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China and Islam in the
Northwest Chinese Region
May 10, 2004
by Sascha Matuszak
Kingdoms have risen and fallen in
China's Xinjiang region for the past 2000 years. In
the early 20th century, foreign archaeologists were
surprised and delighted to find Muslim communities
built upon Tang dynasty ruins built upon Tibetan
villages built upon Han forts built upon Indian
Buddhist monasteries – with Roman and Bactrian frescos
thrown in for good measure.
The Silk Road brought two of the world's most
influential religions, Islam and Buddhism, together,
and the two struggled with each other for hundreds of
years – Buddhists reigning supreme up until the Tang
Dynasty, and Islam wresting away control after the
Mongol period.
Eventually, Islam came to dominate the western half of
this region and reached past Dunhuang (Blazing Beacon)
in Gansu Province – long China's gate to the west –
while Buddhism retreated back into India, Tibet, and
China's heartland.
The people of the region retain the traces of the past
in their buildings, mode of life, and faces – local
Uighur populations range from dark and heavily bearded
to green-eyed and pale. Kazakhs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Han,
Hui, and Mongolians have carved out niches and held on
to cultural traditions strong enough to withstand any
onslaught.
Even the cultural menace modernization.
Tension
Much has been written about China's Xinjiang policy.
By most accounts, China is considered a repressive and
destructive influence on local culture and religion
but an energetic and positive force in terms of
economic development.
Take for instance the Uighur Muslims and the Han –
probably just about the least compatible cultures in
the world. But in the provinces east of Xinjiang,
especially Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia, the Hui Muslim
minority has managed to live in peace with the Han and
still visit the mosques and refrain from various sins.
But many Uighurs look down upon Hui and never resist a
chance to crack a joke about the alleged duplicity and
lack of character of the average Hui. According to
more prejudiced Uighur, Hui are donkeys – bastard
offspring of Han and Muslim. According to the less
prejudiced, Hui are bad Muslims who have been
corrupted by the Han.
The Hotan region is a good example of what happens
when Han and Uighur are thrown together. Hotan was and
still is a center of Islam in Xinjiang – the tomb of
Imam Asim, one of the first missionaries of Islam in
the region is a pilgrimage spot and site of a festival
and market every Thursday, pretty much year round.
The gates to the festival, which I visited, are manned
by Han and Uighur opportunists, who charge five yuan
per person. On Wednesday, 138 buses full of Muslims
bounced down the road through the fields and into the
desert where the imam's tomb lies. A banner hangs
above the entrance proclaiming "The greatest threat to
Xinjiang stability are the splittists" in Uighur
Arabic script.
Uighur police stroll through the sands with an eye out
for suspicious foreigners. One displayed his loyalty
to the center by calling in my presence and demanding
my passport number.
But the overall atmosphere of the festival is relaxed
and religious – musician-preachers strut up and down
aisles formed by sitting Muslims and bark out wisdom
from the Quran and "the University of Life." Beggars
line the path toward the tomb and benefit from the
generosity of Muslims attending a holy event.
Uighur don't have much of a chance of gaining a
passport from the government, so this is as close to
Mecca as any of them will get .…
Uighur children in front of a mosque in Kashgar's old
city
In Hotan city center a recently finished plaza that
knocked out most of the ancient wall boasts a large
statue of Mao Zedong meeting Durban Tulum, a local
farmer who made his way to Beijing in the 1950's. The
other night children sat around a stage built around
the statue, accompanied by local Public Security
Bureau (PSB) and waited for a government-sponsored
dance and song show to begin. While they waited,
Cultural-Revolution-era ballads about "beloved
Chairman Mao" blasted across the square.
The city displays the benefits of development, a
medical and teachers' university, paved roads and a
surplus of goods – but also the dark side – Sichuan
and Hunan prostitutes have shown up, and public
drunkenness under neon lights makes the beard of an
old Uighur tremble.
Resting in the bazaar
Get 'em While They're Young
Children in Xinjiang are not allowed to attend Islamic
school until the age of 18, and they do not have leave
to attend prayers on Friday due to school. This grates
on locals who see Islam as the core of their culture.
In Kashgar, the former palace of King Said, one of the
last kings of Kashgaria, is now the Communist Party
headquarters, and the Islamic school he founded is now
the site of a "Patriotic Religious Training Center."
This training center meets ten times a year, and Imams
from around the Kashgar area gather to learn how to
pray, when to pray, and what new laws have been
established to enforce the Party line.
Teaching Islam at home is a crime in Xinjiang, and
many have been arrested in southern Xinjiang since
1995 when the police began enforcing the law.
Schoolchildren spend much of their time learning Party
theory (Mao, Deng, Jiang) by rote. Clerks in the
Executive Administration – a puppet government
subordinate to the Party – also spend at least six
hours a week studying Party Policy and are required to
monitor the mosques every Friday. Names are taken and
ages are checked and any mistake by the clerk means
their job.
A Uighur girl on her way to bazaar in Opal, near
Kashgar
Who Is Native?
Han who came here in the 1960's and have lived here
and had children tend to speak a little Uighur and
have reached an agreement with their Muslim neighbors.
There is mutual respect, business, and even friendship
– but people eat, drink, and play separately. Han who
arrived in the past 30 years refer to themselves as
natives.
There is a Uighur part and a Han part of the city –
the separation is as clear as the "Peace Wall" that
divided Ireland's Falls and Shankhill neighborhoods.
The Uighur part of town tends to be poorer and less
developed, but a swath of locals have taken advantage
of Xinjiang's importance to Beijing to make themselves
rich and powerful. There are as many Uighur police as
there are Han patrolling the streets and for every ten
soldiers living at the base between Hotan and Kashgar,
one is a Uighur.
Two boys I talked to near the tomb of Mahmood
Kashgaria, a scholar of the 10th century who
translated the Quran into Uighur, hail from Hunan and
Sichuan. But they were born here, their parents live
here, they speak in the Xinjiang dialect with but a
smidgeon of their grandparents' mode of speech to be
detected.
Are they natives? Most of their friends are Han, but
they play in the deserts and fields of Xinjiang. They
eat lamb and bread as much as they eat rice and pork,
and they have no desire to return to a home they have
never known.
Uighur farmers and small time entrepreneurs say they
do not have the same access to loans as the Han. When
money from the center arrives in Urumqi and is
dispersed throughout the regions, Han businessmen
flock to the small towns and gobble up the loans,
acting on tips from Party and bank officials.
Justification?
How can China justify prohibiting children from
visiting the mosques? What possible purpose could
Cultural Revolution songs blasted into the ears of the
populace serve? Why occupy the center of Kashgar's old
city, unless you are a conqueror?
The answer is simple – China aspires to superpower
status. And if China has learned anything from
superpowers past and present, it has learned that
there can only be one power in a nation.
The only other culture as diametrically opposed to
Islam as the Han is American culture. For China, to
tolerate a Muslim enclave is to tolerate the Black
Panthers. To consider any other status for Xinjiang
would be to reconsider the US's southwest.
But unlike the US, China's policy is to take Islam
away from the children and replace it with desire –
desire for wealth, desire for love in a "non-traditional"
sense, and desire to assimilate into the nation as a
whole. Not unlike the US, desire in Xinjiang is
combined with a healthy fear of prison and death at
the hands of the PSB.
America's policy is purely to conquer in the classical
sense – to replace Islam with fear and submission.
Both nations intend to destroy the religion and
plunder the resources – but what China has in its
favor is that Xinjiang lies within its borders.
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