In the center of the desert landscapes of Taklamakan, in the northern-western part of China, the land of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the very least populated land while it covers near to a sixth from the nation's area. Getting resisted while in centuries the Han Chinese control, Xinjiang, or Old Eastern Turkistan, fell into under the Chinese Han control in 1949. From then, its population is primarily Uyghur People and Turkic - speaking System.
Muslim especially, the Uyghurs have a very good religious identification that, in particular, allowed them to maintain a strong difference towards the Chinese enemy. In fact, the Uyghur Empire of Mongolia knew a excellent civilization, until its absorption by the Mongolian Empire in the XIIIth century.
While in their own background, the Uyghurs successively taken on Shamanism, Manicheism, Buddhism and the Nestorianism before finally converting 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 beliefs which they adopted, Uyghur People taken successively, and sometimes in a competing way, a great number of written forms (turco-runic, brahmi, tokharien, soghdien) before developing their own unique graphic system.
The entrance of Islam was a great change mainly because it was followed by the assimilation of the Uyghur land in the enormous Turco-Mongolian and Islamic Empire. Thus, the descendants of Genghis Khan slowly replaced their writing by a Arabo-Persan alphabet, still used today.
If their writing, their language and their religion mark a real difference with the tradition of Chinese Han, the Uyghurs also differ from their characteristic, so aspect of Central Asia's people. A matt 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, though they represent only nine million population - a trifle for this big region. Thus, the Uyghurs 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 allows them a few rights in a country exactly where their difference is very often repressed. Thus, Uyghur families escape the "single child policy" and their language is known as the second official language in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The integration of the Uyghurs and their culture in China, however, seems really illusory. The presence of all-natural resources in Xinjiang, and its distance with nations well-known as sensitive, strongly encouraged the government to speed up the sinicization of this area. Million of Han thus came to settle in this new Chinese eldorado, monopolizing the greater responsibility job opportunities.
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 freedom, but especially the recognition of their true identity, this movement was seriously repressed by the power authorities in place 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 Uyghurs population continues today to proudly continue to keep their identification and their tradition , despite the fact that they become a minority on their own territory.
To get more detailed information about the Uyghurs, you can visit a Uyghur website called Uyghur News at http://www.uyghurnews.com
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