As I travelled between Kashgar and a neighbouring city on a public bus, I witnessed young Uighur men obediently filing off at police checkpoints so that their phones could be checked for religious materials. Nothing religious at all. You can have nothing at all on there, one man told me as we watched another climb back on the bus and reassembled his phone. The government wants to discourage religion. No official is allowed to pray in a mosque. And no one under the age of 18 is allowed in. No children. A Uighur police officer told me the same thing. I am a practising Muslim but I cant pray at the mosque. When I asked how he felt about this, he looked nervously around him and pulled a wry expression. His caution was understandable. It is dangerous to complain about any government policies in Xinjiang. To the state, any criticism is construed as sympathy with the three evils of religious extremism, separatism and terrorism. The government insists its terror problem is a foreign import, that Xinjiang is now on the radar of international jihad. It says the internet is poisoning young Uighur minds with off the shelf visions of martyrdom and a sense of belonging to a bigger mission. Certainly a suicide attack on Tiananmen Square a year ago which killed and maimed many innocent tourists was accompanied by a video in which the attackers pledged holy war. Earlier this year, Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi criticised Beijings policies in Xinjiang and asked all Chinese Muslims to pledge allegiance to him instead. An English-language magazine released by al-Qaeda described Xinjiang as an occupied Muslim land to be recovered into the Caliphate. Meraj
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 00:44:05 +0000
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