In the center of the desert landscapes of Taklamakan, in the north-western part of China, the land of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is a least populated province while it covers close to a sixth from the country's territory. Having resisted while in centuries the Han Chinese control, Xinjiang, or Old East Turkestan, fell under the Chinese Han domination in 1949. From then, its population is mostly Uyghurs and Turkish - speaking System.
Muslim mainly, the Uyghur people have a solid religious identification which, in specific, permitted them to keep a solid difference towards the Chinese enemy. Certainly, the Uyghur Empire of Mongolia knew a great civilization, until its absorption by the Mongolian Empire in the XIIIth century.
While in their own history, the Uyghur People successively taken on Shamanism, Manicheism, Buddhism and the Nestorianism before lastly converting to Islam when the Arab conquerors beat the Chinese in year 751 BC., as a result beginning the way to the Islamization of the whole Central Asia.
Under the influence of the beliefs which they taken, Uyghur People used successively, and sometimes in a competing way, a large number of written forms (turco-runic, brahmi, tokharien, soghdien) before developing their own graphic system.
The arrival of Islam was a great modification since it was accompanied by the absorption of the Uyghur areas in the immense Turkic and Islamic Kingdom. Thus, the descendants of Genghis Khan progressively replaced their writing by a Arabo-Persan alphabet, still used nowadays.
If their writing, their language and their religion mark a real big difference with the tradition of Chinese Han, the Uyghurs also differ from their aspect, so characteristic of Central Asia's people. A shiny skin, eyes representing a whole pallet of colors, from black to deep blue, features going out to the Mongolian, Turkish or Uzbek roots of these men and these women.
For a few years, China has included the proper identity of these remote people, though they represent only eight million inhabitants - a little for this specific huge land. So, Uyghur people are now part of the 56 racial minority groups having been recognized in an official way by the People's Republic of China.
This law will allow them a few rights in a land exactly where their difference is very often repressed. Therefore, Uyghur families escape the "single child policy" and their language is accepted as the second official language in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The integration of the Uyghurs and their culture in China, however, looks pretty illusory. The presence of all natural resources in Xinjiang, and its closeness with nations recognized as sensitive, highly urged the government to accelerate the sinicization of this area. Million of Han thus came to settle in this new Chinese eldorado, monopolizing the greater responsibility job opportunities.
In response to this true will to assimilate the Uyghurs into the Chinese culture, an independent party like East Turkistan Islamic Movement(ETIM) was born in the early 1990.
Saying more freedom, but primarily the acceptance of their true identity, this movement was severely repressed by the power authorities in location Xinjiang.
The situations of September 11, 2001, were the perfect occasion for the Chinese government to justify true reprisals: they declared the "Uyghur freedom fighters" as dangerous terrorists linked to Al Quaida because of their Muslim origins and their proximity with Pakistan and Afghanistan... However, the terrible repression which followed did not calm down the anger. The Uyghur peoples population continues today to proudly keep their identification and their ethnic heritage , despite the fact that they become a minority on their own land.
To get more detailed information and facts about the Uyghurs, you can visit a Uyghur website called Uyghur News at http://www.uyghurnews.com
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