This is a paper I wrote for a graduate history course taught by Prof. Ayesha Jalal at Tufts University in 2017. Prof. Jalal encouraged me to write on this subject and I am grateful for her interest. I have not edited it significantly since I submitted it. All mistakes are my own.
I had my own reservations of sharing my findings then; things in Turkestan have exacerbated significantly since my writing of this paper. As a non-Muslim Han Chinese who is in solidarity with Uyghur aspirations for autonomy, I am feeling increasingly powerless and voiceless. I am drained from feeling sad and angry from news of the concentration camps, such as the recent Vice documentary on how the Chinese communist state systematically separates Uyghur children from their relatives and parents, many who have left East Turkestan for better opportunities.
I am also disappointed at the many nations and international bodies who have not denounced this well-documented atrocity. Some of the protesters of Hong Kong this summer expressed their solidarity with the Uyghurs in concentration camps and are a delightful exception. While the cause for discrimination and torture against Uyghurs in East Turkestan ("Xinjiang") is rooted in some of the racist attitudes and/or ignorance of religious practices, it is important to remember that the current system uses Uyghur men and women to torture Uyghur men and women, just as Han Chinese are used by the system to other police Han Chinese. While the degrees of suffering under the current regime vary, the flagrant denial of human rights can be felt by any person in China (as well as Hong Kong) under the current regime. Still, I think it is appropriate to use the word "cultural genocide" for the present situation of East Turkestan.
from @AbdugheniSabit on Twitter: "More Hong Kong protesters who occupied the Legislative Council spraypainted the below to show who they stand in solidarity with #Uyghurs."
The graffiti text says: "China will pay for its crimes against Uyghur Muslims."
This paper has been written with care and compassion, though I am aware that the findings can upset anyone, as history often does. I have never visited "Xinjiang" or East Turkestan. Still, I am publishing it here in hopes that this paper can create a sense of continuity for whoever is interested in this area's history, regardless of ethnicity or religion. The former title I submitted was "Retracing the Uyghur Identity in Chinese Turkestan" but I have modified it for this blog post.
Unlike the idea of firm boundaries of today’s nation-states, ancient China’s territoriality
had unstable frontier zones for many reasons.1 Border areas were re-conceptualized through
diplomatic interactions between the Qing Empire and outside powers, such as the Russian and
British Empire. Since the collapse of the Qing, many former regions have been severely affected
by the process of state-building. The focus of this paper is one the regions— officially designated
as the Xinjiang (the New Frontier) Uyghur Autonomous Region, it is also known as Chinese
Turkestan. In 1911, the discourse of a Five Race Republic was adapted from the Qing Empire’s
classification of its people, which constituted the Han, the Manchu, the Mongol, the Hui, and the
Tibetan. The “Hui” category included Muslims of a motley of ethnic groups. The 1911 founders
of the Republic of China, who were mostly Han elites, adopted the same classification but also
distanced themselves from a “celestial dynasty.” They aimed to justify the new multiethnic
political order as well as the Chinese territorial nation-state.2 Yet the underlying interests were
pro-Han; in the words of thinker and reformer Liang Qichao: “From now, if China as such dies,
nothing can be done; but if China continues to exist in this world, it has to adopt an imperialist
political strategy: Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui, Miao and Tibetan people must combine
themselves into one big nation...” Within this large territorial nation, Liang Qichao wrote, Han
must be at its core.3 The Chinese Communist Party combined this discourse with the 1920s
Soviet classification system of ethnicity, which differentiated ten Muslim groups within the Hui category.4 A historical understanding of ethnicity would show the fluid boundaries for all ethnic
groups and certain people have the ability to leave or join ethnic groups even if it happens over
certain generations. Ethnic identity is tied with power and created based on transactions between
two or more groups: those individuals who join a new ethnic group can lose or gain as a result.5
Scholars have noted how “Han” only emerges as a category in Chinese discourses when people
who subscribe to this culture are politically marginalized; and when they are dominating, they
are less concerned with identity-making of themselves but ascribe social markers to Others
through policies.6 While Chinese culture is invoked as a tradition of thousands of years, “Han”
only started to carry the meaning of the modern ethnonym since the Ming dynasty (circa 1368).7
This process obscured the Hui identity—Muslims who speak Chinese and wear similar clothes—
and prominently highlighted Uyghur identity, Muslims who live in Chinese Turkestan, wear
specific clothing, and do not speak Chinese.8
It is thus interesting to ask to what extent are Muslims in China “Othered” due to
religious and/or ethnic reasons, and to what extent is this process due to the modern state
building projects. The Uyghurs, who mostly hail from Chinese Turkestan, are distinct among the
Muslim ethnic minorities. This distinction is partly due to their vocal political advocacy by
certain transnational groups since the creation of the Chinese modern nation-state; some of them are calling for East Turkestan to this day.9 They are also distinct by way of the
geographical location of their homeland: Xinjiang was a “base for Chinese operations against the
USSR throughout much of the Afghan war, when China funneled military material through the
Karakoram highway;” certain locations in Chinese Turkestan were used to train mujahedeen.
Xinjiang was also “a hotbed of open military conflict” when tensions flared with India in 1962
and with the Soviet Union in 1969.10 By looking at the histories of Chinese Turkestan during the
time of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, one sees that this area's history did not have a
teleology towards any specific state formation. The definition of Islam before the twentieth
century was localized and specific. The well-known historian of the time of high colonial competition was Molla Musa Sayrami, an Altishahri (“of the six cities” from the Tarim Basin) provides a good example of the term’s usage. He used the term Musulman not just for denoting a religion but moreover, to “[distinguish] its bearer according to descent, mode of life, and place of residence.”11 The Turkic term “Musulman” had multiple meanings: one was the Turkic-speaking Muslims, such as the Tungani of Jungharia or the Kyrgyz people, and the second was the indigenous people of “Chinese Turkistan.” The historian in question acknowledged that other Muslim communities also existed within the same geographical area of Chinese Turkestan / Moghulistan, but used terms other than Musulman to categorize the people who shared with him “the mode of life (settled), association with a specific territory… ethnic origin (Turkic), myth of descent (Oghuz-Moghul-Turk-Yapheth-Noah), shared history (the Moghul legacy).”12 The Muslim ruler Yaqub Beg who ruled the region from in the 1860s to 1870s was thus not “Musulman” for Sayrami, since he was Andijani, meaning that he was from Andijan, a place in modern day Uzbekistan; Yaqub Beg also identified himself as socially distinct.13 This postulation of being Musulman also demarcated who was indigenous and who was non-indigenous or non-Islamic. The Manchu and Han both fell in the latter category. Similarly, the Qing administration also used the term “musalman” synonymously with “yerlik” (local). Qing policies changed the local identities as well:
Qing policies…such as rotation of begs within Yettishahr; movement of officials, troops, agricultural workers, and criminals within Xinjiang; and other methods of rule that laid the fundamental framework for the emerging self-perceptions of the indigenous Turkic dwellers of Yettishahr as a single community.14
These people were termed as Taranchis, who mostly live in Ili Valley, as opposed to the
Altishahr Kashgaris. This fluidity in identity was further diminished by many reformers in the
early twentieth century. Influenced by Pan-Turkic ideals and Central Asian Jadidists, reformers
in Chinese Turkestan wished to sport a uniform identity to uplift the local Muslim social groups
from poverty and press them towards modern Islamic education. Jadidists such as Nazakhoja
Abdusamadov were crucial to the formulation of a historical theory that construct their “Uyghur”
ancestry.15 Intellectual trends, including Soviet Communism, promoted the word “Uyghur” as an
ethnic marker.
On the one hand, the privileging of the state precludes the history of the actual culture
and tradition. Historian Rian Thum’s marvelous work on shrine worship in Altishahr showed that
there existed a common understanding of the oasis cities that predates any notion of unified sovereignty.16 Through examining biographies (tazkirahs) that depict a version of narratives of
the Twelve Imams and local saints and the shrine worshiping tradition, Thum identified that the
“adoption and absorption of elements from pre-Islamic and Islamic traditions of Arab, Persia and
Central Asia is more than mere textual inheritance for the Muslim Turks of Altishahr.”17 Thum
argued that modernity often eclipsed a fuller picture of history by equating a homogeneous
nationalism. Other processes in the region preceded a linear conclusion towards a Xinjiang state
as well: Turkicization since the ninth century, Islamization since the tenth century, or the Mongol
Junghar administration since the seventeenth century of parts of the area are notable processes.18
Finally, their causes for rallying behind one identity were often historically specific, responding
to local sources of oppression—such as the Qing administrators (begs) or descendants of exiled
Islamic Khojas—rather than ideologically predetermined.19 For example, an article by historian
David Brophy on the Hami (Qamul) region in Chinese Turkestan has argued that “the presence
of a ghazi ethos among the ruling elite in an Islamic frontier society should not lead us to
conclude that this ethos demanded continuous war against the infidel, or precluded alliances with
non-Muslim forces.”20 Rather, collaboration with the other non-Islamic powers was prevalent.
Historian Kim Hodong’s work also argued the locals accepted that Qing rule as the rule of justice
(adalat) during times of peace and prosperity. Armed Islamic interventions occurred during
times of high tax burdens. The locals rallied around the cause to chase away “infidels” and bring
welfare.21 Yet when Muslim rulers also failed to improve social welfare, they were also
challenged.
On the other hand, other scholars as well as nationalist intellectuals have argued for the
case of an ideological or state-sanctioned unity of the Chinese Turkestan region. The unified
territory of Jungharia and eastern Xinjiang, for example, precisely emerged from the Qing
dynasty’s colonial takeover in 1759. Rotation of officials, implanting of intermediaries such as
the Muslim wangs (men that claim aristocratic genealogy), and forced migration also created the
geopolitical, modern-day Xinjiang.22 Qing classifications, elevated the Turkic Muslims’ status
from their previous designations as “barbarians” to “one of the five constituent cultural
groups.”23 Resistance from the local people also developed alongside imperial maneuvers actors
based in Russia, Britain, Germany and Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century. A gradually
uniformed understanding of the identity "Uyghur" and the corresponding language and confession of Islam was crystallized in this period as well. While no one can deny the influence of foreign
powers and interests in the region, local actors also used trade and politics to formulate their own
identity. The aforementioned historian Molla Musa Sayrami wrote his Tarikh-i Hamidi in honor
of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid.24 An Ottoman traveler in 1893 Tianjin (which is a port city
close to Beijing) found Dungan Muslims, an ethnic group of Turkic-speaking Chinese Muslims, pronouncing the khutba in the name of sultan Abdulhamid.25 The reformist thoughts of the
Young Turks as well as Pan-Turkic ideals of Crimean Turks also influenced Uyghur
intellectuals, who also went by the title of “Jadidists.”26 Some came from families of the
religious elite, but they were defined by their opposition to old methods of education and
politics. Their education initiative, the “New Method” (usul-i jadid), coined their name as a
group. One of the prominent Jadidist, Abdulqadir Damolla, studied the works of Ibn Taymiyya
as well as modern scholars such as Jamaluddin Afghani and Muhammad Abduh.27 He wrote in
one of his works in 1911:
Q: What is the reason for the shame and ignominy of the nation?
A: There are two reasons. One is stubbornness and ignorance; the other is conflict and discord. The reason for the disgrace and decline of any people or any nation is ignorance and the lack of unity.28
This strand of activism has now culminated in a situation of “competing nationalism,” as shown
by research on the Pan-Turkic or nationalist Uyghur historiography that emerged roughly
alongside the foundation of Communist China.29
In the process of state intervention, the state-opposing groups, however diverse, unify in
their demands and narratives as well and mirror a statist framework. There are two main reasons
for privileging the statist account, as most accounts of nation-state histories would attest: one is
that nationalists of all backgrounds would generate more interest for a coherent nation-state formation rather than nuanced projects such as Rian Thum’s. While Thum’s project confirmed
the diverse oasis culture identities first proposed by Justin Rudelson,30 many historians like
Sayrami prefer to write accounts that portray the region as “a single territorial, cultural, and
political entity.”31 The second reason is that the archival material for actors such as those
functioning for the Qing Empire or the Soviet Communist Party are more readily available than
accounts from an ethnographic and/or Islamic perspective. As David Brophy has pointed out,
scholars know much more about the intermediary wangs’ loyalty to those higher in the
administrative ladder than how the Turkic Muslim society perceived them.32 The Qing rulers did
not identify themselves within Islamic terms largely due to the “absence of a single principle of
legitimacy uniting the Muslim elite in Xinjiang at this time.”33 Sources that did not originate
from the same paradigm as the Qing become identified as “Islamic” retroactively, even if some
historians such as Thum and Ondrej Klimeš have tried to show that there were many meanings to
being a Musulman that often were at odds with each other in this era.
Similarly, the highly politicized Uyghur language was not called “Uyghur” and went
through several script incarnations.34 In terms of the literary language, Persian gradually gave
way to Turki / Uyghur in the eighteenth century.35 In terms of oral communication, linguistic processes and “deliberate policies resulted in an exciting process of the vernacularization of
Eastern Turki;” Arabic and Persian words decreased while Chinese or Russian words
increased.36 Only since the 1930s have these texts been referred to as “Uyghur” by the
eponymous intellectuals. Yet at times the same group also used “East Turki” or “Turki” to refer
to the same language.37 This paper will examine the contestations of identities and will try to
offer an alternative view rather than a teleological narrative that culminates in a uniform Uyghur
identity associated with a certain form of religion tied to a state.
Pre-Qing Muslim Conversion and Qing Rule
The earliest record of conversion in this region dated from the tenth century, initiated by
Turkic tribes called the Qarakhanids. “Uyghur” was a term used by them to refer to infidels of
the region, and thus had a negative connotation.38 The twelfth century Mongol rulers, the
Chaghatayids, converted gradually and patronized khojas with shakyh lineages and still paid
homage to their nomadic tradition.39 In the fourteenth century, “when the Ming dynasty sent its
emissaries to Amir Timur’s court in Samarkand, there were already many Muslims living among
the Buddhist Uyghurs of Hami and Turfan.”40 Shrine-worshiping was much more accessible for
the local people than going to Hajj. Many locals also often resisted the rulers such as Yaqub Beg who sought to institute Islamic laws.41 The discontent towards a top-down Islamic rule generated
dissenting poems from the time:
“From Peking the Chinese came, like stars in the heaven.
The Andijanis rose and fled, like the pigs in the forest.
They came in vain and left in vain, the Andijanis!
They went away scared and languidly, the Andijanis!”42
The conquest of Chinese Turkestan by the Junghars and Qing Manchu rulers could not
have been possible without internal Sufi schisms, namely the competition between the White
Mountain and Black Mountain Khojas. While Afaq Khoja of the White Mountain Khojas aided
the alliance of the Junghars and Dalai Lama and ended the Yarkand Khanate of Turkic Muslims,
the later Manchu conquest was aided by the Black Mountain Khojas.43 The Manchu rulers
subsequently made efforts to justify their rule in Chinese Turkestan. The Qing incorporated the
local language Chaghatay in “official multilingual inscriptions, dictionaries, and encyclopedias,”
sponsored the Sulayman mosque construction in Turfan, exempted religious endowments (waqf)
taxes, and appointed guardians to sacred shrines.44
But these efforts were not enough for the population, many of whom were not followers
of the Black Mountain Sufis. This divide subsequently led to uprisings against the indigenous
social groups that acted as Qing intermediaries, such as the Dungan Rebellion that erupted in
1862 and lasted until 1877 in Chinese Turkestan. Qing intermediaries (beg) were “appointed by
and received substantial benefits from the Qing administration.”45 They wielded autonomy in ruling practices and imposed surcharges on commoners. Rebels murdered many non-Muslims in
Kucha as a form of expressing communal discontent. Muslims intermediaries loyal to the Qing
Empire, such as Ahmad Wang Beg, were also murdered. Historian Kim Hodong has offered
many factors behind the Dungan rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century. “Local grievances
against heavy taxation and maladministration fed the discontent, but in addition to this many
among the Dungans of Xinjiang seem to have believed a rumor that the Tongzhi emperor (1861
1875) had decreed the extermination of the empire’s Muslims.”46 The beg intermediaries, who
benefited from access to the inland Chinese markets and Qing protection, found themselves in
between a potential Islamic mandate and the existing political mandate.47 Uprisings in “Kucha,
Urumuci, Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan were led mostly by the local clergy and Sufi shaykhs,”
but there was no definite outcome for an Islamic governance.48 Rashidin Khan Khoja emerged as
a prominent leader after the rebellion and attempted to unify the region alongside the tide of
communal anger.49 Yet the rebellion of the 1860s in Chinese Turkestan ultimately split in three
ways. The Islamic identity lost its rallying power after they defeated the Qing administration and
other non-Muslims. Charismatic personages with different prestigious lineages claimed authority
and came into conflict with one another.50 Chinese Turkestan inhabitants were increasingly
alienated from the administration of the victors, Yaqub Beg and the Khoqandis.51 General Zuo Zongtang has been credited with the re-conquest of the area; he also contributed to policy
making of the region.
Still, the effects of the rebellion are far-reaching. This rebellion inspired the interest of a
Russian Sinologist who proceeded to study the region in the context of what he saw as Islam.
While his methods led him to overlook any Turkic influence on the people’s makeup, his
framework and theses regarding religion under Qing rule inspired much more European
scholarship that were either independent or collaborative with Tatar scholarship, which later
informed the definition of a Uyghur nation.52 It also promoted a “protonational Musalman sense
of communal identity” under Qing rule and laid the ground for the modern Uyghur nationalist
movement.53 It also sparked the debate among Qing officials and Chinese elites on whether or
not they should expend efforts to keep the “New Frontier.”54 The next section of this paper will
focus on the various forces competing for influence after Qing reestablished its claim through
military force.
Post-Yaqub Beg Competition
The situation continued to be fluid in Chinese Turkestan as before Yaqub Beg, and many powers sought to take advantage of it. The Qing and Russian Empire both maneuvered to attract residents to stay in their administered areas. Demobilized men from General Zuo Zongtang’s army as well as poor Chinese migrants constructed city walls, administrative buildings, dredging canals, and tilled agricultural land.55 Zuo Zongtang, a long supporter for Qing rule in Xinjiang even before the re-conquest, argued for establishing Confucian primary schools for local Muslim children. Other contemporary elites who support Qing’s dominance in Xinjiang include scholar Gong Zizhen, who was the first to stress the importance of investing in infrastructure in 1820, and Wei Yuan, who argued for conquest by way of Han resettlement.56 This faction won the policy debate, and Chinese Turkestan became an administrative province of “Xinjiang” in 1884.57 While one can see the connection with contemporary People’s Republic of China, policies continued to form on an ad hoc basis, depending on the surrounding circumstances. Merchants and gentry took advantage of the
situation of a thin and culturally alien administrative personnel to act as intermediaries. Historians such as Brophy and Klimeš have rightly argued that histories of Qing colonization of Chinese Turkestan has overlooked the collaborative intermediaries.58
Russia's commercial involvement in Chinese Turkestan started since the 1830s.59 Chinese
Turkestan merchants traded mostly with Russia and other Central Asian entities while remaining
under the Qing domain. This prompted Russia to construct the Central Asian railway connecting
from 1879 to 1931, which accelerated this tendency. Many merchants avoided the Qing trade
taxed by masquerading as Russian subjects.60 Russia rulers wanted to change that situation for their own benefits as well, especially when the Qing dynasty experienced problems in internal
governance. The Russians cited the disorders caused by Yaqub Beg and occupied parts of
Chinese Turkestan in July 1871, “claiming that they were attempting to protect their citizens
from Muslim raids and would withdraw as soon as the Chinese reestablished order.”61 They proposed the 1879 Treaty of Livadia that stipulated the rights for Ili Valley subjects to move to
Russia and become Russian subjects according to their wishes.62 A Qing official signed the
treaty without realizing that the treaty granted Russia to a large portion of the Ili Valley. After
the Qing rulers realizing this mishap, General Zuo Zongtang had to rectify it; both his troops and
the Russians both prepared for battle; eventually Russia returned Ili to the Qing Empire after
British diplomatic intervention. A new treaty was established. Still, Russia gained tax cuts on
trade.63 The Ili Valley incident also reflects the room for negotiation for residents of the
borderlands. The narrative of the Great Game at times obscured the many nuances within the
policies of the Russian empire. While empires made high diplomatic and paternalistic claims,
local political actors and residents jostled according to their own rhythm. While Russia indeed
expanded its interests, they were not always originating from a centralized plan. The residents of
Qing Turkestan also maneuvered to benefit from the imperial policies as much as they could—
they claimed status of both Russia and Qing depending on the situation.64 The intense Russian
Qing competition ended alongside the demise of the Qing. By the end of the Republic of China era, Chinese Turkestan traded exclusively with Russia.65 This section has discussed the
competing Chinese and Russian interests in this period. The next section will examine the
modernist discourses on nation and civilization that created the impetus for a Uyghur
consciousness.
The Jadidists and Uyghurs
Ottoman Pan-Turkism in the late nineteenth century informed the Tanzimat reforms and
the Young Turks, as well as Central Asian reformers.66 These progressive reformers, mostly
Russian Muslims, are a loose group that formed as a group “Jadidists” in 1917.67 They wanted to
push through a new form of education in Central Asia to revive Islam in the context of
modernization. In their view, the maktab as it existed was "disorganized, unhygienic, and run by
uncouth teachers with no training in pedagogy; there was no system for inspecting schools; ...
and the philanthropy of the rich... took no organized form."68 Maktabs in Chinese Turkistan also
“drew on a curriculum that was common across Turkistan, consisting primarily of Quran
recitation, catechisms, and Sufi poetry. Alongside these schools were limited efforts to introduce
the language and culture of the metropole.”69 Russian was taught in the Russia dominated areas,
and Qing officials introduced gratis Chinese schools (yishu) in 1878. Qing later instituted
learning halls (xuetang) that combined Quran classes in the curriculum. Both forms were unpopular among the Chinese Turkestan inhabitants partly because of the dress requirement.70
Rich Muslim families even paid poorer neighbors to act as substitutes and feign attendance at
these schools.71
Jadidists wished to not only reform the maktab, but also create sites of cultural practices,
including schools, publishing houses and political parties. Jadidist notions of identity were
informed by ethnographic knowledge produced by colonialists and “romantic discourses of
nationhood from the Tatars and the Ottomans.”72 For example, a traveling Jadidist, Nushirvan
Yavshev, reached Kashgar in 1915 and wrote prolifically on the need to improve local
conditions. “No one here knows what education is. They don’t know anything apart from saying
prayers and making the hajj.”73 He subsequently wrote articles that aimed at debunking the
myths of saintly shrines. His account is an objectification of Islam, which is the process in which
Muslims view the religious system as distinct from its previous, particularly after the rise of print
media. These ideas profoundly influenced the region since it occurred alongside political
assertion of Central Asian Muslims. Specifically, it “led to the emergence of a largely secular
Muslim confessional nationalism in which Islam functioned as a marker of political and cultural
identity” in Central Asia as well as Chinese Turkestan.74 They were called “short shirts” by the conservatives who wore traditional “long coats.”75 Later this term carried a more positive
meaning, as the majority of the Taranchi population accepted their new schools and methods.
There are parallels between Jadidists in Chinese Turkestan and Chinese intellectuals of
this period in their top-down understanding and civilizing zeal. Gu Jiegang, a historian of ancient
China, wrote the following speech in 1938 after visiting the Northwest regions of China (which
did not include Chinese Turkestan):
Of the places I visited, many were districts with complex racial and religious intermingling… The Muslims have Old Teaching, New Teaching, and New-New Teaching, while the lamaists have Red, Back, Yellow, and Flowery sects… Because northwesterners have all these factions, all these mental barriers, they know only that there are sectarian divisions, and they don’t know that they are all citizens of the Republic of China! The places we went on this trip are actually in the middle of our country’s territory… So our responsibility in ‘frontier work’ must be gradually to shrink the frontier, while enlarging the center, so that sooner or later the ‘frontier’ will just be the border.76
Jadidists similarly wrote about the ignorance of the Chinese Turkestan people in regards to their
ethnicity.77 While Jadidists aimed at building multiple Central Asian nations through presenting
a modernist understanding of Islamic culture, the Chinese intellectuals also wished to incorporate
the frontier Muslims and Others into their post-Qing nation-state. Both flaunted acute
understandings and observations of contemporary affairs as well as an urge to adapt conditions to
meet the challenges of the day.
What did the locals make of these political discourses of non-Chinese Turkestan people?
The title “Uyghur” had more political connotations among the people of Chinese Turkestan. Activists in Anatolia promoted it as an “abstract and deterritorialized symbol of the civilized
Turk.”78 Writers contextualized the category to regions: Any Turkic nation that achieved a high
civilization were christened “Uyghurs,” such as Ottomans, Hungarians, or those in Chinese
Turkestan. In the mid-1920s, a story by Jadidist Nazakhoja Abdusamadov showed how two old
men could have discussed politics in a Kashgar bazaar:
Tell me, what’s the news? [...]
Right now nothing much. But there are rumors going round that the Uyghurs are about to rise up.
Why would they rise up? Surely not!
No, it seems to be true, my friend.
The short-shirts have gotten very active lately.
Those short-shirts still haven’t come to their senses. In Tsar Nicholas’s day they couldn’t sit still in Central Asia. Since the Bolsheviks have come along they’re still being stubborn. They don’t get along with any of them! Well, the Bolsheviks gave them what they deserved. So they’ve forgotten that already!
I know what you mean. But who are these “Uyghurs” anyways?
The “Uyghurs” are these short-shirts we’re talking about.79
In contrast, many elites from Chinese Turkestan spoke Turkic and traveled abroad for hajj or
business agreed with the Jadidists and also adopted the ethnonym of Uyghur. Accounting for
class difference is crucial in understanding the formation of nationalist ideology in Chinese
Turkestan. The next section will briefly trace two different claimants on Chinese Turkestan by
Islamic regimes of the time.
The Twentieth Century: Ottomanism and Turanism
Ottoman prestige enjoyed a long history in the region. Each year tens of thousands of
pilgrims came from the Qing territory to Ottoman-administered sites. At times, there would be
official representatives from Chinese Turkestan who facilitated the hajj for Kashgari pilgrims.
Some idealistic Turks even went from the heartland to Kashgar to spread their ideas. Ahmed
Kemal was one of them. He arrived in Kashgar in 1914 at the request of a rich Uyghur
merchant.80 He wrote the following text during his time in Kashgar:
Q: Where are you from?
A: I am from Kashgar, Sir. […]
Q: Can you tell me what you know about Kashgar?
A: Very well, Sir. Kashgar is a city that belongs to us, the Turks of Chinese Turkistan. The city is in the continent of Asia. It is a great place, where the Turk race, to which we belong, was born and grew up.81
The uniform at Ahmed Kemal’s school was modeled off of Ottoman court costume.82 The school
advocated allegiance to the Ottoman sultan and taught Turkic nationalist songs.83 Some
conservatives took his school to task and the warlord Yang almost called it off, if the Hui
Muslim relative of a Naqshbandi leader at the time did not intervene.84 Later, authorities still
banned all Ottoman Turks and foreign educators to teach in Chinese Turkestan. Ahmed Kemal
contacted his students secretly until 1917 and was later arrested and deported back home.85
Another political ideal for the region was Turanism, which saw a land consisting parts of
China, “Tibet, Iran, the desert of Dasht-i Kipchak, and the Caspian sea” as a unity.86 Amanullah
Khan, sovereign of the Kingdom of Afghanistan, was a proponent of Turanism. Banking on his
popularity in Central Asia after the Third Anglo-Afghan war, he called for Kashgar-Afghanistan
connections under the name of an Islamic Confederacy in 1919.87 Afghan merchants in Chinese
Turkestan lost British consulate protection after Afghanistan won the right to an independent foreign policy by the treaty of Peshawar. To address this situation, Amanullah proposed a
confederacy of Afghanistan, Bukhara, Khiva, and Khokand and attempted to establish
independent diplomatic links between Kabul and Urumuchi. He was also interested in promoting
Afghan influence in Chinese Turkestan. Both sides sent missions but the Chinese warlord Yang
Zengxin was wary of the Turanism claims since it undermined his grasp on power. The Afghan
mission refused to leave Yarkand in Chinese Turkestan. As a result, “something of an Afghan
cult began to develop at Yarkand, and the Chinese authorities at Kashgar were disturbed to hear
that some local Turkic-speaking peoples were studying Pushtu.”88 Ottomanism and Turanism
were two competing discourses in Chinese Turkestan. The former gained much more traction
and still does today. One can see that the identity of Uyghurs was as much of a political issue in
the beginning of the twentieth century as it is today, with arguably much higher stakes.
Conclusion
This paper has shown the contested histories of the people who are now called Uyghurs
(wei wu er) occurred in a land called the New Frontier (Xinjiang) prior to the establishment of
the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, there was no agreement on their ethnic affiliation until
1934.89 In the 1937 census, the categories of Taranchi (those from North Chinese Turkestan) and
Kashgari (from the South) were merged together, while some Taranchi politicians continued to
lobby for power in Urumuchi under their distinct identity. They recognized that the new warlord
Sheng Shicai would hold onto the territory, and thus made claims according to his framework.90
Other political actors used the moniker of “turban-wearing Muslims” (chantou huizi), derived
from the official use which aimed to distinguish them from Chinese-speaking Muslims (huizi).
Khoja Niyaz Haji continued to use the title “turban-wearing Muslims” on the international stage
in the 1930s when he appealed to the Mongolian government for the support of his Chantou
People’s Republic project.91 The multitude of identities gradually consolidated under various
frameworks of categorization. Categories come at the expense of fluidity; but who benefits from
this sort of clarity? Qing administrators, Jadidists, and the Chinese Republicans used similar
categories in their attempt to make Chinese Turkestan theirs. The outlier in the above account
was the warlord Yang Zengxin, who sought a different type of governmentality with his small
army of ten thousand men.
While one can see the diversity of Chinese Turkestan’s culture and see its demise alongside the twentieth century construction of a Uyghur nationalism influenced by transnational processes carried by Jadidists, I would caution against dismissing the Uyghur nationalist project. Historian Shahab Ahmed argued in What is Islam? that accounts of Islam and Islamic thinking should not exclude social reality. Similarly, Jadidist and nationalist thought in Central Asia was connected to local contexts. Demands to lower taxes and address social inequality informed Uyghur nationalists and Jadidists alike. They inquired about just rule and politics, and demanded new state policies.
Footnotes
1 Liu, Xiaoyuan. 2015. “From Five 'Imperial Domains' to a 'Chinese Nation': A Perceptual and Political Transformation in Recent History,” in Ethnic China: Identity, Assimilation, and Resistance. eds. Xiaobing Li and Patrick Fuliang Shan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 7. 2 Ibid. 4. 3 Ibid. 11-13.
4 Gladney, Dru. 1991. Muslim Chinese. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard. 19. These groups include the Hui, Uyghur, Kazak, Dongxiang, Kyrghyz, Salar, Tadjik, Uzbek, Baoan, and Tatar.
5 Elliott, Mark. 2012. "Hushuo". In Critical Han Studies, 1st ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California.176.
6 Elliott, Mark. 2012. "Hushuo". 177.
Gladney, Dru. 1991. Muslim Chinese. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard. 16.
7 Gladney, Dru. 1991. Muslim Chinese. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard.179.
8 Ibid. xi.
9 Bovingdon, Gardner. 2010. The Uyghurs. New York: Columbia University Press.
10 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 4.
11 Ibid. 48.
12 Ibid. 56-57.
13 Ibid. 48.
14 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 88.
15 Ibid. 88. Also spelled as Nezerghoja Abdusemetov.
16 Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes Of Uyghur History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
17 Chaudhuri, Debasish. 2016. "Book Review: The Sacred Routes Of Uyghur History By Rian Thum, The Sacred Routes Of Uyghur History (Cambridge And London: Harvard University Press, 2014), Pp. 323 + Viii, US$39.95, £29.95, €36.00, ISBN 9780674598553". China Report 52 (3): 245-250. doi:10.1177/0009445516646250.
18 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 49. 19 Newby, Laura J. 1998. "The Begs Of Xinjiang: Between Two Worlds". Bulletin Of The School Of Oriental And African Studies 61 (02): 278. doi:10.1017/s0041977x00013811.
Newby, Laura J. 2005. The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand (c. 1760– 1860). Leiden: Brill.
20 Brophy, David. 2008. "The Kings of Xinjiang: Muslim Elites and the Qing Empire." Etudes Orientales 25: 69-90.
21 Kim, Hodong. 2010. Holy War in China. Stanford Calif: Stanford University Press. 55.
22 Ibid. While the Qing borrowed the rotation of begs from a previous policy of the Junghars, it was used in combination with other symbolic/cultural tools, which coupled together may have been more decisive in consolidating “Xinjiang” as one unit.
23 Millward, James. 2016. Beyond The Pass. 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. After the Qianlong conquest, along with the Mongols and Tibetans, the Turkic Muslims in Altishahr were elevated to the level of the Han and Manchu.
24 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 87.
25 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 88. Lattimore, Owen. 1992. Inner Asian Frontiers Of China. Oxford Univ. Press. 183
26 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 70. 27 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 109-110. Although Abdulqadir Damolla studied in Bukhara, some thought he was Egyptian or Syrian because of his excellent written Arabic.
28 Ibid. 131.
29 Bovingdon, Gardner and Tursun, Nabijan. 2004. Contested histories. In: S. Frederick Starr, ed. Xinjiang: China’s Muslim frontier. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 353–374.
30 Rudelson, Justin Jon. 1997. Oasis Identities. New York: Columbia University Press. He conducted research in the 1980s with full access to villages in Xinjiang and found distinct differences in Uyghur identity depending on whether the subject was a peasant, a merchant, or an intellectual.
31 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 52
32 Brophy, David. 2008. "The Kings of Xinjiang: Muslim Elites and the Qing Empire." Etudes Orientales 25: 69-90.
33 Ibid. 84.
34 Mortimer, Caroline. 2017. "China’s Muslim Minority Banned From Using Their Language In Schools". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-muslim-minority-school-language-ban-hanxinjiang-uyghur-hotan-hetian-government-communist-a7873446.html.
35 Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes Of Uyghur History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
36 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 24.
37 Ibid. 24.
38 Ibid. 87.
39 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 87. Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 26. 40 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 24-5. “According to the envoy Chen Cheng (1365-1457), the Buddhists and Muslims spoke a common Turkic language but were distinguished from one another by religious and cultural markers. For example, Uyghur men grew their hair long, while the Muslims shaved their heads. Uyghur women donned black veils, while Muslim women dressed in white."
41 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 138.
42 Kim, Hodong. 2010. Holy War in China. Stanford Calif: Stanford University Press. 70.
43 Thum, Rian. 2012. "Beyond Resistance And Nationalism: Local History And The Case Of Afaq Khoja". Central Asian Survey 31 (3): 293-310. doi:10.1080/02634937.2012.722366.
44 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 30.
45 Ibid. 54.
46 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 48-51. 47 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 54. Kim, Kwangmin. Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016.
48 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 48-51. 49 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 52.
50 Ibid. 38.
51 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 38.
Khalid, Adeeb. The politics of Muslim cultural reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 43.
“The khanates of Central Asia were surrounded by deserts inhabited by nomadic tribes, and the concerns of rulers continued to focus on the shifting calculus of power.... The khans of Kokand had paid tribute to the Qing dynasty since the 1750s, but this relationship remained... nominal.”
52 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 48-51.
53 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 57.
54 Ibid. 61.
55 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 72.
56 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 61.
57 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 72.
58 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 63. The warlord Yang Zengxin similarly coopted intermediaries from 1911 to 1928 and successfully strengthened his rule with merely ten thousand troops. Klimeš characterizes him as an “anti-modernist” who worked with conservative dignitaries to prevent reform.
59 Ibid. 65.
60 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. 80. 61 "Ili Crisis | Chinese History". 2017. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Ilicrisis#ref1079985.
62 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 66.
63 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 66.
64 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation.
65 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 66.
66 Ibid. 69.
67 Ibid. 72.
68 Khalid, Adeeb. The politics of Muslim cultural reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 13.
69 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 86.
70 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 75.
Chinese names were given to some students and most were required to wear Chinese attire or braid their hair.
71 Ibid. 76.
72 Khalid, Adeeb. The politics of Muslim cultural reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 8.
73 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 136.
74 Ibid. 11.
75 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 90.
76 Lipman, Jonathan Neaman. 2003. Familiar Strangers. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. 17. The New Teaching here refers to Jahriyya sect and is not the same as the usul-e jadid.
77 “We have said above that Uyghurs of East Turkestan used to be called ‘Uyghurs’ in the past and that they became nameless afterwards. Why is that? If you ask a local Turk who he is, he will answer: ‘A Kashgari.’ Or ‘a Khotani.’ If you tell him that this is a toponym, he will immediately say, ‘I am a Muslim.’ If you tell him that you were not asking about his religion, he will say with fright: ‘I am a Rag-head.’ [chantou] The ones who come into contact with Kazaks and Kyrgyz will tell you they are Sars. It means that they do not know who they really are! What ignorance.” –Abdusemetov, cited in Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 93.
78 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. 142. In the era of linguistic invention of the 1930s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk included “uyğar” in the “Pure Turkish” dictionary as civilized, replacing the former Arabic word madani.
79 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. 245.
80 Ibid. 130.
81 Ibid. 130.
82 Millward, James A. 2010. Eurasian Crossroads. London: C. Hurst. 173. 83 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 79.
83 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 79.
84 Millward, James A. 2010. Eurasian Crossroads. London: C. Hurst. 173. 85 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 79.
86 Ibid. 69.
87 Forbes, Andrew D. W. 1986. Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press. 69.
88 Forbes, Andrew D. W. 1986. Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia. 69.
89 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. 257.
90 Ibid. 258-60.
I had my own reservations of sharing my findings then; things in Turkestan have exacerbated significantly since my writing of this paper. As a non-Muslim Han Chinese who is in solidarity with Uyghur aspirations for autonomy, I am feeling increasingly powerless and voiceless. I am drained from feeling sad and angry from news of the concentration camps, such as the recent Vice documentary on how the Chinese communist state systematically separates Uyghur children from their relatives and parents, many who have left East Turkestan for better opportunities.
I am also disappointed at the many nations and international bodies who have not denounced this well-documented atrocity. Some of the protesters of Hong Kong this summer expressed their solidarity with the Uyghurs in concentration camps and are a delightful exception. While the cause for discrimination and torture against Uyghurs in East Turkestan ("Xinjiang") is rooted in some of the racist attitudes and/or ignorance of religious practices, it is important to remember that the current system uses Uyghur men and women to torture Uyghur men and women, just as Han Chinese are used by the system to other police Han Chinese. While the degrees of suffering under the current regime vary, the flagrant denial of human rights can be felt by any person in China (as well as Hong Kong) under the current regime. Still, I think it is appropriate to use the word "cultural genocide" for the present situation of East Turkestan.
The graffiti text says: "China will pay for its crimes against Uyghur Muslims."
This paper has been written with care and compassion, though I am aware that the findings can upset anyone, as history often does. I have never visited "Xinjiang" or East Turkestan. Still, I am publishing it here in hopes that this paper can create a sense of continuity for whoever is interested in this area's history, regardless of ethnicity or religion. The former title I submitted was "Retracing the Uyghur Identity in Chinese Turkestan" but I have modified it for this blog post.
Retracing the Uyghur Identity in Chinese / East Turkestan
had unstable frontier zones for many reasons.1 Border areas were re-conceptualized through
diplomatic interactions between the Qing Empire and outside powers, such as the Russian and
British Empire. Since the collapse of the Qing, many former regions have been severely affected
by the process of state-building. The focus of this paper is one the regions— officially designated
as the Xinjiang (the New Frontier) Uyghur Autonomous Region, it is also known as Chinese
Turkestan. In 1911, the discourse of a Five Race Republic was adapted from the Qing Empire’s
classification of its people, which constituted the Han, the Manchu, the Mongol, the Hui, and the
Tibetan. The “Hui” category included Muslims of a motley of ethnic groups. The 1911 founders
of the Republic of China, who were mostly Han elites, adopted the same classification but also
distanced themselves from a “celestial dynasty.” They aimed to justify the new multiethnic
political order as well as the Chinese territorial nation-state.2 Yet the underlying interests were
pro-Han; in the words of thinker and reformer Liang Qichao: “From now, if China as such dies,
nothing can be done; but if China continues to exist in this world, it has to adopt an imperialist
political strategy: Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui, Miao and Tibetan people must combine
themselves into one big nation...” Within this large territorial nation, Liang Qichao wrote, Han
must be at its core.3 The Chinese Communist Party combined this discourse with the 1920s
Soviet classification system of ethnicity, which differentiated ten Muslim groups within the Hui category.4 A historical understanding of ethnicity would show the fluid boundaries for all ethnic
groups and certain people have the ability to leave or join ethnic groups even if it happens over
certain generations. Ethnic identity is tied with power and created based on transactions between
two or more groups: those individuals who join a new ethnic group can lose or gain as a result.5
Scholars have noted how “Han” only emerges as a category in Chinese discourses when people
who subscribe to this culture are politically marginalized; and when they are dominating, they
are less concerned with identity-making of themselves but ascribe social markers to Others
through policies.6 While Chinese culture is invoked as a tradition of thousands of years, “Han”
only started to carry the meaning of the modern ethnonym since the Ming dynasty (circa 1368).7
This process obscured the Hui identity—Muslims who speak Chinese and wear similar clothes—
and prominently highlighted Uyghur identity, Muslims who live in Chinese Turkestan, wear
specific clothing, and do not speak Chinese.8
It is thus interesting to ask to what extent are Muslims in China “Othered” due to
religious and/or ethnic reasons, and to what extent is this process due to the modern state
building projects. The Uyghurs, who mostly hail from Chinese Turkestan, are distinct among the
Muslim ethnic minorities. This distinction is partly due to their vocal political advocacy by
certain transnational groups since the creation of the Chinese modern nation-state; some of them are calling for East Turkestan to this day.9 They are also distinct by way of the
geographical location of their homeland: Xinjiang was a “base for Chinese operations against the
USSR throughout much of the Afghan war, when China funneled military material through the
Karakoram highway;” certain locations in Chinese Turkestan were used to train mujahedeen.
Xinjiang was also “a hotbed of open military conflict” when tensions flared with India in 1962
and with the Soviet Union in 1969.10 By looking at the histories of Chinese Turkestan during the
time of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, one sees that this area's history did not have a
teleology towards any specific state formation. The definition of Islam before the twentieth
century was localized and specific. The well-known historian of the time of high colonial competition was Molla Musa Sayrami, an Altishahri (“of the six cities” from the Tarim Basin) provides a good example of the term’s usage. He used the term Musulman not just for denoting a religion but moreover, to “[distinguish] its bearer according to descent, mode of life, and place of residence.”11 The Turkic term “Musulman” had multiple meanings: one was the Turkic-speaking Muslims, such as the Tungani of Jungharia or the Kyrgyz people, and the second was the indigenous people of “Chinese Turkistan.” The historian in question acknowledged that other Muslim communities also existed within the same geographical area of Chinese Turkestan / Moghulistan, but used terms other than Musulman to categorize the people who shared with him “the mode of life (settled), association with a specific territory… ethnic origin (Turkic), myth of descent (Oghuz-Moghul-Turk-Yapheth-Noah), shared history (the Moghul legacy).”12 The Muslim ruler Yaqub Beg who ruled the region from in the 1860s to 1870s was thus not “Musulman” for Sayrami, since he was Andijani, meaning that he was from Andijan, a place in modern day Uzbekistan; Yaqub Beg also identified himself as socially distinct.13 This postulation of being Musulman also demarcated who was indigenous and who was non-indigenous or non-Islamic. The Manchu and Han both fell in the latter category. Similarly, the Qing administration also used the term “musalman” synonymously with “yerlik” (local). Qing policies changed the local identities as well:
Qing policies…such as rotation of begs within Yettishahr; movement of officials, troops, agricultural workers, and criminals within Xinjiang; and other methods of rule that laid the fundamental framework for the emerging self-perceptions of the indigenous Turkic dwellers of Yettishahr as a single community.14
These people were termed as Taranchis, who mostly live in Ili Valley, as opposed to the
Altishahr Kashgaris. This fluidity in identity was further diminished by many reformers in the
early twentieth century. Influenced by Pan-Turkic ideals and Central Asian Jadidists, reformers
in Chinese Turkestan wished to sport a uniform identity to uplift the local Muslim social groups
from poverty and press them towards modern Islamic education. Jadidists such as Nazakhoja
Abdusamadov were crucial to the formulation of a historical theory that construct their “Uyghur”
ancestry.15 Intellectual trends, including Soviet Communism, promoted the word “Uyghur” as an
ethnic marker.
On the one hand, the privileging of the state precludes the history of the actual culture
and tradition. Historian Rian Thum’s marvelous work on shrine worship in Altishahr showed that
there existed a common understanding of the oasis cities that predates any notion of unified sovereignty.16 Through examining biographies (tazkirahs) that depict a version of narratives of
the Twelve Imams and local saints and the shrine worshiping tradition, Thum identified that the
“adoption and absorption of elements from pre-Islamic and Islamic traditions of Arab, Persia and
Central Asia is more than mere textual inheritance for the Muslim Turks of Altishahr.”17 Thum
argued that modernity often eclipsed a fuller picture of history by equating a homogeneous
nationalism. Other processes in the region preceded a linear conclusion towards a Xinjiang state
as well: Turkicization since the ninth century, Islamization since the tenth century, or the Mongol
Junghar administration since the seventeenth century of parts of the area are notable processes.18
Finally, their causes for rallying behind one identity were often historically specific, responding
to local sources of oppression—such as the Qing administrators (begs) or descendants of exiled
Islamic Khojas—rather than ideologically predetermined.19 For example, an article by historian
David Brophy on the Hami (Qamul) region in Chinese Turkestan has argued that “the presence
of a ghazi ethos among the ruling elite in an Islamic frontier society should not lead us to
conclude that this ethos demanded continuous war against the infidel, or precluded alliances with
non-Muslim forces.”20 Rather, collaboration with the other non-Islamic powers was prevalent.
Historian Kim Hodong’s work also argued the locals accepted that Qing rule as the rule of justice
(adalat) during times of peace and prosperity. Armed Islamic interventions occurred during
times of high tax burdens. The locals rallied around the cause to chase away “infidels” and bring
welfare.21 Yet when Muslim rulers also failed to improve social welfare, they were also
challenged.
On the other hand, other scholars as well as nationalist intellectuals have argued for the
case of an ideological or state-sanctioned unity of the Chinese Turkestan region. The unified
territory of Jungharia and eastern Xinjiang, for example, precisely emerged from the Qing
dynasty’s colonial takeover in 1759. Rotation of officials, implanting of intermediaries such as
the Muslim wangs (men that claim aristocratic genealogy), and forced migration also created the
geopolitical, modern-day Xinjiang.22 Qing classifications, elevated the Turkic Muslims’ status
from their previous designations as “barbarians” to “one of the five constituent cultural
groups.”23 Resistance from the local people also developed alongside imperial maneuvers actors
based in Russia, Britain, Germany and Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century. A gradually
uniformed understanding of the identity "Uyghur" and the corresponding language and confession of Islam was crystallized in this period as well. While no one can deny the influence of foreign
powers and interests in the region, local actors also used trade and politics to formulate their own
identity. The aforementioned historian Molla Musa Sayrami wrote his Tarikh-i Hamidi in honor
of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid.24 An Ottoman traveler in 1893 Tianjin (which is a port city
close to Beijing) found Dungan Muslims, an ethnic group of Turkic-speaking Chinese Muslims, pronouncing the khutba in the name of sultan Abdulhamid.25 The reformist thoughts of the
Young Turks as well as Pan-Turkic ideals of Crimean Turks also influenced Uyghur
intellectuals, who also went by the title of “Jadidists.”26 Some came from families of the
religious elite, but they were defined by their opposition to old methods of education and
politics. Their education initiative, the “New Method” (usul-i jadid), coined their name as a
group. One of the prominent Jadidist, Abdulqadir Damolla, studied the works of Ibn Taymiyya
as well as modern scholars such as Jamaluddin Afghani and Muhammad Abduh.27 He wrote in
one of his works in 1911:
Q: What is the reason for the shame and ignominy of the nation?
A: There are two reasons. One is stubbornness and ignorance; the other is conflict and discord. The reason for the disgrace and decline of any people or any nation is ignorance and the lack of unity.28
This strand of activism has now culminated in a situation of “competing nationalism,” as shown
by research on the Pan-Turkic or nationalist Uyghur historiography that emerged roughly
alongside the foundation of Communist China.29
In the process of state intervention, the state-opposing groups, however diverse, unify in
their demands and narratives as well and mirror a statist framework. There are two main reasons
for privileging the statist account, as most accounts of nation-state histories would attest: one is
that nationalists of all backgrounds would generate more interest for a coherent nation-state formation rather than nuanced projects such as Rian Thum’s. While Thum’s project confirmed
the diverse oasis culture identities first proposed by Justin Rudelson,30 many historians like
Sayrami prefer to write accounts that portray the region as “a single territorial, cultural, and
political entity.”31 The second reason is that the archival material for actors such as those
functioning for the Qing Empire or the Soviet Communist Party are more readily available than
accounts from an ethnographic and/or Islamic perspective. As David Brophy has pointed out,
scholars know much more about the intermediary wangs’ loyalty to those higher in the
administrative ladder than how the Turkic Muslim society perceived them.32 The Qing rulers did
not identify themselves within Islamic terms largely due to the “absence of a single principle of
legitimacy uniting the Muslim elite in Xinjiang at this time.”33 Sources that did not originate
from the same paradigm as the Qing become identified as “Islamic” retroactively, even if some
historians such as Thum and Ondrej Klimeš have tried to show that there were many meanings to
being a Musulman that often were at odds with each other in this era.
Similarly, the highly politicized Uyghur language was not called “Uyghur” and went
through several script incarnations.34 In terms of the literary language, Persian gradually gave
way to Turki / Uyghur in the eighteenth century.35 In terms of oral communication, linguistic processes and “deliberate policies resulted in an exciting process of the vernacularization of
Eastern Turki;” Arabic and Persian words decreased while Chinese or Russian words
increased.36 Only since the 1930s have these texts been referred to as “Uyghur” by the
eponymous intellectuals. Yet at times the same group also used “East Turki” or “Turki” to refer
to the same language.37 This paper will examine the contestations of identities and will try to
offer an alternative view rather than a teleological narrative that culminates in a uniform Uyghur
identity associated with a certain form of religion tied to a state.
Pre-Qing Muslim Conversion and Qing Rule
The earliest record of conversion in this region dated from the tenth century, initiated by
Turkic tribes called the Qarakhanids. “Uyghur” was a term used by them to refer to infidels of
the region, and thus had a negative connotation.38 The twelfth century Mongol rulers, the
Chaghatayids, converted gradually and patronized khojas with shakyh lineages and still paid
homage to their nomadic tradition.39 In the fourteenth century, “when the Ming dynasty sent its
emissaries to Amir Timur’s court in Samarkand, there were already many Muslims living among
the Buddhist Uyghurs of Hami and Turfan.”40 Shrine-worshiping was much more accessible for
the local people than going to Hajj. Many locals also often resisted the rulers such as Yaqub Beg who sought to institute Islamic laws.41 The discontent towards a top-down Islamic rule generated
dissenting poems from the time:
“From Peking the Chinese came, like stars in the heaven.
The Andijanis rose and fled, like the pigs in the forest.
They came in vain and left in vain, the Andijanis!
They went away scared and languidly, the Andijanis!”42
The conquest of Chinese Turkestan by the Junghars and Qing Manchu rulers could not
have been possible without internal Sufi schisms, namely the competition between the White
Mountain and Black Mountain Khojas. While Afaq Khoja of the White Mountain Khojas aided
the alliance of the Junghars and Dalai Lama and ended the Yarkand Khanate of Turkic Muslims,
the later Manchu conquest was aided by the Black Mountain Khojas.43 The Manchu rulers
subsequently made efforts to justify their rule in Chinese Turkestan. The Qing incorporated the
local language Chaghatay in “official multilingual inscriptions, dictionaries, and encyclopedias,”
sponsored the Sulayman mosque construction in Turfan, exempted religious endowments (waqf)
taxes, and appointed guardians to sacred shrines.44
But these efforts were not enough for the population, many of whom were not followers
of the Black Mountain Sufis. This divide subsequently led to uprisings against the indigenous
social groups that acted as Qing intermediaries, such as the Dungan Rebellion that erupted in
1862 and lasted until 1877 in Chinese Turkestan. Qing intermediaries (beg) were “appointed by
and received substantial benefits from the Qing administration.”45 They wielded autonomy in ruling practices and imposed surcharges on commoners. Rebels murdered many non-Muslims in
Kucha as a form of expressing communal discontent. Muslims intermediaries loyal to the Qing
Empire, such as Ahmad Wang Beg, were also murdered. Historian Kim Hodong has offered
many factors behind the Dungan rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century. “Local grievances
against heavy taxation and maladministration fed the discontent, but in addition to this many
among the Dungans of Xinjiang seem to have believed a rumor that the Tongzhi emperor (1861
1875) had decreed the extermination of the empire’s Muslims.”46 The beg intermediaries, who
benefited from access to the inland Chinese markets and Qing protection, found themselves in
between a potential Islamic mandate and the existing political mandate.47 Uprisings in “Kucha,
Urumuci, Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan were led mostly by the local clergy and Sufi shaykhs,”
but there was no definite outcome for an Islamic governance.48 Rashidin Khan Khoja emerged as
a prominent leader after the rebellion and attempted to unify the region alongside the tide of
communal anger.49 Yet the rebellion of the 1860s in Chinese Turkestan ultimately split in three
ways. The Islamic identity lost its rallying power after they defeated the Qing administration and
other non-Muslims. Charismatic personages with different prestigious lineages claimed authority
and came into conflict with one another.50 Chinese Turkestan inhabitants were increasingly
alienated from the administration of the victors, Yaqub Beg and the Khoqandis.51 General Zuo Zongtang has been credited with the re-conquest of the area; he also contributed to policy
making of the region.
Still, the effects of the rebellion are far-reaching. This rebellion inspired the interest of a
Russian Sinologist who proceeded to study the region in the context of what he saw as Islam.
While his methods led him to overlook any Turkic influence on the people’s makeup, his
framework and theses regarding religion under Qing rule inspired much more European
scholarship that were either independent or collaborative with Tatar scholarship, which later
informed the definition of a Uyghur nation.52 It also promoted a “protonational Musalman sense
of communal identity” under Qing rule and laid the ground for the modern Uyghur nationalist
movement.53 It also sparked the debate among Qing officials and Chinese elites on whether or
not they should expend efforts to keep the “New Frontier.”54 The next section of this paper will
focus on the various forces competing for influence after Qing reestablished its claim through
military force.
Post-Yaqub Beg Competition
The situation continued to be fluid in Chinese Turkestan as before Yaqub Beg, and many powers sought to take advantage of it. The Qing and Russian Empire both maneuvered to attract residents to stay in their administered areas. Demobilized men from General Zuo Zongtang’s army as well as poor Chinese migrants constructed city walls, administrative buildings, dredging canals, and tilled agricultural land.55 Zuo Zongtang, a long supporter for Qing rule in Xinjiang even before the re-conquest, argued for establishing Confucian primary schools for local Muslim children. Other contemporary elites who support Qing’s dominance in Xinjiang include scholar Gong Zizhen, who was the first to stress the importance of investing in infrastructure in 1820, and Wei Yuan, who argued for conquest by way of Han resettlement.56 This faction won the policy debate, and Chinese Turkestan became an administrative province of “Xinjiang” in 1884.57 While one can see the connection with contemporary People’s Republic of China, policies continued to form on an ad hoc basis, depending on the surrounding circumstances. Merchants and gentry took advantage of the
situation of a thin and culturally alien administrative personnel to act as intermediaries. Historians such as Brophy and Klimeš have rightly argued that histories of Qing colonization of Chinese Turkestan has overlooked the collaborative intermediaries.58
Russia's commercial involvement in Chinese Turkestan started since the 1830s.59 Chinese
Turkestan merchants traded mostly with Russia and other Central Asian entities while remaining
under the Qing domain. This prompted Russia to construct the Central Asian railway connecting
from 1879 to 1931, which accelerated this tendency. Many merchants avoided the Qing trade
taxed by masquerading as Russian subjects.60 Russia rulers wanted to change that situation for their own benefits as well, especially when the Qing dynasty experienced problems in internal
governance. The Russians cited the disorders caused by Yaqub Beg and occupied parts of
Chinese Turkestan in July 1871, “claiming that they were attempting to protect their citizens
from Muslim raids and would withdraw as soon as the Chinese reestablished order.”61 They proposed the 1879 Treaty of Livadia that stipulated the rights for Ili Valley subjects to move to
Russia and become Russian subjects according to their wishes.62 A Qing official signed the
treaty without realizing that the treaty granted Russia to a large portion of the Ili Valley. After
the Qing rulers realizing this mishap, General Zuo Zongtang had to rectify it; both his troops and
the Russians both prepared for battle; eventually Russia returned Ili to the Qing Empire after
British diplomatic intervention. A new treaty was established. Still, Russia gained tax cuts on
trade.63 The Ili Valley incident also reflects the room for negotiation for residents of the
borderlands. The narrative of the Great Game at times obscured the many nuances within the
policies of the Russian empire. While empires made high diplomatic and paternalistic claims,
local political actors and residents jostled according to their own rhythm. While Russia indeed
expanded its interests, they were not always originating from a centralized plan. The residents of
Qing Turkestan also maneuvered to benefit from the imperial policies as much as they could—
they claimed status of both Russia and Qing depending on the situation.64 The intense Russian
Qing competition ended alongside the demise of the Qing. By the end of the Republic of China era, Chinese Turkestan traded exclusively with Russia.65 This section has discussed the
competing Chinese and Russian interests in this period. The next section will examine the
modernist discourses on nation and civilization that created the impetus for a Uyghur
consciousness.
The Jadidists and Uyghurs
Ottoman Pan-Turkism in the late nineteenth century informed the Tanzimat reforms and
the Young Turks, as well as Central Asian reformers.66 These progressive reformers, mostly
Russian Muslims, are a loose group that formed as a group “Jadidists” in 1917.67 They wanted to
push through a new form of education in Central Asia to revive Islam in the context of
modernization. In their view, the maktab as it existed was "disorganized, unhygienic, and run by
uncouth teachers with no training in pedagogy; there was no system for inspecting schools; ...
and the philanthropy of the rich... took no organized form."68 Maktabs in Chinese Turkistan also
“drew on a curriculum that was common across Turkistan, consisting primarily of Quran
recitation, catechisms, and Sufi poetry. Alongside these schools were limited efforts to introduce
the language and culture of the metropole.”69 Russian was taught in the Russia dominated areas,
and Qing officials introduced gratis Chinese schools (yishu) in 1878. Qing later instituted
learning halls (xuetang) that combined Quran classes in the curriculum. Both forms were unpopular among the Chinese Turkestan inhabitants partly because of the dress requirement.70
Rich Muslim families even paid poorer neighbors to act as substitutes and feign attendance at
these schools.71
Jadidists wished to not only reform the maktab, but also create sites of cultural practices,
including schools, publishing houses and political parties. Jadidist notions of identity were
informed by ethnographic knowledge produced by colonialists and “romantic discourses of
nationhood from the Tatars and the Ottomans.”72 For example, a traveling Jadidist, Nushirvan
Yavshev, reached Kashgar in 1915 and wrote prolifically on the need to improve local
conditions. “No one here knows what education is. They don’t know anything apart from saying
prayers and making the hajj.”73 He subsequently wrote articles that aimed at debunking the
myths of saintly shrines. His account is an objectification of Islam, which is the process in which
Muslims view the religious system as distinct from its previous, particularly after the rise of print
media. These ideas profoundly influenced the region since it occurred alongside political
assertion of Central Asian Muslims. Specifically, it “led to the emergence of a largely secular
Muslim confessional nationalism in which Islam functioned as a marker of political and cultural
identity” in Central Asia as well as Chinese Turkestan.74 They were called “short shirts” by the conservatives who wore traditional “long coats.”75 Later this term carried a more positive
meaning, as the majority of the Taranchi population accepted their new schools and methods.
There are parallels between Jadidists in Chinese Turkestan and Chinese intellectuals of
this period in their top-down understanding and civilizing zeal. Gu Jiegang, a historian of ancient
China, wrote the following speech in 1938 after visiting the Northwest regions of China (which
did not include Chinese Turkestan):
Of the places I visited, many were districts with complex racial and religious intermingling… The Muslims have Old Teaching, New Teaching, and New-New Teaching, while the lamaists have Red, Back, Yellow, and Flowery sects… Because northwesterners have all these factions, all these mental barriers, they know only that there are sectarian divisions, and they don’t know that they are all citizens of the Republic of China! The places we went on this trip are actually in the middle of our country’s territory… So our responsibility in ‘frontier work’ must be gradually to shrink the frontier, while enlarging the center, so that sooner or later the ‘frontier’ will just be the border.76
Jadidists similarly wrote about the ignorance of the Chinese Turkestan people in regards to their
ethnicity.77 While Jadidists aimed at building multiple Central Asian nations through presenting
a modernist understanding of Islamic culture, the Chinese intellectuals also wished to incorporate
the frontier Muslims and Others into their post-Qing nation-state. Both flaunted acute
understandings and observations of contemporary affairs as well as an urge to adapt conditions to
meet the challenges of the day.
What did the locals make of these political discourses of non-Chinese Turkestan people?
The title “Uyghur” had more political connotations among the people of Chinese Turkestan. Activists in Anatolia promoted it as an “abstract and deterritorialized symbol of the civilized
Turk.”78 Writers contextualized the category to regions: Any Turkic nation that achieved a high
civilization were christened “Uyghurs,” such as Ottomans, Hungarians, or those in Chinese
Turkestan. In the mid-1920s, a story by Jadidist Nazakhoja Abdusamadov showed how two old
men could have discussed politics in a Kashgar bazaar:
Tell me, what’s the news? [...]
Right now nothing much. But there are rumors going round that the Uyghurs are about to rise up.
Why would they rise up? Surely not!
No, it seems to be true, my friend.
The short-shirts have gotten very active lately.
Those short-shirts still haven’t come to their senses. In Tsar Nicholas’s day they couldn’t sit still in Central Asia. Since the Bolsheviks have come along they’re still being stubborn. They don’t get along with any of them! Well, the Bolsheviks gave them what they deserved. So they’ve forgotten that already!
I know what you mean. But who are these “Uyghurs” anyways?
The “Uyghurs” are these short-shirts we’re talking about.79
In contrast, many elites from Chinese Turkestan spoke Turkic and traveled abroad for hajj or
business agreed with the Jadidists and also adopted the ethnonym of Uyghur. Accounting for
class difference is crucial in understanding the formation of nationalist ideology in Chinese
Turkestan. The next section will briefly trace two different claimants on Chinese Turkestan by
Islamic regimes of the time.
The Twentieth Century: Ottomanism and Turanism
Ottoman prestige enjoyed a long history in the region. Each year tens of thousands of
pilgrims came from the Qing territory to Ottoman-administered sites. At times, there would be
official representatives from Chinese Turkestan who facilitated the hajj for Kashgari pilgrims.
Some idealistic Turks even went from the heartland to Kashgar to spread their ideas. Ahmed
Kemal was one of them. He arrived in Kashgar in 1914 at the request of a rich Uyghur
merchant.80 He wrote the following text during his time in Kashgar:
Q: Where are you from?
A: I am from Kashgar, Sir. […]
Q: Can you tell me what you know about Kashgar?
A: Very well, Sir. Kashgar is a city that belongs to us, the Turks of Chinese Turkistan. The city is in the continent of Asia. It is a great place, where the Turk race, to which we belong, was born and grew up.81
The uniform at Ahmed Kemal’s school was modeled off of Ottoman court costume.82 The school
advocated allegiance to the Ottoman sultan and taught Turkic nationalist songs.83 Some
conservatives took his school to task and the warlord Yang almost called it off, if the Hui
Muslim relative of a Naqshbandi leader at the time did not intervene.84 Later, authorities still
banned all Ottoman Turks and foreign educators to teach in Chinese Turkestan. Ahmed Kemal
contacted his students secretly until 1917 and was later arrested and deported back home.85
Another political ideal for the region was Turanism, which saw a land consisting parts of
China, “Tibet, Iran, the desert of Dasht-i Kipchak, and the Caspian sea” as a unity.86 Amanullah
Khan, sovereign of the Kingdom of Afghanistan, was a proponent of Turanism. Banking on his
popularity in Central Asia after the Third Anglo-Afghan war, he called for Kashgar-Afghanistan
connections under the name of an Islamic Confederacy in 1919.87 Afghan merchants in Chinese
Turkestan lost British consulate protection after Afghanistan won the right to an independent foreign policy by the treaty of Peshawar. To address this situation, Amanullah proposed a
confederacy of Afghanistan, Bukhara, Khiva, and Khokand and attempted to establish
independent diplomatic links between Kabul and Urumuchi. He was also interested in promoting
Afghan influence in Chinese Turkestan. Both sides sent missions but the Chinese warlord Yang
Zengxin was wary of the Turanism claims since it undermined his grasp on power. The Afghan
mission refused to leave Yarkand in Chinese Turkestan. As a result, “something of an Afghan
cult began to develop at Yarkand, and the Chinese authorities at Kashgar were disturbed to hear
that some local Turkic-speaking peoples were studying Pushtu.”88 Ottomanism and Turanism
were two competing discourses in Chinese Turkestan. The former gained much more traction
and still does today. One can see that the identity of Uyghurs was as much of a political issue in
the beginning of the twentieth century as it is today, with arguably much higher stakes.
Conclusion
This paper has shown the contested histories of the people who are now called Uyghurs
(wei wu er) occurred in a land called the New Frontier (Xinjiang) prior to the establishment of
the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, there was no agreement on their ethnic affiliation until
1934.89 In the 1937 census, the categories of Taranchi (those from North Chinese Turkestan) and
Kashgari (from the South) were merged together, while some Taranchi politicians continued to
lobby for power in Urumuchi under their distinct identity. They recognized that the new warlord
Sheng Shicai would hold onto the territory, and thus made claims according to his framework.90
Other political actors used the moniker of “turban-wearing Muslims” (chantou huizi), derived
from the official use which aimed to distinguish them from Chinese-speaking Muslims (huizi).
Khoja Niyaz Haji continued to use the title “turban-wearing Muslims” on the international stage
in the 1930s when he appealed to the Mongolian government for the support of his Chantou
People’s Republic project.91 The multitude of identities gradually consolidated under various
frameworks of categorization. Categories come at the expense of fluidity; but who benefits from
this sort of clarity? Qing administrators, Jadidists, and the Chinese Republicans used similar
categories in their attempt to make Chinese Turkestan theirs. The outlier in the above account
was the warlord Yang Zengxin, who sought a different type of governmentality with his small
army of ten thousand men.
While one can see the diversity of Chinese Turkestan’s culture and see its demise alongside the twentieth century construction of a Uyghur nationalism influenced by transnational processes carried by Jadidists, I would caution against dismissing the Uyghur nationalist project. Historian Shahab Ahmed argued in What is Islam? that accounts of Islam and Islamic thinking should not exclude social reality. Similarly, Jadidist and nationalist thought in Central Asia was connected to local contexts. Demands to lower taxes and address social inequality informed Uyghur nationalists and Jadidists alike. They inquired about just rule and politics, and demanded new state policies.
Footnotes
1 Liu, Xiaoyuan. 2015. “From Five 'Imperial Domains' to a 'Chinese Nation': A Perceptual and Political Transformation in Recent History,” in Ethnic China: Identity, Assimilation, and Resistance. eds. Xiaobing Li and Patrick Fuliang Shan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 7. 2 Ibid. 4. 3 Ibid. 11-13.
4 Gladney, Dru. 1991. Muslim Chinese. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard. 19. These groups include the Hui, Uyghur, Kazak, Dongxiang, Kyrghyz, Salar, Tadjik, Uzbek, Baoan, and Tatar.
5 Elliott, Mark. 2012. "Hushuo". In Critical Han Studies, 1st ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California.176.
6 Elliott, Mark. 2012. "Hushuo". 177.
Gladney, Dru. 1991. Muslim Chinese. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard. 16.
7 Gladney, Dru. 1991. Muslim Chinese. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard.179.
8 Ibid. xi.
9 Bovingdon, Gardner. 2010. The Uyghurs. New York: Columbia University Press.
10 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 4.
11 Ibid. 48.
12 Ibid. 56-57.
13 Ibid. 48.
14 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 88.
15 Ibid. 88. Also spelled as Nezerghoja Abdusemetov.
16 Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes Of Uyghur History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
17 Chaudhuri, Debasish. 2016. "Book Review: The Sacred Routes Of Uyghur History By Rian Thum, The Sacred Routes Of Uyghur History (Cambridge And London: Harvard University Press, 2014), Pp. 323 + Viii, US$39.95, £29.95, €36.00, ISBN 9780674598553". China Report 52 (3): 245-250. doi:10.1177/0009445516646250.
18 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 49. 19 Newby, Laura J. 1998. "The Begs Of Xinjiang: Between Two Worlds". Bulletin Of The School Of Oriental And African Studies 61 (02): 278. doi:10.1017/s0041977x00013811.
Newby, Laura J. 2005. The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand (c. 1760– 1860). Leiden: Brill.
20 Brophy, David. 2008. "The Kings of Xinjiang: Muslim Elites and the Qing Empire." Etudes Orientales 25: 69-90.
21 Kim, Hodong. 2010. Holy War in China. Stanford Calif: Stanford University Press. 55.
22 Ibid. While the Qing borrowed the rotation of begs from a previous policy of the Junghars, it was used in combination with other symbolic/cultural tools, which coupled together may have been more decisive in consolidating “Xinjiang” as one unit.
23 Millward, James. 2016. Beyond The Pass. 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. After the Qianlong conquest, along with the Mongols and Tibetans, the Turkic Muslims in Altishahr were elevated to the level of the Han and Manchu.
24 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 87.
25 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 88. Lattimore, Owen. 1992. Inner Asian Frontiers Of China. Oxford Univ. Press. 183
26 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 70. 27 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 109-110. Although Abdulqadir Damolla studied in Bukhara, some thought he was Egyptian or Syrian because of his excellent written Arabic.
28 Ibid. 131.
29 Bovingdon, Gardner and Tursun, Nabijan. 2004. Contested histories. In: S. Frederick Starr, ed. Xinjiang: China’s Muslim frontier. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 353–374.
30 Rudelson, Justin Jon. 1997. Oasis Identities. New York: Columbia University Press. He conducted research in the 1980s with full access to villages in Xinjiang and found distinct differences in Uyghur identity depending on whether the subject was a peasant, a merchant, or an intellectual.
31 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 52
32 Brophy, David. 2008. "The Kings of Xinjiang: Muslim Elites and the Qing Empire." Etudes Orientales 25: 69-90.
33 Ibid. 84.
34 Mortimer, Caroline. 2017. "China’s Muslim Minority Banned From Using Their Language In Schools". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-muslim-minority-school-language-ban-hanxinjiang-uyghur-hotan-hetian-government-communist-a7873446.html.
35 Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes Of Uyghur History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
36 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 24.
37 Ibid. 24.
38 Ibid. 87.
39 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 87. Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 26. 40 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 24-5. “According to the envoy Chen Cheng (1365-1457), the Buddhists and Muslims spoke a common Turkic language but were distinguished from one another by religious and cultural markers. For example, Uyghur men grew their hair long, while the Muslims shaved their heads. Uyghur women donned black veils, while Muslim women dressed in white."
41 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 138.
42 Kim, Hodong. 2010. Holy War in China. Stanford Calif: Stanford University Press. 70.
43 Thum, Rian. 2012. "Beyond Resistance And Nationalism: Local History And The Case Of Afaq Khoja". Central Asian Survey 31 (3): 293-310. doi:10.1080/02634937.2012.722366.
44 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 30.
45 Ibid. 54.
46 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 48-51. 47 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 54. Kim, Kwangmin. Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016.
48 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 48-51. 49 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 52.
50 Ibid. 38.
51 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 38.
Khalid, Adeeb. The politics of Muslim cultural reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 43.
“The khanates of Central Asia were surrounded by deserts inhabited by nomadic tribes, and the concerns of rulers continued to focus on the shifting calculus of power.... The khans of Kokand had paid tribute to the Qing dynasty since the 1750s, but this relationship remained... nominal.”
52 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 48-51.
53 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 57.
54 Ibid. 61.
55 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 72.
56 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 61.
57 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 72.
58 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 63. The warlord Yang Zengxin similarly coopted intermediaries from 1911 to 1928 and successfully strengthened his rule with merely ten thousand troops. Klimeš characterizes him as an “anti-modernist” who worked with conservative dignitaries to prevent reform.
59 Ibid. 65.
60 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. 80. 61 "Ili Crisis | Chinese History". 2017. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Ilicrisis#ref1079985.
62 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 66.
63 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 66.
64 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation.
65 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 66.
66 Ibid. 69.
67 Ibid. 72.
68 Khalid, Adeeb. The politics of Muslim cultural reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 13.
69 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 86.
70 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 75.
Chinese names were given to some students and most were required to wear Chinese attire or braid their hair.
71 Ibid. 76.
72 Khalid, Adeeb. The politics of Muslim cultural reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 8.
73 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 136.
74 Ibid. 11.
75 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 90.
76 Lipman, Jonathan Neaman. 2003. Familiar Strangers. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. 17. The New Teaching here refers to Jahriyya sect and is not the same as the usul-e jadid.
77 “We have said above that Uyghurs of East Turkestan used to be called ‘Uyghurs’ in the past and that they became nameless afterwards. Why is that? If you ask a local Turk who he is, he will answer: ‘A Kashgari.’ Or ‘a Khotani.’ If you tell him that this is a toponym, he will immediately say, ‘I am a Muslim.’ If you tell him that you were not asking about his religion, he will say with fright: ‘I am a Rag-head.’ [chantou] The ones who come into contact with Kazaks and Kyrgyz will tell you they are Sars. It means that they do not know who they really are! What ignorance.” –Abdusemetov, cited in Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 93.
78 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. 142. In the era of linguistic invention of the 1930s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk included “uyğar” in the “Pure Turkish” dictionary as civilized, replacing the former Arabic word madani.
79 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. 245.
80 Ibid. 130.
81 Ibid. 130.
82 Millward, James A. 2010. Eurasian Crossroads. London: C. Hurst. 173. 83 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 79.
83 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 79.
84 Millward, James A. 2010. Eurasian Crossroads. London: C. Hurst. 173. 85 Klimeš, Ondrej. 2015. Struggle By The Pen. Boston: Brill. 79.
86 Ibid. 69.
87 Forbes, Andrew D. W. 1986. Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press. 69.
88 Forbes, Andrew D. W. 1986. Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia. 69.
89 Brophy, David John. 2016. Uyghur Nation. 257.
90 Ibid. 258-60.
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