In the middle of the desert landscapes of Taklamakan, in the north-west part of China, the land of Xinjiang is a least populated land while it covers near to a sixth of the country's area. Getting resisted during generations the chinese control, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, or Old Turkistan, fell within the Chinese Han domination in 1949. From then, its population is mostly Uyghur People and Turkish - speaking System.
Islamic mainly, the Uyghurs have a strong religious identity which, in specific, enabled them to maintain a strong difference towards the Chinese invader. Definitely, the Uyghur Empire of Mongolia knew a brilliant civilization, until its absorption by the Mongolian Empire in the XIIIth century.
While in their history, the Uyghur People successively taken on Shamanism, Manicheism, Buddhism and the Nestorianism before lastly moving to Islam when the Arab conquerors beat the Chinese in year 751 BC., as a result beginning the way to the Islamization of the entire Central Asia.
Under the influence of the religions which they taken on, Uyghur People used successively, and sometimes in a competing way, a large number of written forms (turco-runic, brahmi, tokharien, soghdien) before developing their own graphic system.
The coming of Islam was a great change because it was supported by the assimilation of the Uyghur land in the enormous Turco-Mongolian and Islamic Kingdom. Thus, the descendants of Genghis Khan progressively replaced their writing by a Arabo-Persan alphabet, still used today.
If their writing, their language and their religion mark a real big difference with the culture of Chinese Han, the Uyghurs also differ from their characteristic, so aspect of Central Asia's people. A shiny skin, eyes representing a whole pallet of colors, from black to deep blue, features going 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, although they represent only eight million population - a little for this immense region. Thus, Uyghur people are now part of the fifty six racial minority groups having been well-known in an official way by the People's Republic of China.
This particular law will allow these people a few rights in a country exactly where their difference is very often repressed. Thus, Uyghur people 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 the People's Republic of China, however, seems pretty illusory. The presence of all-natural resources in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and its area with nations well-known as very 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 more significant responsibility jobs.
In response to this true will to assimilate the Uyghur people into the Chinese culture, an independent party like East Turkistan Islamic Movement(ETIM) was born in the early 1990.
Asserting more freedom, but in particular the acceptance of their true identity, this movement was seriously repressed by the power authorities in location Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The events 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 continue to keep their identity and their culture , 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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