Has Faruqi forgotten Islam’s colonising history?
Xin Du
These messages only succeeded in showing that the Greens Party is led by people who lack basic human sympathy while understanding apparently very little of history.
Bandt, of English and German descent, should perhaps reflect on how the small island of the UK, headed by Sir Winston Churchill and the Queen’s father, George VI, essentially stood alone for two years against one of the vilest, most openly racist, and genocidal regimes that was Nazi Germany, ultimately ensuring its demise. It was in large part due to the good relations that the UK had with its existent or former colonies, such as America, Canada, India, Australia, and New Zealand, that it was able to rally a coalition of volunteer forces to defeat the Axis powers.
The Axis also included the equally racist and bloodthirsty (because – gasp! – people other than ‘whites’ can be racists) Japanese Imperial Forces, which had killed, maimed, brutalised, and raped uncountable millions of civilians across China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The British lost tens of thousands of troops fighting the Japanese in Asia. The Fourteenth Army, the British and Commonwealth’s main fighting force in the region, was perhaps the most diverse in history, with some 40 languages being spoken by its soldiers.
Faruqi, who emigrated from Pakistan and who is a Muslim, should perhaps remember that Islam only entered what is now Pakistan through the conquest and subjugation of the Sindh Kingdom in the eighth century C.E., led by Muhammad ibn Qasim.
She might also remember the almost 800-year period of the al-Andalus when the Berber commander Tariq ibn Ziyad subjugated the indigenous Visigoth Kingdom and the Muslims ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula as an imperialist power. Or the Ottoman Empire, one of the largest expansionist empires in history.
The 600-year-long Sunni Muslim Empire conquered large swathes of North Africa, including Egypt, as well as European territories that included Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, and had reached the gates of Vienna before being repelled by a coalition of European forces in 1683. Greece only regained independence in 1829. Other European territories were lost by the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars, as recently as 1913.
So, when Faruqi spouts cheap, prefabricated insults like ‘racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples’, while she might not feel a fool, she certainly looks like one.
Anyone who knows anything about Elizabeth II should have an inkling that one of her major achievements was to have accelerated the decolonisation process, overseeing the transition to independence of over 20 countries. While colonialism has been tried by almost every notable civilisation, from Portugal to Turkey to Japan, it must be noted that the decolonialisation of the British Empire is unique for its comparative peacefulness. It is not an accident that the Commonwealth of Nations remains a thriving entity.
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