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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Letters From |
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Kashgar |
Disco My Way
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| As Uighurs resist Chinese hegemony, some turn to outside modernising forces, while others opt for religious conservatism. |
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FRITZ HOFFMANN / IN PICTURES / CORBIS |
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| Standing in front of the Id Kah mosque, the largest in China, Uighur women watch Uighur men dance wildly in the central square. In a
country that discourages religion, the men are celebrating the end of the Ramadan fasting period.
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HE SUN WON'T SET ON KASHGAR for another
three hours, but inside the Padiqi disco
night is well under way. |
In the dark, it’s difficult to see faces
among the steady stream of young Uighur
men and women, mostly teenagers, pouring
in past the waiters done up in leather cowboy hats, offering
bottled iced teas and cold sodas to the patrons.
Night falls long before dark in Kashgar, so to say, well before
worried parents fret about what their children might
do in mixed company. In their own simple act of rebellion,
the kids have created darkness at 3 pm, flocking to the city’s
daytime disco clubs and returning home in plenty of time
for dinner.
The crowd at the disco—entirely Uighur—is about two-thirds
young men, many smoking cigarettes furtively as
they talk with friends, look at the girls and wait for the
music to begin. The girls arrive in groups, most dressed
modestly in long skirts and sweaters, their hair hidden by
brightly patterned silk scarves. Except for one young couple
at the back of the club, the crowd is segregated—men
and women do not mix at the tables.
Then, the music begins: techno versions of the best-known
Uighur folk songs thump loudly from a huge sound
system on stage. A handsome young man who could be a
West Asian pop star belts out the lyrics. Given the chaste
appearance of the patrons, one might expect the dance
floor to be empty. In a typical small Chinese city disco, self-consciousness
keeps crowds from dancing. But this is Xinjiang
and these are Uighurs. They are here to dance. With every
song, the floor is packed, the crowd dancing in a steady
circle, still divided by gender.
To outside eyes, it’s an innocent scene. But the local friend
who brought us here speaks of his own teenage disco days
with a conspiratorial whisper. Just then, a large group of Uighur girls enters the club. They sport funky clothes, short
skirts and tights, fashionable shoes and uncovered hair. Our
Uighur friend scoffs: “They’re trying to be Chinese.”
Later, teens Ramilla and Abi are horrified to learn people
believed they were dressing like the Chinese. It’s Europeans
and Americans they want to emulate, especially
the French. The Chinese girls at their high school have no
fashion sense and often dress garishly, they say. These girls
are not copying Chinese classmates; they are not shrinking
Muslim violets hidden behind veils. They are animated,
confident and bright, speaking at length about young life in
Kashgar and switching easily between Uighur, fluent Chinese
and English.
“We don’t want to be Chinese. We don’t want to marry
Chinese boys,” says Ramilla, a striking 17-year-old who
wears her thick, uncovered hair in a dramatic bob. “We are
proud to be Uighur.”
The girls are open to cultural influences, but it soon becomes
clear that their disdain for the Chinese is about more
than fashion. They attend Chinese high school rather than
an Uighur school, hoping for an advantage in future studies
and jobs. In making that choice, they lost the right to
wear their head coverings and celebrate their religious holidays
at school. Though they could ask for these things, their
teachers don’t stop the clock on studies when the five-day
Id holiday rolls around. Chinese classmates, who make up
nearly 90 percent of the student body, tease them for fasting
during Ramadan and have little understanding of anything
Uighur. This despite the fact that the majority of the people
in Kashgar are still Uighur rather than Han Chinese.
“It’s difficult sometimes because we have to do things
differently than we would like,” says Ramilla.
With the creeping demands of assimilation growing
stronger in Kashgar, some Uighurs have turned in the other
direction, decrying both Chinese and Western cultures.
A local dentist is just one example. When his first wife
died, he found a new bride, arranged through family connections.
He is nearly 40 years old; she is 18 and must cover
herself from head to foot in long, black robes. She wears a
full veil, not the modified and fashionable headscarves that
most young Uighur women prefer, but something even more
dramatic than the brown head and face covering favoured
by her grandmother’s generation.
The dentist is a devout Muslim, and considers himself
Wahhabi—the Sunni Islamic movement embraced by the
religious establishment in the House of Saud and which
spread a puritanical message by sponsoring clerics and
building mosques.
“Women don’t behave properly anymore,” the dentist
complains. “Society is changing and it’s no longer traditional
Uighur behavior.”
What the dentist is seeking is not Uighur Utopia. He
wants something stricter, where men pray five times a day
and women stay covered and at home. He considers Saudi
Arabia a cultural model.
Muslim extremism isn’t widely regarded as a serious
threat in Xinjiang, but there is evidence that growing Chinese
cultural pressure on Uighurs is creating a backlash and
more Uighurs are turning toward the stricter practices of
Islam. Separatism and battles for autonomy over religion
and culture continue to be the main apparent conflicts in
Xinjiang. The Chinese authorities have clamped down hard
on unrest, which almost routinely begets violence. Last
year, seven people were killed in a bombing in the northern
Aksu city.
In the struggle for Uighur culture, modern girls like Ramilla
and Abi are most likely the wave of the future.
China’s border regions are home to its highest concentrations
of religious people and activities. Near North Korea,
Christian churches are a staple. On the boundary with
Myanmar, Buddhism is the norm. In Kashgar, where Turkic-
speaking Muslim Uighurs trade with people from nearby
Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Central Asian nations,
religion can be a volatile issue. The Chinese government has long pointed to violent Uighur separatists as a reason it
needs for tightly controlling the area. That control has led
to unrest and unhappiness in Xinjiang, which manifested
most notably in 2009 in violent riots in the capital Urumqi
that left hundreds of mostly Han Chinese dead. More than
half the people on the Chinese government’s wanted list for
crimes related to the riots came from Kashgar—the heart of
Uighur culture and religion.
It’s no secret that attempts at the cultural assimilation of
Uighurs into Chinese culture has created some resentment
and backlash.
“The pressures on Uighurs to abandon their faith and
assimilate with Chinese society are relentless,” said Henryk
Szadziewski, manager of the Washington, DC-based
Uyghur Human Rights Project. “The Uighur form of Islam
has always been devout, but never extreme; however, the
potential exists that the further Uighurs are alienated from
their faith, some may seek a stricter interpretation of Islam
far from their traditional approach—a phenomenon common
among all oppressed peoples.”
What remains unclear is the way forward—whether Uighurs
will become more globalised like Ramilla and Abi, or
more fundamentalist, like the dentist.
The only certainty is that things are changing.
A version of this article previously appeared in GlobalPost.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Rohan
24 April 2011
07:48 AM
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Why does every article or television report of the last few years that have even vaguely to do with Muslim people start talking about radicalisation?!
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