Sidi Junaid gives his $1

And so I was browsing around today and ended up reading old posts on Ali's blog .

One of them particularly caught my attention

Specially these comments by Mr. Junaid which I cannot help but agree with......

" ......... On the theme of why certain conflicts get more play in the Muslim imagination than others, which Ali touched on in his post as well, it may well be just subconscious racism, but my feeling is that there's something more to it.

Whenever you hear about the "ills of the Muslim world", the countries mentioned are always the usual suspects: Palestine, Iraq, now Afghanistan and occasionally Kashmir (though not often). What all of these conflicts have in common is that they are perceived by Muslims (whether rightly or wrongly) to be continuations of the European colonial experiment (the Indian thing in the Kashmir case is also thought to be a violation of state sovereignty -- though obviously not an European encroachment, hence the relatively weak response from the Muslim diaspora). And so there's a visceral response dictating that we should do everything in our power in defence of "our people" against "them" (read: Americans).

Unfortunately, and to our shame, the dynamics of African poverty don't seem to hold the same urgency for us -- although I think a good case can be made that Western nations owe a lot to Africa for the ravaging of their continent.

And so I think, as I often do, that the problem really returns to us. What is it about the modern Muslim psyche that elicits such a myopic vision of the world and the ummah? My tentative response is that we define what it means to be Muslim vis-a-vis "those terrible Americans/Westerners." Our identity seems to be a function of what we're not. And so we get riled up when we are thought to be under the hegemonic control of those dirty kafirs who we are so much better than. Meanwhile, African children (many, many of them Muslims) dying of AIDS, hunger, and civil war slip under the radar."