“Eradicating Ideological Viruses”: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims
September 01, 2018“We have no rights in Xinjiang…. They scare us so much. Living there changes your way of being. You become afraid of [people in] uniforms, you’re afraid of telling the truth, you’re afraid of praying, you’re afraid of being a Muslim.”
“They also confiscated religious items like carpets.… they destroyed the mosque.… There were three mosques in the village – one for Uyghur, one for Kazakh, one for Hui – and they destroyed them all. There is no [longer] Friday prayer and people stop praying because doing so is no longer safe.”
“They were shutting down mosques, even Hui mosques, which were traditionally more tolerated. When the imam there was unhappy about it, he was taken away, and that was surprising to all the Huis.”
“I used to pray five times a day. But I heard they were making a list of people who do, so when I pray I close my curtains. The authorities came and asked how many times I prayed, and I said five times a day. But then my sister-inlaw nudged me, and I said, “Only once.””
“When we were there, it was Ramadan – the authorities watched people even [in the middle of the] night. They watched who turned on the lights and would go into the homes [of those who did]. The neighborhood office … rented an office in every apartment block and during Ramadan watched whose lights were on [in the early morning] and if your lights are on, then you’re in trouble.”
“We heard, in May 2017, that they have started to [punish people for religious items] so we’ve burned the books ourselves.… It was this neighboring community that’s old, and one day we saw lots of police vehicles led by neighborhood office workers who came and searched the homes … for two hours, and so we got scared because we heard it was about religious articles.”