Wiro Sableng-123-Genderuwo Patah Hati

Journal of Contemporary China (2007), 16(53), November, 627–654
Chinese Oppression in Xinjiang, Middle

Eastern Conflicts and Global Islamic
Solidarities among the Uyghurs
JOANNE SMITH FINLEY*
Individuals in Xinjiang are not merely passive recipients of state representations and
policies; they are also agents capable of finding subtle means of self-representation. These
symbolic oppositions are necessarily fluid: they emerge, adapt and disappear in response to
the changing political environment. Currently, some individuals are demonstrating symbolic
resistance to the state through the vehicle of Islam itself: a return to the mosque and orthodox
religious practice. This article explores the nature and source of the current Islamic renewal
in Xinjiang, conceived (though not exclusively) as a vehicle of symbolic opposition to
perceived Muslim oppression at national and global levels. In discussing the international
dimension, I explore the role played by imported Islamic materials, pilgrimage, study abroad,
and, above all, the national and global mass media.
Introduction
It has been observed that ethno-national movements ‘have dynamics of their own,
which have the potential to override obstacles set up by the dominating power’.1
These dynamics of resistance need not consist of direct methods such as
demonstration or riot, but may also involve subtler means. During the mid-1990s,
some pro-independence activists in Xinjiang employed direct methods of resistance
against the Chinese state, including sabotage and assassinations of police, military
personnel and indigenous officials. Yet the majority of Uyghurs expressed their
* Joanne Smith Finley is Lecturer in Chinese at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. Her research interests
include ethnic, national and hybrid identities among the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, NW China; the relationship between
repression, resistance (including religious renewal) and accommodation in Xinjiang since the 1997 Ghulja riots; and
alternative representations in Uyghur popular music and popular culture. Dr Smith Finley was co-organiser of the
international conference Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia, held at the School of Oriental and
African Studies in London on 5–6 November 2004, and funded by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation in conjunction
with the China and Inner Asia Council of the AAS. She is currently co-editing a volume of papers arising from that
meeting, while working on a monograph on ‘pure’ versus hybrid identities among the Uyghurs of contemporary
Xinjiang. This is an expanded version of a paper given at the conference China and the Middle East: Central Asian
Connections, at the University of Haifa, Israel on 16–18 May 2006. The author is grateful to panel members and
conference participants, as well as to Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Rachel Harris for useful comments and suggestions.
1. Nicolas Becquelin, ‘Staged development in Xinjiang’, China Quarterly 178, (2004), p. 377.
ISSN 1067-0564 print/ 1469-9400 online/07/530627–28 q 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/10670560701562333
JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
opposition through non-violent, symbolic means. The three main vehicles for this
were:
1. daily repetition of alternative (negative) stereotypes of Han Chinese;
2. symbolic, spatial and social segregation from Han Chinese; and
3. dissemination of alternative representations of Han/Uyghur as coloniser/co-
lonised through the medium of popular Uyghur song (‘new folk’).
In so doing, they firmly rejected the Utopian visions of ‘nationality unity’ (minzu
tuanjie) and ‘nationality equality’ (minzu pingdeng) perpetuated in state discourses.
Following the 1997 Ghulja [Ch. Yining ] riots and subsequent intensification in
Xinjiang of the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign against separatism and ‘illegal religious
activities’, this situation radically changed. Heavy restrictions were placed on
freedom of speech in order to suppress the expression of alternative representations,
labelled ‘local nationalist’ and ‘splittist’ by the state. In Ghulja, a ‘Three-No’ policy
was established: no questioning [the riots], no telling [about the riots], no visiting
[those imprisoned following the riots].2 In 2002, censorship within the cultural sector
was also stepped up following the public recital of a nationalist poem during
the Naw-ruz celebrations in Ürümchi,3 so that two means of symbolic resistance
previously in operation—oral stereotyping and nationalist metaphor in popular
culture—were outlawed. Yet alternative representations and symbolic oppositions
are necessarily fluid: they emerge, adapt and disappear in response to the changing
political environment. While ethnic segregation continues to be enforced by most
Uyghurs at present (an exception is some Chinese-educated, school-age urban
Uyghurs), a new symbolic boundary has emerged among some individuals since the
late 1990s. That new boundary is Islam itself; a return to the mosque, a renewal of
orthodox religious practices, as distinct from the national customs informed by Islam
which featured previously in alternative stereotypes distinguishing Uyghur from Han.
This article is a preliminary exploration of the nature and source of the current
Islamic renewal, conceived (though not exclusively) as a vehicle of symbolic
opposition to perceived Muslim oppression at national and international levels. I
place this phenomenon in a sensible perspective against official Chinese claims of
‘Islamic terrorism’, and suggest that it results less from militant ‘Islamist’ ideological
influences and more from increased dissatisfaction with oppressive and repressive
domestic policies.4 Domestic dissatisfaction is combining with a sense of empathy
with Middle Eastern Muslims perceived to be oppressed by foreign imperialist
powers to forge an unprecedented sense of global Islamic solidarity among the
Uyghurs. In focusing on this international dimension, I will explore the role played by
imported Islamic materials, pilgrimage, study abroad, and, above all, the national and
global mass media.
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).
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CHINESE OPPRESSION IN XINJIANG
State representations, self-representations

The proposition that the Uyghur nationality was largely ‘created’ by the Chinese state
has circulated for some time. This notion hinges largely on the fact that, following
gradual conversion to Islam in the region now known as Xinjiang, the ethnonym
‘Uyghur’—formerly associated with the Buddhist kingdom of Khocho [Ch.
Gaochang, 850– 1250]—fell into disuse until officially reinstated by the Chinese
Communist Party as part of its nationalities classification project in the 1950s.5 Thus,
Justin Ben-Adam argues that although enmity towards the Hui, perceived as allies of
the Han administration, helped the region’s Turkic Muslims envisage themselves as a
single group prior to 1949, the Uyghurs are the Uyghurs primarily because the
government gave them that name. At the same time, however, he acknowledges that
this classification ‘effectively drew a map within which the Uighurs already saw
themselves living’ (my emphasis).6 I would suggest that factors other than an
ethnonym—e.g. patterns of social interaction, cultural norms, common religious
practices, a common history and an attachment to the land—had provided a sense of
connection or ‘we-hood’ (to borrow Sartre’s term) to the oasis dwellers long before
the arrival of the Chinese Communists. This sense of ‘we-hood’, embodying shared
group experiences such as language, religion and notions of origin, has been
neglected in the literature on the Uyghurs in favour of ‘us-hood’, or the sense of
group loyalty engendered through enmity towards or competition with the ‘others’
(relative ethnicity).7 This focus on us-hood and comparative eclipse of we-hood tends
to produce the hypothesis that Uyghurs maintained no coherent identity prior to the
advent of the modern Chinese nation-state. It plays down the possibility that prior to
1949, there existed, in addition to oasis and social group identities, an over-arching
regional identity based on social, cultural and religious factors common to all of
Central Asia and perhaps subsumed under the term musulman (Muslim).8
Gladney’s approach to minority representation in contemporary China similarly
privileges the state representation of the minority. Yet while he provides us with
important and convincing illustrations of the ways in which minorities are exoticised
and feminised so as to define the Chinese [Han] nation, in adopting this focus he
seems to understate the possibilities for minority self-representation. In his view,
minorities ‘have had little choice’ in the way in which they have been represented in
the media, while the lack of a free press makes it ‘impossible’ for Muslims to
represent themselves in the public sphere without state mediation.9 He states too that
no indigenous ‘subaltern scholarship’ has yet begun to develop in China.10 While
acknowledging that minorities have occasionally attempted to voice their objections,
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. Ildikó Bellér-Hann, Cristina Cesàro, 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.
629
JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
the examples he gives centre on direct methods of opposition such as street

demonstration and ignore the less obvious, ongoing dynamics of symbolic resistance.
This general stance tends to deny the modern Uyghurs any social agency.
Undeniably, minorities cannot prevent the dissemination of state representations;
yet indigenous voices may nonetheless employ creative means to make themselves
heard, as ethnographers working in Xinjiang during the mid– late 1990s discovered.11
Here, Harrell’s conceptualisation of civilising projects as ‘asymmetrical dialogues
between the center and the periphery’ is fruitfully applied, since it allows not only
for the ideological discourse of the centre but also for an ethnic discourse of the
periphery.12 As he puts it, ‘ . . . peripheral peoples [ . . . ] respond [to the civilising
project] at least partially by developing an ideology of ethnicity or ethnic
consciousness’.13 At first glance, this appears to resemble the proposition that
minorities are created through the intervention of the nation-state in a ‘dialogical’
fashion. But Harrell nuances the term ‘developing’ to denote either the development
of something anew where it did not previously exist, or the further development
(sharpening, focusing, intensifying) of something that already existed. With at least
500 years’ history of common social, cultural and religious practices and norms since
the last Buddhist Uyghurs converted to Islam, and a common attachment to the land
developed during the course of over a millennium, it might be argued with some
justification that the Uyghurs belong to the latter category. This acknowledged, we
may in turn re-focus on the pre-existing sense of ‘we-hood’ when discussing Uyghur
identity and contemporary Uyghur– Han relations. However, even Harrell concludes
that ‘the answer to whether the subaltern can speak is that the subaltern can speak
[only] on the sufferance of the civilizer’;14 again, this view seems to allow for no
independent development of minority voices. I will argue that individuals in Xinjiang
are not merely passive recipients of state representations and policies; they are also
agents capable of finding subtle means of representing their own identities and
expressing disaffections. Currently, an important vehicle for this self-representation
is Islam. But in this post-9/11 era where diverse forms of Islam have tended to
become subsumed under a monolithic banner of militant fundamentalism, it is
important to carefully nuance the nature of the return to Islam both across the Central
Asia region as a whole and in Xinjiang in particular.
11. See Ildikó Bellér-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; Gardner Bovingdon, ‘The not-so-silent majority: Uyghur resistance to Han rule in Xinjiang’, Modern
China 28(1), (2002), pp. 39–78; M. Cristina Cesàro, ‘Consuming identities: food and resistance among the Uyghur in
contemporary Xinjiang’, Inner Asia 2(2), (2000), pp. 225 –238; 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; Joanne N. Smith, ‘Making culture
matter: symbolic, spatial, and social boundaries between Uyghurs and Han Chinese’, Asian Ethnicity 3(2), (2002), pp.
153–174; 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).
12. Stevan Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 1994), p. 7.
13. Ibid., p. 27.
14. Ibid., p. 34.
630
Militant Islamism in contemporary Central Asia: a ‘contamination effect’?15

Following the end of Soviet power in 1991, the independent Central Asian republics
witnessed a broad religious resurgence. This was partly a reaction to Islam’s long
oppression under Soviet rule,16 but resulted also from the sudden power vacuum,
economic collapse and the onset of poverty, and the injection of Saudi funding. One
element of the resurgence has been the growth of political Islam, a development
routinely exploited by leaders of the Central Asian states, who have used fears of
fundamentalist takeover in order to continue with repressive policies.17 A recent
example on a grand scale is the Andijan incident in Uzbekistan in May 2005, sparked
when an armed crowd sprung from jail 23 members of Akramiya accused of ‘Islamic
extremism’.18 The Uzbek authorities reacted brutally to the protest, which resulted in
over 500 deaths, and subsequently characterised the affair as a foreign-assisted coup
aimed at forming an Islamic caliphate.19 The US, keen to maintain its airbase in
southern Uzbekistan (one of a series of ‘lily pads’ bordering on a belt of oil and gas
fields stretching from the Middle East to Central Asia), supported President
Karimov’s stance, to much public criticism.20 In stark contrast, regional specialists
and local witnesses stated that the Islamic elements in the Andijan crowds, far from
espousing Islamic extremism, were concerned about government corruption and
poverty, and occupy a position that is ‘more Turkey than Taliban’.21
While Islamic militancy undoubtedly exists in Central Asia, it is important to
consider this against a broader landscape of Islamic renaissance and, more recently,
moderate Islamist social and economic activism. If cultural aspects of Islam have
been on the rise since independence and the republics have desired to connect more
fully with the traditional practices of the Islamic past, their religious awareness ‘does
not necessarily translate into radical, political behaviour’.22 Rather, Islam should be
viewed as ‘a means of national self-identification, an instrument of spiritual liberation
from Moscow, the excessive influence of the communist system and Slavic culture—
expressions of foreign colonial domination’.23
In Central Asia, the revival of Islamic consciousness has manifested itself
variously as:
1. the Sufi revival of ritual practice;
15. This term was coined by Harald Bøckman 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.
16. See Ghoncheh Tazmini, ‘The Islamic revival in Central Asia: a potent force or a misconception?’, Central
Asian Survey 20(1), (2001), p. 67.
17. Mehrdad Haghayeghi, ‘Islam and democratic politics in Central Asia’, World Affairs 156(4), (1994), p. 195.
18. 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).
19. Nick Paton Walsh, ‘Uzbeks accuse foreign media of coup attempt as Andijan “show trial” opens’, The
Guardian, (21 September 2005).
20. Craig Murray, ‘What drives support for this torturer’, The Guardian, (16 May 2005).
21. 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).
22. Tazmini, ‘The Islamic revival in Central Asia’, pp. 66–67, 81.
23. Ibid., p. 68.
631
JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
2. adoption of Muslim appellation and identity while continuing on a secular path;

3. the observance of Islamic holidays, rituals and Friday prayer only;
4. adoption of a strict form of religious practice (especially among the youth); and
5. appropriation of Islam as the basis for an alternative political system.24
Only the last of these may be linked to radical politics.25
There has been an expectation among some scholars that militant Islamism in Central
Asia and other countries west of Xinjiang (Pakistan, Afghanistan) might also take hold
among disaffected Uyghurs.26 To date, however, there is no compelling evidence that
this is happening. At the logistical level, collaborations between member states of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (formerly the Shanghai Five/Six) involving border
security and suppression of Islamist and separatist activities have successfully prevented
the development of links between Uyghur separatists and their cousins in Central Asia.27
At the ideological level, it is noted that episodes of Uyghur resistance have been
characterised by a variety of ideologies, of which Islam is only one.28 Certainly, militant
Islamist ideologies centring on the creation of an Islamic state by any means have not
featured in contemporary pro-independence discourses, and Uyghur separatist
organisations have consistently denied any connection with terrorism.29 At the same
time, exiled and local Uyghurs alike reject allegations that they are terrorists. On the
other hand, the evident need to contest the exaggerated claims of the international media
and Chinese officials concerning the threat of ‘Islamic terrorism’ in the region should not
lead us to under-state the significance of Islam as a symbolic, oppositional force. Protests
that have taken place in Xinjiang during the reform period have often adopted a focus on
the protection of Islam or Islamic culture. In 1980–1981, a suspicious mosque fire in
Yäkän resulted in a riot and calls including ‘To burn a mosque is to burn Islam’;30 in 1989,
24. 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. 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.
25. 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.
26. See Yitzhak Shichor, ‘Separatism: Sino–Muslim conflict in Xinjiang’, Pacifica Review 6(2), (1994), p. 81;
Colin Mackerras, ‘Xinjiang at the turn of the century, and the causes of separatism’, Central Asian Survey 20(3),
(2001), pp. 289, 296; Yueyao Zhao, ‘Pivot or periphery? Xinjiang’s regional development’, Asian Ethnicity 2(2),
(2001), p. 222; Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 12.
27. 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, see Dillon, Xinjiang,
pp. 142 –155.
28. James Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: A Critical Assessment (Washington, DC: East –West
Center, 2004), p. ix.
29. Ibid., pp. 23 –28, 31; see also Dru C. Gladney, ‘Islam in China: accommodation or separatism?’, The China
Quarterly 174, (2003), p. 458.
30. Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, p. 8.
632
there was a joint Hui/Uyghur demonstration in Ürümchi against the (later withdrawn)
book Xing fengsu [Sexual Customs ], which contained insulting misrepresentations of
Islam;31 and in April 1990, the call to arms for the Baren uprising, spread through
mosques and cassette tapes, responded to government plans to extend the family
planning policy to minorities, including Muslims.32 Each incident may be seen as a
religiously oriented response to a perceived assault on Islamic symbols or cultural
practices; the collaborative (Hui/Uyghur) nature of the albeit peaceful response to Xing
fengsu also demonstrates how adherence to a common ummah may indeed undermine
stability in line with the deepest fears of central government. More recent incidents have
involved a defensive reaction to the increased state repression of religion. For example,
the ‘Talip [religious student] incident’ in Yäkän in January 1990 involved the closure of
‘illegal’ private religious schools;33 disturbances in Ürümchi and other cities in October
1991 followed protests that Xinjiang did not enjoy religious freedom as paraded in the
‘White Paper on Human Rights’ published that year;34 the Khotän demonstration of July
1995 followed the sudden arrest of local imams;35 and the Ghulja riots of February 1997
resulted from state prohibition of mäshräp and the arrest of taliplar.36 It is also significant
that assassinations of politically ‘accommodative’ Uyghur cadres, common in April–
June 1996 and the core of the sporadic violence that peaked in the 1997 Ghulja riots,
often focused on members of the Chinese Islamic Association, viewed as ‘traitors’ by
their fellow Muslims.37
At present, Islam is increasingly assuming an important function in Uyghur social
and cultural life and individual psychology, as well as in the political consciousness
of some individuals. It should be stressed, however, that this return to orthodox
Islamic practice and the more or less conscious employment of Islam as a means of
alternative representation and symbolic protest is taking a non-violent form. While
re-introducing Islam into the picture, I eschew the automatic confusion of Islam with
Islamism (understood as militant fundamentalism), a tendency perpetuated in
Chinese state discourse, the press, and sometimes also in the academic literature.
Whether owing to the repressive ‘Strike Hard’ campaign, the PLA military presence,
the history of non-radical, traditional Islam in the region or a historical tendency
31. Ibid.; Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 60 –61; Gladney, Dislocating China, pp. 232, 314–315.
32. Shichor, ‘Separatism’, p. 74; Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 62–65; Mackerras, ‘Xinjiang at the turn of the century’, p.
291; Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, pp. 14–15.
33. Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, p. 14.
34. Shichor, ‘Separatism’, p. 75.
35. Joanne N. Smith, Changing Uyghur Identities in Xinjiang in the 1990s, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Leeds, 1999, Appendix I, pp. v–vi; Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 70; Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, p.
15.
36. Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 92–98; 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. 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; 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.
37. 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. For accounts of particular incidents, see Nicola Beckley, ‘China’s Muslims sharpen their knives against
Peking’, The Independent, (5 March 1997); and Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 70.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
towards a docile, ‘sheep-like’ acceptance of rule from without, Islam in Xinjiang is

currently taking the form of symbolic opposition.
Islamic renewal in Ürümchi since the late 1990s38

By 1989, the number of mosques in Xinjiang had increased by 5.8 times compared
with a decade earlier to some 20,000; but, of that figure, 17,540 were said to be in the
south,39 where Uyghurs greatly outnumber Han Chinese and have historically been
more observant than those in the north. By the end of the 1990s, the number had
reached 23,000, and continued to grow.40 There are indicators that religiosity had
begun to revive in the south by the mid–late 1990s. While conducting fieldwork
among southern peasants, Ildikó Bellér-Hann noted that observance of public
worship on Friday, praying once a day and fasting during Ramadan were usually cited
as important requirements for Muslim males.41 In 1996, peasants in rural Aqsu
showed me printed leaflets (origin unclear) containing information about the Day of
Judgment, which they said had ‘scared them into praying’, whereas their attitude
towards prayer had originally been lax. A revival of traditional Islamic alms-giving
was noted, whereby peasants who produced a surplus sometimes donated it to the
poor; this charity was often coordinated by indigenous dadui [village] officials.42 The
picture of local officials’ participation in spontaneous religious renewal is further
suggested by the story of a xiaodui zhang [production team leader] who led his
community in building a new mosque, an act characterised as ‘an initiative which
came from his neighbours and had nothing to do with his position in a formal political
hierarchy’.43 Although appointment to an official post precluded religious
participation, many rural officials ignored this until the rule was reinforced in 1996
in response to increased separatist unrest. Even then, they often returned to the
mosque following retirement as this was ‘a precondition for acceptance in the local
moral community’.44 In urban Qäshqär, there was a strong reliance in 1993– 1994 on
the orally transmitted knowledge of religious elders. However, this local knowledge
has latterly been challenged by reformist Muslims claiming to uphold a more
38. 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 Ürümchi 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.
40. Mackerras, ‘Xinjiang at the turn of the century’, p. 292.
41. Ildikó Bellér-Hann, Community Matters: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur in Xinjiang,
1880s– 1990s (forthcoming ), p. 311.
42. Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Chris Hann, ‘Peasants and officials in Southern Xinjiang: subsistence, supervision
and subversion’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 124, (1999), p. 10.
43. Ibid., p. 13.
44. Ibid., pp. 16 –17.
634
‘orthodox’ form of Islam, a development attributable to increased transnational links

and greater access to the scripturalist traditions.45
In Han-dominated Ürümchi in the north, the process of religious renewal proceeded
more slowly. It was not at all evident when I conducted my doctoral fieldwork in 1995–
1996, gaining momentum only towards the end of the decade and, significantly, only
after the 1997 Ghulja riots and subsequent crackdown on ‘illegal religion’ and
separatism. The current return to prayer has necessitated the replacement of the city’s
original mosques with new ones many times their size and more attractive and splendid.
While larger mosques have been built on existing sites with the aid of state funding, there
is also evidence of new sites being opened up for small-scale mosque construction,
funded by private donations. By the time of my stay in 2002, the former Aq Meschit
[White Mosque] at Shanxihang had been replaced by a larger, new mosque, with
beautiful turrets and domes and intricate carved wooden doors (the completion date on
the façade read ‘2001–8–21’). Where the doors of the former mosque had opened
straight onto the road, the new mosque was set back, allowing for a large forecourt to
accommodate greater numbers of worshippers. The replacement Yan’anlu mosque
remained under construction in 2002 but was completed by the time of my stay in 2004.46
It was a huge, exotic building, again set back off the road, with a large square forecourt in
front. I asked two petty traders what had become of the tiny old Yan’anlu mosque; they
responded enthusiastically: ‘That’s gone! Pulled down! [ . . . ] With numbers of
worshippers increasing so rapidly, they couldn’t fit them all in [ patmaydu ]! The new
mosque has two floors!’ Another large, ornate, multi-storeyed mosque being built in the
Erdaoqiao district in 2002 was also complete by 2004, making a total of four huge
mosques in the relatively small area between Nanmen and Yan’anlu.
Clearly, the government is complicit in the construction of these large mosques,
which have benefited greatly from state funding in addition to private donations, and
has its own reasons for supporting the venture. As Dilbär, an 18-year-old, female high
school student, remarked:
Of course, one should not forget the element of tourism: the government knows that if it
builds mosques and other buildings with ‘ethnic’ characteristics, foreigners will come to
see them and will be interested in the local ‘culture’ . . . then it can say ‘Look! We built
all these mosques for our Muslims; aren’t we good to them?’
Many respondents highlighted the relatively lenient policies towards religion in
Ürümchi (where Uyghurs are outnumbered by the Han and considered comparatively
loyal to the state), and suggested that the government hoped to buy the loyalty of its more
‘civilized’ (read, Chinese-educated or Chinese-speaking) Uyghur population by
granting it freedom of religion.47 Such policies contrast starkly with the strict religious
45. 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.
46. 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.
47. 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.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
policies in operation in the south, where Uyghurs are dominant in number, considered
less ‘civilized’, and historically resisted Chinese rule. However, as Rudelson has
accurately pointed out, both strategies of control are doomed to fail since the suppression
of Islam invites opposition, while its tolerance leads to an intensified sense of
separateness from (Han) Chinese society.48 A second factor behind the Islamic face-lift
in the regional capital may be the state’s desire to maintain good diplomatic and
economic relations with other Islamic nations.49
However, as pointed out with reference to the spread of Christian church meetings,
a politics of permission is at the same time a politics of response; religious resistance
in China often takes the form of a ‘negotiated compromise with state agencies’.50
Tourists and Islamic foreign dignitaries are not alone in taking advantage of these
new Islamic spaces. The volume and composition of mosque-goers has changed
radically. On each occasion in 1995 and 1996 when I visited Ürümchi’s principal
mosques on a Friday (traditionally the most important day of prayer), I observed only
a handful of elderly men going in. The sole exception was on the occasion of a
funeral, when the former Yan’anlu mosque was attended by a larger crowd of elderly
and middle-aged men, one of whom commented wryly: ‘The only time we go to the
mosque these days is when someone dies.’ Compare this with an observation made at
the Aq Meschit on a Monday in summer 2002:
Six years earlier, you would barely have seen a soul going into the mosque on a non-
Friday, just the odd bearded elder. What a difference now! Some men were already inside
when I got there [ . . . ] Men drifted in continuously until about 12.45; unlike in the mid-
1990s, these were not only men in their sixties in long coats, hats and ötük [tall, leather
boots]; there was an equally large number of young men, ranging from teenagers to those
in their thirties, as well as some younger boys taken in by fathers and grandfathers. The
middle-aged men were conspicuous in their relative absence. A few were there, certainly,
but they were greatly outnumbered by the upper and lower generations. Of course, this
generation had grown up during the Cultural Revolution [and so had not been educated in
the Arabic script, nor in prayer rituals].
Some respondents suggested that these worshippers may have been southern
traders and businessmen passing through; others noted that there are simply more
Uyghurs (migrants) in Ürümchi now. There is also evidence that reformist
Muslims from Qäshqär may be congregating in Ürümchi because of the city’s
greater religious freedom.51 Yet the suggestion that ‘only southerners go in the
mosque’ reflected a southern bias against Uyghurs in the capital, often assumed to
be religiously empty due to their relative proximity to Han Chinese. Ürümchiliks
(Uyghurs born and raised in Ürümchi) confirmed that many Ürümchi Uyghurs are
now returning to religion. Two male traders explained: ‘Now the youth are going
into the mosques . . . this is a very good thing! It demonstrates the strength, the
48. Justin Rudelson, Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism along China’s Silk Road (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997), p. 48.
49. 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.
50. Stefan Feuchtwang, ‘Religion as resistance’, in Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden, eds, Chinese Society:
Change, Conflict and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 167.
51. See Waite, ‘The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang’.
636
power [küchlük ] of Islam!’ The young mosque-goers I observed seemed to be

mainly businessmen and petty traders, although this clearly reflected the mosques’
location in the Uyghur-dominated southeast, where few Uyghurs are employed by
work units or Han companies and are therefore free to go to prayer. Zunun, a state
employee in his thirties, pointed out that one reason why mosques are smaller and
fewer in the northwest of the city is that most Uyghurs there are attached to work
units and cannot get time off to pray, nor are they officially permitted to do so. He
was keen to stress that this does not necessarily mean that these men are not
observant (I will return to this theme later).
An increase in religiosity is also visible among some young women in Ürümchi.
By 2002, the number of women wearing full veils or tying headscarves beneath
the chin had greatly increased in the Erdaoqiao district compared with the mid-
1990s, and included very small girls. Textile traders, young and old, prayed in
designated rooms in the bazaars. Respondents confirmed these observations to be
an accurate reflection of the trend. Gülhärä, a 20 year-old Uyghur-educated
student, explained: ‘The middle-aged women don’t wear headscarves, but a lot of
young women are wearing them now around Erdaoqiao, passed under the chin
[ . . . ] some wear the full veil with just their eyes showing. Even the tiny girls wear
scarves’. According to Yultuz, another 20-year-old Uyghur-educated student, some
women are covering up on their own initiative, while others are persuaded to do so
by their husbands following marriage. But it would be simply untrue to claim a
strong element of male coercion; persuasion, where it occurs, is usually gentle and
based on explanation of Islamic teachings. In some cases, wives are more
observant than their husbands. Ghayrät, migrant worker from Aqsu in his thirties,
told me:
A friend’s wife in my hometown reads bäsh waq namaz [five daily prayers], but he
drinks, smokes and has a good time. He often says to her ‘You don’t need to wear a veil’,
but she does so because she wants to. No-one is forcing her.
Perhaps more indicative of a general shift in levels of religiosity in the capital

is the emerging evidence surrounding prayer beyond the public eye, that is,
among students and state employees. Despite their exposure to the secular state
curriculum and state prohibitions on their participation in religious activities, I
detected a strong desire among Uyghur-educated high school and university
students to pray, and a considerable effort to circumvent the law forbidding this.
Interestingly, some minkaohan (Chinese-educated Uyghurs) are also taking part
in prayer, especially those exposed to a strong ‘counter-education’ in the family
home. Gülhärä explained:
I pray at home. We’re not allowed to pray at college, but we do anyway, in the dorms
where no-one can see us . . . some minkaohan [Chinese-educated Uyghurs] pray too,
those who’ve been taught well in their family, whose mum and dad showed them how.
We can’t wear headscarves at school. I would like to, perhaps when I graduate. But, if I
get a job in a state work unit, I still won’t be allowed to wear one! I’ll wear it at home
then.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
As Fuller and Lipman correctly observe, the surveillance and suppression of religion
has thus had the paradoxical effect of strengthening the central role of Islam in Uyghur
life.52 For Dilbär, an 18-year-old, Uyghur-educated student living in Han-dominated
northwest Ürümchi, family education assumed a key role in maintaining religious
identity. Her grandparents scolded her if she didn’t wear a scarf, while her parents were
less strict on head coverings but forbade her from wearing what she termed ‘wild clothes’
(short sleeves, etc.). In her view, the Chinese authorities were reluctant to allow young
girls to wear headscarves at school through fear that it would encourage or pressure other
girls to veil up and thus ‘exert a bad influence’ (i.e. strengthen the common, religious
identity). Despite the considerable time and space constraints imposed by the daily
school routine and the law, she and her classmates tried to pray as often as they could:
I like to pray, but it’s hard. Because we’re so busy rushing to and fro from school. I did
pray regularly a while back; I put a long black veil over my head [ . . . ] but then I missed a
few days, being so busy. And it’s no good stopping and starting. I want to start praying
again, though. It’s the same for the boys, they barely have time to rush out for lunch when
they’re at school, so it’s hard to go to the mosque. But many go on Fridays.
Bahar, an 18-year-old, Uyghur-educated daughter of a first-generation minkaohan,
found the secular climate of the state education system equally stifling, but
nonetheless made sure to pray at least once a day:
I know how to pray. But I only know the words, I don’t know the actions [härikätlär ]
[ . . . ] I pray every day at night-time, just mouthing the words, you know. I really like to
pray, but I’m very busy with school, so I don’t have much time. Most of the boys at my
school go to the mosque on Fridays even if it means missing their lunch [laughs].
I later interviewed some of the male classmates, and discovered a strong tendency
at their schools to apply peer pressure on those who did not enter the mosque. Ömär,
an 18-year-old, Uyghur-educated student, described the process as follows:
The strength of religion has grown, yes . . . it’s a powerful force, an abstract thing, it’s
hard to explain. But I know one reason is that we put pressure on one another to go to the
mosque . . . in my class [high school], the male pupils ragged me for not going on
Fridays, and so I began to go. And another lad has started to go now because I railed at
him and said ‘You didn’t go to the mosque . . . ’. And so it goes on. And we don’t trust
people if they don’t believe in Allah.
He described it as ‘the force of propaganda’ and explained that classmates ‘feel good
about themselves and each other’ if they go to the mosque. He was visibly glad as he
described his feeling on seeing the errant classmate at the mosque the previous Friday,
‘wearing a snowy white doppa and looking really happy’.
The process of peer pressure is also in operation in the broader community (where it
may be dubbed ‘community pressure’), and was mentioned at the other end of the
spectrum by Ibrahim, an elderly religious man in his seventies originally from Khotän:
52. 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. Feuchtwang, ‘Religion as
resistance’, p. 164.
638
Numbers of religious devotees have increased in Ürümchi partly because people tend to
imitate one another [bir-birsini doraydu ]. They watch the VCDs, listen to the cassettes,
read the books and become afraid; afraid of Allah. Some give up alcohol and cigarettes,
and when others see this, they feel ashamed and embarrassed and do the same.
However, he questioned the depth of religious knowledge among some new devotees,
suggesting that many don’t understand the meanings behind namaz, but ‘read them in
Arabic as if they are blind men [qarghularchä ]’. Patigül, a music trader in her early
thirties, similarly suggested that some new mosque-goers were not profoundly religious
individuals: ‘Everyone goes in the mosque now, not just those who recite namaz, but also
those who don’t . . . the thieves [oghri ] go in the mosque now too!’ This strongly
suggests that, for some people at least, the renewed popularity of the mosque masks a
‘ritual of defiance’ rather than the simple rediscovery of religiosity.53
Muslim oppression and religious renewal

I will argue that Islam has recently assumed a number of important roles in Xinjiang,
and that the religious renewal may be viewed at certain levels as a means of
alternative minority representation and a symbolic form of Uyghur opposition to the
Chinese state and/or its policies. The current return to orthodox Islamic practice
embodies variously (and in no particular order of importance):
1. a means of symbolic resistance against perceived Muslim oppression (on a
national and/or global level);
2. a response to failed development and an identification with Islam’s egalitarian
ethos;
3. a return to religious and cultural ‘purity’;
4. a source of spatial and psychological escapism; and
5. a vehicle for personal and national reform and salvation.
In the first case, through their alternative allegiance to Islam (rather than to the state)
individuals are demonstrating symbolic resistance against colonial oppression at
home;54 for some, this is extended to include oppression of Muslims worldwide. In the
second case, individuals are expressing their growing discontent at widening socio-
economic inequalities between Uyghurs and Han migrants in the wake of successive
regional development campaigns.55 In the third, they are choosing Islam as a ‘pure’
53. Feuchtwang gives examples of similar ‘rituals of defiance’ in Tibet; see ‘Religion as resistance’, p. 173.
54. 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.
55. 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;
Becquelin, ‘Staged development in Xinjiang’, pp. 358–378; Ildikó Bellér-Hann, ‘The peasant condition in Xinjiang’,
Journal of Peasant Studies 24(4), (1997), pp. 87– 112; 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.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
alternative to the cultural impurity imported by secular education in particular and Han
modernity in general. In the fourth, they are seeking psychological consolation and
catharsis amid the peace and social cohesion of the mosque community, with religion
defined as ‘an area of certainty’ separate from the world of changing politics;56 at the
same time, their patronage of this exclusively Islamic space underlines a continuing
desire for spatial segregation from Han Chinese migrants, who are increasingly
encroaching on formerly exclusive Uyghur spaces. The fifth case embodies a search for
personal and, by extension, group (national) salvation through the vehicle of Islam. It
includes both those individuals who believe religious laxity to be at the root of the
Uyghurs’ national demise and those whose primary motivation may be fear or
superstition.
Since it is well beyond the scope of this article to examine all five
manifestations, my discussion focuses on the first only: the causal relationship
between perceived Muslim oppression (including religious repression) and Islamic
renewal. However, this narrow focus should in no way imply that this is the
only—or even the most central—process going on. For some re-Islamising
Uyghurs, all the above factors are playing a part; for others, some factors are
important while others are less so; for still others, different factors may be fore-
grounded at different times. Individuals also display differing levels of awareness
towards the process, a point highlighted by Tashmämät, an intellectual in his
forties originally from Qäshqär:
For many people going to the mosque now, it is a superficial manifestation. These middle
school kids you mention who are going to the mosque on Fridays—for them, it’s not a
deep commitment or understanding. They are in fact expressing their discontent
[naraziliq bildürmäk ] with the current state of society. Perhaps ‘opposition’ [qarishi
qilmaq ] is too strong a word and certainly many won’t realize that what they’re doing is a
kind of symbolic opposition. But it is a kind of resistance insofar as it’s an expression of
discontent with government policy and with the Hans. Such expressions of discontent can
take many forms . . . at present they are taking a religious form.
His description suggests ‘a certain artlessness, almost ingenuousness’ in local

experiences of Islamic renewal, as also documented for other Muslim countries
undergoing revival.57
This article considers just one facet of Islam in contemporary Xinjiang: its function
as a vehicle for symbolic opposition to Muslim oppression, at the national level (with
the Chinese polity viewed as coloniser) and the global level (with individuals
expressing empathy with similarly ‘oppressed’ Muslims in the Middle East). The
active role played by Islam in many of the anti-colonial independence movements of
the twentieth century is well known.58 In post-1997 Xinjiang (i.e. since separatist
unrest peaked in the Ghulja riots), the Chinese state has moved quickly to consolidate
its programme of internal colonisation. The acceleration via the Western
56. Ibid., p. 172.
57. James Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 37.
58. See John Esposito, Islam and Politics, 3rd edn (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 60– 95.
640
Development Campaign of China’s policy of ‘domestication’ pursued in the 1990s

has led to further Han in-migration as the state attempts to stabilise the region by
altering the population composition.59 This ill-advised policy is being executed in an
already explosive climate of socio-economic competition between Han Chinese and
minorities, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, Uyghur language tuition,
outlawed for some time in Xinjiang’s universities (the exceptions are Uyghur
language and literature departments), is now increasingly rare in secondary and
primary schools as well.60 This is despite constitutional guarantees of linguistic
freedom for minority nationalities. 61 In a broader sense, the de facto
institutionalisation of the Chinese language in all spheres including education and
employment means that Uyghur parents are increasingly forced to place their
children in Han Chinese classes in order to ensure their competitiveness and indeed
their survival in the urban milieu. There they are taught in the Chinese (rather than the
Uyghur) language, learn about the Chinese (rather than the Uyghur) cultural heritage,
and absorb the Chinese (rather than the Uyghur) version of history.62 A majority of
Uyghurs believes that policies surrounding Han migration and Uyghur language and
religion are intended to result in cultural or ethnic genocide.63
The recent acceleration of sinicising (‘domesticating’) economic and cultural
policies aside, it is perhaps significant that religion did not initially resurge—or at
least not to this degree—under these conditions alone; nor did it feature prominently
in rising Uyghur nationalism in the mid– late 1990s.64 Rather, it seems that the
heightened repression of so-called ‘illegal religious activities’ since the mid-1990s
has particularly invited this religiously oriented response (although increased
censorship of other forms of expression—see earlier—may also have played a
part).65 Uyghur intellectual, Tashmämät, situated the current trend squarely within a
repetitive cycle:
59. 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.
60. See Arienne Dwyer, The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy and Political Discourse,
Policy Studies 15 (Washington: East –West Center, 2005).
61. 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.
62. 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
the 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.
64. 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.
65. On religious repression in Xinjiang since the mid-1990s, see Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 84–130, 156– 162; Fuller
and Lipman, ‘Islam in Xinjiang’, pp. 324–325, 332–338.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
There is a historical pattern, a cycle of religious repression being followed by religious

resurgence in Xinjiang. In the sixties and seventies—the Cultural Revolution period—
religion was totally repressed, but it didn’t disappear. After 1978—and Deng’s
conciliatory policies towards minorities—religion resurged once more. The current
situation is a repetition of that cycle.66
A male restaurateur in his forties, originally from Qäshqär, explained: ‘I suppose
Islam is stronger now because the government is trying to block religious activity. If
the government tries to block or limit Islam [hökumät tosisa . . . ], then people’s faith
only becomes stronger’. Ömär, an 18-year-old, Uyghur-educated high school student,
elaborated on this idea:
The reason why 1997 [the Ghulja riots] happened and why Islam has grown further since
then is because the government decided somewhere around 1995–1996 that all things
related to Islam—religious activities in the mosque, Islamic schools—were related to
separatist politics, and that Uyghurs were meeting in those places to plot with one
another. And so they clamped down [ching tutush ]. The laws forbidding under-18s to go
into mosques and so on were previously in place; the difference is that they weren’t
enforced. Now they began to enforce them.
In this way, ‘what might not be resistance on its own, becomes potential resistance
when it is categorized as illegal’.67 His female cousin Aynur, a Uyghur-educated
graduate in her twenties, further pointed out that numbers going into the mosque had
increased again following the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. This suggests that
the current Islamic response is at one level a reaction to increased religious
repression, initially on a national scale, but, more recently, also on a global scale.
Below I examine the global dynamics of the phenomenon.
Globalising forces: border trade, pilgrimage, study abroad and news media
For decades, the ‘closed’ nature of Chinese communist politics had restricted access
to religious ideologies in other Muslim societies.68 By contrast, over the course of the
1990s, forces of globalisation have vastly increased the flow of ideas and feelings
from outside Xinjiang into the region.69 Like contemporary individuals everywhere,
today’s Uyghurs are subject to ‘ . . . an extraordinary diversity of information [ . . . ]
images, concepts and lifestyles from well beyond their immediate locales’.70 My data
show that (a) imported Islamic materials; (b) pilgrimage to Mecca; (c) Islamic study
abroad; and (d) increased access to media coverage of Muslim issues worldwide are
all contributing to dynamics of re-Islamisation in Xinjiang.
Border trade between China and Central Asia and other neighbouring countries has
been developed rapidly over the past two decades, as has domestic and cross-border
66. 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.
67. Feuchtwang, ‘Religion as resistance’, p. 172.
68. Waite, ‘The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang’.
69. Cf. Mackerras, ‘Xinjiang at the turn of the century’, p. 301.
70. Youna Kim, ‘Experiencing globalization: global TV, reflexivity, and the lives of young Korean women’,
International Journal of Cultural Studies 8(4), (2005), p. 446.
642
infrastructure.71 With this increase in trade and improvements in communications,

the isolation of Muslims in Xinjiang has ended, and closer religious connections with
the outside world are reinforcing religious identity and the ‘sense of separateness
from the Chinese’.72 In particular, the import of Islamic materials is encouraging
Uyghurs to renew their faith or, in some cases, to learn about Islamic practices for the
first time. There was, until recently, an extreme scarcity of religious publications in
the region, and Uyghurs had little access to alternative forms of knowledge in the
print media; the Qur’an itself was not translated into Uyghur until 1986 in the
contemporary era.73 By contrast, imported Islamic materials—some of which are
translated, produced and copied locally—now flood the region in the form of books,
pamphlets, audio cassettes, CDs and VCDs, some sanctioned by the state, others
‘illegal’. It is known that imported Islamic literature has been confiscated by customs
officials at Xinjiang’s borders since at least 1993.74 Such materials have nonetheless
been finding their way into the region for some time. In July 1996, Xinjiang Daily
called for a crackdown on what it called ‘illegal publications and audio and video
products that promote religious fanaticism’.75 The problem remained at the top of the
state agenda in 1999, when on 1 January a special 100-day ‘Strike Hard’ campaign
was launched in Ürümchi against pornography and ‘illegal publications with political
problems’, a code for separatist and unofficial Islamic materials.76
In interview, Jelil, an observant graduate in his thirties, confirmed that works about
Islam are now being translated into Uyghur, circulated and read by increasing
numbers of people. Two male music sellers in their thirties argued that such materials
are ‘developing and broadening’ Uyghur minds. Mihray, a middle-aged woman in
full headscarf (i.e. passed under the chin) who worked on a religious book stall near
the Yan’anlu mosque, spoke of Uyghurs previously unversed in prayer rituals
learning these from newly available publications and audio-visual media. Other
interviews supported this trend toward religious self-education; one woman in her
sixties showed me a book from which she had recently taught herself how to conduct
namaz. She had grown up in a religiously lax southern rural community and was now
learning for the first time how to conduct the five daily prayers. Edmund Waite has
observed a similar process of religious self-education taking place in Qäshqär.77
Second, the interactive experience—globally and locally—of pilgrimage is both
contributing to the development of a broad, supra-national Islamic identity and
increasing knowledge of Muslim issues in the outside world. Pilgrimage resumed in
71. See Zhao, ‘Pivot or periphery?’, pp. 197– 224.
72. 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.
73. 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.
75. Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 88.
76. Ibid., p. 127.
77. Waite, ‘The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang’.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
the first decade following China’s opening, with 6,500 Xinjiang pilgrims visiting
Mecca between 1980 and 1987.78 Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
the Chinese authorities accused outside separatist groups of ‘subverting pilgrims’ en
route, and in 1996 they announced a limit on numbers allowed to go on the hajj,
with officials complaining that local imams had returned to China ‘dressed like
Arabs’.79 Notwithstanding, official hajj numbers for the late 1990s regularly
surpassed 6,000 each year (though this figure is for the whole of China);80 and it
is certain that many more travelled in a private capacity. In 2001, more than 6,000
pilgrims visited Mecca, mostly privately financed.81 Micallef and Svanberg argue
in their writings on contemporary Central Asians that the pilgrimage tradition has
provided ‘a space for popular discussion that is difficult to monitor’.82 Whether or not
some Uyghur pilgrims are being subverted by ‘outside separatists’, the hajj
experience is at the very least serving to increase the sense of religiosity among
pilgrims and their neighbourhoods back home, and to enhance their sense of being
part of a broader Islamic community. We know that during the Qing period, Hui
Muslim notables who visited Mecca ‘told their fellow Muslims of the marvels of the
Islamic world and of their brethren there’ upon their return to China.83 Similarly, the
rituals attached to Uyghur pilgrimage in the pre-socialist period are said to have
had a bonding effect within the mosque community, which was further strengthened by
the presents distributed by the returning pilgrims. The stories pilgrims told about their
journey also became communal property, and they served the integration of the pilgrim’s
community into the wider community of Islam.84
My contemporary data point to a similar process occurring today. One respondent
described it as follows:
Now, people’s knowledge of Islam is deeper. Not only have they been able to read more
about it, but a lot more people are also going to Mecca. They come back and tell us what
they saw, what they heard; they tell us about the Kaba. They disseminate information
[täswiqat ], encourage us with propaganda. They tell us all they’ve heard about what will
happen to us in the Afterlife if we are not good Muslims . . .
In this way, religious information is passed on by pilgrims and ‘community
pressure’ is exerted on others to be better Muslims. Mecca (and the Middle East) may
thus gradually come to embody an alternative centre of identification.85
There are some arguments against pilgrimage leading either to the development of
a supra-national Islamic identity or to consolidation of the local Islamic community.
On the one hand, it is reported that many hajj returnees mention an increased sense of
affinity with the Uyghur ethnic group rather than with members of the

79. Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 66, 90.
80. Gladney, ‘Islam in China’, p. 463.
81. Gladney, Dislocating China, p. 235.
82. Micallef and Svanberg, ‘Turkic Central Asia’, pp. 158–160.
83. 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.
84. Bellér-Hann, Community Matters, pp. 332–333.
85. 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.
644
international community.86 Certainly, pilgrims notice national differences in terms

of the contrastive customs of other groups with whom they come into contact; yet
I would suggest that this does not preclude the broader development of a common
religious identity or an appreciation of universalist Islam. Rather, contrast with the
‘other’ occurs simultaneously with comparison. On the other hand, it has been
argued that pilgrimage may do more to create social divisions than to enhance
social cohesion within the community back home. Gladney writes that increased
travel to the Middle East and exposure to new and radical ideas has prompted
criticism of local Muslim practices and contributed to ‘factional struggles’ among
China’s Muslims (presumably between Sufi sects).87 Certainly, this notion is
usefully applied to the Hui Muslims of the Northwest, especially when one
examines their history; and there are indications that the dissemination of reformist
ideologies by hajj returnees has created limited discord between observant and
nominal Muslims in Xinjiang, as the former put pressure on the latter to abandon
local, syncretic religious practices.88 Even so, it appears that for each person who
resents the proselytising activities of the pilgrims, another person may be
persuaded to enact a lifestyle change.
Another conduit for the re-Islamisation process has been study abroad. At the
start of the reform era, several Muslim countries expressed a desire to strengthen
religious exchanges with China’s Muslims. In the mid-1980s, King Riyadh of
Saudi Arabia recommended that Sino– Saudi religious exchanges be expanded
after observing the ‘overall adverse condition of Islam and Muslims in Communist
China’; access to China’s (and Xinjiang’s) Muslims was subsequently facilitated
by the establishment of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Beijing in
July 1990.89 Also during the 1980s, the Islamic Development Bank gave China
over US$4 million to spend on four projects in the Northwest, including the
enhancement of the Xinjiang Islamic Academy.90 In 1989, Ayatullah Ahmad
Jannati, president of Iran’s Islamic Propagation Organisation, stated his
preparedness to strengthen Iran’s relations with China’s Muslim community
through the exchange of cultural and scientific delegations and (significantly)
theology students.91 Educational exchanges have subsequently been set up with a
number of Islamic nations, exposing both Hui92 and Uyghurs to international
aspects of their religious heritage. Of 34 students from China enrolled in Islamic
and Arabic studies courses in 1993 at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, 28 were
Uyghur. These students were studying on private scholarships provided by
relatives (some of whom lived abroad), the Muslim World League in Saudi Arabia
87. 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.
88. See Waite, ‘The emergence of Muslim reformism in contemporary Xinjiang’.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
and the university itself.93 Since 1996, China and Egypt have officially exchanged
20 students a year; yet in 2003 there were around 350 Chinese nationals studying
in that country. A significant proportion of these students were self-funded,
suggesting that individual travel abroad has been greatly facilitated by improved
cross-border communications infrastructure.94
Abdullah, an observant Muslim I interviewed in Ürümchi in 2002, had spent a
protracted period between 1994 and 1999 in Pakistan, initially studying theology at a
religious school. The experience had rendered him antagonistic to controlled Islam in
Xinjiang, and he had been arrested in 1999 following an argument with the
‘government imam’ at the Nanmen mosque. The latter had berated him for saying
‘Amin’ at the end of prayer, a practice outlawed at that particular mosque.95 Others
(presumably government informants) had told the police, who had subsequently
arrested him and questioned him about his activities in Pakistan.96 Abdullah’s view
on the episode was as follows:
I don’t like this imam. He has sold his conscience to the Chinese, like an infidel. Look at his
long white beard! He has sold it to the infidels! He has sold his heart. They give him money,
you know, to be a traitor . . . by the back door route [arqi ishik ] . . . They wanted me to be an
imam! They offered me this money too! But I said ‘No, thank you very much’. Never!
I interviewed a number of observant Uyghurs who claimed that Chinese
officials had attempted to buy their political loyalty in this way. Meanwhile, the
government has been reluctant to issue passports to Uyghurs since 1997, owing to
concern that foreign travel will infect Uyghurs with extreme nationalist or Islamist
ideas.97 In 2002 and 2004, respondents confirmed that visa applications for study
abroad were being carefully screened and the political and religious background of
all applicants checked.
Given state attempts to restrict pilgrimage and study abroad, the primary vehicle
for the current development of a global Islamic identity in Xinjiang is probably the
audio-visual mass media. As Dilbär, an 18-year-old high school student explained,
printed materials in the Arabic script, including books, pamphlets and newspapers,
remain less accessible to minkaohan, whose first language is Chinese, unless their
content is explained orally by family or friends: ‘They can’t read the script as fast
or as readily, and so it will depend on what their parents talk about at home’. On
the other hand, audio tapes, VCDs, and radio and television broadcasts—national
and international—can reach all Uyghurs regardless of language background. Kim
lists a number of theoretical conceptualisations of the globalisation phenomenon,
93. Ibid., pp. 234, 237.

94. Ibid., p. 237.
95. 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’.
96. 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.
97. 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.
646
among which the notions of ‘accelerating interconnectedness’ (the intensification

of global social relations and consciousness of world society) and ‘action at a
distance’ (the influence of the actions of social agents in one part of the world on
those of distant others) are most relevant to our context.98 One example of these
dynamics is radio, which has brought many local Muslim populations in touch
with what is going on in the rest of the world:
People are now [ . . . ] anxious to formulate Islamic positions on current political,
economic, and social issues—or, in other words, to think of the world’s problems in
Islamic terms [ . . . ] Muslims come to know how dissatisfaction and protest against
injustices can be and have been, in other places, framed by reference to Islam.99
In this way, processes of Islamic revival—like ethnicity—may entail reflexive as
well as socio-psychological and political dimensions in the global age.100 Gladney
has attributed the current depth of Islamic knowledge among urban Hui to increased
educational levels and greater media exposure.101 Uyghurs have also been
increasingly exposed to mass media—national, international and illegal—during
the reform era. In the mid-1990s, Radio Free Asia regularly broadcast subversive
news reports to Xinjiang via its Uyghur language programmes, and is rumoured to
have encouraged Uyghurs to believe that they could achieve independence.102
According to respondents interviewed in 2002, the authorities responded in the late
1990s by going door to door and confiscating radios from rural homes in the south.
They had apparently been unable to successfully block the airwaves.103
However, media reports need not be directly subversive to exert an influence; the
emancipatory effects of exposure to international news broadcast through official
channels is clearly illustrated in the following interview with Zunun, service industry
worker in his thirties:
Before, people were less educated, less informed, and they feared the government. But now
their educational and cultural level has been raised. They read what America has been saying
in the newspapers and see it on the TV [ . . . ] America attacks China’s human rights record;
China declares its rejection of America’s stance. And so we understand about human rights
and no longer feel frightened. We say ‘We are Uyghurs and we are Muslims’.
98. Kim, ‘Experiencing globalization’, p. 446.

99. 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. See
Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 43, 67.
100. 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.
102. 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/.
103. 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.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
In this way, discussion of concepts such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion
in the news media is providing a reference point against which Uyghurs can compare
their own situation.104 Or, put another way, knowledge gained through global
television may provide viewers with the ‘tools for self-understanding’.105 This type
of critical reflexivity is increasingly understood to be a central tendency among
contemporary subjects under the conditions of global modernity, with the media
serving as nucleus.106 Mass media may be still more powerful when combined with
powerful visual images; it is especially through daily consumption of the often
shocking images accompanying international news reports that horizons have been
broadened for the contemporary Uyghurs, leading to a series of broader Islamic
identifications.
Anti-American and anti-Israeli feeling: the emergence of global Islamic

solidarities
The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (supported by the UK), Israeli
encroachment on the contested territory of the Palestinian homeland, and long-term
US involvement in the Israel – Palestine conflict have invited condemnation across
and sometimes beyond the Arab world, with US actions often characterised as
economic and cultural imperialism. In Xinjiang, the development in recent years of
anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-UK feeling is central to the renewed faith in
Islam observable among some individuals, and can be linked directly to the barrage
of images presented in newspaper reports and on national television depicting
violence against Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere (for instance,
Chechnya).
In the mid-1990s, young Uyghurs from different social groups (including
intellectuals, state employees and businesspeople/traders) had almost unanimously
held positive attitudes toward the West in general, and the US and its role as a world
superpower in particular. These attitudes were often directly linked to the belief that
the US, perceived as an upholder of democracy, would support Uyghur independence
from China. Yet in 2002 and 2004 (especially the latter), many of my respondents had
begun to express negative attitudes towards the US, Israel and, to a slightly lesser
extent, the UK regarding their policies on Iraq and Palestine. This development has
also been observed by other scholars. Colin Mackerras had the impression while
interviewing in mosques in south Xinjiang in 2003 that religious identity had greatly
104. 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. See Ben-Adam, ‘Islam’, p. 208.
105. Kim, ‘Experiencing globalization’, p. 449.
106. 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.
648
strengthened and that anti-American feeling had begun to develop.107 Dru Gladney
was similarly struck in 2003 by the personal hostility he encountered from one young
Uyghur man simply because he was an American: ‘I began to wonder if [ . . . ]
Muslims there [in China] were beginning to share other, generally Middle Eastern
views that were often critical of US policy in the Middle East, and regard US
individuals as anti-Muslim . . . ’.108 The change of heart is in one respect linked to the
US government’s partial endorsement in 2002—motivated by its own need for
support in the ‘war against terror’—of Chinese claims concerning ‘Islamic terrorism’
in Xinjiang.109 Uyghur reactions to this turn of events ranged from disappointment
(while retaining faith that the situation would improve) to bitter disillusionment and,
at the other end of the spectrum, condemnation and anger.110 But the change derives
also from increased exposure to often graphic media images of Muslim victims in
Iraq and Palestine. At the more forgiving end of the spectrum, some secularly-
oriented intellectuals said that they continued to believe in US integrity and stressed
the continuing importance of political alignment with the Western world. Though
their disappointment regarding America’s recognition of the East Turkestan Islamic
Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist group was undisguised, they saw the political
dangers of a knee-jerk reaction against the US and also of the shift towards an
Islamically oriented resistance. Both could damage Uyghur chances of winning
international support, while the second might also threaten Uyghur unity, given the
divisions between strictly observant and nominal Muslims and between orthodox and
popular religious practices.
Uyghur-educated high school students had not taken such a long-term view and
were on the whole more critical, although responses were sometimes ambivalent.
While rejecting the suggestion that religious renewal in Xinjiang is a statement of
opposition to America or the UK, they condemned ‘the bombing of innocent
Muslims’ in Afghanistan and Iraq, labelled Tony Blair a ‘running dog’ [zougou ] for
George Bush, and cited the section in the Qur’an stating that Muslims should defend
themselves when attacked in their own land by a more powerful nation. They
confirmed that anti-US anger was widespread across the Uyghur community, with
many Uyghurs ‘watching the international news on TV morning and evening’.
Interestingly, this media exposure has brought Uyghur opinion more into line with
popular Chinese (Han) opinion on the ‘Western imperialists’, providing a rare
source of mutual identification.111 Consider the following statement made by Dilbär:
All the common people [ puqra ] feel angry towards the US; they really hate Bush. Yes,
both businessmen and state employees. We see America as a country that cares only
107. Colin Mackerras, ‘Some issues of ethnic and religious identity among China’s Islamic peoples’, Asian
Ethnicity 6(1), (2005), p. 13.
109. For details of this unfortunate move, see Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang, pp. 13–14.
110. 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.
111. 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.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
about itself and couldn’t give a damn about others; a country that profits from others’
suffering; a country that attacks smaller, weaker countries. We were furious when the UK
supported the US invasion of Iraq. We characterize the relationship between the two as a
sibling relationship . . . the Hans feel the same way about this issue.
In a follow-up interview, she continued:
The US wants to split China up, see Tibet separate, see Xinjiang separate . . . the rest
would split too. Then the US would be the sole superpower in the world, and China would
be small and weak. Don’t I want Xinjiang to secede? Well, yes, but in another sense, no;
not if it means the US has free rein to go marching around the world invading and
bullying Muslims as it pleases. Some [separatists] say it’s good that China’s busy with
Taiwan; it means their attention is diverted from us! They say we should take advantage
of it! But others [pro-Chinese federation] think it’s better for China to remain strong.
Only the other day, the newspaper headlines read ‘If Bush gets a second term, Iran is
next!’
She claimed that China would almost certainly intervene if the US invaded North
Korea and boasted that China had ‘many military secrets’ that no-one knew about.
Rarely had I heard a Uyghur respondent identify with the Chinese nation with such
pride. Thus, while new identifications with ‘oppressed’ Muslims in the Middle East
are reinforcing many Uyghurs’ sense of being oppressed at home, leading to a return
to Islam as a symbol of anti-Chinese and anti-colonial resistance, at another level—
for some individuals—they simultaneously create common cause with Han Chinese
for resistance against perceived US imperialism. It may well have been with this
latter dynamic in mind that the Chinese government welcomed the establishment of
an Al-Jazeerah TV office in Beijing in November 2002.112
Strictly observant Muslims (including intellectuals, students, businesspeople and
traders) generally held negative views towards American and British interventions in
the Middle East, although here too there was ambivalence. For some observant
intellectuals, faith in the West has to a degree been replaced by faith in potential
Islamic allies. Abdukerim, a Uyghur-educated graduate in his twenties from Aqsu,
related with pride how Iranian ministers had challenged China over the post-1997
Ghulja executions.113 A prominent Uyghur artist confided that he had become deeply
suspicious of US and UK motives in their foreign policy, condemned Bush’s war on
Iraq and labelled Tony Blair ‘Bush’s sidekick’. He and his companion Jelil, an
observant graduate in his late twenties, explained that while few Uyghurs had
objected to the first US invasion of Iraq in 1990, many Uyghurs now considered
American conduct to be persecutory.114 Yet this same artist conceded that Uyghurs
112. Permits were apparently ‘sped up’ to allow its opening, while the bureau chief is a former Palestinian
diplomat. See Gladney, Dislocating China, p. 335.
113. 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; 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; see Dru C. Gladney, ‘Rumblings from the Uyghur’, Current
History 96(611), (1997), p. 288.
114. 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’. Ghayrät, a
trader in his thirties originally from Aqsu, excused the first Gulf War for the same reason.
650
nonetheless continued to like Western people, and was pleased by the growth of anti-
West sentiment among Han Chinese, since this damaged Chinese relations with the
West and increased Uyghur chances of gaining Western support. His ambivalence
suggests that anti-West feeling among the Uyghurs, such that it exists, is very much a
product of recent, unpopular US and UK policies, both towards the Uyghur situation
in particular and towards the world’s Muslims in general. Most Uyghurs would
otherwise tend to incline towards an alignment with the West, politically and
culturally (especially in contrast with China).
Businesspeople and traders held the most consistently negative views. Ghayrät, a
trader in his thirties originally from Aqsu, linked the Islamic revival directly to: (a)
recent actions taken by the US, the UK and Israel against weaker, Muslim peoples;
and (b) the US failure to support independence and democracy for Xinjiang. For him,
the two issues were closely intertwined:
Now my heart is very sad. Things are very different from when you were here in 1995 –
1996. Back then, we really liked and believed in the Western countries . . . we believed
that everyone was treated equally in America [ . . . ] But that’s all changed now. Since the
9/11 incident and Bush’s reaction to it, we’ve begun to see America and the UK quite
differently. We watch America invading people whenever it feels like it, one day it
attacks Afghanistan, the next Iraq, who next, North Korea? Israel is also a big problem.
America just stands by and watches as a powerful nation bullies a weak one. We believe
that’s wrong [ . . . ] We see Americans as very nationalistic [millätchiliq] now, not as a
democratic people. They won’t be happy until every Muslim is dead! They have no sense
of how to discriminate between terrorists, people like Bin Laden, and ordinary people,
ordinary Muslims . . . And so we feel let down, we thought that the Americans
represented democracy and that they would support us. Now people are really fed up with
life, so fed up they don’t know how to manage their unhappiness. You know, if we were
treated well, everyone would be glad to get married, bring up their children, live a happy
existence centred on family life . . . but people are so unhappy. So some turn to terrorism;
some smoke, or inject heroin; some drink; some find refuge in the mosques, in prayer.
These are all ways to deal with unhappiness.
He condemned US attacks on ‘innocent Muslim women and children’, and confirmed
that now more than ever Uyghurs lauded Saddam Hussein as ‘the man who stood up
to America’ (as some already had in the mid-1990s).115 His description of Americans
as ‘nationalistic’ demonstrates how US behaviour is now considered by some as no
more just or democratic than Chinese behaviour, the Hans having long been
characterised as overlords. Others identified the key factor underpinning anti-
American feeling as a basic desire to oppose inequality. For these respondents, the
main impetus behind the current popularity of Islam should be construed as a desire
to take a symbolic stand against America’s perceived self-centredness and anti-
Muslim persecution, this considered analogous with sino-centrism and Chinese
115. 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.
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JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
repression. Ghayrät’s list of ‘ways to deal with unhappiness’ accords well with my
observations of Uyghur reactions to their predicament, although it should be stressed
that the violent incidents he refers to as ‘terror’ are sporadic and localised. One might
add to his list the additional alternatives of study for those who can afford it
(emancipation through education; survival through accommodation) and exit
(temporary or permanent emigration abroad).
The Palestine theme was picked up by many respondents. Back in 1996, a
minkaohan intellectual had expressed deep sympathy for the Palestinians’ situation
(note that Chinese-educated persons may be just as politicised as Uyghur-educated
persons and sometimes more so). By 2004, such identifications were pronounced
across social groups. Respondents demonstrated a keen awareness of unequal power
relations, particularly between Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Many talked of
the oppression of other Muslims such as the Palestinians or the Chechens, and linked
these examples directly to their own experience. They attacked Israel’s then Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon with comments like: ‘Every day he’s attacking defenceless
Palestinians’; and ‘It’s always inequalities . . . big, strong nations bullying small,
weak ones. The Hans have weapons and guns and we Uyghurs don’t. It’s the same
with America and Iraq; Israel and Palestine’.116 They lamented the deaths of innocent
children in Iraq and Palestine, and equated America’s and Israel’s ‘bullying’ of
Muslim countries with China’s persecution of the Uyghurs, insisting: ‘We are being
bullied here, too’. One man cited the Qur’an in justification of Iraqi, Palestinian and,
by extension, Uyghur resistance: ‘In the Qur’an, it says that we Muslims should fight
back if persecuted. This kind of struggle is guilt-free [gunarsiz ]. It’s the same here in
China’. Doubtless, the Uyghurs are not the first Muslim television viewers to have
made such comparisons. As Worsley once remarked, the Tamils of Sri Lanka must
have watched newsreels from the West Bank on the Palestinian struggle with great
academic interest.117 Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities demonstrated their own
awareness of the potential influence of the mass media in 1997, when Xinjiang TV
broadcast a commentary in which it was pointed out that ethnic conflicts in other
countries had led to ‘divisions and incessant wars, turning people into refugees and
plunging them into the abyss of misery and death’.118 The message to the Uyghur
populace was clear.
While increased awareness of the conflicts involving Muslims in other parts of the
globe has not led to a renewal of actual struggle in Xinjiang in the years following the
Ghulja riots, for some individuals it has resulted in a growing sense of international
solidarity with the world’s Muslims, embodied in the local return to Islam. The
observant Uyghur artist cited above conceived of the Uyghur situation as just one part
of a broader attack on the global Islamic community, arguing: ‘They will never get
rid of Muslims, as hard as they try. The more they repress us, the more we will
believe. There are millions of Muslims all over the world. They won’t eliminate us’.
116. 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.
117. Cited in Eriksen, ‘The epistemological status of the concept of ethnicity’, p. 7.
652
Conclusion
The sense of symbolic community—local and global—experienced by re-Islamising
Uyghurs today should be situated within the broader frame of the internationalisation of
Islam in an age of modern technologies. Through international trade, pilgrimage, study
abroad and, above all, the mass media, Muslim communities around the world come to
recognise mutual commonalities; through these identifications, they consolidate their
sense of belonging to the virtual ummah. Raphael Israeli has suggested that, unable to
express themselves politically within the system, Hui Muslims sublimated through
the universal ummah their political frustrations within China as well as their political
aspirations outside of it.119 A similar dynamic may be occurring in Xinjiang today, where
a feeling of victim-hood created by domestic Chinese oppression (and repression),
combined with an empathy for similarly ‘oppressed’ peoples in the Middle East, is
finding expression in an unprecedented sense of global Islamic solidarity and the visible
demonstration of opposition through the symbolic vehicle of Islamic practice.
The Uyghurs do have a choice in their representation. For instance, while it may be
difficult for minority nationalities to express themselves directly in the official media,
it has nonetheless been possible at times to do so via a roundabout route; the
alternative representations presented in metaphor and allegory in the ‘new folk’ songs
and historical novels of the 1990s are an obvious case in point. Since the turn
of the century, we are also seeing the emergence of an indigenous scholarship in
Uyghur academic circles, even if this takes the form of cautious advocacy.120 But
representation need not take the obvious, direct form of argument and debate in
newspapers and journals, or street demonstration; there are also subtle, symbolic
means of exercising agency and making oneself heard. When Uyghurs express their
discontent through vehicles such as oral stereotypes, ethnic segregation and visible
participation in Islamic practices (veiling, growing a beard, praying and participating
in the mosque community), they are drawing on a sense of ‘we-hood’ enjoyed for at
least the last 500 years. In creating and maintaining stereotypes and boundaries, or re-
emphasising the centrality of religious ritual in everyday life in symbolic opposition
to the state, they draw on a repository of social, cultural and religious practices and
norms basically common to all Uyghurs since the last of the Uyghur Buddhists
converted to Islam. Thus, religious culture ‘links personal to collective truths which
are large in potential scale, beyond the limits of a generational or a group identity or a
particular period of a history, a government, regime or state’, and may challenge the
practices of that state.121
In this article, I have characterised the process of re-Islamisation in Xinjiang as just
one such subtle form of minority representation. However, it would be inaccurate and
disproportionate to suggest that all re-Islamising Uyghurs are doing so for the same
reasons, or even that all Uyghurs are returning to the mosque. In fact, the causes and
sources of the Islamic renewal are far more complex, as I have outlined earlier, while
the return to Islam among some individuals has simultaneously created a greater
119. Israeli, ‘Muslims in China’, p. 289.

120. See the contributions by Rahilä Dawut and Äsäd Sulayman in Bellér-Hann et al., eds, Situating the Uyghurs
between China and Central Asia.
121. Feuchtwang, ‘Religion as resistance’, p. 163.
653
JOANNE SMITH FINLEY
polarisation between observant and nominal Muslims. This divide cannot be neatly
explained in terms of minkaomin (Uyghur-educated ¼ observant) and minkaohan
(Chinese-educated ¼ secular) as one might expect, since some Uyghur-educated
persons now go to university and embrace secularism, while some minkaohan, albeit
a minority, are today embracing religion.
There are a number of factors which in combination might feasibly strengthen
adherence to the common ummah to such a degree that it may yet lead to the
popularisation of a violent form of resistance among the Uyghurs. These include
further encroachment by Han migrants on formerly exclusive Uyghur spaces; further
marginalisation of the Uyghur language and script; the continued failure of regional
economic policies to benefit Uyghurs; increased reluctance of Han-managed
companies to bestow meaningful employment on even minkaohan (Uyghurs whose
first language is Chinese); mosque closure and heightened restrictions on mosque
construction; increased persecution of non-collaborating religious personnel and
proliferation of state-sponsored imams; and, potentially most dangerous of all, a
tightening of the family planning policy in rural Uyghur communities (currently more
lax than it might be). Further, if practices to date viewed and represented
predominantly as ‘cultural’ rather than ‘religious’ customs (wedding and funeral
ceremonies, circumcision, etc.) were also subjected to sustained levels of repression,
this might prove too much to bear even for the most resilient and resourceful of
individuals.
A final important word: anti-American and anti-Israeli feeling in Xinjiang is far
from monolithic and may well prove a temporary phenomenon. Even one respondent
who expressed particularly harsh views was confident of the potential for change:
It may take ten years or more, but the situation could improve. If the US does something
to secure the safety and independent future of Palestine, that would help a lot [...] Given
time, people’s views would gradually change and become positive again.
At the heart of the matter lie the respective futures of Iraq, Palestine and perhaps
also Iran; should US, Israeli and UK foreign policies evolve in such a way that
Muslim peoples in these countries are guaranteed security in their own homelands,
anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-UK feeling among Uyghurs in Xinjiang would
almost certainly subside, although the evolving US stance towards human rights and
minority rights in Xinjiang will also be critical.
654

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Journal of Contemporary China (2007), 16(53), November, 627–654

Chinese Oppression in Xinjiang, Middle

ISSN 1067-0564 print/ 1469-9400 online/07/530627–28 q 2007 Taylor & Francis

State representations, self-representations

the examples he gives centre on direct methods of opposition such as street

Militant Islamism in contemporary Central Asia: a ‘contamination effect’?15

2. adoption of Muslim appellation and identity while continuing on a secular path;

towards a docile, ‘sheep-like’ acceptance of rule from without, Islam in Xinjiang is

Islamic renewal in Ürümchi since the late 1990s38

‘orthodox’ form of Islam, a development attributable to increased transnational links

power [küchlük ] of Islam!’ The young mosque-goers I observed seemed to be

Perhaps more indicative of a general shift in levels of religiosity in the capital

Muslim oppression and religious renewal

His description suggests ‘a certain artlessness, almost ingenuousness’ in local

Development Campaign of China’s policy of ‘domestication’ pursued in the 1990s

There is a historical pattern, a cycle of religious repression being followed by religious

infrastructure.71 With this increase in trade and improvements in communications,

78. Shichor, ‘Separatism’, p. 80.

international community.86 Certainly, pilgrims notice national differences in terms

93. Ibid., pp. 234, 237.

among which the notions of ‘accelerating interconnectedness’ (the intensification

98. Kim, ‘Experiencing globalization’, p. 446.

Anti-American and anti-Israeli feeling: the emergence of global Islamic

119. Israeli, ‘Muslims in China’, p. 289.

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