By J.T. Quigley
I was sitting in my high school
history classroom on September 11, 2001. Although not in the city proper, I was
living in New York at the time, and my father was working just across the
Hudson River in New Jersey. I remember vividly the knock on the door that led
our teacher to stop her lecture, step into the hallway for a moment, and return
– a shade paler – to turn on the television set. We watched live as the
second plane hit, and we were sent home just in time to watch the towers
collapse from the comfort of our living room couches.
A few years later, as the United
States waged dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I graduated. Thanks to frequent
news reports showing our bearded, scarf-wearing “enemies,” popular country
music songs that bordered on outright racism, and the still-fresh scars left
from that fateful day, I came of age during the peak of America’s Muslim fear.
In 2006, while an undergraduate at
La Salle University, I had the opportunity to meet a panel of Chinese
journalists who were discussing an HIV/AIDS boom in the country’s “Wild West” –
Xinjiang Province. Unlike the African model of sexual transmission, the problem
in China was mostly attributed to intravenous drug use – with a University of
Pennsylvania researcher finding that nearly one in three injecting drug users
in the city of Urumqi were already infected. Complicating this discovery was
the fact that the disease was mostly isolated to an indigenous population
called the Uyghurs – a group that, until then, I had never heard of.
My research brought me to Rebiya Kadeer,
a Uyghur rights activist in exile and a Nobel Prize nominee. She helped to shed
light on the plight of her people – a group of Turkic-descended Muslims who
have been pushed to the fringes of Chinese society. Since the late 1980s, the
majority Han Chinese have flocked to Xinjiang for economic opportunities,
covering the Uyghur’s ancestral lands with skyscrapers, factories, and
mega-farms.
Though religiously moderate, the
fact that Uyghurs practice Islam made them easy targets in a post 9/11 world.
Beijing cracked down, with most of the world unaware of who the Uyghurs were
until 2009 – when a peaceful student protest against the beating of Uyghur
factory workers who were falsely accused of rape turned into a bloodbath.
After winning a research grant from
my university, I traveled to China in the summer of 2007 with my retired
HIV/AIDS reporter-turned-journalism-professor. We were intent on learning more
about the Uyghurs, the apparent HIV/AIDS epidemic, and what role the Han
Chinese and their government had in all of it. While I was able to put together
a solid piece
for the Philadelphia Inquirer – I never had an opportunity to tell the
whole story.
After initial groundwork in Beijing,
we boarded a “hard sleeper” train for a 48-hour trek across the Gobi desert. We
arrived in Urumqi hungry and with stiff necks. Our fixer, Angelina (not her
real name, but a nickname that we gave her because of a resemblance to Angelina
Jolie), was waiting at the train station. In skinny jeans, a T-shirt, and
Converse Chuck Taylors – and with no head-covering of any kind – didn’t strike
me as a Uyghur, or as a Muslim, for that matter. She looked like anyone who
might have sat next to me in a lecture hall back at La Salle.
Angelina’s faith became more
apparent at dinner. She passed on alcoholic beverages and stuck to eating
mutton and vegetables. She was fully tri-lingual in Uyghur (which resembles
Arabic), Mandarin, and English – but was also studying several other languages
in order to attract more foreign clients. We were nearly the same age, and we
became quick friends over the course of our research and interviews.
After our research had concluded, my
professor left Xinjiang. Instead of traveling around China for a while – my
original plan – I decided to stay put in Urumqi. Angelina offered me her couch
until I could move into a cheap hostel. It was in her living room, sitting on
low cushions and chomping down on pizza-crust shaped Uyghur naan, that Angelina
told me about her passport – or rather, her lack of a passport.
Angelina explained that over the
past year, Chinese police had been arresting Uyghurs and confiscating their passports. Their crime? Possessing a college education and being
popular in the local community. She told me that her father, a local university
professor, had been interrogated over alleged ties to a “separatist movement”
in the local Uyghur community and briefly jailed. After that, police
confiscated the passports of every member of her family. Her dreams of
traveling around the world had been dashed.
One day, Angelina asked me if I’d like
to attend a Uyghur wedding. A close friend of hers was to be married, and word
of Angelina’s American visitor had apparently spread around the community. I
bought a cheap suit and obliged – but had mixed feelings about how I would be
perceived.
Upon arrival, I was seated at a
table full of local Uyghur men ranging in age from their 20s to 50s. Some of
them were professors at the local university, capable of basic English
conversation. I was surprised when they began pouring shots of Baiju – the
potent Chinese grain alcohol – and offering toasts. Angelina stopped by my
table to pass on some advice – leave the glass full or they will keep filling
it to the brim. If they insist that I take more shots than I can handle,
pretend to drink it, then spit it out into a water glass and they won’t know
the difference.
Even more surprisingly was when an
openly gay relative of the bride took to the floor for an interpretive dance.
“These are the Muslims that China is so scared of?” I thought to myself.
I ended my time in Urumqi with a
visit to Angelina’s tiny village on the outskirts of the city. The simple,
one-story stone homes made a long row, with each home butting against the one
next to it. I shook Angelina’s father’s hand – he was short and unimposing with
a big moustache and an even bigger smile. Her mother cooked mutton stew in a
dirt-floored kitchen. I felt safe and cared-for.
It wasn’t until I returned to
Philadelphia that I realized what a profound impact my short few months in
Xinjiang had on me. At the time, Philadelphia led the national murder rate. I
had been safer with the Uyghurs, surrounded by mosques and men who stopped five
times a day to pray. It was a profound realization for someone who grew up
during the height of Muslim fear in post-9/11 America.
A report from the BBC said
that the security threat level in Urumqi has been raised to level one – the
highest possible – despite the attack taking place on the other side of the
country. A waitress said that local Han Chinese were given whistles by local
police, instructed to sound an alert if they see “anyone suspicious with a big
beard or burka.”
The Global Times, widely regarded as a CCP mouthpiece, also reported that
all three “violent terrorists” were Uyghur.
"Their cruelty in aiming
their jeep at innocent lives will never be forgiven,” the newspaper reported. “People from Xinjiang, especially the Uyghurs, will be the
biggest victims.”
Even if these three bad apples were,
in fact, Uyghurs – a thinly veiled threat of genocide is unacceptable in a
civilized world. But if growing up in the shadow of 9/11 taught me anything, it
is that civilization is a very thin veneer.
The original link can be found at: http://thediplomat.com/asia-life/2013/10/who-are-the-uyghurs-really/?all=true
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