Why Muslim World Is Silent Over China’s War On Islam?

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China’s

Sumera B. Reshi
Quite recently, Beijing passed a law to make Islam ‘compatible’ with socialism within the next five years. The new legislation is meant to implement measures to ‘Sinicize’ Islam, the newest effort to crack down on China’s minority Muslim population. The pivotal aim of this law is to ‘make it more Chinese. China has been seeking to ‘Sinicize’ religions by infusing them with ‘Chinese characteristics’ such as loyalty to the Communist Party under President Xi Jinping‘s 2015 directive. ‘Islam in China should be guided by the Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. Chinese authorities met eight Islamic groups to formulate the plan. After the discussions and deliberations, Chinese authorities agreed to ‘guide Islam’ to be compatible with socialism. However, the details of ‘Sinicization’ are shrouded in a mystery and no details were furnished to the media till date.
As the Chinese authorities continue a brutal crackdown in Xinjiang, Islam has been one of the main targets. Major mosques in the major cities of Kashgar and Urumqi now stand empty. Prisoners in the camps are told to renounce God and embrace the Chinese Communist Party. Prayers, religious education, and the fasting during Ramadan are increasingly restricted or banned. Even in the rest of China, the Arabic text is being stripped from public buildings, and Islamophobia is being tacitly encouraged by party authorities.
Despite the invisible torture of Uyghurs, Muslim leaders and communities around the world stand silent. While the fate of the Palestinians stirs rage and resistance throughout the Islamic world, and millions stood up to condemn the persecution of the Rohingya, there’s been hardly a sound on behalf of the Uyghur. None of the Muslim leaders have made a public statement in support of the Uyghurs. Politicians and many religious leaders who claim to speak for the faith are silent in the face of China’s political, economic power and longstanding friendship. As stated by Professor Michael Clarke, China Policy Expert, “China’s economic power and the fear of retaliation was a big factor in Muslim politics.” He added, “You are dealing with one of the most powerful states in the World.”
Other Muslim-majority countries, including Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia have avoided criticizing China or raising the atrocities of Uygur in public. Pakistan reaffirming the pledge of being an ‘all weather friends’ has gone a step further by ignoring the media reports on Uyghur and terming the situation as ‘sensationalized’ by the Western media. Chinese investments and contracts in the Middle East and North Africa from 2005 until Dec 2018 amount to $144.8 billion. In addition, Beijing has heavily invested in state-owned oil and gas industries in Saudi Arabia and Iraq and promised to continue investments across Asia, Africa and the Middle East with its Belt and Road initiative.
Analysts say that Beijing’s policy of ‘non-intervention’, whereby it avoids becoming involved in the domestic affairs of other nations, has long been a key part of its foreign policy agenda.
According to Simone van Nieuwenhuizen, a Chinese-Middle East relations expert at the University of Technology, Sydney, ‘Many states in the Middle East are becoming more economically dependent on China. China’s geo-economics strategy has resulted in political influence.” Pakistan sees China as a vital balancer against India, and their relationship, sometimes referred to as the ‘iron brotherhood,’ goes back decades. Therefore, it is plausible to in case of China that the economics determine the relations and not the religion.
In 2018, a United Nations (UN) human rights panel uncovered that China holds a million ethnic Uyghur’s and Muslim minorities in prison in the Xinjiang region. Researchers believe that southern Xinjiang’s Luopu County No 1 has borne the brunt of the government’s crackdown on Muslims because of its density of Uyghurs and distance from major cities. Luopu County houses vocational skills training centers where Muslims are detained and indoctrinated. As per UN, 1.1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Hui and other ethnic minorities had been detained in internment camps.
Luopu is a sparingly populated rural county of about 280,000 and home to eight internment camps officially called as ‘vocational training centers. In Luopu or Lop County, authorities are expanding detention camps, increasing surveillance, policing and co-opting residents through intimidation, force and financial incentives. Since 2018, construction of vocational skills training centers has gone up in order to detain more Uyghurs into these internment camps.
Moreover, domestic security expenses have doubled in 2017 as the security campaign got underway. Chinese authorities are spending lavishly on detention centers in counties with a large concentration of ethnic minorities quadrupling, according to Adrian Zenz, a researcher whose emphasis is on ‘China’s ethnic policies.’
As per Gay McDougall, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, ‘Uyghurs and Muslim minorities are being held in a ‘political indoctrination camp’ in Western Xingjian. However, China blames that Xingjian region faces insurgency from Islamist militants and separatists who try to drive a wedge between the ethnic Han Chinese majority and Muslim Uyghurs.
As stated by the Wall Street Journal, the increase in internment camps since last year in mind boggling and which the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China has described as ‘the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today’. China firstly detained Uyghurs Muslims and then prohibited them from growing long beard. Ever since, the news about internment camps and the fate of Muslims in Xingjian autonomous region leaked to the world media, China has been vending its own narrative. They call these internment camps as vocational training centers, schools or reeducation camps. Those who have been infected by an ideological illness are being sent to reeducation camps. People who have been maligned with religious extremism and violent terrorist ideology must seek treatment according to Chinese authorities. China considers the religious extremist ideology a type of poisonous medicine, which confuses the mind of the people. If we do not eradicate religious extremism at its roots, the violent terrorist incidents will grow and spread all over like an incurable malignant tumor.
James Millward, a professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University, said, “Religious belief is seen as a pathology in China.” “And Beijing often claims religion fuels extremism and separatism. So now they are calling reeducation camps ‘hospitals’ meant to cure thinking. It’s like an inoculation, a search-and-destroy medical procedure that they want to apply to the whole Uyghurs population, to kill the germs of extremism. But it is not just giving someone a shot – it is locking them up for months in bad conditions,” professor Millward added.
Since long, China has feared that Uyghurs might attempt to establish their own national homeland in Xinjiang, which they refer to as East Turkmenistan. Tracking down the origin of Uyghurs, they are actually a Turkic ethnicity who have historically and in contemporary times lived largely in Central Asia and in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). In China, Han makes up around 92 per cent of China’s population and besides Han, there are 55 ethnic minority groups in the country including the Uyghurs, Hui and Tibetans. Chinese officials believe that the Uyghurs have no indigenous claim to the area, and they migrated from Mongolia and other Central Asian territories.
Additionally, the conflict between the Hans and Uyghurs goes back to centuries to dynastic China, but the major fissures occurred after the US was attacked on September 11, 2001. In 2009, ethnic riots resulted in hundreds of deaths.
Moreover, Uyghurs are alleged that they have carried out terrorist attacks in recent years and which need to be suppressed else Uyghur separatism might set a precedent. For this reason, reeducation camps were established to make Uyghur Muslims compatible with Chinese state policy.
“China did have intermittent periods of control over the area, but it was only during the Qing dynasty in the mid-eighteen century that they exerted control for a longer period,” commented Michael Clarke, an Associate Professor at the National Security College, Australian National University. Besides, Jennifer Ang states that “the Uyghurs have no ethnoreligious identity which has become underscored in contemporary times due to China’s constructed narrative regarding the Uyghurs and Xinjiang.”
Nevertheless, China’s claim and a description of the Xinjiang has offended the Uyghurs history, identity and culture and has reinforced the ethnic divide between them and the Hans. Soon after the birth of China as a republic, it went through a communist revolution and the same year witnessed the ‘peaceful liberation’ of Xingjian. Despite Moa rejected Han-chauvinism and promoted a multi-ethnic Chinese nation, the actual ‘Sinicization’ of the Uyghurs took place under communist China. Those who follow the path set by Chinese authorities won’t face the torture, but those who resist will be punished vehemently.
In 1950 when China invaded Tibet, they were treated like they treat Uyghurs now. The state wants ethnic minorities to behave in their way and the reason is that they want to unify all people as ‘Chinese’.
Although China has provided autonomy to five regions with a majority non-Han ethnicity, however, the aim seems to be the ‘Sinicization’ of these regions and ethnicities. Professor Clarke asserts that since 1949, China has wanted to integrate Xinjiang fully with China politically, culturally, and economically subsuming the non-Han ethnic groups of Xinjiang into the ‘unitary, multiethnic state’ of China.
In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet, China introduced a new ploy to appease the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The plan was to develop Xinjiang and increase economic growth in the region to ‘buy the Uyghurs’ loyalty. One of the ways to do this was to connect and open up Xinjiang to the newly formed Central Asian republics.
To counter this, China diplomatically engaged the new republics, not only to improve economic growth, but more importantly to reduce separatism in Xinjiang. From 1996-2000, China’s diplomatic efforts paid dividends, through the Shanghai Five and improved bilateral relations, as they neutralized the threat faced from Uyghur advocacy groups in Central Asia.
Although during the 1990s, China undoubtedly developed the Xinjiang region with highways, trains, industries and other infrastructure, this had even more adverse effects on the Uyghurs. China’s compliance towards its development/modernization policy benefited the Han immigrants in Xinjiang as they were more educated, already Sinicized, and knew Chinese. The Uyghurs thus had to compete in their own homeland with Chinese-speaking Hans in an economic environment controlled by the same ethnicity.
“The state’s project requires Uyghurs to “adopt an entirely new set of rules” so that instead of Islam, they must follow the 12 secular values of China,” asserted Darren Byler and Timothy, Grose, academics and experts on China studies. Ang mentions that Uyghurs are trapped between Han-chauvinism and Chinese imperialism. The rules ascertained enable or disable the Uyghurs from progressing in life in Xinjiang. The Uyghurs must Sinicize their religion, speech, dressing, behavior, culture, and language in order to compete with the favored Han migrants and that too, unfortunately, in their own homeland of Xinjiang.
Due to a methodical campaign of oppression in an apparent attempt to extinguish the religion and ethnicity of the Uyghurs. Uyghurs today are not free in the most fundamental sense of the word—not to travel, not to practice their faith, not to speak to their relatives, not to name their children. Not even submission to discriminatory government regulations and coercion keeps their families safe. And the world barely seems to notice.

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