses are considering new legislation to block Islamic law from penetrating their legal systems, in what Muslim American leaders are calling a phantom menace and an act of fearmongering.
“If the treatment of American Muslims doesn’t change, that will jeopardize U.S. interests in the Muslim world. Muslims have options. They might go to China and India,” said Haris Tarin, head of the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a Muslim American advocacy group.
What happens in the United States is splashed across the Arab presses, much as calls to terrorism are published widely in American media, said James Zogby, the founder of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a DC-based community-advocacy organization that conducts polling and policy research across the Middle East and North Africa.
“When we want Muslims to take a loyalty oath, it rings loudly around the Middle East like a bell,” Zogby said.