It would have been impossible to meet these figures, all at once and in a span of hours, in London, or Washington, DC, or any other Western metropolis of that stature. They found safe haven, for however long it lasted, in Istanbul—a politically imperfect place that, at minimum, provided religious refuge from the panopticon of all-seeing surveillance in Xinjiang and the Hindutva imperialism in Kashmir.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 1220