Islam on the ropes

This week's massive firefight in Iraq symbolizes the
depth of Islamic defiance -- but not in China, reports
GEOFFREY YORK. Remote Xinjiang's one-rebellious
Muslims now live in fear

By GEOFFREY YORK
Saturday, May 1, 2004 - Page F2

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040501/KASHGAR0\
1/TPComment/TopStories


KASHGAR, CHINA -- Under the midday sun, an old man
climbs slowly to the roof of his centuries-old Silk
Road mosque. Then, standing beside a minaret, he calls
the faithful to prayer.

But the cry goes almost unheard. Prohibited from using
an amplifier, the muezzin is barely audible above a
nearby loudspeaker pumping out government propaganda.

Here in the heartland of China's Muslims, mosques are
usually pad-locked. In the brief time they are open,
worshippers must obey a strict set of rules: no
criticism of the authorities, no unregistered guests,
no contact with foreign organizations, no visitors
under 18, no encouragement of veils and mandatory
reporting of people's prayers.

China is one of the few places where Islam is visibly
in retreat. Elsewhere, the world's fastest-growing
religion is on the rise, battling mightily against
global superpowers. This week alone, Muslim insurgents
gave Iraq some of its bloodiest fighting since the
fall of Saddam Hussein.

Here, however, Islam has collided with the ruthless
methods of the world's biggest Communist state -- and
the state is winning.

In the 1990s, China's Muslim territory, Xinjiang, was
restive and erupted in a wave of bombings and violent
attacks by groups seeking independence. But today the
separatists have been forcibly subdued. Beijing has
managed to crush almost all resistance by the eight
million Muslim Uighurs who live scattered across this
remote desert territory in China's far northwest.

Now, the traditional identity of the Muslims is under
siege. Their historic streets are being demolished to
make room for Chinese shopping malls. Their language
and culture are eroding under a tide of newcomers from
China's Han majority. Hundreds of mosques still
survive, but they are tightly controlled and
monitored. Thousands of Muslims have been arrested as
suspected terrorists, and hundreds have been executed.

"The government wants to get rid of our nationality,"
says a young man in Kashgar, an ancient city of
mud-brick houses and narrow alleys where 80 per cent
of inhabitants are Uighurs, Turkic followers of Islam
for 1,000 years.

"They tell us to get rid of our beards, the veil, our
traditional knives," he says, sipping tea. "They want
our culture to be gone. They want only Chinese culture
here."

After centuries of sporadic Chinese incursions, the
Uighur homeland was finally conquered in the 18th
century and given its Chinese name (Xinjiang means
"new frontier"). Since then, the Uighurs have launched
repeated uprisings, including rebellions in 1933 and
1944 that twice led briefly to the proclamation of an
independent republic of Eastern Turkestan.

Beijing was so disturbed by the violence of the 1990s
that it responded with a systematic campaign to quell
Muslim agitation with a calculated mix of economic
incentives, shrewd diplomatic manoeuvring, and brutal
police and military intervention.

Its Communist-appointed chairman, Ismail Tiliwaldi,
boasts that he now runs the safest region of all.
"There was not a single explosion or assassination in
Xinjiang last year," he said recently in Beijing.

The iron fist that maintains China's grip is visible
just outside Kashgar, where long military convoys can
be spotted, carrying hundreds of heavily armed
soldiers ready for any sign of dissent.

"The Uighur people are wild and rude," an army general
explains during a flight to Xinjiang. "But in the
future the Uighurs will be like the Manchus,
assimilated by the Chinese, because the Chinese
culture is much stronger."

Beijing also uses diplomatic lobbying to help keep the
Uighurs isolated and, since the Sept. 11 attacks in
the United States, has found it easier to portray
Uighur separatists as terrorists. It has persuaded
Washington to declare one Uighur group a terrorist
organization and applied heavy pressure to Kazakhstan
and Kyrgyzstan to crack down on Uighur activists.

At the same time, Beijing has lashed the region to the
Chinese economic growth machine, providing a source of
hope for discontented Uighurs. Jobs and education are
more plentiful now. Official growth in Xinjiang was
10.8 per cent last year, well above the Chinese
average. Even if most of the new money is earned by
Han Chinese businessmen and migrants, enough trickles
into Uighur hands to convince many that life is
getting better.

Even so, there is still widespread resentment of
Chinese dominance. Beijing's levers of control are
everywhere. Uighurs who work as teachers or other
public-sector jobs, for example, are prohibited from
wearing Islamic beards or veils, carrying the Koran or
attending mosques. Female schoolchildren cannot wear
the veil. Most Uighurs cannot get passports for
foreign travel.

The streets are filled with undercover police and
informers. There is a climate of fear among ordinary
Uighurs, who seldom dare to discuss politics with a
stranger. "The walls have ears," one man says.

Uighurs tell the story of a teacher who stood up at a
public meeting to protest against the ban on beards.
Even Karl Marx wore one, he noted -- and soon lost his
job.

To have a career as a teacher or bureaucrat, people
must give up the Koran and accept Communist
indoctrination. But many retreat into a secret world
where Islam still rules. University students, barred
from attending mosques, pray in seclusion in their
dormitory rooms. Mothers often have three or four
children, violating the Communist child-control
limits. To keep their pregnancies secret, they move
back in with their parents.

Much of Beijing's growing control, however, is
exercised through its cultural and commercial
influence. Millions of Han Chinese migrants have
flooded into Xinjiang in recent years. A new railway,
driven straight as a knife through the vast Taklamakan
Desert, reached Kashgar in 1999 and made it even
easier for the Chinese to reach the city.

Government policies are tilted to favour the new
arrivals. The best jobs and university opportunities
are reserved for those who speak Chinese, leaving the
Uighurs largely on the outside. Most university
classes are taught in the Chinese language. Even in
Kashgar, an overwhelmingly Uighur city, most street
signs and shop signs are written in large Chinese
characters, while the Uighur signs are smaller or
non-existent.

Kashgar's only official bookstore has plenty of
Uighur-language texts -- on Buddhism and Confucianism,
but not on Islam. On the city streets, when a visitor
notices her reading, an old woman quickly hides her a
book on Islam. "It's just a storybook," she mumbles.

The commercial heart of the city is dominated by a
huge monument of Mao (one of the few still found in
China). Propaganda banners declare that "Xinjiang has
been an inseparable part of China since ancient times.
The Han people cannot separate themselves from the
minorities; the minorities cannot separate themselves
from the Han."

Every Friday, thousands of Uighurs flock to midday
prayers at the 560-year-old Id Kah mosque, which is
Kashgar's biggest but most days serves as merely a
tourist attraction. These days, it's also hidden
behind the steel fences of a massive building site,
with the red Chinese flag flying above the giant
construction crane. Medieval streets nearby have been
demolished, ancient tombs dug up and moved, and
hundreds of Muslims forced to relocate to make room
for a 55,000-square-metre shopping plaza with almost
3,000 new shops.

Nearby billboards carry images of $100 U.S. bills and
urge investors to rent space, but local merchants say
they cannot afford it, so Chinese businesses are
expected to take over. In fact, an artist's depiction
of the plaza shows it populated entirely by Han
Chinese, with the mosque reduced to a backdrop.

Xinjiang's biggest city, Urumqi, is already largely
Han. "In 10 years, Kashgar will be like Urumqi," one
man says. "It's very sad."

The owner of an instrument shop believes that it's
already too late. "When the Han people came to
Kashgar, it was destroyed," he tells a Chinese
visitor. "Just like Japan invaded you, you have done
the same to us. You have brought more money here, but
if you have to choose between money and freedom, what
would you choose? We would choose freedom."

Geoffrey York is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in
Beijing.

Not a love story

As he stares at a belly dancer gyrating to the Venus
club's throbbing disco beat, Kuresh laments the
shortage of virgins.

"Probably I will have to marry a Pakistani girl," he
says with a sigh. "The girls there are still keeping
the old traditions."

As a proud Muslim, he insists on marrying a virgin.
Yet he finds it difficult to resist the temptations
flooding into China's remote northwest. Like many
people, he is alternately shocked and seduced.

"When I was young, I never would have dared to enter a
nightclub. Even 10 years ago, we would have refused to
enter this kind of place. Uighur girls would never
have dared to perform in such places, but now they do,
and they earn a high income from it."

Kashgar, located near the border with Pakistan and
Afghanistan, has always been one of China's more
isolated places -- a city of veils and mosques,
surrounded by harsh deserts and forbidding mountains,
with a religion and language that reinforce the sense
of separation.

In the past decade, however, it has changed so rapidly
that the local population suddenly finds itself caught
between Islamic morality and China's secular
mainstream.

A local tour guide, for example, says he quit a job at
a hotel when he discovered Uighur men were using it
for liaisons with prostitutes, something he says never
used to happen.

Meanwhile, 21-year-old Akbar is nursing a hangover. He
was so upset upon discovering his girlfriend of two
years wasn't a virgin that he spent all of last night
drinking wine. That, too, is a breach of the Koran,
but "I'm in such pain," he moans. "I can't marry her,
but I still love her."

Kuresh says a growing number of women undergo surgery
to "restore" their virginity before their wedding
nights. Uighur girls, he says, "are much different
from a few years ago, but they still know that they
will be driven out of their home by their bridegroom
if he discovers that they are not a virgin."

He lost his own girlfriend of three years, who was
ethnic Chinese, because their parents objected. When
someone spotted them at a disco, the girl's father
kicked her so hard she wound up in the hospital. "I
miss her," Kuresh says, "but we have to accept
reality."

This culture clash is epitomized by the story of the
most famous of all Kashgar women, known as the
Fragrant Concubine. She lived in the 18th century and
was so beautiful that Emperor Qianlong ordered her
brought to Beijing wrapped like a piece of porcelain.
She was installed in the Forbidden City and spent the
rest of her life there.

"Love between this Uighur maid and the emperor is
evidence of the great unity among different ethnic
groups in China," according to a sign at the tomb of
one of her ancestors.

But the Uighurs scoff at this notion. They claim the
Fragrant Concubine defied the emperor, refusing to let
him touch her, and finally committed suicide to
preserve her honour.

-- Geoffrey York
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To learn more about Muslims in China see:
http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Park/6443/China/







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