In the center of the desert landscapes of Taklamakan, in the northern-west part of China, the land of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the least populated province whereas it covers near to a sixth of the nation's area. Having resisted during hundreds of years the chinese control, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, or Old East Turkistan, fell into within the Chinese Han domination in 1949. From then, its population is mostly Uyghur People and Turkic - speaking System.
Islamic especially, the Uyghurs have a deep religious identification which usually, in particular, enabled them to preserve a strong difference in opposition to the Chinese enemy. Without a doubt, the Uyghur Empire of Mongolia knew a great civilization, until its absorption by the Mongolian Empire in the XIIIth century.
While in their own history, the Uyghurs successively adopted Shamanism, Manicheism, Buddhism and the Nestorianism before finally changing to Islam when the Arab conquerors beat the Chinese in year 751 BC., thus beginning the way to the Islamization of the whole Central Asia.
Under the effect of the religions which they adopted, Uyghur People used successively, and at times in a competing way, a great number of written forms (turco-runic, brahmi, tokharien, soghdien) before developing their own unique graphic system.
The arrival of Islam was a great modification simply because it was accompanied by the assimilation of the Uyghur land in the immense Turco-Mongolian and Muslim Kingdom. Thus, the descendants of Genghis Khan progressively replaced their writing by a Arabo-Persan alphabet, still used nowadays.
If their writing, their language and their religion mark a real big difference with the tradition of Chinese Han, the Uyghurs also are different from their characteristic, so aspect of Central Asia's people. A matt skin, eyes representing a whole pallet of colors, from black to deep blue, features pointing out to the Mongolian, Turkish or Uzbek roots of these men and these women.
For a few years, China has included the proper identity of these remote people, though they represent only eight million population - a trifle for this specific immense country. So, Uyghur people are now part of the 56 ethnic minority groups having been well-known in an official way by China.
This particular statute will allow these people a few rights in a land exactly where their big difference is very often repressed. Therefore, Uyghur families escape the "single child policy" and their language is recognized as the second official language in Xinjiang.
The integration of the Uyghur people and their culture in China, however, looks pretty illusory. The presence of all natural sources in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and its closeness with nations known as sensitive, clearly encouraged the government to accelerate the sinicization of this area. Million of Han thus came to settle in this new Chinese eldorado, monopolizing the greater responsibility job opportunities.
In response to this true will to assimilate the Uyghurs into the Chinese culture, an independent party like East Turkistan Islamic Movement(ETIM) was born in the early 1990.
Saying more flexibility, but specially the acceptance of their true identity, this movement was seriously repressed by the power authorities in location Xinjiang.
The situations of September 11, 2001, were the perfect occasion for the Chinese government to justify true reprisals: they declared the "Uyghur freedom fighters" as dangerous terrorists linked to Al Quaida because of their Muslim origins and their proximity with Pakistan and Afghanistan... However, the terrible repression which followed did not calm down the anger. The Uyghur peoples population continues today to proudly keep up their identity and their tradition , even though they become a minority on their own land.
For more information about Uyghur people, you can visit a Uyghur website called Uyghur News at http://www.uyghurnews.com
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