Beijing: As atrocities against Uighur Muslims continue in China, authorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have now detained hundreds of Muslim imams or religious leaders. According to the Radio Free Asia report, the detention of imams has created an atmosphere in which the Uighur people are “afraid of dying” because there will be no one to oversee their funerals.
Abduveli Ayup, a Norwegian activist associated with the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), said that interviews with Uighurs in the Xinjiang region showed that at least 613 Imams were exterminated. Beginning in 2017, 1.8 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were placed in vast networked internment camps in the region.
Ayup said this while speaking in a webinar hosted by the Washington-based Uighur Human Rights Project (UHRP) on Thursday called ‘Where are the Imams?
Ayup said that in my search I found that these were the most targeted religious population figures.
Ayup, who spent months in detention and tortured during his 2013-2014 imprisonment after fighting for social and cultural rights through the promotion of Uighur language education, said he had interviewed at least 16 former camp detainees, including the arrest of imams would have kept the Uighur community in the Xinjiang region.
According to Radio Free Asia, one of the former detainees living in the Netherlands told him that in the capital of Xinjiang, Urumqi, “people should register and wait for someone to die”.
Another former detective said: “They are afraid of dying because the mosques are demolished, and the imams are arrested, and there is no possibility of performing the last rites. It’s very sad.”
Meanwhile, Rachel Harris, professor of ethnography at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, noted that the Imam, who is male, is not the only religious figure targeted in society. She said that female religious leaders are also very important in Uighur society.
“They don’t lock down mosques… they have a role in the house, but they all play the same important roles as male imams,” she said.
“They (the female religious leaders) work with the women, so they work on the funerals of the women, they teach the children to recite the Quran and all that, and they also have an important role in society. The work of women religious leaders is to mediate disputes, advise, conduct all kinds of rituals,” she said.
The classified documents, known as the Chinese cables, viewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists last year, have highlighted how the Chinese government has used technology to control Uighur Muslims around the world.
However, China routinely denies such misconduct and claims that the camps provide “vocational training”.