Uyghurs face stricter controls on religious education and worship and how they dress because of Islam’s links to their political identity, analysts say.
... in the Xinjiang region in China’s far west, where the mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uyghurs form an ethnic group 9 million strong, government policies bar women and anyone under age 18 from attending mosques.
Uyghur parents are forbidden to teach religion to their children at home, and private religious education is subject to harsh crackdowns.
Six teenaged Uyghur boys who were arrested for studying the Quran on their own after school are now serving sentences of 8 to 14 years in jail, a Uyghur farmer in the area who wished to remain anonymous told RFA this month.
The boys, who were between the ages of 14 and 17 at the time, had been arrested in April 2010 in Keriye prefecture, and are now being held in jails in Aksu and Yarkand far from their hometowns, he said.
In May this year, an 11-year-old Uyghur boy died under suspicious circumstances in police custody after being detained when police raided his teacher’s home in Korla prefecture where he had been studying the Koran with two other boys when police took him away.
In a separate incident weeks later, a dozen children in Hotan prefecture suffered burns after police using teargas and stormed a religious school where some 50 children were studying under “illegal preachers.”
Aside from restrictions on Islamic education and worship, Uyghurs are also subject to restrictions on traditional Islamic dress.
“Uyghurs are different; they had their own land and were invaded by China,” Ghulam Osman said, referring to Xinjiang’s past before it came under Chinese control following two short-lived East Turkestan Republics in the 1930s and 1940s.
China, fearing a separatist movement in Xinjiang, represses Uyghurs’ religious freedom because Islam is significant in the survival of their identity, he said.
But if China is worried about an independence movement blossoming among Uyghurs, such a movement would be more likely to be spurred in reaction to repressive religious policies than religion on its own, Gladney said.
“All the Uyghur movements against the Chinese government were caused by frustration that resulted from the heavy-handed repression of the Chinese government in the region, not by radical religious forces,” Gladney said.
But the political role of Islam in allowing Uyghurs to maintain an identity separate from the rest of China should not be underestimated, Ghulam Osman said.
“It is true that all political movements of Uyghurs are caused by the heavy handed policy of China and not by radical religious forces.”
“However, this does not mean religion does not play a significant role in Uyghur survival and Uyghur political movements,” he said.
“Islam and the Uyghur language are deeply embedded in Uyghur identity. They strengthen our racial and historical differences with Han Chinese.”
Via: "Radio Free Asia"
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