NY Times, Sept. 25, 2020
China Is Erasing Mosques and Precious Shrines in Xinjiang
By Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy
Until a decade ago, the pilgrims would travel by bus, car, donkey and
foot to gather by the thousands at the Imam Asim Shrine in the desert on
China’s western frontier.
They trudged through the sand dunes to kneel at the sacred site
dedicated to Imam Asim, a Muslim holy man who helped defeat the Buddhist
kingdom that had ruled here over a thousand years ago. The devotees were
Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority, and often joined annual
festivals to pray for abundant harvests, good health and strong babies.
They tied strips of cloth carrying prayerful messages to wooden posts
around and near the shrine. They delighted in fairground amusements on
the site’s edge, where magicians, wrestlers and musicians entertained
the crowds. They clustered around storytellers reciting ancient tales.
Thousands of pilgrims were praying at the Imam Asim Shrine in 2009.Video
by Rahile Dawut and her students
“It was not just a pilgrimage. There were performers, games, food,
seesaws for the children, poetry reading, and a whole area for
story-telling,” said Tamar Mayer, a professor at Middlebury College who
visited the Imam Asim Shrine for research in 2008 and 2009. “It was
still so full of people, and full of life.”
Even then the authorities were trying to limit the crowds at the shrine
with checkpoints. By 2014, pilgrims had been almost entirely banned. And
by last year, much of the shrine had been demolished. Wooden fences and
poles that once encircled the tomb and held fluttering prayer flags had
been torn down. Satellite images show that a mosque at the site was
leveled. All that remained was the mud-brick building marking the tomb
of Imam Asim, which appeared to be intact amid the ruins.
The Chinese authorities have in recent years closed and demolished many
of the major shrines, mosques and other holy sites across Xinjiang that
have long preserved the culture and Islamic beliefs of the region’s Muslims.
The effort to close off and erase these sites is part of China’s broader
campaign to turn the region’s Uighurs, Kazakhs and members of other
Central Asian ethnic groups into loyal followers of the Communist Party.
The assimilation drive has led to the detention of hundreds of thousands
in indoctrination centers.
The new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a research
group based in Canberra, systematically gauges the degree of destruction
and alteration to religious sites in recent years. It estimated that
around 8,500 mosques across Xinjiang have been completely demolished
since 2017 — more than a third of the number of mosques the government
says are in the region.
“What it does show is a campaign of demolition and erasure that is
unprecedented since the Cultural Revolution,” said Nathan Ruser, the
researcher at the institute who led the analysis. During the decade-long
turmoil that unfolded from 1966 under Mao Zedong, many mosques and other
religious sites were destroyed.
The institute, also known as ASPI, compiled a randomized sample of 533
known mosque sites across Xinjiang, and analyzed satellite images of
each site taken at different times to assess changes. It studied the
state of the region’s shrines, cemeteries and other sacred sites through
a sample of 382 locations taken from a state-sponsored survey and online
records.
The Chinese government has dismissed reports of widespread demolition of
religious sites as “total nonsense” and said that it values the
protection and repair of mosques.
Chinese officials have accused the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
of seeking to malign China, and pointed to its funding from the United
States government as evidence that its findings are biased. The
institute rejects that claim, saying its research is completely
independent from its funders.
The authorities have placed tight controls on movement within Xinjiang
and curbed the flow of information out of the region, making it a
challenge to assess the scale of the destruction on the ground. The New
York Times verified many of the details in ASPI’s report by studying
satellite images and visiting sites across southern Xinjiang last year.
“What we see here is the deliberate destruction of sites which are in
every way the heritage of the Uighur people and the heritage of this
land,” said Rachel Harris, an expert on Uighur music and culture at the
University of London who reviewed the report.
During festival time in 2008, the Imam Asim Shrine also included a
fairground area of entertainment and children’s rides.Tamar Mayer
Many of the shrines and cemeteries that the authorities have recently
closed or razed embodied the Uighurs’ diverse Islamic traditions.
Pilgrims would visit shrines, known locally as “mazar,” with food
offerings, goat horns and animal hides to show their piety, or cloth
dolls embodying their hopes for a healthy child. Some spent weeks
traveling from one sacred site to another.
Large shrines are often gravesites of imams, merchants and soldiers who
spread Islam in the region over a thousand years ago. Some are imposing
complexes built and rebuilt over the centuries. But a tree or pile of
stones can also serve as a shrine, marking a holy presence for villagers.
At Ordam, a famed shrine in the desert of southern Xinjiang, pilgrims
had been gathering for more than 400 years years to celebrate the memory
of a leader who brought Islam to the region and fought a rival Buddhist
kingdom.
“If you have a donkey and a cart, you load up your food and you spend
three weeks to get to a shrine,” said Rian Thum, a researcher at the
University of Nottingham who has studied Ordam and other shrines and
their fate. “The only place I’ve seen a grown Uighur man cry was at a
shrine.”
But in the 1990s, the Chinese government grew increasingly nervous about
the expansion of mosques and revival of shrines in Xinjiang. Officials
saw the gathering of pilgrims as kindling for uncontrolled religious
devotion and extremism, and a spate of antigovernment attacks by
discontented Uighurs set the authorities on edge.
Still, some visitors and tourists crept in to visit.
“One Uighur who had managed to visit Ordam told some of the villagers
nearby that she had been, and they started weeping and one asked for
some dust from her jacket,” Mr. Thum recalled. “This gives a sense how
important this place is to people, even when they cannot visit.”
The previous closures and bans on visits to the shrines were a prelude
to a more aggressive campaign by the government.
By early 2018, the Ordam shrine, isolated in the desert and almost 50
miles from the nearest town, had been leveled, eradicating one of most
important sites of Uighur heritage. Satellite images from that time
showed the shrine’s mosque, prayer hall and simple housing where its
custodians once lived had been razed. There is no news of what happened
to the huge cooking pots where pilgrims left meat, grain and vegetables
that custodians of the shrine cooked into holy meals.
“You see a real and what seems to be a conscious effort at destroying
places that are important to Uighurs, precisely because they are
important to Uighurs,” Mr. Thum said.
In some instances, the government has demolished mosques in the name of
development. When Times reporters visited the city of Hotan in southern
Xinjiang last year, we found a new park where satellite images showed
there had been a mosque until late 2017.
We found four other sites in the city where mosques once stood that were
now new parks or bare patches of ground, and one mosque that was
half-torn down. The main central mosque in Hotan remains, though only a
trickle of people attend, even for Friday prayers.
In Kashgar, the major city in southern Xinjiang, nearly all of the
mosques in the center of town appeared shut, with furniture stacked up
inside, gathering dust. One mosque had been turned into a bar.
“It’s like I’m losing my family members around me because our culture is
being taken away,” said Mamutjan Abdurehim, a Uighur graduate student
from Kashgar who now lives in Australia and has been seeking information
about his wife in Xinjiang. “It’s like a part of our flesh, our body, is
being removed.”
Not every religious site has been razed. Some are now official tourist
attractions, and no longer serve as pilgrimage sites, like the famed
Afaq Khoja Mausoleum in Kashgar. A sprawling Uighur cemetery on the edge
of Kashgar has so far survived and families stopped to tidy graves and
pay their respects.
Uighurs noted that shrines had been destroyed in previous decades then
rebuilt, and that they could rise again. But they were daunted by the
scale of the recent eradication.
“The intensity of this crackdown is quite shocking,” Mr. Abdurehim said.
“Many Uighurs who would like to be hopeful are quite pessimistic,
including me.”
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