Given the current state of affairs, I have decided to create this initiative to connect academics who are against the current genocide against Uyghur culture. As the Dalai Lama has said in the context of Sino-Tibetan relations, studying history together, alongside non-Asian historians, is a possible route for addressing the present.
I hope to garner more support in the future. There is currently a twitter account for posting happenings related to such efforts within academia.
Here is a book review I read yesterday. I am sharing it here with some of my Mandarin annotations for those people interested in peace, Uyghur history, and preserving Uyghur culture.
----------
I hope to garner more support in the future. There is currently a twitter account for posting happenings related to such efforts within academia.
Here is a book review I read yesterday. I am sharing it here with some of my Mandarin annotations for those people interested in peace, Uyghur history, and preserving Uyghur culture.
----------
Book review: Holy war in China
In May 2004, Al-Sharq al-Awsat, an Arabic newspaper published in London, interviewed Mr. Mustafa Yang, vice-president of the Islamic Society in China, a governmental organization in charge of the religious life of China’s various Muslim ethnicities. After several introductory questions concerning the number of Muslims in China and their history, the interviewer detoured to the touchy question of what he called “the problem of East Turkestan,” and asked about the occasional news that seemed to indicate that the Muslims in the region were oppressed. Mr. Yang answered with a correction: “[W]e call the region Xinjiang and not ‘East Turkestan,’ for this region has been part of China for a long period now. Half of its population is Muslim and its conditions are improving gradually. The Muslims there are free to practice their religion freely. However, a few years ago some [violent] activity was detected, which was carried out by several violent and radical movements which the local Muslims themselves reject” (Al-Sharq al-Awsat, May 13, 2004).
It is ironic that such an interview was published some 140 years after what was arguably the last major political and military event in the region: the 1864 Muslim revolt that erupted on June 4 of that year. The uprising gave rise to an independent Muslim regime encompassing most of the territory under the leadership of the legendary Ya‘qub Beg (Chinese: Ah-gu-bo). This Muslim state survived until 1877, when it was crushed by the Chinese armies. The episode was subsequently over-shadowed by a series of major upheavals within China proper that took place during the period and consequently was neglected by scholarship. Research on the episode is also hampered by the fact that it calls for proficiency in not only Chinese and the usual host of Western European languages but also Russian as well as an array of Islamic languages, among them Turkish, Persian, and Uighur.
Now with Hodong Kim’s Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877, the revolt of 1864 f i nally gets the attention that it has so long lacked. I open with the interview excerpt by way of illustrating how timely the topic still is and how persistent notions are of the violence of the region.
The author admirably tackles the huge task of placing the revolt within both the late Qing dynasty and international contexts. He confidently navigates between the contemporary goings-on within China proper—namely, the devastating rebellions sweeping the country—and the tensions between the local Xinjiang rulers (begs) and the Qing state as well as other neighboring countries such as Russia. He also manages to weave into his narrative of the revolt the many perspectives produced by its Western observers. Remaining resolutely committed to a purely document-driven account, he manages nevertheless to create a coherent narrative.
Following the Qing conquest of Xinjiang during the eighteenth century, there was a precarious balance of power between the khanate of Khokand and the Qing.
The Qing, ruling Xinjiang through acomplex structureofdual—localandimperial— government, had to rely on the Khokand khans who restrained the Afaqi Khwajas.
The latter were the previous rulers of Xinjiang, driven out by the Qing to exile in Khokand. During the nineteenth century, they were still brooding over the loss of their territories with a dissatisfaction that bore increasingly strong religiousovertones, ultimately calling for a jihad in order to free Xinjiang. Initially the Khokandian rulers were able to restrain these movements in return for favorable commercial treaties with the Qing, but as they themselves weakened dramatically during the 1840s because of intrusions and battles with the Qipchaqs and the Qirghizs, the Khokandian rulers were less and less able to maintain the peace at the western borders of Xinjiang. Thus, as social and economic conditions in the region worsened, anti-Qing elements from without combined effectively with anti-Qing sentiments within to produce riots and social unrest that further worsened the situation. Again, the rebellions inside China proper also contributed to the already volatile atmosphere in the region.
The immediate trigger that ignited the first major eruption, in the Kucha, was news of executions of Tungan (Chinese-speaking) Muslim leaders by the Qing government. The surprising success of this eruption against the Qing quickly swept the entire region into a holy war against the “infidel” rulers. The temporary expulsion of Qing armies from the region gave rise to six major local centers of power in the various oases of the region in which military power, religious charisma and authority, and local and ethnic differences contended. As Kim carefully documents, various leaders of the revolt fashioned themselves holy warriors (ghazi), and that led to declaring one of the rebel governments (in Urumchi) an Islamic state, Qingzhenguo 清真国.
This is one of the key points, to my mind, of Kim’s book—its documenting of the use of Islam as overarching ideology in order to overcome ethnic, cultural, geographical, and class differences. This specific use of Islam charged the various leaders with the task of uniting the different centers into one polity, a quintessential challenge for any leader of a ghazi state. However, as Qing infidels disappeared, this religious edge dulled and unification became a harder task.
Kim’s hero, Ya‘qub Beg, a former Khokandian military officer (b. 1820, probably of Uzbek origin and therefore not a native of the region), was the one leader who finally succeeded in unifying most of Xinjiang from his initial base in Kashgar. He did so despite the lack of political or religious prestige and despite being a stranger in the region (for that reason, he never took the title of “khan”). Kim’s description of Ya‘qub Beg’s state shows that it was centralized in a manner that, not surprisingly perhaps, resembled the Qing structure and that he relied heavily on Khokandian personnel in staffing key posts in the military and administration (which eventually proved to be a fatal move). In order to stabilize his regime further and gain some legitimacy, Ya‘qub Beg employed Islam by enforcing the shariah as the law and by sponsoring and cultivating the cult of local saints. Another important feature of his rule was the constant relatively successful use of diplomatic relations and juggling between various international powers such as Russia, England, and the Ottoman empire.
Toward China, Ya‘qub Beg attempted a policy of avoiding confrontation, which undermined the moral (and ideological) motivation of his military officers. Finally, despite preliminary successes in military and administrative buildup and international legitimacy, the regime succumbed to differences between the rulers and the ruled and a lack of stable financial bases of support, which helped the reentering of Qing armies to the region.
Among the several consequences of this episode, two are of particular relevance today. After reconquering the region, the Qing government sought to incorporate Xinjiang fully into the Chinese empire and to turn it into something resembling a Chinese province. In addition, “Hanization” through migration of Han Chinese into the region began. Within Xinjiang’s society, religious sentiments and jihad ideology gave way to the rise of nationalist sentiments and ideas. Thus, Kim shows how many of the policies of the People’s Republic of China government toward the region are rooted in the late Qing period.
Kim’s highly relevant and timely study not only fills a significant lacuna in the historiography of the region but also opens the door to new scholarly enterprises. One such tempting possibility would be a comparison of the histories, ideologies, and international roles of Qingzhenguo and Pingnanguo, the latter being the contemporary rebel state of Yunnan, which was also “founded” by a Muslim, Du Wenxiu.
Finally, the author’s good command of an amazing range of languages often reminded this reader of Kim’s former teacher, the late Joseph Fletcher, who no doubt now resides in a heavenly oasis hopefully far less chaotic than those that his former student so ably describes.
ZVI BEN-DOR BENITE
New York University
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق