dogu-turkistan-sempozyumu

The Role of the International Community in East Turkestan / Prof Dru C. Gladneyquestion of why such expanded imaginings (the certainty of Truth, the quest foreternal salvation, the restoration of religious sovereignty) has led so many peopleto martyr not only themselves, but to take others with them. For many analysts,transnational Islamist movements have been the answer to both these questions:why Muslims would so willingly die, as well as take so many others with them.China’s government and the novelistic portrayal above both suggest thatUyghur militants have killed and are threatening to kill other Chinese citizensin the name of radical Islam, drawing direct parallels to current events in nearbyChechnya. Since the end of the 19 th century, China has been engaged in anunremitting project of nationalization and secularization that includes, amongother things, emancipation from its imperial past, engagement with Westernpolitical institutions, and establishment of its sovereignty over its boundedterritory. Unlike Turkey’s official state policy of secularism and the strict separationof church (or mosque) and state, in China, secularization is a state project thatis enforced upon its general populace (or at least, strongly recommended). Onerecent challenge to this nationalist project, with roots in the early 20 th century,is that of a widespread separatism movement among one Muslim group knownas the Uighur. That the largest Muslim group in China, known as the Hui, havenot participated in nor been sympathetic to such a movement speaks volumesregarding the diversity of Islamic identity and the practice in China over the lastcentury in response to state projects of nationalization and secularization.One of the defining moments of secularization for China’s Muslims involvedthe re-definition of their very identification. From the beginning the people nowknown as the Hui have been the liminal, the perpetual immigrant in China, whomJonathan Lipman (1998) calls Familiar Strangers in the title of his Hui history.Not only an entirely different culture than their host culture of China, despiteover 1,300 years of inter-marriage and integration, they are still regarded as aseparate race. In China, “Race... would create nationhood,” according to Dikötter’s(1992: 71) thesis and this has much to do with Han Chinese representations ofHui religious and national identity. Even their name, “Hui” () in Chinese canmean "to return", as if they have never been at home in China and are destined toleave. Descended from Persian, Arab, Mongolian and Turkish Muslim merchants,soldiers and officials who settled in China from the 7th to 14th centuries and453