RELIGION : Islamic World Galvanized by Reported Killing of Bosnia’s Muslims, Deplores Inaction by U.N. : Donations pour in from Arabs. Sermons at mosques criticize West for slower response to Serbian aggression than to invasion of Kuwait.

The newspaper photograph shows a dark-haired child with a bloody bandage around his head, his mouth open in a silent scream. “Pay a pound, save a Muslim,” says the caption.

“A pound from every citizen monthly will keep a nation from extermination,” it adds. “God’s prophet said, ‘He who has no interest in Muslim matters is not one of them.’ ”

The appeal worked. In poverty-plagued Egypt, $1.9 million in donations has poured in since the Doctors’ Syndicate began its appeal last month for Muslim victims of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Poor men have walked into the syndicate’s offices and donated watches and wedding rings; one man left his wheelchair.

In Saudi Arabia, King Fahd launched an aid drive with an $8-million personal contribution. Pakistan pledged $10 million. Iranians have called for dispatching Islamic troops and heavy artillery to end the bloodshed. Tens of thousands of Sudanese marched through Khartoum streets this week in support of Bosnia’s Muslims.

Throughout the Arab world, the reports of slaughter, captivity and torture of Muslims by Orthodox Christian Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where 43% of the population is Muslim, have played like the opening chapters of a new Holy War. It is an issue that has galvanized the Islamic community in a way that the Arab-Israeli conflict, the sanctions against Iraq and Libya, even the Gulf War have not.

Muslims, fanned with appeals on street banners and in the press from Islamic fundamentalist groups, want to know why the United Nations was quick to defend Kuwait but slow to try to halt the bloodshed in the former Yugoslav republic. Newspaper headlines are full of Islamic outrage. Sermons at the mosques boom out new orations against the Western response to the crisis--or lack of it.

Ahmed Reda Hussein, an American University of Cairo student, wrote to the Al Ahram newspaper, noting that President Bush, during the Gulf crisis, had said he would not dispatch U.S. troops when there is a “hiccup here or there. . . . Well, excuse me, Mr. President, because I don’t think that the killing of thousands of people is less in any way than the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, and if the President considers it a ‘hiccup,’ he must consider World War II as nothing more than a bad cold.”

Similar messages have been forthcoming in recent weeks from government officials, academics and the official Arab press.

“If those who lived in Bosnia, if the majority were of the Jewish faith, would the slaughtering be going on until now like this?” asked Adnan Omran, assistant secretary general of the Arab League. “To me, following events, reading history, knowing the mentality of leadership in the world, my answer would be no. I believe the reaction would have been different, and it would have been quicker.”

Similar sentiments have been raised about the United Nations’ stumbles in the African nation of Somalia.

“People have been saying that it’s because the people of Bosnia are Muslims . . . and the people in Somalia are black,” said Nagui Ghatrifi, spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry. “It’s clear that it’s not that easy to intervene by force in Yugoslavia. The situation is different from the one in the Gulf. But still there is a feeling that something is wrong with the new world order. And it’s hard to believe that the world is incapable of putting an end to the killings and atrocities and the savagery which is being displayed in Yugoslavia.”

Egyptians and other Arabs--even at the official level--have particularly criticized U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the first Arab and African to head the international body, for failing to recommend quick, decisive action against the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “In this area there’s a kind of disappointment,” Ghatrifi said.

Other Arab Muslims said there is private talk that Boutros-Ghali’s Christian Coptic background has kept him from taking prompt action in Bosnia. “People say that a Copt is sitting in New York, and this is a collusion between him and the Christian Serbs,” an influential Egyptian said.

But many Arabs complain that the Islamic world has waited ineffectually for the United Nations and the West to act while failing to move on its own.

An emergency meeting of Islamic foreign ministers in Istanbul in June condemned the Serbian aggression and called for international help to stop it; few Islamic governments have recalled their ambassadors to Belgrade or imposed independent economic sanctions. Egypt’s troops in the region are limited to a humanitarian peacekeeping role.

Wealthy Arab governments in the Persian Gulf could but are not providing economic incentives to the cash-strapped Serbian government to end the violence, said Mohammed Salim, political science professor at Cairo University. “We are wasting our time crying wolf and crying about harassment of the Muslims and not providing any concrete solutions,” he said.