Islamophobia in China, SILENCE across the border
Recently a 38-year-old Muslim man was sentenced to six years in prison for the crime of growing a beard. His wife was sentenced to two years for wearing the veil. The punishments were handed down by a court in the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, China
Ironically, the trials took place in Kashgar, the city romanticised in Muhammad Iqbal’s poetry as one end of the unbreachable Muslim flank guarding the sacred “Haram”.
The couple was pronounced guilty of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.
The charge is so absurdly vague and ambiguous that it may as well be Mandarin for “we didn’t like your face”. Which is indeed what it sounds like, if one follows the trail of violent suppression of the Uighur populace through a history littered with arbitrary arrests and baffling restrictions.
In July last year, the government forbade Xinjiang officials to fast in the month of Ramadan, and initiated a robust campaign discouraging native women from wearing the veil.
In Urmaqi, bus passengers were banned from carrying a wide range of common household items, including yoghurt.
The restrictions, each a flagrant assault on the Uighur people’s cultural values, are justified by the most valuable excuse available to us in the post-9/11 universe: “security”.
These increasingly despotic measures are being adopted under the doctrine that counter-terrorism definitively trumps individual liberty, although I’m personally having a hard time figuring out how you could weaponise yoghurt and facial hair. I would reach out and ask the exceptionally inventive Uighur Muslims, except the Chinese government has dismantled the Internet in that region. These casual violations of basic freedoms would barely fill a single page in a book on Chinese aggression against the Muslims of Xinjiang.
Between 1964 and 1996, China conducted more than 40 poorly controlled, nuclear tests in Xinjiang.
An expert who studied radiation effects from tests by the US, France and the Soviets, calculated that as many as 194,000 people may have died from acute radiation poisoning, among a whopping 1.2 million people who received doses high enough to induce cancer and gross foetal abnormalities.
These are the “conservative estimates” of the damage caused in three decades.
If this form of aggression appears too indirect and impersonal, it should be viewed in context of decades of arbitrary arrests, executions and reports of heinous torture.
The government has been accused of promoting a Han mass migration to Xinjiang that has diluted the Uighur proportion from 90 per cent of the population in 1949 to 45 per cent today. The regime now “manufactures consent” (weirdly, a Chomskian term usually reserved for Western imperialists) of its people for these extreme measures against Xinjiang ‘s Muslims by citing “Islamic terrorism” against the Hans in the province.
Ultimately, perhaps the Chinese government’s greatest feat here is to have its president sit beaming in the same room as the prime minister of its neighbour, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, without “Uighur” creeping into conversation.
More impressive still, is the capacity of Pakistani political leaders, touting Islamic unity and decrying the oppression of Muslims wherever they may be, to ignore the Islamophobia raging over the border.
But that’s realpolitik. I’m more curious about how this information will be processed by the average Pakistani social media user, incensed by the anti-Muslim bigotry across Europe.
Meanwhile, we are left wondering whether we’ll be able to hear our prime minister’s next impassioned speech on the Sino-Pak friendship over the loud rumbling of the elephant in the room.
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