This book analyses the Uyghur community, presenting a brief historical background of the Uyghurs and debating the challenges of emerging Uyghur nationalism in the early 20th century. It elaborates on key issues within the community, such as the identity and current state of religion and worship. It also offers a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of the Uyghur diaspora, addressing the issue of identity politics, the position of the Uyghurs in Central Asia, and the relations of the Uyghurs with Beijing, notably analyzing the 2009 Urumqi clashes and their long term impact on Turkish-Chinese relations. Re-examining Urghur identity through the lens of history, religion and politics, this is a key read for all scholars interested in China, Eurasia and questions of ethnicity and religion.

Drawing on a wide range of historical sources presenting both emic and etic views, this book offers an insight into aspects of social life among the Uyghur in pre-socialist Xinjiang and substantiates the concept of tradition which modern Uyghurs draw upon to construct their ethnic identity.

Along the Russian-Qing frontier in the nineteenth century, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and revolution. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the Uyghur nation.

The narrative is framed around the terms identity, community, and masculinity. As the author shows, the Uyghurs of Yining, a city in the Xinjiang region of China, express a set of individual and collective identities organized around place, gender, family relations, friendships, occupation, and religious practice.

The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances. This new paperback edition features a new introduction by the author. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match For three years Gulbahar Haitiwaji was held in Chinese detention centers and “reeducation” camps, enduring interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, rats, and nights under the blinding fluorescent lights of her prison cell. Her only crime? Being a Uyghur. China’s brutal repression of Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide and reported widely in media around the world. In 2019, the New York Times published the “Xinjiang Papers,” leaked documents exposing the forced detention of more than one million Uyghurs in Chinese “reeducation” camps. The Chinese government denies that these camps are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism” and calling them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter, with the help of the French diplomatic corps. Others have not been so fortunate. In How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp, Gulbahar tells her story, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances. This new paperback edition includes a new introduction by the author.

Drawing together distinguished international scholars, this volume offers a unique insight into the social and cultural hybridity of the Uyghurs. It bridges a gap in our understanding of this group, an officially recognized minority mainly inhabiting the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China, with significant populations also living in the Central Asian states. The volume is comparative and interdisciplinary in focus: historical chapters explore the deeper problems of Uyghur identity which underpin the contemporary political situation; and sociological and anthropological comparisons of a range of practices from music culture to life-cycle rituals illustrate the dual, fused nature of contemporary Uyghur social and cultural identities. Contributions by 'local' Uyghur authors working within Xinjiang also demonstrate the possibilities for Uyghur advocacy in social and cultural policy-making, even within the current political climate.

How China is using the US-led war on terror to erase the cultural identity of its Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region Within weeks of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the Chinese government warned that it faced a serious terrorist threat from its Uyghur ethnic minority, who are largely Muslim. In this explosive book, Sean Roberts reveals how China has been using the US-led global war on terror as international cover for its increasingly brutal suppression of the Uyghurs, and how the war's targeting of an undefined enemy has emboldened states around the globe to persecute ethnic minorities and severely repress domestic opposition in the name of combatting terrorism. Of the eleven million Uyghurs living in China today, more than one million are now being held in so-called reeducation camps, victims of what has become the largest program of mass detention and surveillance in the world. Roberts describes how the Chinese government successfully implicated the Uyghurs in the global terror war—despite a complete lack of evidence—and branded them as a dangerous terrorist threat with links to al-Qaeda. He argues that the reframing of Uyghur domestic dissent as international terrorism provided justification and inspiration for a systematic campaign to erase Uyghur identity, and that a nominal Uyghur militant threat only emerged after more than a decade of Chinese suppression in the name of counterterrorism—which has served to justify further state repression. A gripping and moving account of the humanitarian catastrophe that China does not want you to know about, The War on the Uyghurs draws on Roberts's own in-depth interviews with the Uyghurs, enabling their voices to be heard.