Although parts of the wider Arab and Muslim world also lingered on the tragedy, it led to nothing like the policy challenge that this presented in the West. Indeed, the tragedy highlighted at least one extraordinary disparity not just between European and Middle Eastern reactions but between European and Middle Eastern asylum attitudes. For although Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey had taken in huge numbers of refugees from the wars in neighbouring Syria and Iraq, and received substantial financial support from the international community for doing so, the attitude of the wider Middle East to such humanitarian crises, never mind to the multiple additional humanitarian and economic crises across Africa and the Far East, stood in total opposition to that of European governments and media. Where European countries took the drowning of a three-year-old on their own consciences, the Arab world from which the boy came – and the wider Muslim ‘ummah’ – remained strikingly unmoved to action.

For instance, the six Gulf Cooperation countries comprising Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman had granted asylum to a grand total of zero Syrian refugees by 2016. Their attitude towards refugees from Eritrea, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan was not even as generous as that. Only a few months before Aylan Kurdi’s death one Kuwaiti official, Fahad al-Shalami, explained in an interview on France 24 why Gulf countries like his were refusing asylum even to Syrian refugees: ‘Kuwait and the Gulf countries are expensive, and are not suitable for refugees,’ he explained. ‘They are suitable for workers. The transportation is expensive. The cost of living in Kuwait is high, whereas the cost of living in Lebanon or Turkey is perhaps cheaper. Therefore it is much easier to pay the refugees [to stay there]. At the end of the day, you cannot accept other people, who come from a different atmosphere, from a different place. These are people who suffer from psychological problems, from trauma.’ You cannot just place them in the Gulf societies, he explained.1