In the middle of the desert landscapes of Taklamakan, in the north-west part of China, the land of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is a very least populated land while it covers near to a sixth of the nation's area. Getting resisted during centuries the Han Chinese control, Xinjiang, or Old East Turkistan, fell into under the Chinese Han control in 1949. From then, its population is generally Uyghurs and Turkish - speaking System.
Muslim primarily, the Uyghur people have a very good religious identification which usually, in specific, permitted them to preserve a solid difference in opposition to the Chinese enemy. Certainly, the Uyghur Empire of Mongolia knew a excellent civilization, until its absorption by the Mongolian Empire in the XIIIth century.
During their historical past, the Uyghurs successively taken on Shamanism, Manicheism, Buddhism and the Nestorianism before lastly changing to Islam when the Arab conquerors beat the Chinese in year 751 BC., therefore opening 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 entrance of Islam was a great change mainly because it was supported by the absorption of the Uyghur areas in the enormous Turco-Mongolian and Muslim Kingdom. Thus, the descendants of Genghis Khan progressively replaced their writing by a Arabo-Persan alphabet, still used presently.
If their own writing, their language and their religion mark a real big difference with the tradition of Chinese Han, Uyghur People 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 directing out to the Mongolian, Turkish or Uzbek origins of these men and these women.
For a few years, China has integrated the proper identity of these remote people, although they represent only 8 million population - a trifle for this particular large land. 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 law will allow these people a few rights in a country exactly where their big difference is very often repressed. Thus, Uyghur families escape the "single child policy" and their language is recognized as the second official language in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The integration of the Uyghur people and their culture in the People's Republic of China, however, looks very illusory. The presence of natural resources in Xinjiang, and its distance with locations known as sensitive, clearly motivated the government to increase the sinicization of this area. Million of Han thus came to settle in this new Chinese eldorado, monopolizing the greater responsibility jobs.
In response to this true will to assimilate the Uyghurs into the Chinese culture, an independent party like East Turkistan Islamic Movement(ETIM) was born in the early 1990.
Saying more flexibility, but mainly the acceptance of their true identity, this movement was seriously repressed by the power authorities in area Xinjiang.
The situations 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 population continues today to proudly continue to keep their identification and their tradition , though they become a minority on their own land.
To get more detailed information about Uyghur people, you can visit a Uyghur website called Uyghur News at http://www.uyghurnews.com
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