Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

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That which is going on in Xanjiang is deeply, deeply morally wrong, and is a genocide as defined by the UN and international law.
 
If militarily weak country like Myanmar can genocide up the Rogingya Muslims with impunity then what chance has the world got to stop a powerful nuclear nation like China wipe out Uighurs?

We need Mahdi (as) quick!
 
Salaam

Another update.

WHY DON’T WE CARE ABOUT CHINA’S UIGHUR MUSLIMS?

IT’S BEEN DESCRIBED as the worst human rights crisis in the world — the arbitrary detention in sprawling camps of a million or more Uighur Muslims in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province. The Chinese government has claimed that the camps are merely vocational training centers, but in November a trove of leaked documents, dubbed the China Cables, confirmed what the world had long suspected: the camps are Communist Party re-education centers in which Uighurs are forced to abandon their traditional religion and language. Nury Turkel is a U.S.-based attorney and Uighur rights advocate and he joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss the situation in Xinjiang — and why so much of the world doesn’t seem to care about it.

[Music interlude.]

MH: When was the last time you spoke to a family member?

Nury Turkel: Last summer.

MH: Summer 2018?

NT: Yes.

MH: You haven’t spoken to a family member in China for nearly 18 months?

NT: I have aging parents. I cannot call them.

MH: I’m Mehdi Hasan. Welcome to a special end-of-the-year episode of Deconstructed, a bonus if you will, in which we’ll examine, discuss, cast a light on, what’s become perhaps the biggest human rights crisis in the world this year – even though it still, in my view, doesn’t get enough attention globally, including here in the West.

NT: As a lawyer, as an advocate, as a Uighur, I believe that my people are going through a modern day cultural genocide.

MH: That’s my guest today, Nury Turkel, a prominent Uighur-American lawyer and human rights campaigner. Nury says China is carrying out a “cultural genocide” against his people So, why isn’t the world, why aren’t we, doing more to stop it?

Rest of interview here.

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/29/why-dont-we-care-about-chinas-uighur-muslims/
 
Assalam o alaikum rahmatullahi wa Barakatuhu

Chinese over the nation may have been suffering from convoravirus which is now more trending on news but our Uighurs brothers and sisters suffered more than that.

May Allah grant them justice, sabr and strength.


JazakAllah khair
 
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They have oppressed the Uyghur muslims for a long time, they did many things over the years.
I posted some links on this thread : Covid-19 Corona Virus and Islam
and that's not even all of it

Maybe Covid 19 is punishment to Communist China govt, maybe not - but attempt to change the Qur'an is only going to make it worse for them.
InshaAllah all oppressors are going to meet what Allah has promised them to suffer.
A lot of countries including China suffer in this pandemic, but China govt is also being sued by other countries.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/24/law...nas-handling-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic.html
[URL]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-20/coronavirus-china-sued-american-class-action-germany-sends-bill/12164106eport/[/URL]
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2202834/3-china-owes-germany-162-billion-coronavirus-damages-report/
 
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I think that must have its own name, “religious genocide”. China is commiting religious genocide on Uygurs.
 
IslamLife00 said:
They have oppressed the Uyghur muslims for a long time, they did many things over the years.
I posted some links on this thread : Covid-19 Corona Virus and Islam
and that's not even all of it

Maybe Covid 19 is punishment to Communist China govt, maybe not - but attempt to change the Qur'an is only going to make it worse for them.
InshaAllah all oppressors are going to meet what Allah has promised them to suffer.
A lot of countries including China suffer in this pandemic, but China govt is also being sued by other countries.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/24/law...nas-handling-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04...ican-class-action-germany-sends-bill/12164106eport/
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2202834/3-china-owes-germany-162-billion-coronavirus-damages-report/
Click to expand...
yes they're suing china because china didn't notify them of the epidemic for months and covered it up to make it look like they had it under control, even jailing a local doctor who spoke out, who they say died of coronavirus in his cell.
 
Salaam

anatolian said:
I think that must have its own name, “religious genocide”. China is commiting religious genocide on Uygurs.
Click to expand...

Dont think we should expect anything less from these Godless communists, given their record and Pakistan (among many other Muslims states) wants to be 'friends' with them.

Another update.





A Response To Habib Ali Al-Jifri’s Comments On Uyghurs

Toqa Badran and Aydin Anwar respond to the statements made by Shaykh Habib Ali Al-Jifri

We acknowledge that those individuals who have devoted their lives to the spiritual empowerment of others are to be admired and respected. The Ulema often serve as beacons of guidance and sources of emulation for the Ummah with their scholarly and moral leadership.

Their critical role means that they are also expected to speak and act according to a higher standard of truthfulness and ethics. Bearing this in mind makes it especially dismaying and hurtful to witness inaccurate comments from a famous preacher and scholar who should be a part of this heritage of high intellectual rigour and superior moral conduct. It is even more problematic that these erroneous statements pertain to a group of fellow Muslims presently experiencing almost unprecedented duress to criminalize and eradicate their religion and cultural identity.

It is unfortunate that Habib Ali al-Jifri, a popular scholar in the Arab world, in a recent lecture has misused his platform by propagating information that is all at once incorrect, biased, and otherwise detrimental to the lives of an entire Muslim nation colonized and oppressed by China.

Although he tepidly acknowledges that China has done wrong to Uyghurs and is not fully innocent, a number of his claims remain inaccurate and deserve to be corrected. This article attempts to walk through some of these inaccuracies, and correct such claims that ultimately work to delegitimize and downplay the deplorable reality of Uyghurs and other Turkic-Muslim peoples, such as Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, of East Turkistan (renamed and referred to as Xinjiang, meaning new territory in Mandarin, by the Chinese occupation).

#1: Shaykh Ali al-Jifri claims that only around half of Uyghurs are Muslim

The first glaring error made by the shaykh is his statement that only around half of the Uyghur population is Muslim. His error may have been a result of confusing the presently reported demographic makeup of East Turkistan with the religious composition of the Uyghur people.

While the Uyghur and indigenous inhabitants of the region are overwhelmingly Muslim, the Han Chinese population has climbed drastically from only 6% in 1949 to an estimated 40% – due largely to incentivized migration and other – settler colonial programs embarked upon by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This statistic itself may be unreliable as many undocumented Uyghurs are unaccounted for and, in recent years, scores of Uyghur prisoners and forced laborers have been forcibly transferred to mainland China.

If, however, al-Jifri meant to propogate the notion that only half of Uyghurs are Muslim, this is another matter altogether. To deny the self-professed Islamic faith of the utter majority of Uyghur people is to commit one of atrocities perpetrated by the CCP itself — the denial and erasure of this long persecuted population’s faith. As for the rootedness of Islam among this people, it has been the predominant religion among Uyghurs in East Turkistan– long before Egypt, or even the Levant, became majority Muslim societies during the Mamluk era. Much of the Islamicization of Central Asia and the Turkic world has been credited to the Karakhanids – a group of Turkic tribes who lived in the Uyghur homeland and converted to Islam in the 10th century (4th century Hijri), after their ruler Sultan Abdulkerim Bughra Khan entered the faith (Svat Soucek. A History of Inner Asia. Cambridge University Press. 2002, pp 84).

Uyghurs were also historically part of the Chagatay Turkic Khanate, whence the rulers of the Mughal Dynasty — who ruled much of India for over two centuries — hailed. Tasawwuf-inflected preaching was a key driver in conversions among these Turkic tribes in ways reminiscent of Islam’s spread at the hands of itinerant Hadhrami Sufi scholars and merchants — from whom Habib Ali hails — across the Indian Ocean littoral and Nusantara (Malay world).

Starting with the aforementioned Karakhanids in the 10th century, Islamic institutions were founded and devoted to the study of theology, natural science, arts, music, and more. These institutions allowed for the emergence of hundreds of prominent Turkic scholars, who helped shape and record Islamic, Turkic, and specifically Uyghur history through their works: The likes of Mahmud Kashgari’s Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, the first comprehensive dictionary of Turkic languages.

Yusuf Khās Hājib’s Kutadgu Bilig, a mirror-for-princes in prose from the 11th century that shed light on Turkish-Islamic history and culture, and is perhaps one of the earliest surviving Turkic works in the genre of akhlāq (Islamic morality and ethics). The Turks of the region have also been greatly impacted by the Yasawī sufi order which helped make communal dhikr gatherings part and parcel of Uyghur culture. The influence of sufism is also evident in the prevalence of Sufi shrines — most of which have since been systematically destroyed or left abandoned after being blocked off with barbed wire by the CCP.

The survival of old Quranic manuscripts from the area, as well as manuscripts from the 19th and 20th century, testify to the centrality of the Islamic intellectual tradition and its preservation within Uyghur culture. Thousands of beautiful mosques were constructed throughout the region, many of which have been demolished in recent years by the CCP regime.

Had they not been places of great significance and visitation, it begs the question as to why the Chinese government would bother razing them. Kashgar, the historic capital of the Karakhanid Empire and “jewel” of the Silk Road, became a prominent center of learning and hub showcasing the rich Uyghur past. Yarkend had also been a particular center of Islamic learning and culture for centuries, with dozens of madrasahs present in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It even holds Queen Amanisa Khan’s shrine, where the 12 Muqam (classical Sufi dance and song performance pieces that are a central Uyghur heritage form) were established.

It is now clear that not only have the vast majority of Uyghurs been Muslim since the 11th century at least, but that the history of East Turkistan cannot be separated from that of the greater Muslim world. Like most Turkic Muslims, Uyghurs have traditionally belonged to Ahl as-Sunnah (the mainstream and overwhelming majority of Muslims), the legal school of Hanafism, and have immense love for the noble Ahl al-Bayt (family and descendants of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ). Uyghurs had even established a maqam (shrine) dedicated to the 8th century scholar and descendant of the Prophet ﷺ, Imam Jafar al-Sadiq – through whom Habib Ali traces his lineage back to the Prophet ﷺ – near the town of Khotan in East Turkistan, which was destroyed by the CCP.

If segments of Uyghur society are not practicing Muslims today, it is mostly due to the Communist repression since WWII, just as Soviet anti-religious repression led to the radical decrease in religious literacy and practice in neighbouring Turkic republics. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy and heartening to see that some of the Central Asian republics are currently experiencing a gradual revival of Islamic observance thanks to the demise of oppressive policies, hinting at how the Uyghur religious life could flourish if and when repressive policies in East Turkistan cease.

The systematic aggression with which the Chinese government has sought to stamp out the works produced by Uyghur scholars and the many ancient Muslim cities scattered across East Turkistan is evidence of their historical importance. From banning the publication of texts in the Uyghur language, closing all religious spaces, and transforming historic sites into propaganda centers for the dissemination of a sanitized, non-religious, and state-sponsored Uyghur identity, it is clear that the CCP feels not only threatened by Uyghur culture, but is aware of its power in maintaining a social fabric worthy of any independent nation.

And with all of the aforementioned said, we pose the question: Even if the majority of Uyghurs were not Muslim as the shaykh incorrectly claimed, does this excuse Muslims elsewhere of their duty to stand against oppression? Over the course of his commentary on the plight of the Uyghur people, the shaykh himself asked the audience why we [Muslims] are only angry when China oppresses Uyghurs and not the Buddhist Tibetans. Not only does this question contradict his initial premise that the Uyghur community cannot be referred to as overwhelmingly Muslim, but also deeply confuses the listener: “Are we to fight against oppression, regardless of the religion of the oppressed, or not?”

We would argue that it is not only an obligation for Muslims, but for all people to resist their own oppression and the oppression of others — especially if this oppression manifests as the criminalization of the most fundamental practices of a people’s faith, Islam in this case. The East Turkistani independence movement itself has always allied itself with those of the Tibetan, Palestinian, and Kashmiri people.

It has been incorrectly posited by the shaykh that Uyghurs have only been oppressed for the last 3-5 years. While this is demonstrably false, through the decades-long occupation Uyghurs have faced, what is worse is that he makes this claim in order to draw a false equivalence (between East Turkistan and the Tibetan people) in the hopes of delegitimizing the plight and cause of those in East Turkistan.

Worse still, is that when the shaykh is confronted with the truth of the 70+ long years of Chinese colonization of Uyghur lands, he contests its factuality by responding that if China were really so bad then we would see the individual politicians responsible for the colonization personally affected by the Chinese Coronavirus. We question the legitimacy of this apparently necessary correlation and will do so again later in this paper. Furthermore, now that we know that the Uyghur identity is as much an Islamic one as his own Arab identity and that Chinese oppression has been occurring for almost a century, do the scholar’s recommendations change?

#2: Shaykh Al-Jifri claims that the question of Uyghur oppression is a political, not religious, one

We would like to preface this section by making it clear that Islam rejects the false dichotomy between the religious and the secular. What is “political” is not necessarily devoid of religious significance, and what is “religious” is not necessarily apolitical.

While the Sharia’s precepts pertaining to siyasah (governance and ‘urfi/customary-public law) are mostly general, with few exact prescriptions established by the sources of Sharia (al-adillah al-sharʿiyyah), Muslims have always conceived of politics as a space bound by Islamic morality and ethics, akhlāq. As with any other dimension of human life, a person’s moral culpability before God extends into the domain of the “political” just as it extends into the domain of the economic, familial, ritual, etc.

While it is true that colonization is often understood as a political phenomenon and not a religious one, religion has featured prominently both as a pretext and the locus of subjugation in China’s crimes against the Uyghur people. China brands its campaign against the Uyghurs as a fight against “Islamic extremism” in an attempt to ride on the coattails of the global “War on Terror” thereby garnering sympathy for its policies — including the imprisonment of millions of Turkic peoples into concentration camps and prisons — and insulate itself from backlash it would otherwise face as a result of its inhumanity in East Turkistan.

Like Modi’s India and many Western nations, China exploits the world’s frenzied paranoia surrounding “Muslim terror” to justify its crackdown on innocent Muslims.

We acknowledge, however, that if this matter was purely religious, and not political, we would see Hui Muslims, who do not have a territorial claim at stake, rounded up into concentration camps and being subject to the same forms of oppression Uyghurs and other Turkic people are. However, this is not the case. Huis have historically been left largely undisturbed for the sake of maintaining the CCP’s facade of religious acceptance — or at most they are subject to the usual disruptions any religious group faces under the anti-religious CCP. Historically, the Hui have been staunch supporters of the Chinese state, and even played a critical role in the dismantling of the first East Turkistan Republic of 1933 and the second of 1944..

This did not spare them, however, from the current religious crackdown they and other faith groups like Christians face, once again highlighting the inextricably religious dimension of the CCP’s supposedly merely “political” project. As though rounding up innocents into concentration camps and subjecting an entire people to violations of fundamental human rights as part of a larger campaign of ethnic cleansing and cultural destruction would be anything less than heinous, even if religion played no role in the matter.

Much of Uyghur and, by extension, all Central Asian Turkic identity, has centered on religion; Uyghurs and other Turks are Muslim, just like Malays have been Muslim based on historical development in the past millennium. Historically, up until the 1930s, Uyghurs were not commonly referred to as “Uyghurs” — they and other Turkic Muslims of East Turkistan were simply referred to as “Musulman” (Muslim), “Turki” (Turk), or “yerlik” (local). This truth further explains why China has been so adamant in removing religion from the lives of East Turkistanis — Islam is so critical to the history and culture of the Turkic presence that the CCP knows that, without it, East Turkistanis will be left weak and purposeless– easily converted into malleable forced worshippers of the party, and indistinguishable from the rest of China’s largely atheist, but nominally Confucian, Buddhist or Taoist Han majority.

Not to mention that they are then exploited in China’s massive hypocritically capitalistic labour scheme — which most of Chinese masses also suffer from.

Claiming that the oppression is not a religious matter implies that Muslims need not care about the Uyghurs out of religious concern, while in reality our blood should be boiling knowing that the rights of God and His worshippers are being violated by the CCP. Muslims around the world rightly condemn and stand in solidarity against zionist oppression in Palestine, though, by the shaykh’s standards, this would be appear a purely political project undeserving of collective Muslim outrage. The Israeli state-apparatus oppresses Muslim and Christian Palestinians alike.

The CCP has singled out Muslims, however, especially those in East Turkistan, as the targets of their brutal project. Again, we see that this is both a religious and political issue against which all Muslims and conscientious human beings should speak and fight. Just as we all wish for the freedom of Palestine sooner rather than later, we should pray, speak, and fight for the freedom of our brothers and sisters in East Turkistan.

Practicing Islam is categorically forbidden in East Turkistan, despite China’s constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion. Islamic texts and names are banned, practicing most of the five pillars of Islam is forbidden, and centuries old Islamic institutions have been destroyed and converted into communist propaganda centers. Religious scholars (ulema) have disappeared, sentenced to life in prison, or killed.

These tragedies are never publicized within China’s borders — and their occurrence is aggressively denied by the Chinese media apparatus. Instead, the media tokenizes and highlights a few religious acts, in reality no more than complex theatrics which the government has directed in order to showcase the power of “CCP Islam”. Journalists and political actors from other countries, especially Muslim ones, are invited to East Turkistan to witness a beautiful charade of “harmony” and happiness that, in reality, is no more than an open air prison for the Uyghurs.

Albanian academic and journalist, Dr Olsi Jazexhi, was one of these visitors, who later reflected on his experiences and observations on such a CCP-sponsored trip. He and other journalists toured many mosques with the CCP’s aim being to show to the outside world that there are mosques, and indeed religious freedom, in East Turkistan. Jazexhi recalls venturing into one of the mosques near Urumqi’s Grand Bazaar and finding only a store. He also recalls his visit to a concentration camp or what China calls a “vocational training center”:

“The center was in the middle of the desert. It was a kind of Alcatraz, and by its appearance, we were expecting to find some criminals, terrorists, and killers, and people who were dangerous to society. When we went there, the criminals presented us with a concert. These poor boys and girls who were being held there since many years. They were told to dance to me; Uyghur dance, Chinese dance, and Western dance.

The authorities wanted us to film them only dancing and smiling and singing. They were all speaking Chinese, even though they were Uyghurs [sic].”

Jazexhi, a dual Albanian and Canadian citizen, was later fired from his university position in Albania — demonstrating the reach of Chinese economic blackmail diplomacy. The professor was blacklisted by China due to his truthful reports on East Turkistan, highlighting the CCP’s suppression of criticism abroad, even within the context of academia, with its diplomatic and economic pressure.

Of course, this harmony would not be complete without the millions of Han Chinese who have been settled, with the aid of the government, within the borders of East Turkistan. While Uyghurs are systematically transported outside of the borders of their homeland and into mainland China to work as forced laborers or to be imprisoned and “reeducated”, it is hard to ignore the demographic erasure of Uyghurs in East Turkistan.

As more and more Han Chinese are brought into Uyghur land to replace the displaced natives, the CCP razes ancient mosques, homes, and sanctuaries to make room for the new settlers.

These settlers act both as continuous reminders of the disappearance of Uyghur autonomy as well as wardens over the remaining Uyghur population. There have been many accounts of Han Chinese living with Uyghur families in their homes as “big siblings”— feeding the government information on the family’s every move and assisting in Uyghur imprisonment for even the smallest of religious offences.

Aside from simple demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing, the Chinese program of destroying Uyghur cities and patrimony is intended to deracinate East Turkistanis from their culture and make them self-internalize that they are a people with no heritage, and to imprison them in easy-to-surveil panopticons with Han colonialists wardens. Destroying ancient cities and heritage is an old authoritarian communist strategy, reflecting the idea brillianty summarized by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that

“to destroy a people you must first sever their roots.”

One former prisoner, Adil Abdulghufur, in an interview with our co-author, Aydin Anwar, recounted how he was beaten unconscious by Chinese prison authorities and forced to wear a 25 kg cement block for a month hung by a thin string around his neck after saying “Bismillah” (in the name of God) in his sleep.

Countless Uyghur women and men, who have been sent to camps and prisons due to religious practice have been raped, forcibly sterilized, drugged, and their bodies used for organ harvesting. Uyghurs are punished with long prison sentences; one Uyghur woman was sentenced to 10 years in prison for promoting the wearing of headscarves, a Kazakh man was sentenced to 16 years in jail after Chinese authorities found audio recordings of the Quran on his computer, and several Uyghur refugees we have spoke with said that even saying the Muslim greeting Assalāmu Alaykum (Peace be upon you) can get them locked up for 10 years. Saying Insha’Allah (God-willing) is also prohibited.

In one of the many documentaries published on the dystopian existence of the Uyghur people, VICE interviews a woman who states her charged crime was the learning of the Quran and the Arabic language. A man, later in the documentary, details how he was punished for refusing to eat pork even while imprisoned. By many accounts, the word God or Allah itself must be replaced with “Party” (Chinese Communist Party), or the name of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.

#3: Shaykh Al-Jifri claims the reason people are fighting for East Turkistan is because they do not want China to build the so-called ‘New Silk Road’ and become 2x as strong as America economically

This claim reduces the East Turkistani freedom movement to a China vs America binary– thereby completely erasing the decades of occupation East Turkistan has endured under China. In 1759, the Manchu Qing Empire invaded East Turkistan and made it its new colony. Uyghurs rebelled against Qing rule, and in 1863 were able to break free and establish Kashgaria under their leader Yaqub Khan, now known as East Turkistan.

Two decades later, the Uyghurs were invaded by the Qing again, and, this time, the Uyghur homeland was formally incorporated under the Chinese empire as “Xinjiang”. Chinese nationalists overthrew the Manchu Qing Dynasty in 1911, putting East Turkistan under the rule of Nationalist China.

The Uyghurs carried out numerous rebellions and were able to establish the East Turkistan Islamic Republic in 1933 and 1944, both of which briefly lasted before the Chinese government reoccupied the region through the military intervention and political interest of the Soviet Union. The most recent occupation started in 1949 when the Communist Party of China came to power, and since then, millions of East Turkistanis have been subject to various forms of brutal systematic genocide.

It is deeply condescending to not only delegitimize the efforts of a Muslim people in standing against their oppressors, but to also deem them to be no more than American pawns. Indeed, Xi Jinping’s China seeks to continue solidifying Chinese hard power in East Turkistan while working towards the larger CCP strategic goal of establishing China as a global hegemonic power with a new Chinese-dominated global economic-political order, via the multi-trillion dollar One Belt One Road (OBOR) Initiative. This strategic-economic project — the largest the Eurasian Landmass ever seen — spanning over 70 countries via railroads, gas pipelines, and other infrastructure projects, is one of the greatest attempts of China to secure itself a superpower position in the 21st century. Without East Turkistan, deemed by the CCP the “Chinese gateway” to Eurasia and the West in general, the entire OBOR initiative’s immediate feasibility is truly brought into question.

In addition to this strategic importance East Turkistan, the land of the Uyghurs is also extremely rich in oil, gas, and coal. According to a 2016 Congressional Research Service report, the region contains the second-highest natural gas reserves and highest oil reserves of any province-level jurisdiction of China, reportedly producing more than 30 BCM of natural gas in 2015.

A statement that reduces the intention of the freedom movement to a simple modern economic enterprise further belittles the rich history of a people that once lived with centuries of independence, and its rightful effort to reclaim its full rights and freedom. The Uyghurs played a crucial role in establishing the Koktürk Khanate (552-744), the Uyghur Khanate (744-840), the Kara-Khanid Khanate (840-1212), Gansu Uyghur Kingdom (848-1036), and Idiqut State (856-1335).

They lived co-independently in the Mongol Empire, even playing crucial roles in its administration through Gengiz Khan’s usage of the Uyghur yasa law system and the Uyghur script. After the Chagatai Khanate, East Turkistan was integrated into the Turkic-Muslim milieu of the larger Turkistan stretching from the Caspian to Mongolia including cities and polities like Bukhara, Samarkand, Kokand, etc. with scholars, traders and others moving east and west.

Thus, it is truly ridiculous to understand the issue of Uyghur colonization solely through a lens of Sino-American politics. The colonization of East Turkistan began long before China was a real contender in the quest for international political-economic hegemony, and will continue –ceteris paribus– long after a change in the foreign policy of either the United States or China.

The recent interest American politicians have taken in the plight of the Uyghurs has never even clearly crossed into the realm of East Turkistani independence– it is Uyghur, Turkic, Muslim, and anti-colonial activists who are at the forefront of the East Turkistani independence movement. Just as it was completely understandable that Afghans accepted American assistance in the fight against Soviet occupation, and that the Viet Cong accepted Chinese assistance to protect against American invasion on the other hand, the Uyghur crisis is so dire that the people are justly tempted to accept the assistance of any powerful nation against the century long Chinese oppression they have faced. Had China, under the yoke of CCP, not suffocated the Muslim peoples inhabiting East Turkistan, Uyghurs could maybe regard China differently…

The only way to secure Uyghurs and other East Turkistanis their essential rights — to practice their faith, operate economically, and take pride in their rich culture and history without fear of imprisonment, assault or death — is to secure the sovereignty of their occupied homeland.

For many Uyghurs, the human rights/autonomy discourse is dead. The Chinese government has proven over the course of its long occupation that it can never guarantee Uyghurs the safety or the freedom they deserve. Although China claims Uyghurs to be one of its “proud 56 ethnic minorities”, it sees Uyghurs not only as foreigners, as made clear with their completely distinct language, history and culture, but also as existential threats to its despotic power.

As internal but “foreign” threats, the Uyghur people have been imprisoned, enslaved, indoctrinated and murdered. There can be no going back after this horror. The only solution is for the Uyghur people, completely foreign to China, to formally exist outside of the jurisdiction of the Chinese government as their own nation.

#4: Al-Jifri asks how COVID-19 can be divine punishment if Communist Party authorities themselves remain untouched by the virus

While we agree with al-Jifri that we are in no position to state definitely whether any worldly occurrence is a direct act of Divine punishment, we question a few of the implications presented during the lecture. For example, the shaykh asks how the coronavirus pandemic can logically be considered Divine punishment if the individuals, who made the governmental decisions resulting directly in the oppression against Uyghurs, themselves remained unscathed by the virus.

We respond: How can a virus which has debilitated the economy and social structure of a country, whose government is committing genocide against millions of colonized peoples, including millions of Muslims, not be? This article does not aim to delve into a metaphysical discussion on the nature of blame and culpability, but we can simply ask how the shaykh knows that none of those individuals he identifies did not fall ill.

Additionally, we question why such a punishment could not target an entire corrupt regime — or even a complicit or apathetic populace — and not simply certain individuals, who he might deem actually culpable.

The fact of the matter is this: We do not know how many of the Uyghurs who are trapped in concentration camps, prisons or forced labor factories, have been additionally subject to this seperate CCP oppression — a virus which only became as terrible of an international menace as it has due to the deception and inadequacy of the CCP. We hope their number is very low, but also understand that the illness of Uyghurs does not indicate that the CCP is any less problematic or morally horrific in its dealing with the virus and with the regime’s colonial holdings.

The shaykh also asks why other oppressors would not be more deserving of a plague such as this one. To this we repeat the shaykh’s question to himself: Who are we to question God’s methods? The burning of the Amazon is not certainly a punishment for the South American nations whose borders it crosses, or it may be a punishment for humanity at large — we cannot know.

It does not take an act of divine punishment for us to recognize the immorality of an action or event. We do not wait for lighting to strike us down before we realize we may have committed a misdeed. In the same way, we do not know if COVID -19 is divine punishment, but we do know that the oppression of Uyghurs is a moral outrage and requires immediate international action, especially from fellow Muslim brethren.

As previously noted, we do not seek to act as interpreters of God’s will. On the contrary, we only seek to act according to a well-established Islamic tradition of taking ʿibrah, a lesson derived from a moral experience, from what we observe in the world.

Even while carefully performing this observation, we acknowledge that our derivations are zannī, or of uncertainty. This being said, we believe that our history and faith have so clearly called for justice and religious freedom that to ignore the direct suppression of Islam or Muslims, especially through means as violent and cruel as those practiced by the Chinese Communist Party, is to commit a definitive moral misdeed.

This kind of deduction by ulema and regular Muslims alike has been practiced for centuries. One pertinent example is of an individual named Mirza Ghulam of Qadiyan, who apostatized from Islam in the late 19th century as a claimant of prophethood, and experienced a rather gruesome death due to dysentery.

His downfall has been commonly interpreted (taʾwīl) as punishment, for his attempting to act as a divinely ordained prophet of God. This kind of informed and qualified interpretation has been performed for centuries and is allowed for any individual so long as they ultimately believe in the finality of the Knowledge and the Will of God. W’Allāhu Aʿlam (God knows best).

https://muslimmatters.org/2020/05/13/a-response-to-habib-ali-al-jifris-comments-on-uyghurs/
 
Salaam

Another update.

IHRC report details harrowing treatment of Uyghur Muslims by China

The Islamic Human Rights Commission has called on China to treat the Uyghurs as equal citizens after it released a damning report on Beijing’s policies towards its largest Muslim minority.

The report, which is based on the personal testimonies of Uyghur refugees in Turkey, said China had chosen to treat its Uyghur population as a threat, whose ethnic and religious identity is out of sync with the majority Han Chinese.

But the report concluded that in order to find a harmonious way forward China must adopt a policy of equality and integration based on acknowledging cultural and religious diversity.

Those interviewed in the IHRC report included individuals who had been repeatedly arrested and tortured, who had been held in so-called “re-education camps,” as well as those who had fled following the persecution of family members.

The most consistent grievances included:

  • The creation of a police state wherein Muslims are monitored everywhere they go in Xinjiang.
  • The systematic targeting and persecution of anyone who displays an Islamic identity.
  • The routine use of torture to extract confessions as well as persuade individuals to provide names of others practising Islam.
  • Females being subjected to rape which is being used as a weapon to humiliate and blackmail women.
  • Family members disappearing into the “re-education” camps.
  • Being forced to undergo many hours of state propaganda, repeating mantras that extol the virtues of the Chinese state and Han identity while denying their own Islamic/Uyghur identity.
  • The incarceration of large numbers of children in the camps.

The western media has spoken of anything between one million and three million Uyghurs being held in camps, while China has talked about hundreds of thousands. Beijing has stated that it has established “vocational education” centres to stave off terrorism in the country.

Commenting on the report, IHRC chairman Massoud Shadjareh said: “What the headlines overlook is the history of persecution faced by China’s Uyghur Muslims. This is a history in which the Chinese government has sought to erase their ethnic and religious identities through acts of persecution, surveillance and where that has failed, by killing those who refused to bow to their dictates.

“The camps are the latest in a long history of persecution: Uyghur women forced to marry Chinese men to change the demography of Xinjiang, imprisonment and torture of Uyghur activists, the repression of all expressions of religious and cultural identity, and the murder of those who were deemed dangerous by the state…

“As each repressive policy fails to disabuse the Uyghurs of their cultural and religious heritage, China responds with newer and more repressive measures. The ‘re-education’ camps in Xinjiang are a sign of desperation: having failed to scare Uyghurs into adopting a Han identity through arrests, torture, surveillance and murder, China is now resorting to forcefully brainwashing the Uighur community in order to teach it how to be more Chinese and less Uyghur.

“The Chinese authorities should know that repressing an entire population will not work – from Palestine to Kashmir, Chechnya or the Rohingya of Myanmar, the modern world is replete with examples of states failing to break the will of oppressed minorities, irrespective of how monstrous and barbaric their assaults on those peoples.

“If China hopes to resolve its Uyghur question, it needs to start viewing them as equal citizens of China. It needs to protect their ethnic and cultural identity and allow them to worship freely. A free, prosperous Uyghur population will be an asset to China. Failure to turn away from its current course will only cause instability in Xinjiang as the Uyghurs seek to free themselves from the repressive policies of Beijing.”

https://5pillarsuk.com/2020/06/17/i...rrowing-treatment-of-uyghur-muslims-by-china/
 
Salaam

Beyond words. . . . .

Blurb

A new investigation says that China is carrying out a campaign to forcibly lower birth rates among ethnic Uighurs. The Associated Press investigation found hundreds of thousands of women have had to undergo pregnancy checks, forced birth control implants, or abortions.

The Chinese government has denied the allegations.

 
Salaam

Another update.





Iran Hardliners Claim China Is Serving Islam By Suppressing Uyghur Muslims

Iranian conservatives have been justifying the Chinese government's suppression of Uyghur Muslims in China and keeping silent in the face of systematic violence against Chines Muslims in Xinjiang Province.

During the past days two tweets by Ali Motahari, a former member of the Iranian Parliament, about the situation of Uyghur Muslims in China has stirred a lot of controversy among conservative political figures close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Motahari tweeted that the Iranian government has kept silent about the situation of Muslims in China because it needs China's economic support. He said that this silence has been humiliating for the Islamic Republic.

Meanwhile, Motahari accused the Chinese government of attempting to uproot in the Xinjiang Province of China.

Motahari's comment led to many reactions among the hardliners. Conservative lawmaker Mahmoud Ahmadi Bighash described Motahari as "mentally impaired" and said that he has always been "useless and still nagging."

Bighash further claimed that the Chinese government has no problem with Chinese Muslims.

Meanwhile, Mehdi Hassanzadeh, the economic editor of hardliner daily newspaper Khorassan also addressed Motahari in a tweet and said that "The Chinese government has a problem with Wahabi Takfiri Muslims which is a hardline brand of Saudi-backed Islam, otherwise, China has no problem with Islam.”

In another reaction, Taqi Dezhakam, a former columnist at the hardliner daily newspaper Kayhan said ironically that the ISIS is also full of Iraqi and Syrian Muslims.

Many other Twitter users who opposed Motahari used the same argument in their attacks against the former MP.

Motahari's critics claim that governments such as Saudi Arabia have made investments in Xinjiang and are planning to promote Wahabism. They claimed that if the Chinese government does not confront these groups, ISIS is going to spread in the region. They further believe that "China is serving Islam."

Such reactions are not limited to Twitter and have their precedence in the official rhetoric of the Islamic Republic officials.

As an example, the research unit of the Iranian state-owned television's external services said in a December 2016 report about the Chinese government's attitude toward Muslims in that country: "There are good Muslims and bad Muslims in China. The problems about Muslims in China have their roots in the pro-Saudi radical policies that follow radical Wahabi and Takfiri ideology."

The situation of Chines Muslims and the way the government violates their rights has been actively criticized by the U.S. and European governments particularly during the past six years. However, pro-Chines elements on Twitter argue that China is not against Muslims. It is against radicalism and ISIS.

IRGC-linked Tasnim news agency in July rejected talks about violation of Muslims' rights in China as "disparaging propaganda, lies and accusations." The agency defended "Beijing's struggle against terrorism and radicalism" and said that "China followed the best policy to defend human rights."

A recent report by a German researcher pointed out that the Chinese government has been sterilizing Uyghur women living in the Western part of Xinjiang Province to control their population.

Meanwhile, China has been keeping mainly Muslim ethnic groups in concentration camps. International human rights watchdogs characterized the practice as "genocide and crime against humanity."

Tehran's double standard is not without precendent. The Islamic Republic has been previously criticized for turning a blind eye to the violation of Muslims' human rights by China. However, the fact that these media outlets suggest that Iran should follow China's policy in this regard is quite new.

The reason for Iranian officials' silence in the face of what China has been doing cannot be just Tehran's economic expectations from China or the suggestion that China is confronting Saudi-style extremism.

The behavior of Iranian hardliners is so odd that it is not unlikely they would at one point portray China as part of the "resistance axis." This looks strange but it is not totally unprecedented. Last year, many reports in Iranian media including Mashregh news which is maintained by hardliners close to Supreme Leader Khamenei and the IRGC, asked China to carry out a joint military exercise with Iran and Russia in the Persian Gulf. Apparently, China was not interested.

https://en.radiofarda.com/a/iran-ha...-by-suppressing-uyghur-muslims-/30766289.html
 

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