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| Zaha Hadid 9left) and Sheikha Moza. |
Muslims face dehumanisation when western countries apply double standards, the wife of the former emir of Qatar has warned in an unusual and critical public intervention from a senior royal in a wealthy Gulf state.
Sheikha Moza bint Nasser al-Missned, one of the most influential and high-profile women in the Arab world, also questioned distinctions between “moderate” or “liberal” and “conservative” Muslims and insisted that it was wrong to say that Islam was “stuck in medieval times”.
“Why is it that world leaders gathered to march in defence of Charlie Hebdo, while the Chapel Hill murders were shrugged off as a parking dispute?” she asked, in a reference to the killing of three Muslim students in North Carolina in February. She was speaking at St Antony’s College, Oxford, on Tuesday.
“At the same time we are confronted with double standards. Why is it that apologies are offered when Europeans are mistakenly killed by drones but only silence follows when innocent Yemeni and Pakistani children and civilians are killed by the same drones? Why do Muslim lives seem to matter less than the lives of others? If they matter at all. I believe this dehumanisation is cultivated through a process of Muslim-phobia.” » | Ian Black Middle East editor | Tuesday, May 26, 2015
