For decades, Islamic nations have invoked ummah solidarity to express outrage over injustices affecting Muslims. From Palestine and Kashmir to the Rohingya crises, leaders within the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) frame solidarity with oppressed Muslims as a moral responsibility. Yet today, as China orchestrates a campaign of mass repression and cultural erasure against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities, much of the Islamic world has remained silent, or worse, defended China’s actions. To many, this is not just a betrayal of a religious ideal, but an assault on the very architecture of the human rights order—principles that Islamic states have themselves invoked when defending Muslim communities elsewhere. Perhaps global Islamic solidarity was always weaker than its rhetoric suggested, undermined not only by states that openly reject human rights norms, but also by the quiet hypocrisies of those who profess to defend them while selectively overlooking other abuses.
Since 2014, China’s “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism” has unleashed a wave of cataclysmic violence against Uyghurs in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. More than a million Uyghurs have been detained in a vast network of “re-education” camps where they are subjected to forced labor, sterilization, torture, sexual violence, and sweeping bans on language and faith. While allegations against China span from crimes against humanity to genocide, many Islamic nations have emerged as China’s most vocal defenders, praising its so-called “counterterrorism” measures and rushing to quell discussion of the Uyghur genocide at the UN.
In October 2022, the UN Human Rights Council voted against debating the Uyghur genocide, marking the second time in the council’s history that such a motion had been struck down. Of the 19 nations that blocked this debate, nine were Muslim majority states—among them Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—alongside a broader cohort of authoritarian regimes, all with deep economic ties to China. Almost all of these nations had condemned atrocities against other Muslim minorities in the past. Saudi Arabia, one of the 50 signatories of a joint letter to the UN Human Rights Council commending China on their “remarkable achievements” in “protecting and promoting human rights” in Xinjiang, had previously denounced Myanmar’s abuses against the Rohingya as “ethnic cleansing.”
What explains this complicity from Muslim majority nations? Many of these nations need external funding for development, putting themselves in a double bind where they either defend human rights principles or reap geopolitical gains. As part of the Belt and Road Initiative, China has poured billions of dollars into loans, ports, railways, and energy grids across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, with implicit expectations of political loyalty from beneficiaries.
Pakistan is caught in the heart of this system. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is worth more than $60 billion and underpins Pakistan’s greatest efforts towards industrial revival and energy security. While Pakistan decries abuses against Kashmiri Muslims in India, Islamabad dutifully echoes Beijing’s “counterterrorism” and “deradicalization” talking points regarding their Uyghur concentration camps. Any public criticism would almost certainly risk jeopardizing Chinese loans, power projects, and debt relief efforts that Pakistan cannot afford to lose. The result is a foreign policy that is starkly hypocritical and intrinsically transactional.
This dynamic plays out similarly with the Gulf monarchies, none of whom have spoken against China’s persecution of its Muslim minority. China’s key 5G and surveillance technology exports, combined with the country’s large appetite for Gulf oil, seem to have dissuaded its partners in the region from raising any potential criticism of its domestic policy. Saudi Arabia was the top supplier of crude oil to China until 2023, the UAE counts China as one of its largest trading partners, and Qatar is host to one of China’s most significant energy investments in the Middle East.
Beyond economics, authoritarian or semi-authoritarian Gulf nations seek to legitimize their own repressive practices. Armed with imported Chinese surveillance technology, Gulf nations that routinely champion Muslim causes abroad preside over some of the world’s most abusive systems, exploiting their own Muslim migrant underclass. It is hardly surprising that China’s model of maintaining social order appeals to them.
Turkey stands as another fascinating case, illustrating China’s use of economic and ideological carrots and sticks in buying the complicity of a state bound to the Uyghurs by both faith and shared history. Long described as a “safe haven for Uyghurs,” Turkey began reversing its earlier opposition to Chinese repression in Xinjiang as it grew increasingly estranged from the West. President Tayyip Erdoğan, who sees himself as a champion of Muslims around the world, denounced China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in 2009 as a “genocide.” Yet, after mass anti-government protests and a corruption investigation jolted his rule in 2013, Erdoğan turned towards non-Western superpowers—namely China—to consolidate his authority. This pivot brought tangible rewards: Turkey joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2015 and has since received billions of dollars in loans, trade deals, and currency swaps to bolster its struggling economy. In return, Turkey has retracted its stance on the crisis in Xinjiang. Official statements and pro-government media echo Beijing’s claims that evidence of Uyghur persecution is “propaganda.”
China and its allies are hardly the only powers to instrumentalize and undermine human rights. Western countries—the United States in particular—have long abstained from criticizing human rights abuses for geopolitical reasons. Beijing has seized on this hypocrisy to discredit its Western critics. At the United Nations, Chinese diplomats frame Western human rights enforcement as interference, insisting that countries have the right to define rights domestically. This rhetorical inversion allows China to present its actions in Xinjiang not as repression but as social stabilization within the bounds of its sovereignty.
But acknowledging that Western powers also wield human rights as a geopolitical cudgel does not absolve any other nation of its crimes, nor does it justify silence. On the contrary, it reveals that the very acceptance of a universal set of human rights has been hollowed out from both sides of the new world order—the West, through its double standards, and China and its allies, through their blatant disregard for these principles. Equating Western inconsistency as a justification for inaction on this issue risks erasing the lived reality of Uyghurs who have been detained, sterilized, or separated from their families.
The Uyghur genocide is not only a tragedy of great consequence, but also a test of the world’s commitment to the human rights standards it has readily invoked in other cases. Laying bare this inconsistency, particularly on the part of Muslim nations, exposes how the professed universality of human rights has been eroded by geopolitical calculations. In an increasingly realist international order, such rights can only endure if they are upheld universally, protected from selective moralism and strategic exceptionalism.