The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History

"They aren’t trying to maintain as much as reinvent their sense of identity. The modern Uighur, who are a collection of Turkic peoples, really almost picked that identity. They looked back at history and said, ‘We are the Uighur who had this powerful empire that the Chinese feared.’ They built this identity, as Thum documents, through shrines, through pilgrimage routes and by going back to the historical record of this empire the Chinese had to deal with as equals under the Tang dynasty. The actual historical connection between the Uighurs and today’s people is pretty shaky. But they created this identity themselves from the ground up. I’m not dismissing the idea of the connection, but they chose it. Absolutely. For him, ethnic identities aren’t fixed. They’re strategies you adapt your reality towards and you play up and play down parts of them to cope with realities of the day. What Scott doesn’t really talk about that you have now is this keen oppositional identity. A lot of Uighur I know now, even in Beijing, won’t eat in Han restaurants and will associate with Chinese as little as possible. This is something that has changed. There has been lots of mixing historically, but because of the rigor of the rule in Xinjiang, where you have this really brutal crackdown, people’s identities are becoming stronger. Uighur meaning ‘not Chinese’ is getting more powerful by the year. The strategy is counterproductive. It causes more Uighur identity to survive in the long run, but it feels like a dead end for the Uighur. They’ve been forced into it because there’s no space for having a more accepting Uighur identity. It’s starting to take on strains of Salafist Islam and jihadism. It worries me when people define themselves narrowly. It leaves people who are half Uighur with this really hard position. When it’s a choice between being the happy, singing minority or this fierce anti-Chinese people, standing up for their self-respect, they pick the second one. We’re mostly talking about young men here. They most fiercely need that identity. They need to believe in something, and for a lot of young Uighur that something is being Uighur and not being Chinese."