Chicago – March 16, 2024
While global leaders from U.S. President Joe Biden to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued well wishes to the more than 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide at the start of Ramadan this week, China’s president remained silent.
Xi Jinping failed to acknowledge Ramadan, one of the most sacred times for Muslims, despite the 11 million-strong mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples who live in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as well as the roughly 7 million other Muslims in China.
Chinese authorities have cracked down on Uyghurs in Xinjiang for decades, claiming they are prone to religious extremism and separatism. The Chinese government says it wants to make Islam “compatible” with Chinese culture by ensuring it aligns with traditional Chinese values defined by Beijing.
Ramandan began less than a week after Ma Xingrui, China’s Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang, discussed the “inevitability” of the Sinicization of Islam, with Uyghur rights organizations expressing concern about possible crackdowns on Muslims during Ramadan, which runs from the evening of March 10 to April 9.
“Everyone knows the need for Sinicization of Islam in Xinjiang,” he said at the National People’s Congress in Beijing on March 7, according to a VOA report. “This is an inevitable trend.”
Since 2017, China has restricted or banned religious rituals among the Uyghurs in an effort to eliminate “religious extremism” amid a larger crackdown on Muslims that resulted in the mass detention of nearly 2 million of them. Authorities have also demolished mosques and committed severe rights violations in Xinjiang, amounting to genocide and crimes against humanity, according to the U.S. government and others.
In 2023, authorities banned Uyghurs in many parts of the region from praying in mosques and their homes during Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Only senior citizens were allowed to pray in mosques under heavy police surveillance.
The previous Ramadan, authorities in Kashgar paid Muslim Uyghur men to danceoutside Xinjiang’s most famous mosque to celebrate the end of the holy month. The performance was filmed and released by state media ahead of an anticipated visit by the U.N. human rights chief.
“To the Uyghurs enduring the ongoing genocide, Ramadan is synonymous with extreme suffering, pervasive surveillance and unyielding oppression,” Rushan Abbas, executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs, told Radio Free Asia.
“This year, the situation is further inflamed by Ma Xingrui’s audacious remarks about the inevitability of the Sinicization of Islam in East Turkistan,” she said, using the Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang.
