Uighur update

-Abdughapar Abdurusul in an undated photo, courtesy of Abdusattar Abdurusul11-21-2018         Authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have sentenced a prominent Uyghur businessman and philanthropist to death for taking an unsanctioned Muslim holy pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, according to his brother....  Abdughapar Abdurusul, a 42-year-old father of four, owns several shops and businesses, and multiple properties, his brother said, and had used some of the money he earned to build a mosque for the local community in recent years.  Abdughapar Abdurusul had also sold an old family home for around 1 million yuan (U.S. $144,000) in April or May, and was living comfortably before he was arrested and all of his family’s assets--totaling around 100 million yuan (U.S. $14.4 million)--were seized, he said.   https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/philanthropist-11212018131511.html...............................................................................................

11-19-18     Eysa thought he had finally escaped the Chinese security services that had pressed him into serving as a spy against his own community and turned his life into a living hell.  He had moved himself and his family to Turkey and begun to carve a new life out among the many Uighurs seeking refuge in a country with a similar language and religion.

  Then the 36-year-old began receiving messages on his phone from the Chinese security official who had pressed him into spying for Beijing, according to the U.K. news outlet. “You think you’re safe in Turkey. But what about your brothers and in-laws?” the interrogator asked in a recording on Eysa's phone. "If we torture them it’s on you; think about that.  We are very powerful and we can reach you wherever you are.”  https://ahvalnews.com/uighurs/long-arm-china-reaches-uighurs-turkey-independent

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Founded by Genghis Khan’s Mongolian armies, the Yuan used Muslims as their tax collectors. Many gained great wealth—and attracted much resentment among the empire’s Chinese subjects. To appease them, the Yuan court began now-familiar policies to weaken Muslim power. Kublai Khan, the Yuan’s greatest emperor, banned halal food, circumcision, and cousin marriages (a common cultural practice among Muslims of that time). As a result, many prominent Muslim families left China. ...

the Qing took over in 1644. The Qing harnessed their martial skills--horsemanship and archery, but also more modern weapons like guns--with the economic might of hundreds of millions of Chinese. This created an unbeatable war machine that smashed the nomadic peoples to the north, who for millennia had threatened China, and expanded the empire’s western borders, taking Tibet and expanding into Central Asia. Suddenly, a China-based empire controlled vast Muslim territories. (Chinese school children learn that the Qing were merely reasserting China’s traditional control over the string of oases that made up the Silk Road, but this is a fanciful, nationalistic reading of history)....the people living there did not feel Chinese, look Chinese, speak Chinese, share Chinese values and myths and stories, or, by and large, want be part of China.  Thus began a series of rebellions, which continue to this day. ...

The problem was that the Qing’s Buddhist political-religious utopia excluded Muslims. As Elverskog describes in his catalogue essay, by the eighteenth century the Qing court drafted discriminatory regulations aimed at Muslims, such as the declaration of any group of three or more Muslims who carried a weapon as criminals.  This drove moderate Muslims into the arms of Muslim rebels, exacerbating the Qing’s problems.  https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/11/23/the-uighurs-and-chinas-long-history-of-trouble-with-islam/

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