** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 791 bis 25 October 2018 GATHERING STORM OVER CHINA

THE OPPRESSED UIGHUR PEOPLE ARE THE FORGOTTEN MUSLIMS OF CHINA. WHY DOES THE COMMUNIST REGIME FEAR THEM SO MUCH?
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‘In Xinjiang, Uighurs and other Muslim groups struggle against Sinification’. A line from The Clash of Civilisations, a controversial Zeitgeist book usually mentioned in ritual refutations. Yet Professor Huntington was right. The people of East Turkestan are indeed rising in revolt against forced Chinese assimilation. The Uighurs fight to defend their culture and religion. Like little David taking on giant Goliath, the battle looks unequal. Perhaps 15 million Uighurs versus 1.300 million, mostly Chinese. But Hegel’s phrase, the Cunning of Reason, springs to mind. At crucial times in human history tremendous upheavals occur that bring about the triumph of freedom. Who knows whether the neglected, defenceless Uighurs be not one of them? Are they perhaps the spanner in the works? The tiny speck of grit that will grow and eventually cause the Communist tyranny to break up and disintegrate?

The Uighurs are the forgotten Muslims of China. They appear in the medieval Travels of Marco Polo. The great Jesuit missionary to China, Matthew Ricci, wondered why Marco Polo’s names of Chinese cities are not Chinese. After he met a Uighur man, the lights dawned: Marco had approached China via and with the Uighurs. A Turkish people who speak a Turkish language. So many of Marco Polo’s names are Uighur names, not Chinese. And the Uighur fellow was visibly non-Chinese in looks. His eyes were not narrow but round, like a European. Nor did the man think of himself as Chinese. He wouldn’t eat pork, because he was a Muslim. Now the Beijing Communist regime demands the Uighurs should prove their loyalty by eating pig’s flesh!

Visiting East Turkestan, I was struck by how many words heard in the local markets sounded like Turkish. So I tried out my modest Turkish. Faces beamed. People festively gathered about me, as if I was a long lost relative happily come back. A large man with a wispy beard offered me his daughter in marriage. (An offer I had to politely decline, alas.) But when I asked about their lives voices were lowered and people looked about in fear – spies hovered nearby. My would-be father in law spoke broken English: ‘We are not free. They are killing our culture. We can’t practice our religion. Can’t go to Haj. Young people can’t go to mosque’, he confided, sotto voce. Others agreed.

The Communist rulers strive to crush the Muslim Uighurs. They realise their resistance might encourage other minorities to rise up. So regime squeals about separatism, extremism and terrorism. But various human rights organisations speak of brutal repression, religious and cultural. Furthermore, the Beijing dictatorship has altered the ethnic make-up of the population of East Turkestan, by pouring in millions of immigrant Chinese, while forcing natives to emigrate. Uighur girls especially, lured away with false promises. Talk of ‘ethnic identity’ makes people uncomfortable in the West, but for the Uighurs it means a very simple thing: survival. The survival of their people, their culture and their religion.

Uighur Enver Tohti spoke at Abrar House, London. East Turkestan has been the home of Uighurs of 2000 years, he explained. A free and independent country for most of them. In 1876 the Manchurians invaded, butchering a million people. They renamed their conquest Xinjiang. Ever since, the land has been under military occupation but the Uighurs never relinquished their hope of independence. An Islamic republic was proclaimed n 1933, and again a Uighur state existed briefly before Mao took over after WW2 and the Communists invaded in 1949 and changed the country’s name. Today East Turkestan languishes under an alien colonial rule. The people’s sufferings have been ‘unimaginable’, Enver said.

That was years ago, after riots took place in Urumqi, the local capital. Infinitely worse now. According to UN estimates, more than a million Uighurs are forcibly interned in ‘re-education centres’ for ‘free vocational training’. Concentration camps, off-limits to journalists. Where inmates are given unwanted Mandarin lessons, forced to sing Communist songs and even beaten or tortured if they insist in speaking their own language. The greatest crime is being caught practicing Islamic rituals, such as the wearing of hijabs or simply eating halal food. State propaganda raises the spectre of terrorism. Some Uighurs have joined ISIS and Jihadis may have infiltrated local resistance. (The authorities insinuate perfidious America uses violent Islamists to destabilise China, as it effectively did to the Soviets in Afghanistan back during the Cold War.) But surely giving the Uighurs their cultural rights is the best way to nip extremism in the bud?

China is a financial wonder of all wonders. An unbelievable success story. The world’s second largest economy. Its teeming cities seem the apotheosis of post-modernity. Immense skyscrapers, glamorous shopping malls, nouveau riches, trendy-looking young people, wealth and prosperity galore. Yet the Communist cabal is insecure. It fears religion. It harshly persecutes harmless Falung Gong practitioners: even doing breathing exercises is a threat! It has formed a ‘patriotic’, alternative Catholic Church, subservient to Communist Party clap-trap. Former Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen has exhorted all Chinese Catholics not to kow-tow to Beijing, despite Pope Francis striking a dubious deal with the Communists. Protestant groups also languish under many disabilities. But it is Islam, a militant religion on the march, which could well prove to be the nemesis of the heirs of Mao’s Long March.

The Cunning of Reason. Marxist-Leninist dogma, the intellectual and concrete incarnation of Hegel’s Reason, saw religious beliefs as doomed to gradual, final extinction. National sentiment, too, was prophesied to be on the wane, to be replaced by a universal classless society, an undifferentiated, amorphous humanity. The old Soviet Union, now mercifully defunct, was meant to be a prelude to that.  As the Uighurs’ stubborn, heroic resistance shows, the divine, transcendent Reason may have the last word.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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