Chinese oppression in Xinjiang, middle eastern conflicts and global islamic solidarities among the Uyghurs

Journal of Contemporary China

Volumn 16, Issue 53, 2007, Pages 627-654

  Finley, Joanne Smith ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GLOBALIZATION; ISLAMISM; MEDIA ROLE; POLICY APPROACH; POLITICAL CONFLICT; POLITICAL REPRESSION; STATE ROLE;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST; XINJIANG UYGUR;

EID: 35648979496     PISSN: 10670564     EISSN: 14699400     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10670560701562333     Document Type: Article

References (150)

1. Nicolas Becquelin, 'Staged development in Xinjiang', China Quarterly 178, (2004), p. 377.
2. Details can be found in Classified document No. 175. Michael Dillon, Xinjiang: China's Muslim Far Northwest (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p. 95.
3. Naw-ruz (Persian, 'New Year's Day') is the start of the year for Afghans, Azerbaijanis, Iranians and Tajiks. Other Central Asian peoples and some Uyghurs in Xinjiang have recently also begun to celebrate this day.
4. A fuller analysis of factors contributing to Islamic renewal in Xinjiang will appear in my monograph Between Purity and Hybridity: Negotiating Uyghur Identities in Contemporary Xinjiang (work-in-progress).
5. See Dru C. Gladney, 'The ethnogenesis of the Uighur', Central Asian Survey 9(1), (1990), pp. 1-28.
6. Justin Ben-Adam, 'China', in David Westerlund and Ingvar Svanberg, eds, Islam Outside the Arab World (Richmond: Curzon, 1999), p. 192.
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, cited in Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 1993), p. 67.
8. Ildikóo Belleér-Hann, Cristina Cesaàro, Rachel Harris and Joanne Smith Finley, eds, Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming) examines the complexities of Uyghur social and cultural life; see in particular the historical chapters by Laura Newby and Ablet Kamalov.
9. Dru C. Gladney, Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities and other Subaltern Subjects (London: Hurst, 2004), pp. 78, 265.
10. Ibid., p. 362.
11. See IldikóBellér-Hann, 'Temperamental neighbours: Uighur-Han relations in Xinjiang, Northwest China', in Günther Schlee, ed., Imagined Differences: Hatred and the Construction of Identity (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2002), pp. 57-81
12. Gardner Bovingdon, 'The not-so-silent majority: Uyghur resistance to Han rule in Xinjiang', Modern China 28(1), (2002), pp. 39-78
13. M. Cristina Cesàro, 'Consuming identities: Food and resistance among the Uyghur in contemporary Xinjiang', Inner Asia 2(2), (2000), pp. 225-238
14. Rachel Harris, 'Cassettes, bazaars, and saving the nation: The Uyghur music industry in Xinjiang, China', in Timothy Craig and Richard King, eds, Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2002), pp. 265-282
15. Joanne N. Smith, 'Making culture matter: Symbolic, spatial, and social boundaries between Uyghurs and Han Chinese', Asian Ethnicity 3(2), (2002), pp. 153-174
16. and Joanne N. Smith, 'The quest for national unity in Uyghur popular song: Barren chickens, stray dogs, fake immortals and thieves', in Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights, eds, Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
17. Stevan Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994), p. 7.
18. Ibid., p. 27.
19. Ibid., p. 34.
20. This term was coined by Harald Böckman to describe the potential spread of national independence movements in Central Asia to Xinjiang; see Harald Bøckman, 'The brewing ethnic conflicts in China and their historical background', in Kumar Rupesinghe et al., eds, Ethnicity and Conflict in a Post-Communist World: The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 192.
21. See Ghoncheh Tazmini, 'The Islamic revival in Central Asia: A potent force or a misconception?', Central Asian Survey 20(1), (2001), p. 67.
22. Mehrdad Haghayeghi, 'Islam and democratic politics in Central Asia', World Affairs 156(4), (1994), p. 195.
23. Akramiya is a moderate Islamist group consisting of Uzbek business and community leaders, which advocates economic prosperity as the key to an Islamic way of life and the diversion of business profits to help the poor. Nick Paton Walsh, 'Brutality and poverty fuel wave of unrest', The Guardian, (16 May 2005).
24. Nick Paton Walsh, 'Uzbeks accuse foreign media of coup attempt as Andijan "show trial" opens', The Guardian, (21 September 2005).
25. Craig Murray, 'What drives support for this torturer', The Guardian (16 May 2005).
26. Nick Paton Walsh, 'Violence flares in Uzbekistan', The Guardian, (14 May 2005); 'Uzbekistan on the brink as clashes spread', The Observer, (15 May 2005); 'Anger as US backs brutal regime', The Observer, (15 May 2005).
27. Tazmini, 'The Islamic revival in Central Asia', pp. 66-67, 81.
28. Ibid., p. 68.
29. Ibid. Compare Tazmini's categories with those drawn up in Soviet sociological surveys conducted in the 1970s, in which 20% of Central Asians were categorised as 'believers by conviction' ('fanatics'); 10% as 'believers by tradition'; 20% as 'hesitants'; 30% as 'unbelievers' who nonetheless performed essential religious rites; and 20% as 'atheists' who nonetheless performed the three religious rites of circumcision, marriage, and burial; see Alexandre Bennigsen and Fanny Bryan, 'Islam in Central Asia', in Joseph Kitagawa, ed., The Religious Traditions of Asia (London: Collier Macmillan, 1989), p. 252.
30. According to surveys conducted by the US Information Office in 1992-1993, 50% of Kazakhs and Uzbeks and 80% of Kirghiz claimed faith in Islam, but only 20% of Uzbeks and Kirghiz said they participated in religious services at a mosque every month; see Roberta Micallef and Ingvar Svanberg, 'Turkic Central Asia', in Westerlund and Svanberg, eds, Islam Outside the Arab World, p. 159.
31. Haghayeghi's earlier broad distinction between 'moderate' and 'fundamentalist' Islamic forces in the region roughly corresponds to categories (4) and (5) above, with the 'moderates' favouring a secular Islamic state as in Turkey while the 'fundamentalists' seek the creation of a theocratic Islamic state such as Iran. See Haghayeghi, 'Islam and democratic politics', p. 187.
32. See Yitzhak Shichor, 'Separatism: Sino-Muslim conflict in Xinjiang', Pacifica Review 6(2), (1994), p. 81
33. Colin Mackerras, 'Xinjiang at the turn of the century, and the causes of separatism', Central Asian Survey 20(3), (2001), pp. 289, 296
34. Yueyao Zhao, 'Pivot or periphery? Xinjiang's regional development', Asian Ethnicity 2(2), (2001), p. 222; Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 12.
35. See Gardner Bovingdon, 'The influence of Central Asian politics on Uyghurs' political visions', paper given at the international conference Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 5-6 November 2004. On how the Chinese government secured the loyalty of countries potentially sympathetic to Uyghur separatism through a combination of arms, trade, and energy deals
36. see Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 142-155.
37. James Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: A Critical Assessment (Washington, DC: East-West Center, 2004), p. ix.
38. Ibid., pp. 23-28, 31
39. see also Dru C. Gladney, 'Islam in China: Accommodation or separatism?', The China Quarterly 174, (2003), p. 458.
40. Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, p. 8.
41. Ibid.
42. Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 60-61
43. Gladney, Dislocating China, pp. 232, 314-315.
44. Shichor, 'Separatism', p. 74
45. Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 62-65
46. Mackerras, 'Xinjiang at the turn of the century', p. 291
47. Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, pp. 14-15.
48. Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, p. 14.
49. Shichor, 'Separatism', p. 75.
50. Joanne N. Smith, Changing Uyghur Identities in Xinjiang in the 1990s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leeds, 1999, Appendix I, pp. v-vi
51. Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 70
52. Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, p. 15.
53. Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 92-98
54. Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, pp. 16-17. In the mid-late 1990s, the 'traditional' form of mäshräp gathering - a vehicle for regulating moral, religious and social etiquette and forming male peer groups - was resurrected among Uyghur communities in Ghulja and Almaty, Kazakhstan with the aims of maintaining Uyghur national culture and tackling youth problems.
55. See Sean Roberts, 'Negotiating locality, Islam, and national culture in a changing borderlands: The revival of the mashrap ritual among young Uighur men in the Ili Valley', Central Asian Survey 17(4), (1998), p. 675
56. and Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), 'The Ghulja Massacre: "we refuse to forget"', press release, 3 February 2006. It quickly came under government suspicion in China as a popular arena for the dissemination of separatist ideologies and literatures.
57. According to Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary Wang Lequan, speaking in December 1997, separatists referred to acts of assassination against 'patriotic religious personnel' as 'bombing the bridge'; Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 114.
58. For accounts of particular incidents, see Nicola Beckley, 'China's Muslims sharpen their knives against Peking', The Independent, (5 March 1997)
59. and Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 70.
60. It is hard to gauge the nature and complex sources of the Islamic renewal underway in Xinjiang other than through qualitative ethnographic means. Statistics on numbers of mosques in the region are useful initial indicators, but do not tell us how many people are visiting the mosques or with what frequency, nor who is going in and why. And they tell us nothing about observant Muslims in education or attached to state work units, who are forced to conduct prayer in private. My empirical data are based on interviews and observations carried out mainly in Ü rümchi but also in Ghulja during the summers of 2002 and 2004. Interviews were conducted with a combination of long-term respondents (those I had known for eight years or more) and new respondents. Themes emerging in initial interviews were probed during a series of follow-up interviews, and checked against my personal observations. 39. David Wang, 'The Uyghurs and disparity in Xinjiang's social demography', paper given at the international conference Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 5-6 November 2004.
61. Mackerras, 'Xinjiang at the turn of the century', p. 292.
62. IldikóBellér-Hann, Community Matters: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur in Xinjiang, 1880s-1990s (forthcoming), p. 311.
63. IldikóBellér-Hann and Chris Hann, 'Peasants and officials in Southern Xinjiang: Subsistence, supervision and subversion', Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 124, (1999), p. 10.
64. Ibid., p. 13.
65. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
66. Edmund Waite, 'The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang: Implications for the Uyghurs' positioning between a Central Asian and Chinese context', in Bellér-Hann et al., eds, Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia.
67. In 2002, a large impressionist painting of the planned new mosque was mounted before the construction site. Though the mosque was not yet in use, people milled excitedly in the forecourt.
68. Sovetlik Uyghur nationalists believe that the Chinese government has deliberately promoted religion - the 'opium of the masses' - in Xinjiang as a means of keeping its Muslim population from becoming revolutionary. See Sean Roberts, 'The Uighurs of the Kazakstan borderlands: Migration and the nation', Nationalities Papers 26(3), (1998), p. 521.
69. Justin Rudelson, Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism along China's Silk Road (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 48.
70. Note that mosques in Peking and Shanghai - two cities which received a high number of foreign visitors - were kept open during the Cultural Revolution. Richard Bush, Religion in Communist China (Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press, 1970), p. 296.
71. Stefan Feuchtwang, 'Religion as resistance', in Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden, eds, Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 167.
72. See Waite, 'The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang'.
73. Graham Fuller and Jonathan Lipman, 'Islam in Xinjiang', in Frederick Starr, ed., Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland (New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), p. 344. Prohibition of religious practices has often had the reverse effect in China; during the Cultural Revolution, the number of underground 'house churches' grew, with bonds among believers strengthening in response to the common risk of professing belief.
74. Feuchtwang, 'Religion as resistance', p. 164.
75. Feuchtwang gives examples of similar 'rituals of defiance' in Tibet; see 'Religion as resistance', p. 173.
76. A clear illustration of this stance would be the demonstration prior to the disturbances in Ghulja in February 1997, during which protesters carried placards proclaiming 'We have one God, not two'. Interview with Qurban, unemployed male in his twenties, Ghulja, summer 2002.
77. The relative failure of regional economic policies to benefit Xinjiang's minority nationalities has been documented elsewhere. See Nicolas Becquelin, 'Xinjiang in the nineties', The China Journal 4, (2000), pp. 65-90
78. Becquelin, 'Staged development in Xinjiang', pp. 358-378
79. IldikóBellér-Hann, 'The peasant condition in Xinjiang', Journal of Peasant Studies 24(4), (1997), pp. 87-112
80. Bellér-Hann and Hann, 'Peasants and officials in Southern Xinjiang', pp. 1-32. It has been suggested that religious Muslims in particular 'do not see themselves as benefiting from the external investment, enhanced domestic spending, and resource development programmes that the central government has initiated...'; Fuller and Lipman, 'Islam in Xinjiang', p. 325. See also Stefan Feuchtwang, who characterises revitalised religions and the spaces occupied by their adherents as 'alternative arenas for telling or performing stories which reflect on the corruption, inequality and lack of security and support seen and experienced by the subjects of the Chinese People's Republic': Feuchtwang, 'Religion as resistance', p. 161.
81. Ibid., p. 172.
82. James Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 37.
83. See John Esposito, Islam and Politics, 3rd edn (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 60-95.
84. The term 'domestication' is coined by Nicolas Becquelin, 'Bettering the Uyghurs: State strategies in Xinjiang, 1955-2005', paper given at the international conference Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 5-6 November 2004.
85. See Arienne Dwyer, The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy and Political Discourse, Policy Studies 15 (Washington: East-West Center, 2005).
86. Article 4 of the Constitution of the PRC reads: 'All nationalities have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages and to preserve or reform their own folkways and customs'. Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, Constitution of the People's Republic of China, 3rd edn (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), p. 13.
87. Among examples of anti-colonial independence movements, the case of North Africa seems quite relevant to contemporary Xinjiang. French colonial policies in North Africa often exemplified the most extreme form of European imperialism in the Islamic world: 'Through a concerted and sustained program, total political and cultural assimilation was attempted and promoted under the French policy of "naturalization" [...] French was imposed as official language and the language of instruction [...] Arabic was reduced to a foreign status': Esposito, Islam and Politics, pp. 75-76. Esposito argues that this policy of total assimilation to all things French caused young, educated Muslims to reassert their own, indigenous identity, beginning with the Arab-Islamic heritage. 63. cf. Fuller and Lipman: '...this demographic shift appeared to almost every Uyghur interviewed [...] to be one of the two greatest threats to their culture and society, the other being state control over religion': 'Islam in Xinjiang', p. 324.
88. Fuller and Lipman's study, conducted in the latter half of the 1990s, concluded that the phenomenon of Islam reinforcing nationalist movements by 'investing secular nationalism with religious and emotional content of a universal nature' had so far scarcely been manifested in Xinjiang: 'Islam in Xinjiang', p. 340.
89. On religious repression in Xinjiang since the mid-1990s, see Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 84-130, 156-162
90. Fuller and Lipman, 'Islam in Xinjiang', pp. 324-325, 332-338.
91. For a general analysis of the cyclical nature of Islamic revivals and causal patterns of religious resurgence throughout the religion's history, see R.H. Dekmejian, Islam in Revolution: Fundamentalism in the Arab World (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995), pp. 8-22.
92. Feuchtwang, 'Religion as resistance', p. 172.
93. Waite, 'The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang'.
94. Cf. Mackerras, 'Xinjiang at the turn of the century', p. 301.
95. Youna Kim, 'Experiencing globalization: Global TV, reflexivity, and the lives of young Korean women', International Journal of Cultural Studies 8(4), (2005), p. 446.
96. See Zhao, 'Pivot or periphery?', pp. 197-224.
97. Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 167. He particularly mentions influences from Central Asia; however, given the fact that many Central Asians rather look to their cousins in Xinjiang as the true keepers of religious customs, influences from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East may be more critical. With regard to Central Asia, the reverse trend has been happening, i.e. Uyghur traders from Xinjiang have been spreading Islamic practices in Kazakhstan with the goal of educating' their Russified sovetlik relatives. See Roberts, 'The Uighurs of the Kazakstan borderlands', pp. 522-523.
98. Waite, 'The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang'. China's first translation of the Qur'an in the vernacular was published in Shanghai in 1952, presumably in Chinese and intended for consumption by Hui Muslims. Its preface noted that it had previously been 'impossible for ordinary Muslims in China with no knowledge of Arabic to fully understand the teachings of Islam'. See Bush, Religion in Communist China, pp. 271- 272.
99. Shichor, 'Separatism', p. 71.
100. Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 88.
101. Ibid., p. 127.
102. Waite, 'The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang'.
103. Shichor, 'Separatism', p. 80.
104. Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 66, 90.
105. Gladney, 'Islam in China', p. 463.
106. Gladney, Dislocating China, p. 235.
107. Micallef and Svanberg, 'Turkic Central Asia', pp. 158-160.
108. Raphael Israeli, 'Muslims in China: Islam's incompatibility with the Chinese order', in Raphael Israeli and Anthony Johns, eds, Islam in Asia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), p. 297.
109. Bellér-Hann, Community Matters, pp. 332-333.
110. See Becquelin, who writes: 'The concept of alternate centres highlights why [...] assimilation (and thus political loyalty to Beijing) will never be either complete or irreversible': 'Staged Development in Xinjiang', p. 377.
111. Gladney, Dislocating China, p. 224.
112. Gladney, 'Islam in China', p. 461. Clearly, pilgrimage can bring ideological influence to bear on local communities; consider for instance the three Sumatran pilgrims who returned from Mecca in 1804 to launch the puritanical, revivalist Padri movement, which attacked lax local practices and aimed to protect locals against robbery and slavery by European trading companies. Youssef Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism, revised edn (London: Pinter, 1997), p. 9.
113. See Waite, 'The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang'.
114. Shichor, 'Separatism', p. 80.
115. Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 44.
116. Shichor, 'Separatism', p. 80.
117. Gladney, Dislocating China, p. 280.
118. Ibid., pp. 234, 237.
119. Ibid., p. 237.
120. Declaration of the word 'Amin' aloud at the end of the Quranic verse derives from Hanbali prayer rites, and is said to be an indicator of those who follow the reformist path. See Waite, 'The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang'.
121. The Chinese authorities have arrested some young Uyghurs who returned to Xinjiang after studying Islamic law in Pakistan, claiming that they are Taliban members of Pakistani and Afghan citizenship. Becquelin, 'Xinjiang in the nineties', pp. 88-89.
122. Fuller and Lipman, 'Islam in Xinjiang', p. 348. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of the Muslims who were to exert 'substantial influence' on Islam in China studied at Al-Azhar University, the foremost Sunni Islamic training institute. Gladney suggests that for this reason, only those students who are less religiously inclined are considered for state funding: Dislocating China, pp. 236-238.
123. Kim, 'Experiencing globalization', p. 446.
124. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-States, p. 30. Perhaps equally aware of the uses of mass media, Uyghur exiles in the CIS called in 1992 for a resumption of Uyghur language radio broadcasts to China, the last having been broadcast in 1979. Meanwhile, in 1999 the Chinese authorities despatched truckloads of television and radio equipment to Xinjiang in a bid to ensure that party propaganda reached even the remotest outposts of the region.
125. See Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 43, 67.
126. On reflexive aspects of ethnicity, see Roosens, cited in Thomas Hylland Eriksen, 'The epistemological status of the concept of ethnicity', Anthropological Notebooks (Slovene Anthropological Society, 1996, p. 7.
127. Gladney, Dislocating China, p. 280.
128. Radio Free Asia describes itself as 'a private, nonprofit corporation that broadcasts news and information in nine native Asian languages to listeners who do not have access to full and free news media'. See http://www.rfa.org/english/about/.
129. Deputy regional CCP secretary Keyum Bawudun had called for a crackdown in May 1998 on 'illegal radio and television stations and networks'. See Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 121.
130. Ömär, an 18-year-old high school student, described a similar dynamic whereby people were buying and reading a state publication entitled 100 Questions and Answers on Human Rights (available from the Xinhua bookstore), designed to refute Western allegations of human rights abuses in China. From this, they were able to glean all the basic theories underpinning Western notions of freedom of speech, association and religion. Thus, the state has itself provided Uyghurs with the means of reflecting negatively on their daily experience. Rudelson provides another example: In 1990, the Chinese government distributed a pamphlet entitled The One Hundred Mistakes of Turghun Almas' Uyghurlar, which aimed to discredit this banned, alternative history of the Uyghurs. The result was of course the opposite to that intended; many more people were exposed to the ideas within and most found the account very compelling.
131. See Ben-Adam, 'Islam', p. 208.
132. Kim, 'Experiencing globalization', p. 449.
133. Ibid., p. 448. Kim relates how increased 'trans-cultural interaction' through the medium of imported movies has led young Korean women to pursue feminine emancipation, with divorce rates rocketing from 5.8% in 1980 to an astonishing 33% in 2000.
134. Colin Mackerras, 'Some issues of ethnic and religious identity among China's Islamic peoples', Asian Ethnicity 6(1), (2005), p. 13.
135. Gladney, Dislocating China, p. 332.
136. For details of this unfortunate move, see Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, pp. 13-14.
137. Haghayeghi warned in the mid-1990s that continuing Western acquiescence in repression of Islamic forces by Central Asian governments 'will undoubtedly alter their [Islamic groups'] positive perception of the West': 'Islam and democratic politics', p. 197. This prophecy has now come to pass.
138. The Chinese government failed to endorse the war against Iraq in 2003 and voiced 'strong concern' about the possible injury of civilians. Chen Guangyan, (Hui) vice-president of the China Islamic Association, went further in publicly condemning the US attack, positioning China's Muslim community alongside the anti-war protesters around the world and stating clearly that war was 'wrong'. See Gladney, Dislocating China, p. 314.
139. Permits were apparently 'sped up' to allow its opening, while the bureau chief is a former Palestinian diplomat. See Gladney, Dislocating China, p. 335.
140. Iranian newspaper Jomhuriye Eslami [Islamic Republic] criticised China's suppression of the Ghulja disturbances and accused it of trying to separate Xinjiang's Muslims from co-religionists across the border
141. see Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 136. A Saudi Arabian newspaper also warned China about 'the suffering of Muslims whose human rights are violated' in the aftermath of the riots
142. see Dru C. Gladney, 'Rumblings from the Uyghur', Current History 96(611), (1997), p. 288.
143. Several respondents differentiated between the two Gulf Wars in this way. Dilbär, the Uyghur-educated female high school student, stated: 'We weren't so bothered about the first Gulf War because, at the end of the day, Saddam did invade Kuwait, another Muslim country, and the Qur'an forbids Muslims from doing that'. Ghayrat, a trader in his thirties originally from Aqsu, excused the first Gulf War for the same reason. 650
144. This view was apparently also taking hold among some Hui in the northwest at the time of the first Gulf War. Gladney cites a highly educated Hui cadre as follows: 'It is because Saddam has stood up to this kind of self-interested [US] militarism that I now have reversed my opinion of him: I now believe that Saddam is a hero, not only for all Muslims, but for all peoples oppressed by foreign imperialism...When my fellow Muslims are being bombed mercilessly by a foreign infidel power [...] I can only support them with my heart and pray that Allah will rescue Saddam Hussein so that he can lead all Muslims [...] in forging a united Muslim coalition...': Dislocating China, p. 323.
145. They were particularly harsh (and quite racist) towards Ariel Sharon: 'That Jew! He's not a human being. All he does is war with people. Just like Bush!' Saddam Hussein's popularity among some of China's Muslims is partly attributable to his support of the Palestinian cause. A Hui respondent told Gladney that 'all true Muslims' should support Saddam because in raising the plight of the Palestinians, standing up to the US and attacking Israel he had proved that he could unite the world's Muslims: Dislocating China, p. 328.
146. Cited in Eriksen, 'The epistemological status of the concept of ethnicity', p. 7.
147. Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 104.
148. Israeli, 'Muslims in China', p. 289.
149. See the contributions by Rahilä Dawut and Äsäd Sulayman in Bellér-Hann et al., eds, Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia.
150. Feuchtwang, 'Religion as resistance', p. 163.