Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to a fiery speech delivered by young speaker at an international conference. Fiery speeches and analyses rarely impress me at this old age. But the emotional speech by Dr. Farooq of Mardan, Pakistan, a noted religious scholar and televangelist, really impressed many elders like me.

In the heat of the moment, he said things that I don’t feel the need to reproduce here. However, at least one or two things were very important and I feel should be mentioned.

Farooq noted that Muslims are the ones who shed the blood of other Muslims in most instances around the world. Though he gave several examples to prove his contentions, I won’t go into the details.

The important point of his speech, which also made me think, was that you could gain citizenship in a Christian or Jewish country, but not in a Muslim, especially an Arab, country.

In other words, you can get citizenship in the United States and Britain after great struggle, but you can never become a citizen of Saudi Arabia or any other Arab country. You can remind them that you are like them, a Muslim, and deserve citizenship, but the doors of Arab countries for citizenship shall remain closed to you. Even after serving in an Arab or Muslim country as a tiller or a servant for half a century, you will have to return to your country of origin.

There is little doubt that the kind of racism and prejudice seen in the Arab-Muslim world has little a parallel in the non-Muslim world. They still have the same racism and prejudices that afflicted their societies during the medieval ages – the discrimination between Arabs and non-Arabs. Iranians and the rest are non-Arabs to them.

My debate starts with the belief in a single Ummah (a single Muslim nation) in the world. Undoubtedly there is one pan-Islamic organization, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), which is limited to paper. Even Farooq called the OIC “a sum of 57 zeros” (there are 57 Muslim countries as members). Now the question arises that if the 25 countries of Europe can bind themselves in the European Union, establishing a common parliament, a currency, with their citizens traveling in the EU without a visa, then why can’t the “sum of 57 zeros,” the Muslims of the OIC member countries, do the same?

The EU is based on political realities and geographic proximity. It is not based on race, religion or language. When we look at the Islamic concept of human relations we find that Islam is meant to remove discrimination, racism and prejudices from society. Then why are Muslims from the Arab world, from which Prophet Mohammad also came, involved in so much racism and discrimination?

A Muslim, Hindu or Sikh can gain citizenship in the United States and Europe after working there for a few years, but he cannot get citizenship from Saudi Arabia after wasting his entire life in the service of Arabs. He is expelled from the Arab countries after giving his prime years and best service to these countries. Even if the non-Arabs stay in the Arab countries, they are treated as not second, but third class citizens and are looked down upon. They are openly discriminated against and told to their face that they deserve this treatment because they are