Author: Rian Thum
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067496702X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr—the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet—have led an uneasy existence under Chinese rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. Beyond broadening our knowledge of tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government, this meditation on the very concept of history probes the limits of human interaction with the past. Uyghur historical practice emerged from the circulation of books and people during the Qing Dynasty, when crowds of pilgrims listened to history readings at the tombs of Islamic saints. Over time, amid long journeys and moving rituals, at oasis markets and desert shrines, ordinary readers adapted community-authored manuscripts to their own needs. In the process they created a window into a forgotten Islam, shaped by the veneration of local saints. Partly insulated from the rest of the Islamic world, the Uyghurs constructed a local history that is at once unique and assimilates elements of Semitic, Iranic, Turkic, and Indic traditions—the cultural imports of Silk Road travelers. Through both ethnographic and historical analysis, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History offers a new understanding of Uyghur historical practices, detailing the remarkable means by which this people reckons with its past and confronts its nationalist aspirations in the present day.
Author: David Brophy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674660374
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Along the Russian-Qing frontier in the nineteenth century, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and revolution. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the Uyghur nation.
Author: Sean R. Roberts
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234493
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
How China is using the US-led war on terror to erase the cultural identity of its Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region Within weeks of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the Chinese government warned that it faced a serious terrorist threat from its Uyghur ethnic minority, who are largely Muslim. In this explosive book, Sean Roberts reveals how China has been using the US-led global war on terror as international cover for its increasingly brutal suppression of the Uyghurs, and how the war's targeting of an undefined enemy has emboldened states around the globe to persecute ethnic minorities and severely repress domestic opposition in the name of combatting terrorism. Of the eleven million Uyghurs living in China today, more than one million are now being held in so-called reeducation camps, victims of what has become the largest program of mass detention and surveillance in the world. Roberts describes how the Chinese government successfully implicated the Uyghurs in the global terror war—despite a complete lack of evidence—and branded them as a dangerous terrorist threat with links to al-Qaeda. He argues that the reframing of Uyghur domestic dissent as international terrorism provided justification and inspiration for a systematic campaign to erase Uyghur identity, and that a nominal Uyghur militant threat only emerged after more than a decade of Chinese suppression in the name of counterterrorism—which has served to justify further state repression. A gripping and moving account of the humanitarian catastrophe that China does not want you to know about, The War on the Uyghurs draws on Roberts's own in-depth interviews with the Uyghurs, enabling their voices to be heard.
Author: Joanne Smith Finley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131753736X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
As the regional lingua franca, the Uyghur language long underpinned Uyghur national identity in Xinjiang. However, since the ‘bilingual education’ policy was introduced in 2002, Chinese has been rapidly institutionalised as the sole medium of instruction in the region’s institutes of education. As a result, studies of the bilingual and indeed multi-lingual Uyghur urban youth have emerged as a major new research trend. This book explores the relationship between language, education and identity among the urban Uyghurs of contemporary Xinjiang. It considers ways in which Uyghur urban youth identities began to evolve in response to the state imposition of ‘bilingual education’. Starting by defining the notion of ethnic identity, the book explores the processes involved in the formation and development of personal and group identities, considers why ethnic boundaries are constructed between groups, and questions how ethnic identity is expressed in social, cultural and religious practice. Against this background, contributors adopt a special focus on the relationship between language use, education and ethnic identity development. As a study of ethnicity in China this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, Asian ethnicity, cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics and Asian education.
Author: Rachel Harris
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253050197
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is experiencing a crisis of securitization and mass incarceration. In Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam, author Rachel Harris examines the religious practice of a group of Uyghur women in a small village now engulfed in this chaos. Despite their remote location, these village women are mobile and connected, and their religious soundscapes flow out across transnational networks. Harris explores the spiritual and political geographies they inhabit, moving outward from the village to trace connections with Mecca, Istanbul, Bishkek, and Beijing. Sound, embodiment, and territoriality illuminate both the patterns of religious change among Uyghurs and the policies of cultural erasure used by the Chinese state to reassert its control over the land the Uyghurs occupy. By drawing on contemporary approaches to the circulation of popular music, Harris considers how various forms of Islam that arrive via travel and the Internet come into dialogue with local embodied practices. Synthesized together, these practices create new forms that facilitate powerful, affective experiences of faith.
Author: Lisa Ross
Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC
ISBN: 1580933505
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
Lisa Ross's ethereal photographs of Islamic holy sites were created over the course of a decade on journeys to China's Xinjiang region in Central Asia, historically a cultural crossroads but an area to which artists and researchers have generally been denied access since its annexation in 1949. These monumental images show shrines created during pilgrimages, many of which have been maintained continuously over several centuries; visitation to the tombs of saints is a central aspect of daily life in Uyghur Islam, and its pilgrims ask for intercession for physical, mental, and spiritual ailments. The shrines, adorned with small devotional offerings that mark a prayer or visit, are poignant representations of collective memory and a pacifistic faith, and endure despite vulnerability to natural forces of sand, heat, and powerful winds. Their simplicity and austerity as captured by Ross invoke ideas of spirituality, eternity, and transcendence. Three essays—by a historian of Central Asian Islam, a Uyghur folklorist, and the curator of an accompanying exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art—situate the photographic content in context. This volume emerges at a critical time, as modernization and new policies for development of China's far west bring about rapid, extreme, and irrevocable change; the region is its largest source of untapped natural gas, oil, and minerals. Many of the sites in Ross's work are threatened by political and economic pressures—her images are valuable, therefore, not only for their intrinsic beauty, but as an important record of a rich and vibrant culture.
Author: Gulbahar Haitiwaji
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1644213885
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances. This new paperback edition features a new introduction by the author. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match For three years Gulbahar Haitiwaji was held in Chinese detention centers and “reeducation” camps, enduring interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, rats, and nights under the blinding fluorescent lights of her prison cell. Her only crime? Being a Uyghur. China’s brutal repression of Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide and reported widely in media around the world. In 2019, the New York Times published the “Xinjiang Papers,” leaked documents exposing the forced detention of more than one million Uyghurs in Chinese “reeducation” camps. The Chinese government denies that these camps are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism” and calling them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter, with the help of the French diplomatic corps. Others have not been so fortunate. In How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp, Gulbahar tells her story, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances. This new paperback edition includes a new introduction by the author.
Author: Güljanat Kurmangaliyeva Ercilasun
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137522976
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
This book analyses the Uyghur community, presenting a brief historical background of the Uyghurs and debating the challenges of emerging Uyghur nationalism in the early 20th century. It elaborates on key issues within the community, such as the identity and current state of religion and worship. It also offers a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of the Uyghur diaspora, addressing the issue of identity politics, the position of the Uyghurs in Central Asia, and the relations of the Uyghurs with Beijing, notably analyzing the 2009 Urumqi clashes and their long term impact on Turkish-Chinese relations. Re-examining Urghur identity through the lens of history, religion and politics, this is a key read for all scholars interested in China, Eurasia and questions of ethnicity and religion.
Author: Perhat Tursun
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023155477X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
The Backstreets is an astonishing novel by a preeminent contemporary Uyghur author who was disappeared by the Chinese state. It follows an unnamed Uyghur man who comes to the impenetrable Chinese capital of Xinjiang after finding a temporary job in a government office. Seeking to escape the pain and poverty of the countryside, he finds only cold stares and rejection. He wanders the streets, accompanied by the bitter fog of winter pollution, reciting a monologue of numbers and odors, lust and loathing, memories and madness. Perhat Tursun’s novel is a work of untrammeled literary creativity. His evocative prose recalls a vast array of canonical world writers—contemporary Chinese authors such as Mo Yan; the modernist images and rhythms of Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kafka; the serious yet absurdist dissection of the logic of racism in Ellison’s Invisible Man—while drawing deeply on Uyghur literary traditions and Sufi poetics and combining all these disparate influences into a style that is distinctly Perhat Tursun’s own. The Backstreets is a stark fable about urban isolation and social violence, dehumanization and the racialization of ethnicity. Yet its protagonist’s vivid recollections of maternal tenderness and first love reveal how memory and imagination offer profound forms of resilience. A translator’s introduction situates the novel in the political atmosphere that led to the disappearance of both the author and his work.
Author: Mamtimin Ala
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761872302
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
Uyghurs are descendants of Turkic peoples, currently facing genocide committed against them in their homeland, East Turkistan. This land has been colonized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, creating a police state and renamed Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). In his book, Worse than Death: Reflections on the Uyghur Genocide, Mamtimin Ala explains how Uyghur rights have been diminishing under the authoritarian rule of the CCP, which has recently escalated into the cultural genocide of Uyghurs. Since Xi Jinping became President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013, he has clearly defined his political agenda towards Uyghurs of implementing the Four Breaks intended to “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.” The situation has now rapidly deteriorated at an alarming rate. Millions of Uyghur families have been separated with an estimated more than one million Uyghurs being indiscriminately placed in concentration camps, under the guise of “re-education.” Xi has justified this as a fight against the Three Evils (terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism). Uyghurs are subject to forced thought reform, torture, rape, organ harvesting, slave labor, and ultimately death in the shrouded secrecy of the camps in the very eyes of the world. For Uyghurs in exile, they face an endless uncertainty, cut off from their families back home without knowing whether they are alive or dead, and are harassed by Chinese security agents with threats against their family back home if they speak out against these atrocities. The world has to date largely remained silent over this genocide due to economic ties with China in the era of globalization. In reflecting upon this situation, the question remains: Who has the courage to speak up and act against this totalitarian regime of the Chinese Communist Party which is committing one of the worst genocides of the twenty-first century before it is too late to repeat the chilling warning of “Never Again?”
