Islamic Philanthropy

The UN Food Agency has declared its suspension of the food program to help feed millions of Syrian refugees, because it says it no longer has the funding it requires to continue that vital service to the refugees. To reverse that decision it would require at least $64-million for the month of December alone in support of the Syrians living in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey.

"A suspension of World Food Program food assistance will endanger the health and safety of these refugees and will potentially cause further tensions, instability and insecurity in the neighbouring host countries."
"The suspension of WFP food assistance will be disastrous for many already suffering families."
"Without WFP vouchers, many families will go hungry. For refugees already struggling to survive the harsh winter, the consequences of halting this assistance will be devastating."
Ertharin Cousin, WFP executive director

Syria Emergency -- UNHCR

Turmoil in Syria has forced nearly 3 million people to flee for their lives.

It is estimated that since 2011, over three million Syrians have become refugees; a like number is internally displaced. The refugees make use of vouchers to buy food in local shops in the countries where they have found haven. Basic food necessities like flour, cooking oil and sugar is provided, with special rations apportioned to pregnant women. The United Nations provides subsistence nutrition to over four million people inside Syria, and over a million more elsewhere.

"It's definitely a catastrophe. If we cannot deliver the food voucher, they simply would not be able to eat. We are asking the world [to help]. This is an international crisis", pleaded Muhannad Hadi, United Nations coordinator of the food program in an interview with Al Jazeera.

The Syrian Sunni population most certainly has suffered dreadful privation, fear and violence. Their government has gone out of its way to prove to the watching world that horrifyingly deadly strikes against civilian men, women and children are not to be uniquely credited to Islamist terrorists.


What is rather inexplicable in the face of this calamitous situation where one of the weapons that the regime of Syrian President Bashir al Assad has used against his own people, is the withholding of food and medicine, while destroying the neighbourhoods that once sheltered the people he now bombs and strafes, is where the much-vaunted charitable impulse of wealthy Gulf State nations under Islam has drifted off to?


Why is it that the United Nations is once again appealing to the moral conscience of the international community -- and the emphasis and the expectation and the return always seems to emanate from majority-Christian European and North American communities -- while fabulously wealthy countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia sit comfortably on their oil wealth.

With their riches enabling them to randomly purchase expensive European real estate, state-of-the-art weapons, and other goods of exalted social status, they have the wherewithal to dispose of $54-million monthly. Doesn't Qatar read its own popular international news organ? It funds a terrorist group like Hamas with generosity, and the Sunni jihadis, but not the suffering Syrian civilians.


What is it that persuades them otherwise than to step forward and offer what to them would represent a minuscule portion of their immense wealth, to wait instead expectantly for the rest of the world to come forward to rescue from starvation their neighbours and co-religionists even as Islam purportedly demands of its faithful that charity be recognized as one of the prime tenets of the faith?

A photo from June 2014 of Syrian refugees breaking their fast outside their tent at a refugee camp in the town of Marj in Lebanon. Photograph: Bilal Hussein/AP