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KASHGAR, CHINA -- Under the midday sun, an old man climbs slowly to the roof of his centuries-old Silk Road mosque. Then, standing beside a minaret, he calls the faithful to prayer. But the cry goes almost unheard. Prohibited from using an amplifier, the muezzin is barely audible above a nearby loudspeaker pumping out government propaganda. Here in the heartland of China's Muslims, mosques are usually pad-locked. In the brief time they are open, worshippers must obey a strict set of rules: no criticism of the authorities, no unregistered guests, no contact with foreign organizations, no visitors under 18, no encouragement of veils and mandatory reporting of people's prayers. China is one of the few places where Islam is visibly in retreat. Elsewhere, the world's fastest-growing religion is on the rise, battling mightily against global superpowers. This week alone, Muslim insurgents gave Iraq some of its bloodiest fighting since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Here, however, Islam has collided with the ruthless methods of the world's biggest Communist state -- and the state is winning. In the 1990s, China's Muslim territory, Xinjiang, was restive and erupted in a wave of bombings and violent attacks by groups seeking independence. But today the separatists have been forcibly subdued. Beijing has managed to crush almost all resistance by the eight million Muslim Uighurs who live scattered across this remote desert territory in China's far northwest. Now, the traditional identity of the Muslims is under siege. Their historic streets are being demolished to make room for Chinese shopping malls. Their language and culture are eroding under a tide of newcomers from China's Han majority. Hundreds of mosques still survive, but they are tightly controlled and monitored. Thousands of Muslims have been arrested as suspected terrorists, and hundreds have been executed. "The government wants to get rid of our nationality," says a young man in Kashgar, an ancient city of mud-brick houses and narrow alleys where 80 per cent of inhabitants are Uighurs, Turkic followers of Islam for 1,000 years. "They tell us to get rid of our beards, the veil, our traditional knives," he says, sipping tea. "They want our culture to be gone. They want only Chinese culture here." After centuries of sporadic Chinese incursions, the Uighur homeland was finally conquered in the 18th century and given its Chinese name (Xinjiang means "new frontier"). Since then, the Uighurs have launched repeated uprisings, including rebellions in 1933 and 1944 that twice led briefly to the proclamation of an independent republic of Eastern Turkestan. Beijing was so disturbed by the violence of the 1990s that it responded with a systematic campaign to quell Muslim agitation with a calculated mix of economic incentives, shrewd diplomatic manoeuvring, and brutal police and military intervention. Its Communist-appointed chairman, Ismail Tiliwaldi, boasts that he now runs the safest region of all. "There was not a single explosion or assassination in Xinjiang last year," he said recently in Beijing. The iron fist that maintains China's grip is visible just outside Kashgar, where long military convoys can be spotted, carrying hundreds of heavily armed soldiers ready for any sign of dissent. "The Uighur people are wild and rude," an army general explains during a flight to Xinjiang. "But in the future the Uighurs will be like the Manchus, assimilated by the Chinese, because the Chinese culture is much stronger." Beijing also uses diplomatic lobbying to help keep the Uighurs isolated and, since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, has found it easier to portray Uighur separatists as terrorists. It has persuaded Washington to declare one Uighur group a terrorist organization and applied heavy pressure to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to crack down on Uighur activists. At the same time, Beijing has lashed the region to the Chinese economic growth machine, providing a source of hope for discontented Uighurs. Jobs and education are more plentiful now. Official growth in Xinjiang was 10.8 per cent last year, well above the Chinese average. Even if most of the new money is earned by Han Chinese businessmen and migrants, enough trickles into Uighur hands to convince many that life is getting better. Even so, there is still widespread resentment of Chinese dominance. Beijing's levers of control are everywhere. Uighurs who work as teachers or other public-sector jobs, for example, are prohibited from wearing Islamic beards or veils, carrying the Koran or attending mosques. Female schoolchildren cannot wear the veil. Most Uighurs cannot get passports for foreign travel. The streets are filled with undercover police and informers. There is a climate of fear among ordinary Uighurs, who seldom dare to discuss politics with a stranger. "The walls have ears," one man says. Uighurs tell the story of a teacher who stood up at a public meeting to protest against the ban on beards. Even Karl Marx wore one, he noted -- and soon lost his job. To have a career as a teacher or bureaucrat, people must give up the Koran and accept Communist indoctrination. But many retreat into a secret world where Islam still rules. University students, barred from attending mosques, pray in seclusion in their dormitory rooms. Mothers often have three or four children, violating the Communist child-control limits. To keep their pregnancies secret, they move back in with their parents. Much of Beijing's growing control, however, is exercised through its cultural and commercial influence. Millions of Han Chinese migrants have flooded into Xinjiang in recent years. A new railway, driven straight as a knife through the vast Taklamakan Desert, reached Kashgar in 1999 and made it even easier for the Chinese to reach the city. Government policies are tilted to favour the new arrivals. The best jobs and university opportunities are reserved for those who speak Chinese, leaving the Uighurs largely on the outside. Most university classes are taught in the Chinese language. Even in Kashgar, an overwhelmingly Uighur city, most street signs and shop signs are written in large Chinese characters, while the Uighur signs are smaller or non-existent. Kashgar's only official bookstore has plenty of Uighur-language texts -- on Buddhism and Confucianism, but not on Islam. On the city streets, when a visitor notices her reading, an old woman quickly hides her a book on Islam. "It's just a storybook," she mumbles. The commercial heart of the city is dominated by a huge monument of Mao (one of the few still found in China). Propaganda banners declare that "Xinjiang has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times. The Han people cannot separate themselves from the minorities; the minorities cannot separate themselves from the Han." Every Friday, thousands of Uighurs flock to midday prayers at the 560-year-old Id Kah mosque, which is Kashgar's biggest but most days serves as merely a tourist attraction. These days, it's also hidden behind the steel fences of a massive building site, with the red Chinese flag flying above the giant construction crane. Medieval streets nearby have been demolished, ancient tombs dug up and moved, and hundreds of Muslims forced to relocate to make room for a 55,000-square-metre shopping plaza with almost 3,000 new shops. Nearby billboards carry images of $100 U.S. bills and urge investors to rent space, but local merchants say they cannot afford it, so Chinese businesses are expected to take over. In fact, an artist's depiction of the plaza shows it populated entirely by Han Chinese, with the mosque reduced to a backdrop. Xinjiang's biggest city, Urumqi, is already largely Han. "In 10 years, Kashgar will be like Urumqi," one man says. "It's very sad." The owner of an instrument shop believes that it's already too late. "When the Han people came to Kashgar, it was destroyed," he tells a Chinese visitor. "Just like Japan invaded you, you have done the same to us. You have brought more money here, but if you have to choose between money and freedom, what would you choose? We would choose freedom." Geoffrey York is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in Beijing. Not a love story As he stares at a belly dancer gyrating to the Venus club's throbbing disco beat, Kuresh laments the shortage of virgins. "Probably I will have to marry a Pakistani girl," he says with a sigh. "The girls there are still keeping the old traditions." As a proud Muslim, he insists on marrying a virgin. Yet he finds it difficult to resist the temptations flooding into China's remote northwest. Like many people, he is alternately shocked and seduced. "When I was young, I never would have dared to enter a nightclub. Even 10 years ago, we would have refused to enter this kind of place. Uighur girls would never have dared to perform in such places, but now they do, and they earn a high income from it." Kashgar, located near the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, has always been one of China's more isolated places -- a city of veils and mosques, surrounded by harsh deserts and forbidding mountains, with a religion and language that reinforce the sense of separation. In the past decade, however, it has changed so rapidly that the local population suddenly finds itself caught between Islamic morality and China's secular mainstream. A local tour guide, for example, says he quit a job at a hotel when he discovered Uighur men were using it for liaisons with prostitutes, something he says never used to happen. Meanwhile, 21-year-old Akbar is nursing a hangover. He was so upset upon discovering his girlfriend of two years wasn't a virgin that he spent all of last night drinking wine. That, too, is a breach of the Koran, but "I'm in such pain," he moans. "I can't marry her, but I still love her." Kuresh says a growing number of women undergo surgery to "restore" their virginity before their wedding nights. Uighur girls, he says, "are much different from a few years ago, but they still know that they will be driven out of their home by their bridegroom if he discovers that they are not a virgin." He lost his own girlfriend of three years, who was ethnic Chinese, because their parents objected. When someone spotted them at a disco, the girl's father kicked her so hard she wound up in the hospital. "I miss her," Kuresh says, "but we have to accept reality." This culture clash is epitomized by the story of the most famous of all Kashgar women, known as the Fragrant Concubine. She lived in the 18th century and was so beautiful that Emperor Qianlong ordered her brought to Beijing wrapped like a piece of porcelain. She was installed in the Forbidden City and spent the rest of her life there. "Love between this Uighur maid and the emperor is evidence of the great unity among different ethnic groups in China," according to a sign at the tomb of one of her ancestors. But the Uighurs scoff at this notion. They claim the Fragrant Concubine defied the emperor, refusing to let him touch her, and finally committed suicide to preserve her honour. -- Geoffrey York |
