The Muslim Community Center – East Bay strives to provide a welcoming space for everyone in our congregation to grow and to feel what the community should feel like.

Since 2018, two dedicated mothers in the congregation have hosted a toddler and children’s group in the Uyghur language for San Francisco Bay Area residents belonging to this ethnic Muslim minority in China. This group meets 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays from August to May. The playgroup sessions are free.

The Uighur playgroup supplements Mommy & Me in English which the MCC has hosted since 2016. Both groups aim to plant the love for Islam in our children from the formative ages of two to six through song, play, games, and crafts.  Both groups require a mother or a female relative to accompany each child. The group has grown to include children 8 to 16.

Email Uighur playgroup facilitators Sisters Buzura Aiziz & Nurbiye Ilghar at uyghur@mcceastbay.org to learn more. See here to learn about MCC’s English Mommy & Me group.

East Turkistan, also known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, lies in the heart of Asia. The current territorial size of East Turkistan is 1,626,000 square kilometers (635,000 square miles), which is 4 times the size of California.

According to official records from 1949, East Turkistan’s original territories contained 1,820,000 square kilometers of land. China’s Qinghai and Gansu provinces annexed part of the territory due to the Chinese communist invasion of 1949.

East Turkistan has a diverse geography. It has grand deserts, magnificent mountains, and beautiful rivers, lakes, grasslands, and forests.

A brief history of East Turkistan and Its People

East Turkistan is the homeland of the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs and other central Asian peoples such as Kazaks, Kyrgyz, Tatars, Uzbeks, and Tajiks. According to the latest Chinese census, the present population of these Muslims is slightly over 11 million; among these, the 8.68 million Uyghurs constitute the majority.  However, Uyghur sources indicate that the Uyghur population in East Turkistan exceeds 15 million.

East Turkistan is located beyond a logical boundary of China, the Great Wall. Historically, East Turkistan is a part of Central Asia, not of China. East Turkistan’s people are not Chinese; they are Turks of Central Asia.

Records show that the Uyghurs have more than 4000 years in East Turkistan. Situated along a section of the legendary Silk Road, Uyghurs played an essential role in cultural exchanges between the East and West and developed a unique culture and civilization.

Uyghurs embraced Islam in A.D. 934 during the Karahanid Kingdom. Kashgar, the capital of the Kingdom, quickly became one of the major learning centers of Islam. Art, the sciences, music, and literature flourished as Islamic religious institutions nurtured the pursuit of an advanced culture. In this period, hundreds of world-renowned Uyghur scholars emerged. Thousands of valuable books were written. Among these works, the Uyghur scholar Yusuf Has Hajip’s book, Kutatku Bilig (The Knowledge for Happiness, 1069-1070) and Mahmud Kashgari’s Divan-i Lugat-it Turk (a dictionary of Turk languages) are the most influential.

East Turkistan was invaded by the Manchu Empire of China.

The Islamic Uyghur Kingdom of East Turkestan maintained its independence and prosperity until the Manchu Empire invaded the nation in 1876. After eight years of bloody war, the Manchu Empire formally annexed East Turkistan into its territories and renamed it “Xinjiang” (meaning “New Territory” or “New Frontier”) on November 18, 1884. Uyghur power, stature, and culture steeply declined after the Manchu invasion.

After Chinese Nationalists overthrew the Manchu Empire in 1911, East Turkistan fell under the rule of the nationalist Chinese government. The Uyghurs, who wanted to free themselves from foreign domination, staged numerous uprisings against Nationalist Chinese rule and twice (once in 1933 and again in 1944) succeeded in setting up an independent East Turkistan Republic.

Political Background

Heavy-handed state repression of all activities associated by the Chinese government with “Separatism” has created a dire human rights environment for the Uyghur Muslim minority population of northwest China. For over a decade, Beijing has claimed to be confronted with “religious extremist forces” and “violent terrorists” in Xinjiang Province, a vast region one-sixth of China’s land area.

Xinjiang is a large, sparsely populated area that has been a site of heavy army and police concentrations since 1949 and is used as a base for nuclear testing, military training, and prison labor facilities. The population of 18 million includes several Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups, of which the Uyghurs, numbering eight million, are the largest. The percentage of ethnic Han Chinese in Xinjiang has grown as a result of government policies from six percent in 1949 to 40 percent at present and now numbers some 7.5 million people. Much like Tibetans, Uyghurs in Xinjiang have struggled for cultural survival in the face of a government-supported influx of Chinese migrants and harsh repression of political dissent and any expression of their distinct identity, however lawful or peaceful.

Reports from Xinjiang document a pattern of abuse, including political imprisonment, torture, and disappearance. Mosques are summarily closed, and the Uyghur language is banned from use in universities. Uyghurs are subjected to compulsory unpaid labor in constructing a pipeline to export local petroleum resources to other parts of China. Uyghurs continue to be the only population in China consistently subjected to executions for political crimes, and these executions are often both summary and public.

The Chinese government has repeatedly invoked a handful of small-scale explosions aimed at government targets over the past decade, particularly since September 11, in support of its strike-hard campaign to crack down on separatism and terrorism. In policy pronouncements for domestic and international audiences, the government has sought to establish that all separatism is tantamount to Islamic terrorism and uses the terms interchangeably. The state’s efforts to extinguish the common desire among Uyghurs for autonomy or outright independence appear to have increased the population’s alienation and, some analysts speculate, the potential for future violent conflict.

Although human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International express concern over the deteriorating situation in Xinjiang, expertise on the region is so scarce that activists agree that without critical support from Uyghur-run human rights organizations, very little information from within Xinjiang will see the light of day. Some information collection and documentation have begun sporadically in Uyghur communities across the diaspora, but the effect will be limited without establishing a human rights organization specifically focused on the Uyghur situation.

Source: Uighur Foundation