China, Syria, Uighurs and the Silk Road redux

Syrian Foreign Minister Walîd al-Mu‘allem
with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi 王毅

In one of the least surprising headlines of the past few news cycles, the government of Syria is thus far the only government to defend China’s human rights record in Xinjiang, in response to the Uighur Act recently passed by the US House of Representatives.

The Syrian people have good reasons to distrust Uighurs, and good reasons to want them kept as much as possible within Chinese borders. The Uighur members of Jabhat al-Nusra affiliate Turkistan Islâmic Party (formerly the East Turkistan Independence Movement), who follow the radically-puritanical and grotesquely-violent Salafist form of Sunnî Islâm, have been active in northern Syria as some of the most vicious jihâdist groups outside of Dâ‘iš. The Uighur jihâdists have raped, tortured and crucified Arab Christians. They’ve beheaded civilian prisoners. They’ve kidnaped children as young as five to harvest their organs. This last charge should indeed render their accusations of organ harvesting against the Chinese government psychologically-suspicious. And they’ve done all this under the protection and logistical support of the Turkish government. So neither the Syrian government nor the people are going to shed too many tears about younger Uighur men being kept home by the authorities in China.

Of course, on the positive side, the Syrian government and the Chinese government have a relationship of long standing which can be traced in the immediate term to the 1960s. That’s when the Arab Socialist Ba‘ath Party began aligning itself globally with the Chinese Communists in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. However, this relationship is not of recent provenance. It can with some justice actually be traced back to the An Lushan Rebellion 安史之乱 against the Tang Dynasty, when the Arab Caliphate sent cavalry to China to help them put down the rebellion. Notably, An Lushan was a tribesman of Central Asia, and the Arabs of the Levant clearly thought it to be in their best interests to aid the government of China instead. The Chinese (Nestorian) Christian general Guo Ziyi 郭子仪 fought alongside these Arabic knights.

More recently, the sæcular Arab nationalist states which were formed in the wake of the First World War formed some natural allegiances with the Hui Muslim minority in China. The Hui Muslims were, in fact, the descendants of Arab, Persian and Turkic traders on the Silk Road and their Chinese spouses. For the most part they practised a traditional, but moderate, form of Sunnî Islâm – that of the Hanafî school of jurisprudence – and they culturally assimilated to Chinese culture while still retaining the particular use of Arabic in religious settings. The Hui sought Arab help against Japan in the Second World War, and the Arab states which tended to be the most sympathetic were those led by left-wing nationalist figures who inclined to moderation in religious matters themselves.

The roots of Uighur discontent in China have a lot to do with the Hui Muslims, who have historically occupied a kind of ‘model minority’ status in China. Here I may be tipping my own hand a bit, but the Uighurs I worked with were intensely proud of being distinct. One Uighur co-teacher I had tended to look down on her Kazakh co-workers, which rather took me aback. But I learned that there was a historical reason for this. The Uighurs still consider themselves the heirs of the Chagatai Khanate, in which they still tend to place a great deal of civilisational pride. They have long held a certain kind of resentment against the Hui Muslims, who – like them – were Hanafî Muslims of a fairly tolerant form of devotion. But the Hui were culturally Sinicised, which offended the sensibilities of the Uighurs. The Hui became the symbols of cultural accommodationism, which also rendered them a target of nationalist violence and, later, fundamentalist terror. The Uighurs shed the first blood in this case, attacking a caravan of Hui civilians near Qeshger in 1933 and killing about 800 people.

This is not to say that the Hui themselves have been immune to the siren call of Salafism; indeed, the first Salafi group to enter China was largely through the Nationalist-aligned Xibei San Ma, and they called themselves the Yihewani 伊赫瓦尼, or the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ – though the relations between this group and the Ægyptian ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ of Sayyid Qutb are nebulous. However, these early waves of Salafism in China have generally been hostile to the newer ones, as well as to the historical Hanafî. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the Hanafî majority of the Hui largely sided with the Communists in the Civil War, against the Yihewani.

Even so: a lot of the cultural erosion of Uighur identity, over which Anglophone liberals are now crying such obnoxious crocodile tears, has actually occurred gradually, from below, over the past four decades. The primary agent of that erosion has actually not been the Chinese state! The Saudis and the Turks, who have been pushing on them this poisonous puritanical ideology of Salafism, have been encouraging the Uighurs to undercut their own traditional jurisprudence and the use of their own language in religious venues. Even traditional architecture has not been safe from Saudi influence!

What’s more, the Arab states, both sæcular and not, have been actively monitoring the situation in Xinjiang, and their analysis is far more relevant and trenchant than the usual yellow-peril tinged analyses coming out of the Beltway and the Anglophone press. The commentary of the Dubai-based and Saudi-funded Al Mesbar Studies and Research Centre is actually quite explicit about the history of Islâmic thought in Uighur nationalist circles. They are clear about its progression from the traditional devotions of the Hanafî school toward modern Salafism. They are also clear about the contradictions between the Hanafî and Sûfî majority in China and the Salafi minority.

The genesis of the roots of Salafism can be traced back to Mongol expansionism and its contemporary origins to European colonialism. Salafism assumed a new dimension after the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 20^th century and was reinvigorated with increased globalisation in 21st century. The Kingdom of al Saud aggressively promoted its brand of Salafism called Wahhabism. With religious exchanges and educational programs, Saudi influence and funding gathered momentum. With the oil money transformed the landscape of Islâm, the call to go back is Salafism found resonance among Muslims worldwide.

The fastest growing Islâmic movement in the world is Salafism. The ideological footprint of Salafism in China is growing. Salafism is an ideological spectrum from the peaceful to the violent. Like elsewhere in the world, the Muslims most susceptible to recruitment by extremist and terrorist groups are those who have embraced Salafism. With the increased contact with South Asia and the Middle East, the Chinese Muslims have been influenced by the Salafi-Jihâdi-Takfiri ideologies. With greater interaction, Chinese Muslims realized that Islâm in their own country has been adapted. Although most Salafists in China are peaceful, increasingly the version of Salafism influencing a growing minority of Chinese is of both religious and security concern.

The vast majority of the Chinese Muslims are Hanafi and Sufi, schools antithetical to Salafism and its virulent strains. Like other countries, China is challenged by the growth of Salafism especially the Jihâdist and Takfiri strain. As an ideology, Salafism in China is propagated on-line and in real space. Like in the real space, Salafism on-line is a spectrum from mainstream to extreme. The existing footprint of Salafi-Jihâdi-Takfiri ideology that has entered China from overseas is reinforced by an on-line version of Salafism, Cyber Salafism is influencing a segment of the Chinese Muslims especially the youth. Also called “cut and paste Islâm,” Cyber Salafists selectively take passages out of context from religious texts and drive Jihâdism and Takfirism, a departure from classical Salafism.

They are also quite clear about the nature and broader aims of Turkish influence there:

In China, the fight for the independence of Xinjiang was spearheaded by Uighur nationalists in the centre and north and Uighur Salafists in the southwest. Gradually, with influence from the bordering South and Central Asia and support from the distant Middle East and Europe, the entire movement assumed a Salafist orientation. Despite efforts by Beijing and Xinjiang governments to dismantle the underground Salafi infrastructure, ideological and operational threat persisted and grew. Although a Uighur militant infrastructure survive in Xinjiang, the sustained pressure to dismantle the group led many like Mahsum to flee China. They reorganised themselves in Munich, Dubai, and in Peshawar in the 1980s and 1990s with support from governmental, non governmental, community, and crime [sic].

As the Turks and segments of the Turkish government considered Uighurs as Turkic, they actively and tacitly supported unity moves by the divided Uighur migrant and diaspora organizations. Driven by the breakup of the Soviet empire and rise of Central Asian states, Turkey wished to expand its influence from Turkey through Central Asia to Xinjiang. The Uighur elite organized the first Uighur National Congress in Istanbul in December 1992. While Turkey remained a key centre, political activity expanded to Germany, fundraising emerged in the Gulf and militant activity in Pakistan spread to Afghanistan.

This is not necessarily to say that what China is doing to the Uighurs is all righteous and blessed. But as Americans, our memories tend to be frightfully short, and we tend to get outraged over all the wrong sorts of things. Not only should we be paying far more attention to our own racial profiling and mass incarceration problems than we currently are, both of which are far worse than China’s. But if we really had the interests of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia at heart – let alone those of the Christian peoples of the Middle East! – we would be doing our best to encourage the humbler, older, more tolerant and more devotional strains of Islâm that belong to the traditional Turkic heritage there. That is largely what the Central Asian ‘Stans’ are attempting to do. We would not now automatically be siding with the jihâdists and takfiris who have usurped that heritage and gutted it, and who are now making war on peoples across the Silk Road in the name of a globalising fundamentalist ambition.

At least Syria’s government does not seem liable to making such a mistake. So much the better.