Uyghurs…. A Turkish exploited roots by extremists in China

Shimaa Hafzy

The Uighurs has been living in China’s East Turkistan Province since 1949, when the Communist Party ruled the country.

There are 30 million Muslim citizens in the country, including 23 million Uighurs, while unofficial reports indicate that the number of Muslims is about 100 million, its means they are about 9.5% of the total population.

Uyghurs & UN

The United Nations has called to release the Uighurs who are being held in the anti-terror camps. China denies any mass arrests, except the detention of some religious extremists. The government also accuses Islamist militants and separatists of stirring unrest in the region.

The United States Mission to the UN calls on China to end its counterproductive policy and to release all detainees.

In September 2017, the authorities issued notices to Muslims to hand over all their religious items, including the copy of the holy Quran and prayer mats.

“We have received a notice saying that every Uighur ethnic person must hand over any material in his house connected to the Islamic religion, including the holy Quran, prayer mats, and anything else that symbolizes religion” said Dlkut Rakset, spokesman for the Uighur World Congress.

Its Roots

The origins of the Uighurs are attributed to the Turkish people, who consider themselves ethnically and culturally closer to the Central Asian nations. Reports also refer to the integration of its members into armed groups, including al-Qaeda.

The Uighurs calls for their independence of Xinjiang Province. The Chinese government refused this demand, which pushed the Uighurs Muslims to a counter-response.

Many of Chinese Muslims joined to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Takfiri Salafist, which prompting some of them to join hardliners and extremists groups, newspapers reported.

Chinese Muslims who were educated abroad or studied the teachings of Islam by Salafist scholars actively contributed to spreading these ideas among the Chinese, According to a study entitled “Salafism in China and its jihadi-takfiri roots”.

The transmission of extremist thought to China contributed to the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood there. In his book, China and Islam, Matthew Asri observes that the Muslim Brotherhood used the same principles of Salafism to achieve their goals in China.

Ma Wan Fu (1849 – 1934) was the most prominent extremist figure in China, where his sect, known as the Jahwani or the Brotherhood, was based in Dongxiang Autonomous Province.

He traveled to Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran and returned to China in 1892 with books, texts and books of the founder of Wahhabism Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab.

He also developed 10 rules to deal with the Quran and Sunnah. He asked his followers to deny ceremonies that are not commensurate with Islam.

In his book “Nationalism in the People’s Republic Muslim Chinese: Ethnic” Dru C. Gladney says that the Brotherhood used mosques like Arab mosques and the prayers in its mosques with just the Arabic.

Despite the lack of accurate statistics on the number of Muslims in China at the time, the writer says that the number of mosques reached 2132 mosques, including about 560 mosques belonging to the Brotherhood.

Uyghurs & Terrorism  

After Hassan Mahsum and his deputy, Abdulqadir Oqban, established the East Turkistan Islamic Movement in Pakistan in September 1997, things took new paths. Mahsum established formal links with the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda, “East Turkistan Islamic Movement” used the infrastructure of the Taliban.

The Uzbeks and the Uighurs were the first of two groups from Central Asia to establish a strategic partnership with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, where Uighur and Uzbek fighters trained in jihadist tactics.

Mahsum was working from Kabul with an Afghan passport and met Osama bin Laden in 1999, while the Afghan Taliban established a Uighur village in Jalalabad.

Afghan Taliban dedicated training facility in Tora Bora, In the second half of the 1990s, the fighters joined the Al Qaeda’s 055 Brigade, which is fighting the Northern Alliance of Xinjiang.