Monday, January 21, 2008
Al-Farabi, Medieval Uyghur Philosopher
During the so-called golden age of Islam in tenth-century Baghdad, Muslim intellectuals widely referred to Aristotle as the "First Teacher". The man they held second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim thinker called Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE).[1] In the words of Muhsin Mahdi, a leading modern scholar of Islamic studies,[2]
[Al-Farabi was] the great interpreter of the thought of Plato and Aristotle ... and the master to whom almost all major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers turned for a fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome and intricate questions of philosophy ... He paid special attention to the study of language and its relation to logic. In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle's logical works he expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire range of the scientific and non-scientific forms of argument and established the place of logic as the indispensable prerequisite for philosophic inquiry.
On his works on logic, Maimonides (1135-1204 CE), the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism, had this to say,
You should always follow this rule: in studying logic, deal only with what was written by the wise Abu Nasr al-Farabi, for all that he wrote, and particularly his work Madabi al-Mawjudat [The Principles of Being], is a pure meal ...
Not very much is known of al-Farabi's private life. Born of Uyghurish descent in the Farab (now Otrar) district of Turkestan – his father served in the Abbasid army of which the Turks were an increasingly prominent part – al-Farabi grew up in Damascus and later moved to Baghdad. Although a competent physician and musician, he disdained a career derived from such learning and was intent neither on financial gain nor public position or influence. Before settling down to teach in Baghdad, he worked as a laborer in a garden and vineyard in Damascus, living on a frugal diet and immersed in nocturnal study by the lamps of the night watchman in the garden. Baghdad was, during most of al-Farabi's time there,
The city of Peace ... the scene of vibrant cultural renaissance ... With its vast number of scholars, its bookstores, its meeting places for learned discussions, its diversified population, the sophistication of its intellectual elite, the ambition and energy of its rulers, this great urban center witnessed a splendor hardly equaled in the entire Medieval world.[3]
'
One of the most revealing measures of the intellectual variety of the period ... was the frequency in Baghdad of public debates between members of opposing schools of thought. [For example, one] debate in 932 CE between ibn Yunis and al-Sarafi was on the relative merits of the sciences of logic and grammar ... sponsored by the Caliph's vizier ... the authorities were still willing to entertain a diversity of views at a time when the proponents of orthodoxy had become increasingly articulate and powerful ... the atmosphere ... was generally cosmopolitan.[4]
In Baghdad, al-Farabi learned philosophy, science, and languages from the leading teachers of the day and despite his youth, soon outstripped them in fame.[5] One of his early conclusions was that man could find truth by reason alone and live according to it. He seems to have held human reason superior to revelation and the ultimate highway to happiness. Here is one expression of his belief in the rational method,[2]
The attainment of certain truth is aimed at in every problem. Yet frequently we do not attain certainty. Instead we may attain certainty about part of what we seek, and belief and persuasion about the rest ... Or we may become perplexed, as when the arguments for and against strike us as having equal force. The cause of this [confusion] is the variety of methods we use in treating a problem ... So let it be clear to you that before setting out to investigate problems we must realize that all these methods have to be learned as an art ... This [logical] faculty enables us to discern whether what we infer is certain knowledge or mere belief, whether it is the thing itself or its image and similitude.
Al-Farabi's attempt to resuscitate and elevate ideas and texts written over a millennium ago was in itself an act of boldness and supreme self-confidence, especially since they were largely outside his own tradition. One can only imagine his mounting excitement as he discovered and dissected them. He wrote an introduction to the philosophy of Plato, the very first of its kind in Medieval times.[2]
The framework of his philosophy had a political science at its apex concerned with happiness realized in this life, and how it could be achieved in cities and nations – without recourse to revelation. He drew a close relation between happiness and knowledge. ‘Happiness is an end … attained by virtuous actions, as knowledge results from learning and study, ... ’[6] This is also the basis for the 'highest perfection of man'.
The human things through which nations and citizens of cities attain earthly happiness in this life and supreme happiness in the life beyond are of four kinds: theoretical virtues, deliberative virtues, moral virtues, and practical arts. [Theoretical virtues are innate in mankind, the rest] are acquired by meditation, investigation and inference, instruction and study.[2]
Al-Farabi is regarded as the founder of political philosophy in Islam.[7] He embraced Plato’s philosopher-king as the ideal: just as God rules the universe, so should the philosopher, being the best of mankind, rule the state. He thus relates the political travails of his time to the divorce of philosophy from governance. He decried wars fought for conquest or gain, derided the superstition, mysticism and astrology of the day, advocated an allegorical interpretation of scripture, and declared the pursuit of scientific knowledge a prerequisite for the good life man must seek. For human beings are not only free to choose their actions, they are fully responsible for them.
The two areas that appear to have occupied al-Farabi most are logic and political philosophy ... [his] logical theories, in the last analysis, are informed by and reflect a theory of human nature and human happiness. For al-Farabi, the end of human existence includes, if it is not confined to, the effort to understand being in so far it is knowable through reason ...
At the same time, the second conspicuous fact of al-Farabi's political theory is his recognition of the challenge that revealed religion poses to the philosophic way of life. Simply put, revealed religion claims to give a complete and authoritative account of all things - human and divine, natural and metaphysical ... [it] exalts certainty over investigation ... there are no basic truths left to discover, and wisdom becomes a system of rules to be learned and taught. To meet the challenge ... al-Farabi resorts to an ingenious applications of Aristotle's logical theories according to which religion can be explained as an imitation of philosophy ... a direct presentation of truths for which philosophy provides the proofs ...[4]
If the philosopher could live happily by reason alone what then of the non-philosopher? Al-Farabi said that the latter could lead a good life only through symbols expressed in prophetic faith: heaven, hell, the last judgment. Different religions employ different symbols to drive home similar truth. Philosophy and the religion of Islam express the same truths in different forms, which correspond to the different levels at which human beings can comprehend it. The enlightened man can live by philosophy alone; those who grasp the truth via symbols but reach a certain level of understanding can be guided by theology;[8] the rest should live by the Shari'a and be governed by a philosopher-king.
Curiously enough, al-Farabi maintained that Muhammad was the kind of ruler Plato had envisaged and that his ideal state could therefore be created within Islam. However, besides the qualities of Plato’s philosopher-king,[9] the ideal ruler must also possess prophetic vision. Realizing the difficulty of finding all these qualities in a single man, he relaxes the requirement of prophetic vision first, even proposes a small council of men who collectively achieve the list, and then enumerates the qualities that can be sacrificed next [10] until reaching a stage where, with further compromise, 'the city will undoubtedly perish'. He also classified the character of cities based on their proximity to virtue and knowledge.
Islamic philosophers in al-Farabi's tradition – the faylasufs – while remaining devout Muslims believed rationalism to be the most advanced form of religion, and which in fact, led them to marginalize the role of God, akin to the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle rather than the watchful and judgmental God of revelation. They also elaborated on the major theological issues of the day: the nature of God (unity or plurality of attributes), creation (ex-nihilo vs. emanation from the One), free will (is man responsible for his actions?) and body and soul (material and spiritual attributes of life). However, in case of a conflict between reason and revelation that simply could not be resolved by creative interpretation, they acquiesced to the ultimate authority of the Qur'an. The faylasufs found nothing problematical about the central role of revelation in political authority, the revelation they themselves could live without; they also tacitly accepted the Islamic injunction to jihad, [11] but the 'holy war' aspect of which was no longer taken seriously in Abbasid times. As in the Christian West until well after the Renaissance, reason and science were not seen as opposed to revelation. They formed a subsidiary system, no doubt with an anxious co-existence at times, within revelation's overarching framework.
In the last decade of his life when Abbasid power went into sharp decline and Shiite orthodoxy was on the rise, al-Farabi returned to Syria where he died a bachelor at the age of 80. The Hamdani Amir Saif al-Daula, patron of the arts in Aleppo, held him in high esteem, by now a famous writer and scholar with books on logic, metaphysics, ethics, political science, music, medicine and sociology. Al-Farabi, who shunned attention in general, tried to rebuff his favors. Despite his asceticism and modesty, the story goes that he often turned playful showman before his patron and 'exasperated him with his outlandish attire and boorish manners'.[12] The circumstances of his death are reported as follows:[11]
Al-Farabi was journeying from Damascus to Ascalon, and was met by a company of thieves called ‘the Lads'. Al-Farabi said to them, ‘Take what I have of riding animals, arms and clothing, and let me go’. But they refused and determined to kill him. Seeing that there was no escape, al-Farabi dismounted and fought till he was slain, with his friends. This greatly displeased the Hamdani rulers of Syria who pursued the thieves and crucified them on tree-trunks close by his grave.
Al-Farabi lived more like a despairing, retiring philosopher than a flamboyant intellectual. Scholars have speculated that he, having concluded that conscious, enduring happiness is in principle outside the grasp of virtually all except a few, and that revelation is irrelevant for happiness, wished to conceal this from the non-philosophers. The idea that revelation is unnecessary, if adopted blindly, could lead people to reject scripture with nothing to supplant it with. The fragile social structure would fall apart. Mindful of the dangers inherent in the masses living without external guidance, he continued to advocate scripture for them. What worried him perhaps was the transformation of Abbasid society into one with large numbers of badly behaving irreverent and rootless people, but this will have to remain our conjecture.
While philosophy in al-Farabi's tradition continued in elite circles it was increasingly undertaken as a private activity – largely by peripatetic medicine men dependent on the whims of their patrons. It was pursued with caution and often treated with suspicion. The challenge to Islamic rationalism (and the rational minded Abbasid theologians, the Mu'tazilah [8]) came from two disparate flanks: the Islamic mystics (the older Ibn Sina/Avicenna, al-Ghazali, Ibn al-Arabi, al-Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra) and the orthodox faithful (traditionalist Sunni ulema, Ibn Hanbal, al-Ashari, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Taymiyah, Abdul Wahhab). The next significant crop of rational philosophers came from Moorish Spain (Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd/Averroës). The changing fortunes of these three viewpoints characterize much of medieval Islamic thought.
___________________________
References: [1] Quoted from Aristotelian Logic and the Arabic Language in al-Farabi by Shukri B. Abed, SUNY Press, 1991. [2] Al-Farabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, translated and introduced by Muhsin Mahdi, 1962. This book has three parts: the first spells out al-Farabi's own philosophy and is titled, 'The Attainment of Happiness'. The second and third parts deal with the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, respectively. [3] In the words of Arabist Joel Kraemer. [4] Politics and Excellence - The political philosophy of Al-Farabi by Miriam Galston, Princeton University Press, 1990. pp 3-21. [5] These include Nestorian Christian scholars like Abu Bishr Matta Ibn Yunis (870-939 CE) and Yuhanna Ibn Haylan (860-920 CE), from whom he studied Arabic grammar. [6] Fusul Al-Madani (Aphorisms of the Statesman) by Al-Farabi, p 61. Translated, annotated and introduced by D. M. Dunlop, 1961. [7] Scholars disagree on al-Farabi's immediate purpose in turning to classical Greek political philosophy but politics was a central part of Classical Greek thought and certainly compatible with al-Farabi's concern with happiness realized in this life. [8] In al-Farabi's time, the major school of theological Islam was the Mu'tazilah – liberal in outlook and receptive to reason – centered in Abbasid Baghdad and strongest during the progressive reign of caliphs al-Mansur, Haroon al-Rashid and al-Mamun. Rejected by the orthodox Sunnis, it found moderate support among the Shi'a. The Mu'tazilah school survived another century after al-Farabi, when it finally got beaten down by Sunni orthodoxy. [9] The qualities of Plato's philosopher-king: Intelligence, good memory, keenness of mind, love of knowledge, moderation in matters of food, drink and sex, love of truthfulness, magnanimity, frugality, love of justice, firmness or courage. To this list, Al-Farabi added physical fitness and eloquence. [10] Mabadi Ara Ahl Al-Madina Al-Fadila by al-Farabi (available as 'Al-Farabi on the Perfect State'), Chapter 15: Perfect Associations and Perfect Ruler; Faulty Associations, sections 13, 14. Translated, annotated and introduced by Richard Walzer, 1985. [11] Islam distinguishes four ways by which the duty of jihad can be fulfilled: by the heart, the tongue, the hand, and the sword. The first consists in a spiritual purification of one's own heart by doing battle with the devil and overcoming his inducements to evil. The propagation of Islam through the tongue and hand is accomplished in large measure by supporting what is right and correcting what is wrong. The fourth way to fulfill one's duty is to wage war physically against unbelievers and enemies of the Islamic faith. Those who professed belief in divine revelation – Christians and Jews in particular – were given special consideration. Non-Muslims had the choice of either embracing Islam or at least submitting to Islamic rule and paying a poll and land tax. If both options were rejected, jihad was declared (if not always carried through). [12] A History of Islamic Philosophy by Majid Fakhry, Second Edition, Colombia University Press, 1983.
Posted by Namit Arora at 07:30 PM in Biography, Books & Authors, History, Philosophy, Politics, Religion Permalink
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From:http://blog.shunya.net/shunyas_blog/2007/06/alfarabi_mediev.html
During the so-called golden age of Islam in tenth-century Baghdad, Muslim intellectuals widely referred to Aristotle as the "First Teacher". The man they held second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim thinker called Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE).[1] In the words of Muhsin Mahdi, a leading modern scholar of Islamic studies,[2]
[Al-Farabi was] the great interpreter of the thought of Plato and Aristotle ... and the master to whom almost all major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers turned for a fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome and intricate questions of philosophy ... He paid special attention to the study of language and its relation to logic. In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle's logical works he expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire range of the scientific and non-scientific forms of argument and established the place of logic as the indispensable prerequisite for philosophic inquiry.
On his works on logic, Maimonides (1135-1204 CE), the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism, had this to say,
You should always follow this rule: in studying logic, deal only with what was written by the wise Abu Nasr al-Farabi, for all that he wrote, and particularly his work Madabi al-Mawjudat [The Principles of Being], is a pure meal ...
Not very much is known of al-Farabi's private life. Born of Uyghurish descent in the Farab (now Otrar) district of Turkestan – his father served in the Abbasid army of which the Turks were an increasingly prominent part – al-Farabi grew up in Damascus and later moved to Baghdad. Although a competent physician and musician, he disdained a career derived from such learning and was intent neither on financial gain nor public position or influence. Before settling down to teach in Baghdad, he worked as a laborer in a garden and vineyard in Damascus, living on a frugal diet and immersed in nocturnal study by the lamps of the night watchman in the garden. Baghdad was, during most of al-Farabi's time there,
The city of Peace ... the scene of vibrant cultural renaissance ... With its vast number of scholars, its bookstores, its meeting places for learned discussions, its diversified population, the sophistication of its intellectual elite, the ambition and energy of its rulers, this great urban center witnessed a splendor hardly equaled in the entire Medieval world.[3]
'
One of the most revealing measures of the intellectual variety of the period ... was the frequency in Baghdad of public debates between members of opposing schools of thought. [For example, one] debate in 932 CE between ibn Yunis and al-Sarafi was on the relative merits of the sciences of logic and grammar ... sponsored by the Caliph's vizier ... the authorities were still willing to entertain a diversity of views at a time when the proponents of orthodoxy had become increasingly articulate and powerful ... the atmosphere ... was generally cosmopolitan.[4]
In Baghdad, al-Farabi learned philosophy, science, and languages from the leading teachers of the day and despite his youth, soon outstripped them in fame.[5] One of his early conclusions was that man could find truth by reason alone and live according to it. He seems to have held human reason superior to revelation and the ultimate highway to happiness. Here is one expression of his belief in the rational method,[2]
The attainment of certain truth is aimed at in every problem. Yet frequently we do not attain certainty. Instead we may attain certainty about part of what we seek, and belief and persuasion about the rest ... Or we may become perplexed, as when the arguments for and against strike us as having equal force. The cause of this [confusion] is the variety of methods we use in treating a problem ... So let it be clear to you that before setting out to investigate problems we must realize that all these methods have to be learned as an art ... This [logical] faculty enables us to discern whether what we infer is certain knowledge or mere belief, whether it is the thing itself or its image and similitude.
Al-Farabi's attempt to resuscitate and elevate ideas and texts written over a millennium ago was in itself an act of boldness and supreme self-confidence, especially since they were largely outside his own tradition. One can only imagine his mounting excitement as he discovered and dissected them. He wrote an introduction to the philosophy of Plato, the very first of its kind in Medieval times.[2]
The framework of his philosophy had a political science at its apex concerned with happiness realized in this life, and how it could be achieved in cities and nations – without recourse to revelation. He drew a close relation between happiness and knowledge. ‘Happiness is an end … attained by virtuous actions, as knowledge results from learning and study, ... ’[6] This is also the basis for the 'highest perfection of man'.
The human things through which nations and citizens of cities attain earthly happiness in this life and supreme happiness in the life beyond are of four kinds: theoretical virtues, deliberative virtues, moral virtues, and practical arts. [Theoretical virtues are innate in mankind, the rest] are acquired by meditation, investigation and inference, instruction and study.[2]
Al-Farabi is regarded as the founder of political philosophy in Islam.[7] He embraced Plato’s philosopher-king as the ideal: just as God rules the universe, so should the philosopher, being the best of mankind, rule the state. He thus relates the political travails of his time to the divorce of philosophy from governance. He decried wars fought for conquest or gain, derided the superstition, mysticism and astrology of the day, advocated an allegorical interpretation of scripture, and declared the pursuit of scientific knowledge a prerequisite for the good life man must seek. For human beings are not only free to choose their actions, they are fully responsible for them.
The two areas that appear to have occupied al-Farabi most are logic and political philosophy ... [his] logical theories, in the last analysis, are informed by and reflect a theory of human nature and human happiness. For al-Farabi, the end of human existence includes, if it is not confined to, the effort to understand being in so far it is knowable through reason ...
At the same time, the second conspicuous fact of al-Farabi's political theory is his recognition of the challenge that revealed religion poses to the philosophic way of life. Simply put, revealed religion claims to give a complete and authoritative account of all things - human and divine, natural and metaphysical ... [it] exalts certainty over investigation ... there are no basic truths left to discover, and wisdom becomes a system of rules to be learned and taught. To meet the challenge ... al-Farabi resorts to an ingenious applications of Aristotle's logical theories according to which religion can be explained as an imitation of philosophy ... a direct presentation of truths for which philosophy provides the proofs ...[4]
If the philosopher could live happily by reason alone what then of the non-philosopher? Al-Farabi said that the latter could lead a good life only through symbols expressed in prophetic faith: heaven, hell, the last judgment. Different religions employ different symbols to drive home similar truth. Philosophy and the religion of Islam express the same truths in different forms, which correspond to the different levels at which human beings can comprehend it. The enlightened man can live by philosophy alone; those who grasp the truth via symbols but reach a certain level of understanding can be guided by theology;[8] the rest should live by the Shari'a and be governed by a philosopher-king.
Curiously enough, al-Farabi maintained that Muhammad was the kind of ruler Plato had envisaged and that his ideal state could therefore be created within Islam. However, besides the qualities of Plato’s philosopher-king,[9] the ideal ruler must also possess prophetic vision. Realizing the difficulty of finding all these qualities in a single man, he relaxes the requirement of prophetic vision first, even proposes a small council of men who collectively achieve the list, and then enumerates the qualities that can be sacrificed next [10] until reaching a stage where, with further compromise, 'the city will undoubtedly perish'. He also classified the character of cities based on their proximity to virtue and knowledge.
Islamic philosophers in al-Farabi's tradition – the faylasufs – while remaining devout Muslims believed rationalism to be the most advanced form of religion, and which in fact, led them to marginalize the role of God, akin to the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle rather than the watchful and judgmental God of revelation. They also elaborated on the major theological issues of the day: the nature of God (unity or plurality of attributes), creation (ex-nihilo vs. emanation from the One), free will (is man responsible for his actions?) and body and soul (material and spiritual attributes of life). However, in case of a conflict between reason and revelation that simply could not be resolved by creative interpretation, they acquiesced to the ultimate authority of the Qur'an. The faylasufs found nothing problematical about the central role of revelation in political authority, the revelation they themselves could live without; they also tacitly accepted the Islamic injunction to jihad, [11] but the 'holy war' aspect of which was no longer taken seriously in Abbasid times. As in the Christian West until well after the Renaissance, reason and science were not seen as opposed to revelation. They formed a subsidiary system, no doubt with an anxious co-existence at times, within revelation's overarching framework.
In the last decade of his life when Abbasid power went into sharp decline and Shiite orthodoxy was on the rise, al-Farabi returned to Syria where he died a bachelor at the age of 80. The Hamdani Amir Saif al-Daula, patron of the arts in Aleppo, held him in high esteem, by now a famous writer and scholar with books on logic, metaphysics, ethics, political science, music, medicine and sociology. Al-Farabi, who shunned attention in general, tried to rebuff his favors. Despite his asceticism and modesty, the story goes that he often turned playful showman before his patron and 'exasperated him with his outlandish attire and boorish manners'.[12] The circumstances of his death are reported as follows:[11]
Al-Farabi was journeying from Damascus to Ascalon, and was met by a company of thieves called ‘the Lads'. Al-Farabi said to them, ‘Take what I have of riding animals, arms and clothing, and let me go’. But they refused and determined to kill him. Seeing that there was no escape, al-Farabi dismounted and fought till he was slain, with his friends. This greatly displeased the Hamdani rulers of Syria who pursued the thieves and crucified them on tree-trunks close by his grave.
Al-Farabi lived more like a despairing, retiring philosopher than a flamboyant intellectual. Scholars have speculated that he, having concluded that conscious, enduring happiness is in principle outside the grasp of virtually all except a few, and that revelation is irrelevant for happiness, wished to conceal this from the non-philosophers. The idea that revelation is unnecessary, if adopted blindly, could lead people to reject scripture with nothing to supplant it with. The fragile social structure would fall apart. Mindful of the dangers inherent in the masses living without external guidance, he continued to advocate scripture for them. What worried him perhaps was the transformation of Abbasid society into one with large numbers of badly behaving irreverent and rootless people, but this will have to remain our conjecture.
While philosophy in al-Farabi's tradition continued in elite circles it was increasingly undertaken as a private activity – largely by peripatetic medicine men dependent on the whims of their patrons. It was pursued with caution and often treated with suspicion. The challenge to Islamic rationalism (and the rational minded Abbasid theologians, the Mu'tazilah [8]) came from two disparate flanks: the Islamic mystics (the older Ibn Sina/Avicenna, al-Ghazali, Ibn al-Arabi, al-Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra) and the orthodox faithful (traditionalist Sunni ulema, Ibn Hanbal, al-Ashari, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Taymiyah, Abdul Wahhab). The next significant crop of rational philosophers came from Moorish Spain (Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd/Averroës). The changing fortunes of these three viewpoints characterize much of medieval Islamic thought.
___________________________
References: [1] Quoted from Aristotelian Logic and the Arabic Language in al-Farabi by Shukri B. Abed, SUNY Press, 1991. [2] Al-Farabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, translated and introduced by Muhsin Mahdi, 1962. This book has three parts: the first spells out al-Farabi's own philosophy and is titled, 'The Attainment of Happiness'. The second and third parts deal with the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, respectively. [3] In the words of Arabist Joel Kraemer. [4] Politics and Excellence - The political philosophy of Al-Farabi by Miriam Galston, Princeton University Press, 1990. pp 3-21. [5] These include Nestorian Christian scholars like Abu Bishr Matta Ibn Yunis (870-939 CE) and Yuhanna Ibn Haylan (860-920 CE), from whom he studied Arabic grammar. [6] Fusul Al-Madani (Aphorisms of the Statesman) by Al-Farabi, p 61. Translated, annotated and introduced by D. M. Dunlop, 1961. [7] Scholars disagree on al-Farabi's immediate purpose in turning to classical Greek political philosophy but politics was a central part of Classical Greek thought and certainly compatible with al-Farabi's concern with happiness realized in this life. [8] In al-Farabi's time, the major school of theological Islam was the Mu'tazilah – liberal in outlook and receptive to reason – centered in Abbasid Baghdad and strongest during the progressive reign of caliphs al-Mansur, Haroon al-Rashid and al-Mamun. Rejected by the orthodox Sunnis, it found moderate support among the Shi'a. The Mu'tazilah school survived another century after al-Farabi, when it finally got beaten down by Sunni orthodoxy. [9] The qualities of Plato's philosopher-king: Intelligence, good memory, keenness of mind, love of knowledge, moderation in matters of food, drink and sex, love of truthfulness, magnanimity, frugality, love of justice, firmness or courage. To this list, Al-Farabi added physical fitness and eloquence. [10] Mabadi Ara Ahl Al-Madina Al-Fadila by al-Farabi (available as 'Al-Farabi on the Perfect State'), Chapter 15: Perfect Associations and Perfect Ruler; Faulty Associations, sections 13, 14. Translated, annotated and introduced by Richard Walzer, 1985. [11] Islam distinguishes four ways by which the duty of jihad can be fulfilled: by the heart, the tongue, the hand, and the sword. The first consists in a spiritual purification of one's own heart by doing battle with the devil and overcoming his inducements to evil. The propagation of Islam through the tongue and hand is accomplished in large measure by supporting what is right and correcting what is wrong. The fourth way to fulfill one's duty is to wage war physically against unbelievers and enemies of the Islamic faith. Those who professed belief in divine revelation – Christians and Jews in particular – were given special consideration. Non-Muslims had the choice of either embracing Islam or at least submitting to Islamic rule and paying a poll and land tax. If both options were rejected, jihad was declared (if not always carried through). [12] A History of Islamic Philosophy by Majid Fakhry, Second Edition, Colombia University Press, 1983.
Posted by Namit Arora at 07:30 PM in Biography, Books & Authors, History, Philosophy, Politics, Religion Permalink
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Friday, January 18, 2008
Xitay Hökümiti "Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki Teshkilati"gha Ziyankeshlik Qildi
2008.01.17
2007 - Yili mayda Gérmaniyining Frankfurt shehiride "Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilati" qurulghan idi. Halbuki, mezkur teshkilatning qurghuchisi hem teshkilatning reyisi Korash Atahanning bildürüshige qarighanda, teshkilat ezaliri öz teshkilatini Gérmaniyide qanuniy enge aldurush iltimasini qilghan.Iltimas qilinip uzaq ötmey, Gérmaniyening Hessen ölkisidiki sot, edeliye, saqchi we munasiwetlik organlar bu teshkilatning testiqlinish resmiyetlirini ötewatqanda kütülmigen yerdin, bu teshkilat heqqide yaman xewerlerni tapshurup alghan.
Éniqlanghan ehwallardin qarighanda Xitay hökümiti bu teshkilatning qurulghanliqidin intayin tizlikte xewer tapqan. Shu munasiwet bilen Xitay hökümiti Gérmaniye dayirilirige bu teshkilat heqqide bésim ishlitip, bu teshkilatini, térror arqa körünüsh bar, testiqlashqa bolmaydu, dep ipade bildürgen.Xitaylar yene, bu teshkilat testiqlansa xelqara ténchliqqa tesir yétidu, Gérmaniyegimu köp awarichilik keltüridu dep, biljirlighan. Shu arqiliq bu teshkilatning öz aldigha, qanuniy resmiyetlirining ötülishige éghir tosqunluq qilghan.
Netijide qanche aylap tepsiliy tekshürüsh élip barghan Gérmaniye hökümiti, "Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki Teshkilati"ni qanuniy jehettin testiqlap, Xitaylarning Téror sewebidin Uyghur xelqige qaratqan pashistik siyaset we qanunlirining rezil epti-beshirisini échip tashlighan.
Yillardin béri Xitay hökümiti Atalmish térorizimgha qarshi zeherlik qamchisini Uyghur xelqining béshida oynutup, xelqimizni medeniyet jehettin arqida qaldurush, diniy jehetin bixutlashturush, tebéiy köpiyishige tosqunluq qilish, siyasiy jehettin hoquqsizlashturush we iqtisadiy jehettin namratlashturiwétish siyasetlirini qollunup, qanunsiz tutqun qilip, türkümlep ölümge buyrup, insaniy heq-hoquqlirimizni bolishiche depsende qilip, xelqara jamaetke set körsütüp kelgenidi.
Mana emdi öz xelqining kishlik hoquq we insan heqiliri hem musteqil we hör yashishi üchün xelqara qanunlar asasida we démokirattik shekillerde paaliyet élip bériwatqan bir teshkilatini Yawropaliqning köz aldidila "téror" nami bilen qarilap, özining neqeder saxtapez we yalghanchi, bashqilargha xalighan shekilde qara chapliyalaydighan héliger bir hökümet ikenlikini ispatlap, xelqara jamaetchilik teripidin qattiq éghir deshnam yidi.Bir hésapta Yawropa xelqining Xitaylarning qandaq kishilerni "Téror" bilen eyipleydighanliqini bilip qalghanliqi yaxshi boldi.
Hazir bu teshkilat qanuniy jehettin mustehkem asasqa ige bolup, her türlük xizmetlirini paahal qanat yaydurmaqta.
Töwende ixtiyari muxbirimiz Ekremning bu heqte teshkilat reyisi Korash Atahan bilen ötküzgen söhbitini anglighaysiler
Muxbirimiz ekremning bu heqtiki toluq melumati
Awaz köchürüsh
Uyghurche
© 2008 Radio Free Asia
Munasiwetlik maqalilar
Gérmaniye amérikining guantanamodiki uyghurlarni qobul qilish bésimigha duch kelmekte
Gérmaniyidiki uyghurlar kishilik hoquq küni munasiwiti bilen namayish qildi
Dostigha yollash
Xewerge mushteri bolush
Torda anglashqa yardem
Qoyghuchi köchürüsh
Dolqun süzgüch
Radio Free Asia
2025 M Street NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036, USA 202-530-4900 uygweb@rfa.org RFA Jobs
© 2005 Radio Free Asia
2008.01.17
2007 - Yili mayda Gérmaniyining Frankfurt shehiride "Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilati" qurulghan idi. Halbuki, mezkur teshkilatning qurghuchisi hem teshkilatning reyisi Korash Atahanning bildürüshige qarighanda, teshkilat ezaliri öz teshkilatini Gérmaniyide qanuniy enge aldurush iltimasini qilghan.Iltimas qilinip uzaq ötmey, Gérmaniyening Hessen ölkisidiki sot, edeliye, saqchi we munasiwetlik organlar bu teshkilatning testiqlinish resmiyetlirini ötewatqanda kütülmigen yerdin, bu teshkilat heqqide yaman xewerlerni tapshurup alghan.
Éniqlanghan ehwallardin qarighanda Xitay hökümiti bu teshkilatning qurulghanliqidin intayin tizlikte xewer tapqan. Shu munasiwet bilen Xitay hökümiti Gérmaniye dayirilirige bu teshkilat heqqide bésim ishlitip, bu teshkilatini, térror arqa körünüsh bar, testiqlashqa bolmaydu, dep ipade bildürgen.Xitaylar yene, bu teshkilat testiqlansa xelqara ténchliqqa tesir yétidu, Gérmaniyegimu köp awarichilik keltüridu dep, biljirlighan. Shu arqiliq bu teshkilatning öz aldigha, qanuniy resmiyetlirining ötülishige éghir tosqunluq qilghan.
Netijide qanche aylap tepsiliy tekshürüsh élip barghan Gérmaniye hökümiti, "Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki Teshkilati"ni qanuniy jehettin testiqlap, Xitaylarning Téror sewebidin Uyghur xelqige qaratqan pashistik siyaset we qanunlirining rezil epti-beshirisini échip tashlighan.
Yillardin béri Xitay hökümiti Atalmish térorizimgha qarshi zeherlik qamchisini Uyghur xelqining béshida oynutup, xelqimizni medeniyet jehettin arqida qaldurush, diniy jehetin bixutlashturush, tebéiy köpiyishige tosqunluq qilish, siyasiy jehettin hoquqsizlashturush we iqtisadiy jehettin namratlashturiwétish siyasetlirini qollunup, qanunsiz tutqun qilip, türkümlep ölümge buyrup, insaniy heq-hoquqlirimizni bolishiche depsende qilip, xelqara jamaetke set körsütüp kelgenidi.
Mana emdi öz xelqining kishlik hoquq we insan heqiliri hem musteqil we hör yashishi üchün xelqara qanunlar asasida we démokirattik shekillerde paaliyet élip bériwatqan bir teshkilatini Yawropaliqning köz aldidila "téror" nami bilen qarilap, özining neqeder saxtapez we yalghanchi, bashqilargha xalighan shekilde qara chapliyalaydighan héliger bir hökümet ikenlikini ispatlap, xelqara jamaetchilik teripidin qattiq éghir deshnam yidi.Bir hésapta Yawropa xelqining Xitaylarning qandaq kishilerni "Téror" bilen eyipleydighanliqini bilip qalghanliqi yaxshi boldi.
Hazir bu teshkilat qanuniy jehettin mustehkem asasqa ige bolup, her türlük xizmetlirini paahal qanat yaydurmaqta.
Töwende ixtiyari muxbirimiz Ekremning bu heqte teshkilat reyisi Korash Atahan bilen ötküzgen söhbitini anglighaysiler
Muxbirimiz ekremning bu heqtiki toluq melumati
Awaz köchürüsh
Uyghurche
© 2008 Radio Free Asia
Munasiwetlik maqalilar
Gérmaniye amérikining guantanamodiki uyghurlarni qobul qilish bésimigha duch kelmekte
Gérmaniyidiki uyghurlar kishilik hoquq küni munasiwiti bilen namayish qildi
Dostigha yollash
Xewerge mushteri bolush
Torda anglashqa yardem
Qoyghuchi köchürüsh
Dolqun süzgüch
Radio Free Asia
2025 M Street NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036, USA 202-530-4900 uygweb@rfa.org RFA Jobs
© 2005 Radio Free Asia
Monday, January 14, 2008
Tebrikname
Bash shitabi Gérmaniyining Müchén shehridiki "Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki" teshkilatining 16 - nöwetlik saylimining 2008 - yili 1 - ayning 13 - küni 150 din artuq uyghur jamaitining ishtirak qilishi bilen daghdughuluq échilip, ghelbilik yépilghanliqi, weten siritida uchqandek rawajliniwatqan milliy herkitimizning yéngi yildiki yéngi bir ghelbisi bolup qaldi.
Yawrupa Sherqiy Turkistan Birligi, 17 yildin artuq shanliq tarixqa ige bolup, uning milliy herkitimizge qoshqan qimmetlik töhpilliri xelqimiz arisida dastan bolup qalghisi. Yawropa sherqiy Türkistan Birlikgi, milliy herkitimizdiki shereplik enenige we jushqun hayati küchke tolghan bir teshkilat bolup, u tarixida zulum astida yashawatqan xelqimizge siyasiy ghaye, musteqilliq iradisi we ümüt ata qilipla qalmay Sherqiy Türkistan ( Uyghuristan) milliy Qurultiyi, Dunya Uyghur Yashliri Qurultiyi we bügünki Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyining dunygha kélishige zor hesse qoshup, weten siritidiki musteqilliq herkitimizning awangart küchliridin biri bolup qaldi.
Mezkur teshkilatning bu qétimqi saylimigha Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilatining aldinqi reisi, Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyi ning Bash katipi Dolqun Eysa ependi bilen, sabiq Sherqiy Türkistan ( Uyghuristan) milliy Qurultiyining reis, Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyi Ijraiye komitétining wakaletchi reisi Enwerjan qatarliq bilimlik ziyalilar we milliy küresh sépimizdiki küchlük shexislerning özlirini namzat qilip körsetkenliki we muhim wezipilerde olturghanliqi , bu teshkilatning qanchilik derijide küchlük ikenlikini ispatlap turidighan pakittur.
Bu qétimqi saylamda Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilatining sabiq reyisi, Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyining bash katipi Dolqun Eysa ependi Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilatining yéngi bir nöwetlik reislikige, sabiq Sherqiy Türkistan ( Uyghuristan) milliy Qurultiyining reis, Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyi Ijraiye komitétining wakaletchi reyisi Enwerjan ependi we Tursun Muhemmed ependiler Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilatining Muawin reyislikige, Erkin Zunun ependi yene bir qétim teshkilatning bash katipliqigha, Gülnar Osman xanim Fondi mes`ulluqigha, Memtimin Qarim Diniy ishlar bölümi mudirliqigha , Abdusalam ependi Teptishlike , Rahile Osman xanim-qizlar bölümi mes`ulluqigha, Abduleziz Ahmed ependi yashlar bölümi mes`ulluqigha sayliniptu.
Teshkilatimizning barliq ezaliri Yawrupa Sherqiy Turkistan Birligining bu qétimqi saylamningmu intayin adil we démokiratik pirinsiplargha toluq emel qilghan asasta élip bérilghanliqini anglap köp memnun bolduq. Biz Yawrupa Sherqiy Turkistan Birligi bilen qoshmaq teshkilat bolush salayiti bilen bu qétimqi saylamda wezipe alghan hemsherilirimizni we u teshkilatning barliq ezalirini qizghin tebrikleymiz we bundin kéyinki barliq xizmetlerde Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyining jümlidin möhtirem animiz Rabiye Qadirning etrapigha zich uyushup, öz-ara hemkarliship küresh qilidighanliqimizni bildürimiz.
Sherqiy Turkistan Birliki Teshkilati
Gérmaniye,Frankfurt am/Main
2008 – yili 14 - Yaniwar.
Bash shitabi Gérmaniyining Müchén shehridiki "Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki" teshkilatining 16 - nöwetlik saylimining 2008 - yili 1 - ayning 13 - küni 150 din artuq uyghur jamaitining ishtirak qilishi bilen daghdughuluq échilip, ghelbilik yépilghanliqi, weten siritida uchqandek rawajliniwatqan milliy herkitimizning yéngi yildiki yéngi bir ghelbisi bolup qaldi.
Yawrupa Sherqiy Turkistan Birligi, 17 yildin artuq shanliq tarixqa ige bolup, uning milliy herkitimizge qoshqan qimmetlik töhpilliri xelqimiz arisida dastan bolup qalghisi. Yawropa sherqiy Türkistan Birlikgi, milliy herkitimizdiki shereplik enenige we jushqun hayati küchke tolghan bir teshkilat bolup, u tarixida zulum astida yashawatqan xelqimizge siyasiy ghaye, musteqilliq iradisi we ümüt ata qilipla qalmay Sherqiy Türkistan ( Uyghuristan) milliy Qurultiyi, Dunya Uyghur Yashliri Qurultiyi we bügünki Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyining dunygha kélishige zor hesse qoshup, weten siritidiki musteqilliq herkitimizning awangart küchliridin biri bolup qaldi.
Mezkur teshkilatning bu qétimqi saylimigha Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilatining aldinqi reisi, Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyi ning Bash katipi Dolqun Eysa ependi bilen, sabiq Sherqiy Türkistan ( Uyghuristan) milliy Qurultiyining reis, Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyi Ijraiye komitétining wakaletchi reisi Enwerjan qatarliq bilimlik ziyalilar we milliy küresh sépimizdiki küchlük shexislerning özlirini namzat qilip körsetkenliki we muhim wezipilerde olturghanliqi , bu teshkilatning qanchilik derijide küchlük ikenlikini ispatlap turidighan pakittur.
Bu qétimqi saylamda Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilatining sabiq reyisi, Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyining bash katipi Dolqun Eysa ependi Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilatining yéngi bir nöwetlik reislikige, sabiq Sherqiy Türkistan ( Uyghuristan) milliy Qurultiyining reis, Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyi Ijraiye komitétining wakaletchi reyisi Enwerjan ependi we Tursun Muhemmed ependiler Yawrupa Sherqiy Türkistan Birliki teshkilatining Muawin reyislikige, Erkin Zunun ependi yene bir qétim teshkilatning bash katipliqigha, Gülnar Osman xanim Fondi mes`ulluqigha, Memtimin Qarim Diniy ishlar bölümi mudirliqigha , Abdusalam ependi Teptishlike , Rahile Osman xanim-qizlar bölümi mes`ulluqigha, Abduleziz Ahmed ependi yashlar bölümi mes`ulluqigha sayliniptu.
Teshkilatimizning barliq ezaliri Yawrupa Sherqiy Turkistan Birligining bu qétimqi saylamningmu intayin adil we démokiratik pirinsiplargha toluq emel qilghan asasta élip bérilghanliqini anglap köp memnun bolduq. Biz Yawrupa Sherqiy Turkistan Birligi bilen qoshmaq teshkilat bolush salayiti bilen bu qétimqi saylamda wezipe alghan hemsherilirimizni we u teshkilatning barliq ezalirini qizghin tebrikleymiz we bundin kéyinki barliq xizmetlerde Dunya Uyghur Qurultiyining jümlidin möhtirem animiz Rabiye Qadirning etrapigha zich uyushup, öz-ara hemkarliship küresh qilidighanliqimizni bildürimiz.
Sherqiy Turkistan Birliki Teshkilati
Gérmaniye,Frankfurt am/Main
2008 – yili 14 - Yaniwar.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
THE UYGHURS
The Uyghur people are the indigenous and majority population living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) or what they correctly refer from a historical point of view as East Turkestan. The current territory of East Turkestan, or the XUAR under the PRC rule, is more than 1.6 million square kilometers and is bordering with Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. It also borders in its east with China’s Gansu and Qinghai provinces as well as Tibet. Although the Uyghurs are considered a minority in China but they still remain the majority population in East Turkestan. Furthermore, they cannot be considered a minority group in comparison to other population groups in the world. The Uyghur population is one of the groups ranking within the 100 groups whose population exceeds more than one million. If there are 2,000 ethnic groups in the world, the Uyghurs are within the first 100. In fact the size of Uyghur population is bigger than many population groups who have independent states. For example, the size of Kyrgyz and Turkmen populations, although smaller than the Uyghur population, they both have independent states. The Uyghurs are not a minority in East Turkestan but have always been the absolute majority. According to latest Chinese statistics, the Uyghurs are still the majority in the XUAR. In 1949, the Uyghur population consisted of 78% of the total population in East Turkestan and together with other Turkic groups such Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tatars, and Uzbeks, consisted of 98% of the total population. The Chinese population was only 2% in 1949 but has become nearly half of the total population in the XUAR at this time and may soon even become the majority population. Although the 2002 Chinese statistics put the total number of Uyghurs into 8.2 million but Uyghur estimates are higher and up to 20 million. The Uyghurs are considered the fifth largest Turkic groups in Central Asia after Azers, Kazakhs, Turks and Uzbeks, with a long political history and civilization.
1. The Distribution of Uyghur Population
The majority Uyghur population live in East Turkestan and the rest live in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. A small portion of the Uyghur population also lives in Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
a. Uyghur Diaspora in Central Asia
Today, majority of Uyghur diaspora lives in Central Asian states because East Turkestan is part of Central Asia and Uyghurs have close historical, ethnic, and cultural relations with the peoples there as well as geological oneness. According to official statistics from Central Asian states, the Uyghur population in Kazakhstan is 246,000, in Kyrgyzstan is 50,000, in Uzbekistan 39,000 and in Russia is around 3,000. But local Uyghur intellectuals believe that the actual number of Uyghur population in Central Asia is around 1 to 2 million and their number is reduced to what it is now for political reasons.During the 19th century, an estimated 300,000 Uyghurs living in Fergana Valley mixed with Uzbeks in that region. During the 18th and 19th centuries, many Uyghurs in the Ili and Kashgar regions fled to Central Asia as a result of Manchu suppression of Uyghur uprisings against the invading Qing army. Although later certain number of Uyghurs returned to East Turkestan to fight off the Manchu invaders but they had to flee again in 1877 after the defeat of Yakub Beg’s state of Kashgaria, and in 1881 after the Russians returned the Ili region to the Manchus according to “The Russian-Qing Agreement.?The Uyghur immigration to Central Asia has never stopped. In the early 20th century, there have been many waves of Uyghurs going to the then-Soviet Fergana Valley from Kashgaria and to the then-Soviet Yette Su region from the Ili Region to work in factories or do business, and finally settled there. Such waves of immigration increased the Uyghur population in the Soviet Central Asia in the early 20th century to 700,000 according to the Soviet statistics, but the number of Soviet Uyghurs dramatically decreased due to Stalin’s targeted purge of Uyghurs from 1937 to 1938, and due to the WWII from 1941 to 1945. Also, during 1950s and 1960s, there was a mass exodus of Uyghurs into the Soviet Central Asia but the exact number is unclear. Some estimates are up to 100,000. Most of them settled in the Kazakhstan Republic.During the Soviet era, the Uyghur culture was allowed to develop in Kazakhstan. In those years, the Soviet leadership offered Uyghurs in Central Asia certain privileges in order to take advantage of their geopolitical position in dealing with Communist China. In Kazakhstan alone, five different Uyghur newspapers were published; Uyghur bureau was established in every publishing house for printing Uyghur science and literature books and textbooks for Uyghur schools. In addition, more than 60 Uyghur schools were established and some universities also opened Uyghur offices/centers. There were both daily Uyghur radio and television broadcasting. And Uyghur Theater was quite active. However, such trends changed dramatically after Kazakhstan had become independent in 1991. Many of these programs were cut except the Uyghur schools. Today, Kazakhstan still remains to be the Central Asian country, comparatively better than both Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, where the Uyghur culture is best preserved.The situation in Kyrgyzstan is quite different from Kazakhstan. Although there have never been Uyghur media or schools in this country, but Uyghurs have been able to successfully preserve their own ethnic identity and tradition. The Uyghur diaspora in Kyrgyzstan has always had a close relationship with the Uyghur diaspora in Kazakhstan. They are closely in touch through frequent visits, meetings and exchanges. Such exchanges have played a positive role in preserving the Uyghur culture and identity in Kyrgyzstan. In general, during the 1950s and 1960s, Uygurs from the Ili Region settled down in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and Uyghurs from the Kashgar and Artush Regions settled down in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Although the Uyghurs local to Kyrgyzstan shared the same ethnicity with the Uyghur settlers from East Turkestan but they have preserved their own unique difference. In terms of ethnic assimilation of Uyghur communities in Central Asia, the most notable one is the Uyghur diaspora in Uzbekistan because of the close proximity of Uyghur-Uzbek languages, customs and traditions, etc. However, such trend is rare in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Today, Kazakhstan is the country where the biggest Uyghur diaspora lives. But there is definite information with regard to the Uyghur communities in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. But according to the Soviet statistics, there were more than 4,000 Uyghur residents in the Bayram Ali region of Turkmenistan some 20 years ago. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Central Asian states, Uyghurs living in these states began to promote and preserve Uyghur culture and identity, and even began to form political and cultural organizations aimed at linking their political future with those Uyghurs in East Turkestan. Initially, the Central Asian states allowed Uyghurs to form such organizations and even took advantage of them. But after the establishment of the Shanghai Five group in 1996, Central Asian states began to restrict Uyghur political activities in their respective territories in consideration of their diplomatic relations with China. After September 11, 2001, Central Asian states supported the Chinese efforts to fight against terrorism and restricted any kind of Uyghur political activism and warned Uyghurs not to interfere with China’s territorial integrity. They even dispatched Uyghur community leaders to China to establish ‘normal?relations with Beijing. In the past, the Uyghurs in Central Asia became a useful card for the Soviets to play against China. And again, Uyghurs became a card for the Central Asian states to play, this time, in favor of China.
b. Uyghur Diaspora in the West
The first Uyghurs reached the West, especially Europe through Russia, Turkey and India, in the early part of the 20th century. But there is no specific information on their resettlement there. During the 1970s, a lot of Uyghur began to immigrate to Western countries. In this period, some Uyghurs who had immigrated to Turkey from 1949 to 1960 began to immigrate to Germany as a result of employment. This is the beginning of Uyghur immigration in Western and Northern Europe. Around the same time period, some Uyghur immigrated to Australia. Although the first Uyghurs came to the U.S. in the 1950s but majority of them arrived after late 1980s. The number of Uyghur immigrants in the West dramatically increased after 2000 and is still growing. Today, an estimated 1,000 Uyghur Americans and Uyghurs with permanent legal resident status are living in the United States as students and employees. Both Radio Free Asia Uyghur Service and the Uyghur American Association based in Washington, DC became a magnet for other Uyghur immigrants to come and live in the U.S. capital. In Canada, Uyghur immigrants are spread mostly in three locations: Toronto, Vancouver and Quebec. Most Uyghurs living in Quebec came from Central Asia.At present, one could find Uyghurs in most European Union nations such as Germany, the Great Britain, Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Uyghurs, who came to these countries for various reasons, are in two major groups: one came directly from East Turkestan and another from Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The Uyghurs who have immigrated to the West are second generation Uyghurs whose parents fled China during 1950s and 1960s to Central Asia.
2. Uyghur Language and Script
Uyghur language belongs to the Uyghur-Qarluq group within the family tree of Turkish languages in the Altai language system. The Uyghur language, together with more than 40 Turkic languages including Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Tartar share close affinity in morphology, syntax and phonetics. Among these languages, Uyghur and Uzbek are the closest two languages belonging in the same language group. The Uyghurs are one of the oldest Turkic groups that developed and used their own written script. The Uyghurs used Old Turkic runic script from 6th to 9th centuries. They used Uyghur script developed from the Soghdian script from 9th to 16th centuries. But the Uyghurs in Tarim Valley who accepted Islam began to use the Arabic script since the 10th century. This Uyghur Arabic script, modified many times over the centuries to today’s 32-letter system, has been used by all Uyghurs as official script to this day. The Uyghurs in the Soviet Central Asia used the Uyghur Latin script in the 1930s and began to use the Uyghur Cyrillic script in 1947. This Cyrillic script was recognized as the official Uyghur script in Kazakhstan for purposes of education, media and publication.
3. Religion
The Uyghur people believe in the Sunni Branch of Islam. Alghouth Islam reached Kasghar in the 8th century but it did not become the state religion of the Uyghur Qarahand Kingdom until the 10th century. Since then, Islam quickly spread and all Uyghurs became Muslims around the 15th century.Historically, the Uyghurs have believed in a number of religions, including Shamanism, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity, and finally Islam. For about a thousand years, the Uyghurs have continued to believe in Islam. Buddhism initially came to Uyghurs in Hotan via India during the 2nd century B.C. Uyghur Buddhism centers such as Kuchar and Turfan played a pivotal role in spreading Buddhism to China. Prominent Uyghur Buddhist scholar Komorajiwa translated Buddhist scripts and philosophies into Chinese for their conversion. Uyghurs also believed in Manichaeism and Christianity before the advent of Islam. They played an active role in promoting and spreading these religions to their neighbors. From the 10th to 15th centuries, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity and Islam peacefully coexisted among the Uyghur religious believers under the rule of Uyghur Idiqut Kingdom in Turfan. The Uyghurs believing all these different religions lived in peace, harmony, equality, and respected one another’s religious beliefs, creating a new culture. In the later period, Islam became the dominant religion over other religions, and was accepted by Uyghur tribes in both Turfan and Qumul regions. The tolerant rule of the Uyghur Idiqut Kingdom (867-1368) in Turfan is one of the most progressive rules of ancient times and paved a way of religious tolerance for later periods.After the first Uyghurs accepted Islam in the 10th century, it gradually spread and finally became the dominant religion among the Uyghurs. As Islam permeated into Uyghur heartlands, it played an important role in forming Uyghur spirituality, Uyghur social values, economic outlook and new Uyghur identity.
4. Culture, Literature and Art
The Uyghurs possess a rich folk and ethnographic culture. In terms of Uyghur food, dress, music, instruments and lifestyle, the Uyghurs belong to the Central Asian culture, which is completely different from the Chinese culture. Although East Turkestan is now officially part of the PRC but the Uyghurs are an inalienable part of the Turkic peoples in ethnicity, the Muslim world in religion, and the Central Asia in culture. It is true that at a later period the Uyghurs?traditional culture was to a certain extent influenced by the Chinese and Western cultures. In some ways, the Uyghur culture conformed to the modern Chinese culture but such conformation has not fundamentally changed the traditional Uyghur culture. Since the Uyghur culture is essentially a Central Asian culture, and the Chinese culture an Eastern culture, it is easer for the Uyghurs to accept the Central or Western Asian cultural values since they share the same ethnicity and religion. With the Russian conquest of Central Asia during the late 19th century, European social, economic, industrial and cultural influence began to permeate into this region. The Uyghurs, through the Ferghana Valley and the Yette Su region, began to come into contact with Russian and European cultures and goods. During this period, Turks, Tartars and Uzbek bourgeois as well as Uyghur capitalists played an important role in bringing European-style education for the Uyghurs and in enlightening them with new political ideologies. With the revolutionary changes in Russia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and influx of Russian immigrants fleeing the Soviet communist rule into East Turkestan as well as the continuous Soviet influence in the region from 1930s to 1950s, modern Uyghur culture began to flourish intermingling with the European cultural values. In short, the Uyghur modern culture developed in East Turkestan not under the influence of the still minority Chinese culture but under the influence of Central Asian and Western cultures until the 1960s. Even today, the Western cultural influence still dominates the Uyghur cultural psyche. Historically, the Uyghurs have left a treasure house full of cultural relics. Throughout history, the Uyghurs have created their unique history, a classic literature and oral literature in comparison to other nomadic Turkic tribes. From the Uyghur Empire (A.D. 744-840) based in Mongolia to the Qarahand Uyghur Kingdom based in Kashgar (A.D. 9th century-1212) and to the Idiqut Kingdom based in Turfan (A.D. 867-1368), the Uyghurs using ancient Runic script, Uyghur script and later Arab script left volumes upon volumes of scripts and writings on Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity and Islam as well as political, social, legal and literature works. The early Middle Ages can be considered the Golden Age of Uyghur civilization in Central Asia. During the 11th century, prominent Uyghur scholar Mahmud Kashgari wrote the renowned “Turkic Languages Encyclopedia?and famous Uyghur statesman Yusuf Has Hajip penned the book on statecraft “Qutatqu Bilik.?Around the same time, the epic “Oghuzname?appeared in the Turfan region and other poetry and translated works such as “Altun Yaruq,?“Matriy Simit?and “The Biography of Xunzang?became the representative works of the time. The Uyghurs, during the Mongol rule of Chingiz Khan and his descendents, used the Uyghur-Turkic Chaghatay Language and created valuable cultural relics and literature works. This Uyghur language, containing many borrowed Arab and Farsi loan words, became the main literary language of Turkic peoples in Central Asia from the 14th to 19th centuries. Renowned Uyghur poets such as Nawayi (1441-1501), Lutfi (1366-1465), Sekkaki (1468-?), Atayi (15th century), Hirqiti (17th century), Gheribi (18th century), Zelili (1676-1755), Newbeti (1691-1760?), Abdureyim Nizari (1779-1880), Molla Shakir (1805-1870), and Bilal Nazim (1824-1899) became the Uyghur literature stars who developed the modern Uyghur literature based on the ancient Kashgar-Turfan literature heritage. In other words, modern Uyghur literature is the continuation of ancient Uyghur literary traditions. The Uyghur classic literature in different ages has been under the tremendous influence of different religious beliefs and other factors such as Sanskrit, Farsi and Arab culture. Although the Chinese scholars attempt to prove that Uyghur classic literature was developed under the strong influence of Chinese culture but in fact there is little or no evidence that it was the case and such proposition has been rejected.In addition, the Uyghurs also developed different prose-style poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries and recorded historical events with epic poetries. These epic poetries recorded the conversion of Qarahand King Sultan Sutuq to Islam in the 10th century, the history of the Yarkand Kingdom (1514-1678), the Ages of Hojas (1678-1759) and the events related to the struggle against the Manchu invasion, including battles of Kashgar King Yaqup Beg, the Rashidin Hoja uprising in Kuchar and the actions of Uyghur Taranchi in Ili region. The representative examples of such epic poetry are the works of Muhammed Sadiq Kashgari (1725-1849), Mollah Haji (19th century), and Mollah Musa Sayrami (1836-1917). Today, there are more than 400 manuscripts of ancient Uyghur epic poetries preserved in the Asian Museum of the Saint Petersburg in Russia. Others are available at the museums and research institutes in Urumchi, Beijing, Tashkent, and Moscow. The Uyghurs created the modern Uyghur literature in the 20th century. The Uyghur writers and poets using different writing styles and forms made unprecedented progress in writing epic poetries, prose and even drama. The modern Uyghur literature is a complete system of literature developed partly in the Uyghur literature centers of Alma-Ata and Tashkent in the 1930s. The Uyghur writers in the Soviet Central Asia, such as Omer Muhammedi, Hezim Iskendirof, and Momun Hemrayef, made tremendous contribution to the formation of modern Uyghur literature. In East Turkestan, Abduhaliq Uyghuri, Lutfulla Mutellip, Zunun Qadir, abdurehim Otkur, Ziya Semedi, Teyipjan Eliyof and Zordun Sabir are considered the forefathers of modern Uyghur literature. Although the modern Uyghur literature was developed in both East Turkestan and the Soviet Central Asia, and could even be divided into two separate literatures, but they are in fact one because they shared the same theme, content and styles. The historic Uyghur art of paining is quite unique in style and highly developed. The Buddhist paintings in the grottoes of Turfan and Kuchar are the best representatives of Uyghur classical paintings. At present, the Kuchar Grottoes paintings are quite well preserved in abundance. The Uyghur Buddhist paintings have a long history and lasted until the 13th century in Turfan area. After Islam became the dominant religion of Uyghurs, the Uyghur grottoes paintings practically ceased. Although some miniature paintings appeared in the Middle Ages but they didn’t develop any further than the art of painting in Central Asia. Today, Uyghur painters in both East Turkestan and Central Asian states have been able to successfully create unique paintings in the realist, abstract and French styles. The best examples can be Ghazi Amat and Kerim Nasirdin from East Turkestan; Lekim Ibrayimof form Uzbekistan; Azat Mamadinof from Russia; Ahat Baqiyev from Kazakhstan and Telet Mirrahimof from Kyrgyzstan. There are currently more than 100 well-known Uyghur painters in East Turkestan and Central Asia, and Ghazi Amat is considered the father of modern Uyghur painting. The Uyghurs cannot live with their music and songs. The Uyghurs have a very unique musical culture with “Uyghur Twelve Muqam?representing the most systematic Uyghur classical music. Although different Uyghur regions have their own special dance and music but all of them use the same musical instruments, such as satar, ghejek, tambur, dutar, rawap, flute and drum. Uyghur songs, divided by regions, have their peculiar regional tones special to each region. As a result, Uyghur dance and music in Kuchar, Kashgar, Artush, Turfan, Qumul and Ili are somewhat different. Uyghur singers Tudahum, Pasha Ishan, Abdureyim Ahmedi and others are famous for singing Uyghur muqams and folk songs. According to Chinese historical sources, Uyghur people living in the Tarim Basin from the 7th to the 13th centuries developed a high culture of music, dancing and singing. During the 10th century, Chinese visitor Wang Yende recorded that Uyghurs living in the Turfan Iduqut Kingdom carried with them musical instruments everywhere. Uyghurs not only developed their own style of singing, dancing and playing music throughout history. They have also adopted many Western style of singing, dancing and playing music in recent years, enriching the Uyghur musical culture to another step.
5. Historical Identity
The Uyghurs are one of the oldest Turkic peoples in Central Asia. According to historical Chinese record, they have direct blood relations with the ancient Huns and even considered their descendents. Russian historian A. N. Bernishtam believes that the Uyghur people have historically lived in East Turkestan, Mongolia and Yette Su region, and they are the indigenous to East Turkestan. The Uyghurs established the Qanqil Kingdom during the 5th and 6th centuries in the Tarim Basin and the eastern part of the Tagnri Mountains (Tianshan Mountain), and became part of the Kok Turk Empire in the 7th century. The Uyghurs in Mongolia established their own state in the 7th century. In 744, the Uyghurs established a powerful Uyghur State based in Mongolia ruling East Turkestan, Yette Su region, southern Siberia and Altai region including all Turkic, Mongol and even Tonghus-Manchu languages speaking peoples. According to prominent China scholar Colin Mackeras, the Uyghurs actually established an empire called the “Uyghur Empire.? During the 8th and 9th centuries, the Uyghur Empire became the co-equal of China’s Tang Dynasty and the Tibetan Kingdom and in many ways was more powerful than both. The Uyghur Empire played a critical role in suppressing the An Lushan Uprising against the Tang Dynasty, which almost overthrew it, and in saving the weak Chinese state. As a result, the Tang Dynasty became a subordinate of the Uyghur Empire and began to pay annual tributes to the Uyghurs. After the fall of the Uyghur Empire in Mongolia in 840, Uyghurs moved in five directions. Most Uyghur tribes based in the empire capital of Karabalghasun moved to today’s Gansu province and East Turkestan, and mixed with the local Uyghur and Turkic tribes. Later they established the Turfan Idiqut Kingdom (867-1368), Ganzhou Uyghur Kingdom (847-1036) and the Qarahand Kingdom (9th century to 1212). Although some Chinese scholars attempt to describe that Uyghurs moved into East Turkestan for the first time only after the fall of the Uyghur Empire in Mongolia, but other prominent Chinese scholars such as Feng Jasheng, Gu Bao, and Chen Sulo rejected such proposition by stating that Uyghurs lived in East Turketan long before the fall of their empire. Gu Bao believes that most Uyghurs at the time of the fall of the Uyghur Empire lived in the Tarim-Turfan basin area and only a minority of Uyghurs from Mongolia moved into this area after the fall. Bao asserts that Uyghurs have always been the indigenous population of East Turkestan. In addition, Russian scholar A. N. Bernishtam, D.I. Tihonof, D. Pozdneyev and V. Radlov as well as the Japanese scholar Abe Takeo and Turkish scholars Bahayiddin Oge and Zeki Welidi Toghan believe that the Uyghurs are one of the most ancient Turkic peoples indigenous to today’s East Turkestan. Furthermore, Uyhgur historians Muhammed Imin Bughra (1901-1965), Turghun Almas (1921-2001), Dawut Issiyef (1937-1996) and Malik Kebirof confirm that East Turkestan has always been the motherland of the Uyghur people, the Uyghurs who had moved to the Orhun Basin (Mongolia) were only belonging to the eastern Uyghur tribes who later established the Uyghur Empire in Mongolia. They believe that these eastern Uyghur tribes moved back to East Turkestan area after the fall of the empire and later played a significant role in keeping the historic motherland of Uyghurs independent until the Manchu armies invaded in 1759. During the 12th and 13th centuries, there had been great changes taking place in Central Asia. In 1206, Chingiz Khan established a Mongol Dynasty after conquering Mongol factions and neighboring Turkic tribes. Since the Uyghur Kingdom in Turfan recognized the Mongol Kingdom as one of the first states, the Uyghurs developed a friendly relation with the Mongol Empire. As a result such close ally relationship, Chingiz Khan offered his daughter to marry the Uyghur King and even called him his “fifth son.?Chingiz Khan also adopted the Uyghur script as the official script of the Mongol Empire and hired Uyghur military commanders and scribes to serve his army and educate his people. In general, the Uyghurs played a very important role during the Mongol Empire period in its administration of Persia, Central Asia and China. During the rule of Chingiz Khan’s son Kublai Khan (1279-1368) in China, the Uyghurs were given a position just below the ruling Mongols in light of their tremendous contribution to the empire. The Uyghurs were given such a high position as a result of their advanced culture and loyalty to the empire. During the 13th and 14th centuries, the Uyghurs lived under the Chaghatay rule. During the 16th century, the Uyghurs in Tarim Basin established the Saidiye Kingdom in Yarkand, ruling the areas including East Turkestan, Yette Su region, parts of Tibet and Kashmir. Although during the 17th and 18th centuries, the Uyghurs were under the strong influence of the Junghar Mongol influence and even paid taxes to them, but they were mostly left alone to rule themselves under the Uyghur Hojas. In 1759, the Manchu Qing Dynasty invaded the Tarim Basin but faced fierce resistance from the Uyghurs. As a result, the Manchus were never able to successfully control East Turkestan. In fact, the Manchu rule in East Turkestan was overthrown in 1864. After that, Uyghurs established the Kashgaria Uyghur Kingdom (1865-1878) in the south and the Ili Sultanate (1864-1871) in the north, freeing them from foreign subjugation.
The Kashgaria Kingdom later became the focal point of power struggle between great powers such as the Great Britain, Russia and the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which is called the “Great Game.?As a result of this great game, both Russia and the Great Britain allowed the Manchus to reoccupy East Turkestan. In 1878, the Manchu armies led by General Zo Zongtang invaded East Turkestan and established the Manchu rule. In 1884, the Manchus changed East Turkestan into “Xinjiang,?meaning “New Territory,?and designated it as a province. In other words, the name “Xinjiang?has only been used for 113 years. Before that, the Chinese called this region as “Xiyu?or “Western Region?and some even called “Huijiang?meaning ?the Territory of Muslims.?Although the Manchus used Xinjiang to name East Turkestan but the local Uyghur population was not aware of such name changes so continuously used the words “East Turkestan,?“Turkestan?or the oases names of their own towns. In 1912, after the Chinese revolution that overthrew the Manchu Qin Dynasty and the establishment of the Chinese Republic, the Uyghurs in Qumul region revolted against the Chinese rule but failed. After that Chinese governor Yang Zengxing ruled East Turkestan for 17 years enforcing a policy of “divide and conquer, and keep locals backward.?Although he was one of the most cunning early Chinese rulers in East Turkestan but he died in the hands of others. In 1931, the Uyghurs in Qumul staged another large scale uprising against the Chinese rule and the Uyghurs along with other Turkic groups such as Kazakhs and Kyrgys as well as Mongols controlled all areas of East Turkestan except Urumchi in 1934.
On November 12, 1933 the Uyghurs declared their independence by establishing the East Turkestan Islamic Republic and announced that they were the masters of East Turkestan. This republic, established on democratic principles, had its own constitution, national flag, national emblem and money. By declaring a democratic rule and abolishment of Chinese rule, this new republic adopted both foreign and domestic policies. However, in 1934, the Soviet Union established the Xinjiang Research Office led by Voroshilov to assess the situation in East Turkestan and the roles of the Great Britain and Japan in the region. This office later recommended to the Soviet government that Moscow should support the Chinese militarist Shen Shicai’s rule in East Turkestan instead of recognizing the newly independent Uyghur state because that would serve Moscow’s long-term political interest in creating the region as a buffer zone and in opposing the British, Japanese and Islamic challenges in the region. As a result, the Soviets sent its red army and crushed the Uyghur state, solidified the Chinese militarist rule in the region, prevented Chinese Nationalist army to enter the region, blocked the pathway to East Turkestan for seven years and later deployed a block of red army near the border. After Sheng Shicai solidified his power, and especially after the Nazi Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he betrayed Moscow and allied with Chinese Nationalists. He allowed the entry of the Chinese Nationalist Army into East Turkestan.
In 1943, the Chinese Nationalist Government allowed the U.S. and the Great Britain to establish their consulates in Urumchi in order to put further pressure on the Soviets. Since then, Stalin realized his betrayal and began to support the Uyghur independence and prevent an American and British foothold in the region in order to take his revenge against Shen Shicai and the Chinese Nationalists. During his 13-year rule, Shen Shicai murdered more than 100,000 Uyghurs and other Turkic people under all kinds of false political and criminal charges, enraging them and inspiring them to seek independence. As a result, starting in 1943 Uyghur and Kazakhs began to form underground political organizations against rule of china. In September 1944, Uyghurs in the Ili region armed themselves and fought against Chinese rule. On November 12, just three months later, they declared the independence of the East Turkestan Republic. This new republic received military, political, and financial support from the Soviet Union. The Soviets also provided all kinds of advisers. In its 9-point declaration, the East Turkestan Republic declared an independent republic that would treat all religions and peoples equally by embracing democracy and rejecting totalitarianism.
On April 8, 1945 the East Turkestan Republic established its standing army and fought against the Chinese Nationalist forces in three fronts and liberated 26 counties in Ili, Altay and Tarbaghatay regions as well as 6 counties in Kashgar and Aksu regions. The Uyghur struggle for independence became nationwide and the Chinese Nationalist government in Urumchi was about to be crushed. At such a critical time, Stalin forced the East Turkestan leadership to compromise and negotiate with the Chinese Nationalist government. After nearly eight months of negotiation under intense pressure from Moscow, a coalition government was established for the Uyghurs and Chinese to share political powers. But the coalition government collapsed within a year and the East Turkestan army resumed fighting against the Chinese forces and stopped at the Manas River. This river became the unofficial border between two sides until November 1949.
The democratic East Turkestan Republic, consisted of Ili, Altai and Tarbaghatay regions, was loved by all the ethnic groups living in those regions. The reason is that all peoples including the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tartars, Tajiks, Tunggan and Uzbeks believing in Islam, Russians believing in Christianity, Mongols believing in Lamaism, and Shibo and Daur believing in Shamanism fought together for their freedom and this republic. They all supported and created the independence of East Turkestan. Although some Chinese historians try to portray this independence republic as established under the influence of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism but such views are not in line with history. One of the main reasons for Moscow to stop supporting the East Turkestan Republic and forcing its leaders to negotiate with the Chinese Nationalist government was the agreement made at the Yalta Conference held on February 11, 1945, in which the Soviets signed a friendship treaty with the Chinese Nationalists after the Russian interests in Mongolia and Manchuria guaranteed, the Russian decided to join the war against Japan to end the WWII and determine the post-war order.
In accordance with the Yalta Agreement, the Soviet-Chinese negotiation started in June 1945 and ended in August after the Chinese Nationalist government guaranteed the Russian interest in Mongolia and Manchuria. In these negotiations, Chinese Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi demanded from Stalin that Moscow not support the East Turkestan independence and provide weapons. Moscow assured Jiang that the Soviets had no territorial interest in Xinjiang. In short, both Russian and Western historian believe that the East Turkestan Republic became a ‘strategic pawn?of power politics and the Uyghur people’s struggle for freedom and independence was betrayed by political intrigues of great powers. In late 1949, Stalin decided to support Mao Zedong’s communist revolution due to the political situation in China and the necessity of emerging Cold War. During his secret visit to Moscow in July 1947, Liu Shaoqi not only talked about the political system after the communist revolution but also the Xinjiang problem. Liu reiterated to the Soviet leadership that Xinjiang was part of China. According to Uyghur historic witness accounts, Stalin sent Seyfidin Aziz as a figurehead of the East Turkestan Republic to Beijing to attend the founding ceremony of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 after East Turkestan President Ahmatjan Qasimi and other high-level ministers had refused to accept Stalin’s proposal that East Turkestan should be under Chinese communist rule and died in an alleged plane crash on their way to Beijing as a result of their refusal. Furthermore, the Soviets played an active role in persuading remaining Chinese Nationalist forces to surrender to the incoming Chinese red army, which was airlifted by the Soviet transport planes to accelerate the occupation of East Turkestan. With the full support of the Soviet Union, the Chinese red army was able to enter and occupy East Turkestan by November 1949 and start a new and dark political chapter. Mao Zedong, when commenting on the independent East Turkestan, said “The Three-Region Struggle is part of China’s new democratic struggle,?implying that it was not fought for Uyghur independence. The East Turkestan people and army were able to learn of the death of their president Ahmatjan Qasimi and others three months after their death because Moscow and Beijing had kept it as the ultimate secret. Since then it was forbidden to fly the flag of the East Turkestan Republic and sing songs about the independence of East Turkestan. Only the Chinese flag was allowed to fly and the East Turkestan army was incorporated as the fifth corps of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. During this period in December 1949, a Chinese delegation led by Mao Zedong visited Moscow. After three months of negotiation, in February 1950 the “Sino-Soviet Friendsip and Cooperation Agreement?was signed. There were two clauses directly related to mining in East Turkestan and signed by Seyfidin Aziz, former education minister of the East Turkestan Republic who replaced the murdered president Ahmatjan Qasimi. After everything was completed according to the wishes of Stalin and Mao Zedong, in March 1950 the death of Ahmatjan Qasimi and other high-level Uyghur officials were declared and their bodies sent back to Ghulja City for burial. In October 1955, East Turkestan was declared the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Since 1949, the Uyghur people became only one of the 55 minority nationalities in China and suffered unprecedented repression at the hands of the Chinese government. Such heavy-handed repression, in addition to earlier Chinese rule, resulted the death of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs. Historians calculated more than 400 large-scale uprising against foreign rule by the Uyghur since the Manchu Qing Dynasty invaded East Turkestan. There have been many uprisings against the communist Chinese rule as well since 1949. If the Uyghur people were indeed “liberated?as the Chinese government claims, then why would they continue to stage uprisings against their rule? If they were indeed liberated, the situation would not be as complicated as today. And the international community would not have noticed the problems either.
The Uyghur people are the indigenous and majority population living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) or what they correctly refer from a historical point of view as East Turkestan. The current territory of East Turkestan, or the XUAR under the PRC rule, is more than 1.6 million square kilometers and is bordering with Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. It also borders in its east with China’s Gansu and Qinghai provinces as well as Tibet. Although the Uyghurs are considered a minority in China but they still remain the majority population in East Turkestan. Furthermore, they cannot be considered a minority group in comparison to other population groups in the world. The Uyghur population is one of the groups ranking within the 100 groups whose population exceeds more than one million. If there are 2,000 ethnic groups in the world, the Uyghurs are within the first 100. In fact the size of Uyghur population is bigger than many population groups who have independent states. For example, the size of Kyrgyz and Turkmen populations, although smaller than the Uyghur population, they both have independent states. The Uyghurs are not a minority in East Turkestan but have always been the absolute majority. According to latest Chinese statistics, the Uyghurs are still the majority in the XUAR. In 1949, the Uyghur population consisted of 78% of the total population in East Turkestan and together with other Turkic groups such Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tatars, and Uzbeks, consisted of 98% of the total population. The Chinese population was only 2% in 1949 but has become nearly half of the total population in the XUAR at this time and may soon even become the majority population. Although the 2002 Chinese statistics put the total number of Uyghurs into 8.2 million but Uyghur estimates are higher and up to 20 million. The Uyghurs are considered the fifth largest Turkic groups in Central Asia after Azers, Kazakhs, Turks and Uzbeks, with a long political history and civilization.
1. The Distribution of Uyghur Population
The majority Uyghur population live in East Turkestan and the rest live in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. A small portion of the Uyghur population also lives in Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
a. Uyghur Diaspora in Central Asia
Today, majority of Uyghur diaspora lives in Central Asian states because East Turkestan is part of Central Asia and Uyghurs have close historical, ethnic, and cultural relations with the peoples there as well as geological oneness. According to official statistics from Central Asian states, the Uyghur population in Kazakhstan is 246,000, in Kyrgyzstan is 50,000, in Uzbekistan 39,000 and in Russia is around 3,000. But local Uyghur intellectuals believe that the actual number of Uyghur population in Central Asia is around 1 to 2 million and their number is reduced to what it is now for political reasons.During the 19th century, an estimated 300,000 Uyghurs living in Fergana Valley mixed with Uzbeks in that region. During the 18th and 19th centuries, many Uyghurs in the Ili and Kashgar regions fled to Central Asia as a result of Manchu suppression of Uyghur uprisings against the invading Qing army. Although later certain number of Uyghurs returned to East Turkestan to fight off the Manchu invaders but they had to flee again in 1877 after the defeat of Yakub Beg’s state of Kashgaria, and in 1881 after the Russians returned the Ili region to the Manchus according to “The Russian-Qing Agreement.?The Uyghur immigration to Central Asia has never stopped. In the early 20th century, there have been many waves of Uyghurs going to the then-Soviet Fergana Valley from Kashgaria and to the then-Soviet Yette Su region from the Ili Region to work in factories or do business, and finally settled there. Such waves of immigration increased the Uyghur population in the Soviet Central Asia in the early 20th century to 700,000 according to the Soviet statistics, but the number of Soviet Uyghurs dramatically decreased due to Stalin’s targeted purge of Uyghurs from 1937 to 1938, and due to the WWII from 1941 to 1945. Also, during 1950s and 1960s, there was a mass exodus of Uyghurs into the Soviet Central Asia but the exact number is unclear. Some estimates are up to 100,000. Most of them settled in the Kazakhstan Republic.During the Soviet era, the Uyghur culture was allowed to develop in Kazakhstan. In those years, the Soviet leadership offered Uyghurs in Central Asia certain privileges in order to take advantage of their geopolitical position in dealing with Communist China. In Kazakhstan alone, five different Uyghur newspapers were published; Uyghur bureau was established in every publishing house for printing Uyghur science and literature books and textbooks for Uyghur schools. In addition, more than 60 Uyghur schools were established and some universities also opened Uyghur offices/centers. There were both daily Uyghur radio and television broadcasting. And Uyghur Theater was quite active. However, such trends changed dramatically after Kazakhstan had become independent in 1991. Many of these programs were cut except the Uyghur schools. Today, Kazakhstan still remains to be the Central Asian country, comparatively better than both Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, where the Uyghur culture is best preserved.The situation in Kyrgyzstan is quite different from Kazakhstan. Although there have never been Uyghur media or schools in this country, but Uyghurs have been able to successfully preserve their own ethnic identity and tradition. The Uyghur diaspora in Kyrgyzstan has always had a close relationship with the Uyghur diaspora in Kazakhstan. They are closely in touch through frequent visits, meetings and exchanges. Such exchanges have played a positive role in preserving the Uyghur culture and identity in Kyrgyzstan. In general, during the 1950s and 1960s, Uygurs from the Ili Region settled down in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and Uyghurs from the Kashgar and Artush Regions settled down in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Although the Uyghurs local to Kyrgyzstan shared the same ethnicity with the Uyghur settlers from East Turkestan but they have preserved their own unique difference. In terms of ethnic assimilation of Uyghur communities in Central Asia, the most notable one is the Uyghur diaspora in Uzbekistan because of the close proximity of Uyghur-Uzbek languages, customs and traditions, etc. However, such trend is rare in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Today, Kazakhstan is the country where the biggest Uyghur diaspora lives. But there is definite information with regard to the Uyghur communities in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. But according to the Soviet statistics, there were more than 4,000 Uyghur residents in the Bayram Ali region of Turkmenistan some 20 years ago. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Central Asian states, Uyghurs living in these states began to promote and preserve Uyghur culture and identity, and even began to form political and cultural organizations aimed at linking their political future with those Uyghurs in East Turkestan. Initially, the Central Asian states allowed Uyghurs to form such organizations and even took advantage of them. But after the establishment of the Shanghai Five group in 1996, Central Asian states began to restrict Uyghur political activities in their respective territories in consideration of their diplomatic relations with China. After September 11, 2001, Central Asian states supported the Chinese efforts to fight against terrorism and restricted any kind of Uyghur political activism and warned Uyghurs not to interfere with China’s territorial integrity. They even dispatched Uyghur community leaders to China to establish ‘normal?relations with Beijing. In the past, the Uyghurs in Central Asia became a useful card for the Soviets to play against China. And again, Uyghurs became a card for the Central Asian states to play, this time, in favor of China.
b. Uyghur Diaspora in the West
The first Uyghurs reached the West, especially Europe through Russia, Turkey and India, in the early part of the 20th century. But there is no specific information on their resettlement there. During the 1970s, a lot of Uyghur began to immigrate to Western countries. In this period, some Uyghurs who had immigrated to Turkey from 1949 to 1960 began to immigrate to Germany as a result of employment. This is the beginning of Uyghur immigration in Western and Northern Europe. Around the same time period, some Uyghur immigrated to Australia. Although the first Uyghurs came to the U.S. in the 1950s but majority of them arrived after late 1980s. The number of Uyghur immigrants in the West dramatically increased after 2000 and is still growing. Today, an estimated 1,000 Uyghur Americans and Uyghurs with permanent legal resident status are living in the United States as students and employees. Both Radio Free Asia Uyghur Service and the Uyghur American Association based in Washington, DC became a magnet for other Uyghur immigrants to come and live in the U.S. capital. In Canada, Uyghur immigrants are spread mostly in three locations: Toronto, Vancouver and Quebec. Most Uyghurs living in Quebec came from Central Asia.At present, one could find Uyghurs in most European Union nations such as Germany, the Great Britain, Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Uyghurs, who came to these countries for various reasons, are in two major groups: one came directly from East Turkestan and another from Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The Uyghurs who have immigrated to the West are second generation Uyghurs whose parents fled China during 1950s and 1960s to Central Asia.
2. Uyghur Language and Script
Uyghur language belongs to the Uyghur-Qarluq group within the family tree of Turkish languages in the Altai language system. The Uyghur language, together with more than 40 Turkic languages including Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Tartar share close affinity in morphology, syntax and phonetics. Among these languages, Uyghur and Uzbek are the closest two languages belonging in the same language group. The Uyghurs are one of the oldest Turkic groups that developed and used their own written script. The Uyghurs used Old Turkic runic script from 6th to 9th centuries. They used Uyghur script developed from the Soghdian script from 9th to 16th centuries. But the Uyghurs in Tarim Valley who accepted Islam began to use the Arabic script since the 10th century. This Uyghur Arabic script, modified many times over the centuries to today’s 32-letter system, has been used by all Uyghurs as official script to this day. The Uyghurs in the Soviet Central Asia used the Uyghur Latin script in the 1930s and began to use the Uyghur Cyrillic script in 1947. This Cyrillic script was recognized as the official Uyghur script in Kazakhstan for purposes of education, media and publication.
3. Religion
The Uyghur people believe in the Sunni Branch of Islam. Alghouth Islam reached Kasghar in the 8th century but it did not become the state religion of the Uyghur Qarahand Kingdom until the 10th century. Since then, Islam quickly spread and all Uyghurs became Muslims around the 15th century.Historically, the Uyghurs have believed in a number of religions, including Shamanism, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity, and finally Islam. For about a thousand years, the Uyghurs have continued to believe in Islam. Buddhism initially came to Uyghurs in Hotan via India during the 2nd century B.C. Uyghur Buddhism centers such as Kuchar and Turfan played a pivotal role in spreading Buddhism to China. Prominent Uyghur Buddhist scholar Komorajiwa translated Buddhist scripts and philosophies into Chinese for their conversion. Uyghurs also believed in Manichaeism and Christianity before the advent of Islam. They played an active role in promoting and spreading these religions to their neighbors. From the 10th to 15th centuries, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity and Islam peacefully coexisted among the Uyghur religious believers under the rule of Uyghur Idiqut Kingdom in Turfan. The Uyghurs believing all these different religions lived in peace, harmony, equality, and respected one another’s religious beliefs, creating a new culture. In the later period, Islam became the dominant religion over other religions, and was accepted by Uyghur tribes in both Turfan and Qumul regions. The tolerant rule of the Uyghur Idiqut Kingdom (867-1368) in Turfan is one of the most progressive rules of ancient times and paved a way of religious tolerance for later periods.After the first Uyghurs accepted Islam in the 10th century, it gradually spread and finally became the dominant religion among the Uyghurs. As Islam permeated into Uyghur heartlands, it played an important role in forming Uyghur spirituality, Uyghur social values, economic outlook and new Uyghur identity.
4. Culture, Literature and Art
The Uyghurs possess a rich folk and ethnographic culture. In terms of Uyghur food, dress, music, instruments and lifestyle, the Uyghurs belong to the Central Asian culture, which is completely different from the Chinese culture. Although East Turkestan is now officially part of the PRC but the Uyghurs are an inalienable part of the Turkic peoples in ethnicity, the Muslim world in religion, and the Central Asia in culture. It is true that at a later period the Uyghurs?traditional culture was to a certain extent influenced by the Chinese and Western cultures. In some ways, the Uyghur culture conformed to the modern Chinese culture but such conformation has not fundamentally changed the traditional Uyghur culture. Since the Uyghur culture is essentially a Central Asian culture, and the Chinese culture an Eastern culture, it is easer for the Uyghurs to accept the Central or Western Asian cultural values since they share the same ethnicity and religion. With the Russian conquest of Central Asia during the late 19th century, European social, economic, industrial and cultural influence began to permeate into this region. The Uyghurs, through the Ferghana Valley and the Yette Su region, began to come into contact with Russian and European cultures and goods. During this period, Turks, Tartars and Uzbek bourgeois as well as Uyghur capitalists played an important role in bringing European-style education for the Uyghurs and in enlightening them with new political ideologies. With the revolutionary changes in Russia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and influx of Russian immigrants fleeing the Soviet communist rule into East Turkestan as well as the continuous Soviet influence in the region from 1930s to 1950s, modern Uyghur culture began to flourish intermingling with the European cultural values. In short, the Uyghur modern culture developed in East Turkestan not under the influence of the still minority Chinese culture but under the influence of Central Asian and Western cultures until the 1960s. Even today, the Western cultural influence still dominates the Uyghur cultural psyche. Historically, the Uyghurs have left a treasure house full of cultural relics. Throughout history, the Uyghurs have created their unique history, a classic literature and oral literature in comparison to other nomadic Turkic tribes. From the Uyghur Empire (A.D. 744-840) based in Mongolia to the Qarahand Uyghur Kingdom based in Kashgar (A.D. 9th century-1212) and to the Idiqut Kingdom based in Turfan (A.D. 867-1368), the Uyghurs using ancient Runic script, Uyghur script and later Arab script left volumes upon volumes of scripts and writings on Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity and Islam as well as political, social, legal and literature works. The early Middle Ages can be considered the Golden Age of Uyghur civilization in Central Asia. During the 11th century, prominent Uyghur scholar Mahmud Kashgari wrote the renowned “Turkic Languages Encyclopedia?and famous Uyghur statesman Yusuf Has Hajip penned the book on statecraft “Qutatqu Bilik.?Around the same time, the epic “Oghuzname?appeared in the Turfan region and other poetry and translated works such as “Altun Yaruq,?“Matriy Simit?and “The Biography of Xunzang?became the representative works of the time. The Uyghurs, during the Mongol rule of Chingiz Khan and his descendents, used the Uyghur-Turkic Chaghatay Language and created valuable cultural relics and literature works. This Uyghur language, containing many borrowed Arab and Farsi loan words, became the main literary language of Turkic peoples in Central Asia from the 14th to 19th centuries. Renowned Uyghur poets such as Nawayi (1441-1501), Lutfi (1366-1465), Sekkaki (1468-?), Atayi (15th century), Hirqiti (17th century), Gheribi (18th century), Zelili (1676-1755), Newbeti (1691-1760?), Abdureyim Nizari (1779-1880), Molla Shakir (1805-1870), and Bilal Nazim (1824-1899) became the Uyghur literature stars who developed the modern Uyghur literature based on the ancient Kashgar-Turfan literature heritage. In other words, modern Uyghur literature is the continuation of ancient Uyghur literary traditions. The Uyghur classic literature in different ages has been under the tremendous influence of different religious beliefs and other factors such as Sanskrit, Farsi and Arab culture. Although the Chinese scholars attempt to prove that Uyghur classic literature was developed under the strong influence of Chinese culture but in fact there is little or no evidence that it was the case and such proposition has been rejected.In addition, the Uyghurs also developed different prose-style poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries and recorded historical events with epic poetries. These epic poetries recorded the conversion of Qarahand King Sultan Sutuq to Islam in the 10th century, the history of the Yarkand Kingdom (1514-1678), the Ages of Hojas (1678-1759) and the events related to the struggle against the Manchu invasion, including battles of Kashgar King Yaqup Beg, the Rashidin Hoja uprising in Kuchar and the actions of Uyghur Taranchi in Ili region. The representative examples of such epic poetry are the works of Muhammed Sadiq Kashgari (1725-1849), Mollah Haji (19th century), and Mollah Musa Sayrami (1836-1917). Today, there are more than 400 manuscripts of ancient Uyghur epic poetries preserved in the Asian Museum of the Saint Petersburg in Russia. Others are available at the museums and research institutes in Urumchi, Beijing, Tashkent, and Moscow. The Uyghurs created the modern Uyghur literature in the 20th century. The Uyghur writers and poets using different writing styles and forms made unprecedented progress in writing epic poetries, prose and even drama. The modern Uyghur literature is a complete system of literature developed partly in the Uyghur literature centers of Alma-Ata and Tashkent in the 1930s. The Uyghur writers in the Soviet Central Asia, such as Omer Muhammedi, Hezim Iskendirof, and Momun Hemrayef, made tremendous contribution to the formation of modern Uyghur literature. In East Turkestan, Abduhaliq Uyghuri, Lutfulla Mutellip, Zunun Qadir, abdurehim Otkur, Ziya Semedi, Teyipjan Eliyof and Zordun Sabir are considered the forefathers of modern Uyghur literature. Although the modern Uyghur literature was developed in both East Turkestan and the Soviet Central Asia, and could even be divided into two separate literatures, but they are in fact one because they shared the same theme, content and styles. The historic Uyghur art of paining is quite unique in style and highly developed. The Buddhist paintings in the grottoes of Turfan and Kuchar are the best representatives of Uyghur classical paintings. At present, the Kuchar Grottoes paintings are quite well preserved in abundance. The Uyghur Buddhist paintings have a long history and lasted until the 13th century in Turfan area. After Islam became the dominant religion of Uyghurs, the Uyghur grottoes paintings practically ceased. Although some miniature paintings appeared in the Middle Ages but they didn’t develop any further than the art of painting in Central Asia. Today, Uyghur painters in both East Turkestan and Central Asian states have been able to successfully create unique paintings in the realist, abstract and French styles. The best examples can be Ghazi Amat and Kerim Nasirdin from East Turkestan; Lekim Ibrayimof form Uzbekistan; Azat Mamadinof from Russia; Ahat Baqiyev from Kazakhstan and Telet Mirrahimof from Kyrgyzstan. There are currently more than 100 well-known Uyghur painters in East Turkestan and Central Asia, and Ghazi Amat is considered the father of modern Uyghur painting. The Uyghurs cannot live with their music and songs. The Uyghurs have a very unique musical culture with “Uyghur Twelve Muqam?representing the most systematic Uyghur classical music. Although different Uyghur regions have their own special dance and music but all of them use the same musical instruments, such as satar, ghejek, tambur, dutar, rawap, flute and drum. Uyghur songs, divided by regions, have their peculiar regional tones special to each region. As a result, Uyghur dance and music in Kuchar, Kashgar, Artush, Turfan, Qumul and Ili are somewhat different. Uyghur singers Tudahum, Pasha Ishan, Abdureyim Ahmedi and others are famous for singing Uyghur muqams and folk songs. According to Chinese historical sources, Uyghur people living in the Tarim Basin from the 7th to the 13th centuries developed a high culture of music, dancing and singing. During the 10th century, Chinese visitor Wang Yende recorded that Uyghurs living in the Turfan Iduqut Kingdom carried with them musical instruments everywhere. Uyghurs not only developed their own style of singing, dancing and playing music throughout history. They have also adopted many Western style of singing, dancing and playing music in recent years, enriching the Uyghur musical culture to another step.
5. Historical Identity
The Uyghurs are one of the oldest Turkic peoples in Central Asia. According to historical Chinese record, they have direct blood relations with the ancient Huns and even considered their descendents. Russian historian A. N. Bernishtam believes that the Uyghur people have historically lived in East Turkestan, Mongolia and Yette Su region, and they are the indigenous to East Turkestan. The Uyghurs established the Qanqil Kingdom during the 5th and 6th centuries in the Tarim Basin and the eastern part of the Tagnri Mountains (Tianshan Mountain), and became part of the Kok Turk Empire in the 7th century. The Uyghurs in Mongolia established their own state in the 7th century. In 744, the Uyghurs established a powerful Uyghur State based in Mongolia ruling East Turkestan, Yette Su region, southern Siberia and Altai region including all Turkic, Mongol and even Tonghus-Manchu languages speaking peoples. According to prominent China scholar Colin Mackeras, the Uyghurs actually established an empire called the “Uyghur Empire.? During the 8th and 9th centuries, the Uyghur Empire became the co-equal of China’s Tang Dynasty and the Tibetan Kingdom and in many ways was more powerful than both. The Uyghur Empire played a critical role in suppressing the An Lushan Uprising against the Tang Dynasty, which almost overthrew it, and in saving the weak Chinese state. As a result, the Tang Dynasty became a subordinate of the Uyghur Empire and began to pay annual tributes to the Uyghurs. After the fall of the Uyghur Empire in Mongolia in 840, Uyghurs moved in five directions. Most Uyghur tribes based in the empire capital of Karabalghasun moved to today’s Gansu province and East Turkestan, and mixed with the local Uyghur and Turkic tribes. Later they established the Turfan Idiqut Kingdom (867-1368), Ganzhou Uyghur Kingdom (847-1036) and the Qarahand Kingdom (9th century to 1212). Although some Chinese scholars attempt to describe that Uyghurs moved into East Turkestan for the first time only after the fall of the Uyghur Empire in Mongolia, but other prominent Chinese scholars such as Feng Jasheng, Gu Bao, and Chen Sulo rejected such proposition by stating that Uyghurs lived in East Turketan long before the fall of their empire. Gu Bao believes that most Uyghurs at the time of the fall of the Uyghur Empire lived in the Tarim-Turfan basin area and only a minority of Uyghurs from Mongolia moved into this area after the fall. Bao asserts that Uyghurs have always been the indigenous population of East Turkestan. In addition, Russian scholar A. N. Bernishtam, D.I. Tihonof, D. Pozdneyev and V. Radlov as well as the Japanese scholar Abe Takeo and Turkish scholars Bahayiddin Oge and Zeki Welidi Toghan believe that the Uyghurs are one of the most ancient Turkic peoples indigenous to today’s East Turkestan. Furthermore, Uyhgur historians Muhammed Imin Bughra (1901-1965), Turghun Almas (1921-2001), Dawut Issiyef (1937-1996) and Malik Kebirof confirm that East Turkestan has always been the motherland of the Uyghur people, the Uyghurs who had moved to the Orhun Basin (Mongolia) were only belonging to the eastern Uyghur tribes who later established the Uyghur Empire in Mongolia. They believe that these eastern Uyghur tribes moved back to East Turkestan area after the fall of the empire and later played a significant role in keeping the historic motherland of Uyghurs independent until the Manchu armies invaded in 1759. During the 12th and 13th centuries, there had been great changes taking place in Central Asia. In 1206, Chingiz Khan established a Mongol Dynasty after conquering Mongol factions and neighboring Turkic tribes. Since the Uyghur Kingdom in Turfan recognized the Mongol Kingdom as one of the first states, the Uyghurs developed a friendly relation with the Mongol Empire. As a result such close ally relationship, Chingiz Khan offered his daughter to marry the Uyghur King and even called him his “fifth son.?Chingiz Khan also adopted the Uyghur script as the official script of the Mongol Empire and hired Uyghur military commanders and scribes to serve his army and educate his people. In general, the Uyghurs played a very important role during the Mongol Empire period in its administration of Persia, Central Asia and China. During the rule of Chingiz Khan’s son Kublai Khan (1279-1368) in China, the Uyghurs were given a position just below the ruling Mongols in light of their tremendous contribution to the empire. The Uyghurs were given such a high position as a result of their advanced culture and loyalty to the empire. During the 13th and 14th centuries, the Uyghurs lived under the Chaghatay rule. During the 16th century, the Uyghurs in Tarim Basin established the Saidiye Kingdom in Yarkand, ruling the areas including East Turkestan, Yette Su region, parts of Tibet and Kashmir. Although during the 17th and 18th centuries, the Uyghurs were under the strong influence of the Junghar Mongol influence and even paid taxes to them, but they were mostly left alone to rule themselves under the Uyghur Hojas. In 1759, the Manchu Qing Dynasty invaded the Tarim Basin but faced fierce resistance from the Uyghurs. As a result, the Manchus were never able to successfully control East Turkestan. In fact, the Manchu rule in East Turkestan was overthrown in 1864. After that, Uyghurs established the Kashgaria Uyghur Kingdom (1865-1878) in the south and the Ili Sultanate (1864-1871) in the north, freeing them from foreign subjugation.
The Kashgaria Kingdom later became the focal point of power struggle between great powers such as the Great Britain, Russia and the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which is called the “Great Game.?As a result of this great game, both Russia and the Great Britain allowed the Manchus to reoccupy East Turkestan. In 1878, the Manchu armies led by General Zo Zongtang invaded East Turkestan and established the Manchu rule. In 1884, the Manchus changed East Turkestan into “Xinjiang,?meaning “New Territory,?and designated it as a province. In other words, the name “Xinjiang?has only been used for 113 years. Before that, the Chinese called this region as “Xiyu?or “Western Region?and some even called “Huijiang?meaning ?the Territory of Muslims.?Although the Manchus used Xinjiang to name East Turkestan but the local Uyghur population was not aware of such name changes so continuously used the words “East Turkestan,?“Turkestan?or the oases names of their own towns. In 1912, after the Chinese revolution that overthrew the Manchu Qin Dynasty and the establishment of the Chinese Republic, the Uyghurs in Qumul region revolted against the Chinese rule but failed. After that Chinese governor Yang Zengxing ruled East Turkestan for 17 years enforcing a policy of “divide and conquer, and keep locals backward.?Although he was one of the most cunning early Chinese rulers in East Turkestan but he died in the hands of others. In 1931, the Uyghurs in Qumul staged another large scale uprising against the Chinese rule and the Uyghurs along with other Turkic groups such as Kazakhs and Kyrgys as well as Mongols controlled all areas of East Turkestan except Urumchi in 1934.
On November 12, 1933 the Uyghurs declared their independence by establishing the East Turkestan Islamic Republic and announced that they were the masters of East Turkestan. This republic, established on democratic principles, had its own constitution, national flag, national emblem and money. By declaring a democratic rule and abolishment of Chinese rule, this new republic adopted both foreign and domestic policies. However, in 1934, the Soviet Union established the Xinjiang Research Office led by Voroshilov to assess the situation in East Turkestan and the roles of the Great Britain and Japan in the region. This office later recommended to the Soviet government that Moscow should support the Chinese militarist Shen Shicai’s rule in East Turkestan instead of recognizing the newly independent Uyghur state because that would serve Moscow’s long-term political interest in creating the region as a buffer zone and in opposing the British, Japanese and Islamic challenges in the region. As a result, the Soviets sent its red army and crushed the Uyghur state, solidified the Chinese militarist rule in the region, prevented Chinese Nationalist army to enter the region, blocked the pathway to East Turkestan for seven years and later deployed a block of red army near the border. After Sheng Shicai solidified his power, and especially after the Nazi Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he betrayed Moscow and allied with Chinese Nationalists. He allowed the entry of the Chinese Nationalist Army into East Turkestan.
In 1943, the Chinese Nationalist Government allowed the U.S. and the Great Britain to establish their consulates in Urumchi in order to put further pressure on the Soviets. Since then, Stalin realized his betrayal and began to support the Uyghur independence and prevent an American and British foothold in the region in order to take his revenge against Shen Shicai and the Chinese Nationalists. During his 13-year rule, Shen Shicai murdered more than 100,000 Uyghurs and other Turkic people under all kinds of false political and criminal charges, enraging them and inspiring them to seek independence. As a result, starting in 1943 Uyghur and Kazakhs began to form underground political organizations against rule of china. In September 1944, Uyghurs in the Ili region armed themselves and fought against Chinese rule. On November 12, just three months later, they declared the independence of the East Turkestan Republic. This new republic received military, political, and financial support from the Soviet Union. The Soviets also provided all kinds of advisers. In its 9-point declaration, the East Turkestan Republic declared an independent republic that would treat all religions and peoples equally by embracing democracy and rejecting totalitarianism.
On April 8, 1945 the East Turkestan Republic established its standing army and fought against the Chinese Nationalist forces in three fronts and liberated 26 counties in Ili, Altay and Tarbaghatay regions as well as 6 counties in Kashgar and Aksu regions. The Uyghur struggle for independence became nationwide and the Chinese Nationalist government in Urumchi was about to be crushed. At such a critical time, Stalin forced the East Turkestan leadership to compromise and negotiate with the Chinese Nationalist government. After nearly eight months of negotiation under intense pressure from Moscow, a coalition government was established for the Uyghurs and Chinese to share political powers. But the coalition government collapsed within a year and the East Turkestan army resumed fighting against the Chinese forces and stopped at the Manas River. This river became the unofficial border between two sides until November 1949.
The democratic East Turkestan Republic, consisted of Ili, Altai and Tarbaghatay regions, was loved by all the ethnic groups living in those regions. The reason is that all peoples including the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tartars, Tajiks, Tunggan and Uzbeks believing in Islam, Russians believing in Christianity, Mongols believing in Lamaism, and Shibo and Daur believing in Shamanism fought together for their freedom and this republic. They all supported and created the independence of East Turkestan. Although some Chinese historians try to portray this independence republic as established under the influence of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism but such views are not in line with history. One of the main reasons for Moscow to stop supporting the East Turkestan Republic and forcing its leaders to negotiate with the Chinese Nationalist government was the agreement made at the Yalta Conference held on February 11, 1945, in which the Soviets signed a friendship treaty with the Chinese Nationalists after the Russian interests in Mongolia and Manchuria guaranteed, the Russian decided to join the war against Japan to end the WWII and determine the post-war order.
In accordance with the Yalta Agreement, the Soviet-Chinese negotiation started in June 1945 and ended in August after the Chinese Nationalist government guaranteed the Russian interest in Mongolia and Manchuria. In these negotiations, Chinese Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi demanded from Stalin that Moscow not support the East Turkestan independence and provide weapons. Moscow assured Jiang that the Soviets had no territorial interest in Xinjiang. In short, both Russian and Western historian believe that the East Turkestan Republic became a ‘strategic pawn?of power politics and the Uyghur people’s struggle for freedom and independence was betrayed by political intrigues of great powers. In late 1949, Stalin decided to support Mao Zedong’s communist revolution due to the political situation in China and the necessity of emerging Cold War. During his secret visit to Moscow in July 1947, Liu Shaoqi not only talked about the political system after the communist revolution but also the Xinjiang problem. Liu reiterated to the Soviet leadership that Xinjiang was part of China. According to Uyghur historic witness accounts, Stalin sent Seyfidin Aziz as a figurehead of the East Turkestan Republic to Beijing to attend the founding ceremony of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 after East Turkestan President Ahmatjan Qasimi and other high-level ministers had refused to accept Stalin’s proposal that East Turkestan should be under Chinese communist rule and died in an alleged plane crash on their way to Beijing as a result of their refusal. Furthermore, the Soviets played an active role in persuading remaining Chinese Nationalist forces to surrender to the incoming Chinese red army, which was airlifted by the Soviet transport planes to accelerate the occupation of East Turkestan. With the full support of the Soviet Union, the Chinese red army was able to enter and occupy East Turkestan by November 1949 and start a new and dark political chapter. Mao Zedong, when commenting on the independent East Turkestan, said “The Three-Region Struggle is part of China’s new democratic struggle,?implying that it was not fought for Uyghur independence. The East Turkestan people and army were able to learn of the death of their president Ahmatjan Qasimi and others three months after their death because Moscow and Beijing had kept it as the ultimate secret. Since then it was forbidden to fly the flag of the East Turkestan Republic and sing songs about the independence of East Turkestan. Only the Chinese flag was allowed to fly and the East Turkestan army was incorporated as the fifth corps of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. During this period in December 1949, a Chinese delegation led by Mao Zedong visited Moscow. After three months of negotiation, in February 1950 the “Sino-Soviet Friendsip and Cooperation Agreement?was signed. There were two clauses directly related to mining in East Turkestan and signed by Seyfidin Aziz, former education minister of the East Turkestan Republic who replaced the murdered president Ahmatjan Qasimi. After everything was completed according to the wishes of Stalin and Mao Zedong, in March 1950 the death of Ahmatjan Qasimi and other high-level Uyghur officials were declared and their bodies sent back to Ghulja City for burial. In October 1955, East Turkestan was declared the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Since 1949, the Uyghur people became only one of the 55 minority nationalities in China and suffered unprecedented repression at the hands of the Chinese government. Such heavy-handed repression, in addition to earlier Chinese rule, resulted the death of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs. Historians calculated more than 400 large-scale uprising against foreign rule by the Uyghur since the Manchu Qing Dynasty invaded East Turkestan. There have been many uprisings against the communist Chinese rule as well since 1949. If the Uyghur people were indeed “liberated?as the Chinese government claims, then why would they continue to stage uprisings against their rule? If they were indeed liberated, the situation would not be as complicated as today. And the international community would not have noticed the problems either.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Aryans: Culture Bearers to China
Mark Deavin
In July 1996 two students wading in the Columbia River at Kennewick, Washington, stumbled across the skeletal remains of a middle-aged European male. At first anthropologists presumed they had discovered a pioneer who had died in the late 1800's. But radiocarbon dating subsequently showed that the skeleton was a remarkable 9,300 years old. In fact, "Kennewick Man" is the latest in a series of ancient skeletal discoveries which are giving rise to the theory that some of the earliest inhabitants of North America were Europeans who migrated from the Eurasian continent via a land bridge in the Bering Sea near the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago. Dr. Robert Bonnischen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University, believes that "Kennewick Man" helps cast doubt on the accuracy of the term "paleo-Indian," which is usually used to describe this period of American prehistory. "Maybe some of these guys were really just paleo-American," he admits.
Uyghur Imperie
Of course, such facts pose a major challenge to the Politically Correct version of history, which promotes the idea that White Americans shamefully stole their country from its supposed Indian owners. Not surprisingly, therefore, attempts have been made to prevent the facts about "Kennewick Man" from being made public. Encouraged by the Clinton government, American Indians have made a claim on the skeleton using a 1990 Federal law intended to protect their grave sites. Their declared intention is to bury it immediately in a secret location and prevent further scientific examination and DNA testing. However, eight U.S. anthropologists, who claim that the Indians and the Federal government fear the implications of the discovery, began a legal battle in October 1996 to prevent the secret burial from taking place.
In fact, "Kennewick Man" is an important addition to the growing body of evidence which suggests that during the period of the Upper Paleolithic, between about 10,000 and 35,000 years ago, Whites — i.e., men indistinguishable from modern Europeans — lived not only in Europe, but also in a band stretching across northern Asia to the Pacific. In Siberia and other eastern regions they were eventually displaced and absorbed by Mongoloid peoples, although isolated pockets of European genes have survived in northern Asia until this day. The mixed-race Ainu people of Japan are an example.
The credibility of this theory has been dramatically strengthened in recent years by the remarkable discovery of more than 100 naturally mummified European corpses, ranging from 2,400 to 4,000 years old, in the Tarim Basin region of western China. Amazingly well preserved by the arid climate in the area, the mummies give evidence of a Nordic people with an advanced culture, splendidly attired in colorful robes, trousers, boots, stockings, coats, and hats. In one large tomb the corpses of three women and one man were discovered. The man, about 55 years old at death, was about six feet tall and had yellowish brown hair that was turning white. One of the better preserved women was close to six feet tall, with yellowish-brown hair dressed in braids. [Image: Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan), largest province in China, site of the Tarim Basin mummies.]
Items found with the bodies included fur coats, leather mittens, and an ornamental mirror, while the woman also held bags containing small knives and herbs, probably for use as medicines. At Cherchen, on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, the mummified corpse of an infant was found, probably no more than three months old at the time of death, wrapped in brown wool and with its eyes covered with small, flat stones. Next to the head was a drinking cup made from a bovine horn and an ancient "baby bottle" made from a sheep's teat that had been cut and sewn so it could hold milk. One male mummy even had traces of a surgical operation on his neck, with the incision being sewn up with horsehair stitches. [Image: Tall, blond European, buried 3,000 years ago in western China. The mummified bodies of dozens of his kinsmen have been disinterred in the same area.]
Several European mummies had in fact already been found in the Tarim Basin area early in this century, one of which was reminiscent of a Welsh or Irish woman, and another of a Bohemian burgher. All were dressed in fine clothing, including jaunty caps with feathers stuck in them that bore a striking resemblance to alpine headgear still worn in western Europe today. But these earlier discoveries, not much more than 2,000 years old, were dismissed as the bodies of isolated Europeans who had happened to stray into the territory and so were regarded as being of no cultural or historical significance.
Indeed, modern scholars, attuned to Politically Correct historical fashion, have tended to downplay evidence of any early trade or contact between China and the West during this period, regarding the development of Chinese civilization as an essentially homegrown affair sealed off from outside influences. Any diffusion of people and culture, moreover, was held to have been from east to west, with the Europeans being civilized by the Chinese. The very eminent prehistorian Gordon Childe, for example, in 1958 summed up European prehistory as being the story of "the irradiation of European barbarism by Oriental civilization. [1]
But the latest mummy finds in the Tarim Basin region are too numerous, too ancient, and too revealing to dismiss in this way. Most important, they have helped to reopen the debate about the role which Europeans played in the origins of civilization in China, with some archeologists again beginning to argue that Europeans might have been responsible for introducing into China such basic items as the wheel and the first metal objects. This is actually reaffirming theories that were advocated at the beginning of the century, but which were subsequently buried in an avalanche of Political Correctness. In 1912, for example, the distinguished Cambridge scholar A.C. Haddon noted in The Wanderings of Peoples the possibility that the progressive element of the old Chinese civilization was due to the migration of a semi-cultured people from the west.
Now, according to Dr. Han Kangxin, a physical anthropologist at the Institute of Archeology in Beijing, the skeletal and mummified evidence clearly points to the fact that the earliest inhabitants of the Tarim Basin region were White people related to the Cro-Magnons of Paleolithic Europe. This theory is supported by Dr. Victor Mair, a specialist in ancient Asian languages and cultures at the University of Pennsylvania, who stimulated the major search which found the mummies. He has emerged as the main advocate of the theory that large groups of Europeans were present in the Tarim Basin long before the area's present inhabitants, suggesting that Turkic speakers did not move into the area until about the eighth century B.C. Subsequently, he believes, the newcomers displaced the Europeans, although the major ethnic group in the area today, the Uygur, includes people with unusually fair hair and complexions.
Actually, evidence of a now-extinct Indo-European people who lived in central Asia has long existed. Known as Tocharians, they are described more accurately as Arsi, which is cognate with Sanskrit arya and Old Persian ariya, meaning "Aryan": "that which is noble or worthy." Their language, which has similarities to the Celtic and Germanic branches of the Indo-European tree, is recorded in manuscripts dated between the sixth and eighth centuries A.D., and solid evidence for its existence can be found as far back as the third century.
Despite the fact that Tocharian manuscripts are found only for the later period, linguists have isolated occasional Tocharian words embedded in manuscripts written in Gandhari Prakrit, a northwest Indian vernacular that served as the administrative language for large parts of the Tarim Basin during the third through the fifth centuries. Also, the Tocharians were earlier known as the Yuezhi (or Ruzhi), to whom references occur in Chinese texts as early as the fifth century B.C., within the time frame of the Tarim Basin mummies.
The Tocharians are vividly displayed in ancient wall paintings at Kizil and Kumtura (near the modern Chinese city K'u-ch'e, in the Tien Shan Mountains north of the Tarim Basin) as aristocratic Europeans, with red or blond hair parted neatly in the middle, long noses, blue or green eyes set in narrow faces, and tall bodies. The Yuezhi from the first century B.C. also are depicted in striking painted statues at Khalchayan (west of the Surkhan River in ancient Bactria). They too are shown to be Europeans with long noses, thin faces, blond hair, pink skin, and bright blue eyes. It is known from historical sources that during the second century B.C. the Greater Yuezhi moved from northwest China to Ferghana and Bactria, which lie on the far side of the Pamirs. From there they moved south across the Hindu Kush into Afghanistan and the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, where they founded the mighty Kushan empire. The latter, in turn, extended its power back into the Tarim Basin and with it spread Buddhism, which eventually reached China.
"The new finds are also forcing a reexamination of old Chinese books that describe historical or legendary figures of great height, with deep-set blue or green eyes, long noses, full beards, and red or blond hair. Scholars have traditionally scoffed at these accounts, but it now seems that they may be accurate." (Victor Mair)
One hypothesis gaining increasing support is that the migration of these Indo-Europeans began with their invention of wheeled wagons. Working with Russian archeologists, Dr. David W. Anthony, an anthropologist at Hartwick College in New York, has discovered traces of wagon wheels in 5,000-year-old burial mounds on the steppes of southern Russia and Kazakhstan. This line of investigation has a direct bearing on the question of the European mummies in China because tripartite disk wheels similar in construction to those found in western Asia and Europe during the third and second millennium B.C. have been found in the Gobi Desert, northeast of the Tarim Basin. Similarly, spoked wheels dating to the early second millennium B.C. have been unearthed at a site nearby.
Most researchers now agree that the birthplace of horse-drawn vehicles and horse riding was in the steppes of Ukraine, rather than in China or the Near East. As Dr. Anthony and his colleagues have shown through microscopic study of ancient horse teeth, horses already were being harnessed in Ukraine 6,000 years ago. Also, wooden chariots with elaborate, spoked wheels have been shown to date to around 2,000 B.C. in the same area. In comparison, chariots do not appear in China until some 800 years later. Ritual horse burials similar to those in ancient Ukraine also have been excavated in the Tarim Basin, as well as remains of wagon wheels made by doweling together three carved, parallel wooden planks. Wagons with nearly identical wheels are known from the grassy plains of Ukraine as far back as 3,000 B.C.
A number of artifacts recovered from the Tarim Basin mummy burials have provided important evidence for early horse riding. These include a wooden bit and leather reins, a horse whip consisting of a single strip of leather attached to a wooden handle, a wooden cheek piece with leather straps, and a padded leather saddle of exquisite workmanship. This seems to confirm that the mummies belonged to a mobile, horse-riding culture that spread from the plains of eastern Europe. It also supports the growing belief of archeologists that the spread of Indo-European genes, culture, and language may be linked to the gradual spread of horse riding and the technology of horse-drawn vehicles from their origins in Europe 6,000 years ago.
These discoveries have extremely important consequences for understanding the origins of Chinese civilization, since the chariot has now been demonstrated to have entered China only around the middle of the second millennium B.C., at roughly the same time that bronze metallurgy and writing developed there. The evidence suggests, therefore, that wagons and chariots were introduced into China from the west by Indo-Europeans. It also shows that the European penetration of China did not begin with the opening of the transcontinental Silk Road trade route that history books usually place in the second century B.C., but at least 2,000 years earlier at the turn of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, when the whole of Eurasia became culturally and technologically interconnected by migrating Europeans.
Waves of migration over a period of at least 7,000 years (8,000 B.C.-1,000 B.C.) carried Aryans from a homeland north of the Black Sea into western Europe, northern India, western China, and North America (via the Bering Strait).
Actually, as early as 1951 the German archeologist Robert Heine-Geldern sought to show a series of similarities between the metalwork of Europe and China around 800 B.C. His evidence included horse gear, two-edged swords, socketed axes, and spearheads, which he believed originated in the Hallstatt and Caucasus metallurgical centers. Arguing that a "Pontic Migration" had taken place from Europe across Asia, he suggested that the Dongson culture of south China could best be explained as the result of influences carried directly from Europe during the 9th and 8th centuries B.C. [2]
Two years later the well known Russian archeologist S. I. Rudenko noted the existence of mummies with European features in the royal tombs of Pazyryk in the Altai mountains, dated to the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. This evidence was subsequently added to by John Haskins of the University of Pittsburgh, who argued that the Yueh-chih (an ancient Chinese name for the Tocharians) of the Pazyryk region of the Altai might have been related to the Celts of continental Europe.
Significantly, the Tarim Basin mummies have provided further evidence which supports Heine-Geldern's theory. Some of the grave goods found with the mummies strongly suggest a connection with the "socketed celt horizon," typified by socketed bronze celts (axes which have bent wooden handles inserted at the end opposite the blade) and other distinctive bronze objects, such as knives with zoomorphic handles. The "socketed celt horizon" is dated roughly 1,800 to 1,000 B.C. stretching across Europe and correlates well with certain facets of a horse-riding and chariot/cart culture which emphasized hunting with composite bows and perhaps crossbows.
Thus, new credence has been given to previously ignored and ridiculed theories for the origins and development of civilization in China. In light of the new evidence, Edwin Pulleyblank of the University of British Columbia recently argued that European influence may have been an important factor in the unification of the Chinese states and the establishment of the first centralized Chinese empire by Ch'in Shih Huang Ti in the year 221 B.C. He points to the external arrival on the Chinese steppe frontier of the military technique of mounted archery, first explicitly mentioned in Chinese sources in the year 307 B.C. In the west mounted archery appears with the Scythians, closely related to the Celts, who are first mentioned in Near Eastern sources around 800 B.C. and whose way of life is described at length by the Greek historian Herodotus. Ironically, it was the technique of mounted archery that defined the classic nomadism that dominated the European steppe and made possible the great steppe empires of the Xiongnu, the Turks, and the Mongols that later terrorized Europe.
Pulleyblank effectively suggests that European technology was copied by the Chinese and turned against its original inventors. Indeed, a suggestive analogy to the spread of mounted archery eastward to the borders of China can be seen in the way in which the acquisition of horses by the Indians from the Spaniards in Mexico and their use in warfare transformed the Great Plains of North America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This theory of Mongoloid imitation is also reflected in the many words of Indo-European origin in the earliest known layers of Sinitic languages. These include words for "horse," "track," "cart," "wheel," and "cow" and suggest further that it was Europeans who brought these things into China.
Textile samples from the late second millennium B.C. found in the Tarim Basin graves also provide evidence of the diffusion of European technological sophistication to China. One fragment was a wool twill woven with a plaid design which required looms that have never before been associated with China or eastern Central Asia at such an early date. Irene Good, a specialist in textile archeology at the University of Pennsylvania, has confirmed that the plaid fabric was virtually identical stylistically and technically to textile fragments found in Austria and Germany at sites from a somewhat later period.
Dr. Elizabeth J.W. Barber, a linguist and archeologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the author of Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton University Press, 1991), confirms that the Chinese did not use and did not even know twill, but obtained knowledge of the weave from the West, and only after the Han period. Significantly, there appear to be many connections between the Tarim Basin mummies and the 5,000 year old "Ice Man" found in the Austrian Alps in 1991. These include the type and style of clothing, personal artifacts, solar-religious symbolism, and tattoos for healing and decoration — as well, of course, as the distinct racial commonality.
The evidence, therefore, increasingly seems to confirm a Celtic culture extending across Eurasia at least 4,000 years ago. As one academic, James Opie, an expert on design motifs in ancient rugs and bronze implements, has pointed out, it is highly significant that Celtic endless-knot motifs, swastikas, and animal-style decorations have been discovered from Europe, through Iran, to China. The religion of the Celts — including the Scythians — was solar, and three- and four-armed swastikas as solar symbols are an omnipresent element in Celtic art. Likewise, the Tarim Basin Europeans displayed a definite penchant for spiral solar symbols, painting them on their faces and engraving them on the bridles of their horses. This in itself suggests that they were Nordics who were and always have been worshippers of the sun and sky, and more generally of Nature. As Dr. Michael Puett, a historian of East Asian civilization at Harvard University, has argued, the Tarim Basin mummies reveal clear processes of a cultural diffusion from Europe outward.
All of this supports the thesis of the pioneering archeologist Colin Renfrew, who challenged the previously accepted idea that prehistoric culture began in the Near East or Central Asia and was only later "diffused" into "barbarian" Europe. It confirms that the cultural prerequisites for civilization are much, much older in Europe than has been acknowledged, and suggests that far from Europe being civilized from outside, it was rather the rest of the world, including Asia, which was civilized by colonizing Europeans. [3]
1. V. Gordon Childe, Antiquity , 32 (1958), 70
2. J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London, 1989), 59.
3. Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization (New York, 1974).
National Vanguard, 117 (March-April 1997), 13-16. Also available in a French translation. See also (off-site) Nova's Takla Makan Mummies.
From:http://library.flawlesslogic.com/china.htm
Mark Deavin
In July 1996 two students wading in the Columbia River at Kennewick, Washington, stumbled across the skeletal remains of a middle-aged European male. At first anthropologists presumed they had discovered a pioneer who had died in the late 1800's. But radiocarbon dating subsequently showed that the skeleton was a remarkable 9,300 years old. In fact, "Kennewick Man" is the latest in a series of ancient skeletal discoveries which are giving rise to the theory that some of the earliest inhabitants of North America were Europeans who migrated from the Eurasian continent via a land bridge in the Bering Sea near the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago. Dr. Robert Bonnischen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University, believes that "Kennewick Man" helps cast doubt on the accuracy of the term "paleo-Indian," which is usually used to describe this period of American prehistory. "Maybe some of these guys were really just paleo-American," he admits.
Uyghur Imperie
Of course, such facts pose a major challenge to the Politically Correct version of history, which promotes the idea that White Americans shamefully stole their country from its supposed Indian owners. Not surprisingly, therefore, attempts have been made to prevent the facts about "Kennewick Man" from being made public. Encouraged by the Clinton government, American Indians have made a claim on the skeleton using a 1990 Federal law intended to protect their grave sites. Their declared intention is to bury it immediately in a secret location and prevent further scientific examination and DNA testing. However, eight U.S. anthropologists, who claim that the Indians and the Federal government fear the implications of the discovery, began a legal battle in October 1996 to prevent the secret burial from taking place. 
In fact, "Kennewick Man" is an important addition to the growing body of evidence which suggests that during the period of the Upper Paleolithic, between about 10,000 and 35,000 years ago, Whites — i.e., men indistinguishable from modern Europeans — lived not only in Europe, but also in a band stretching across northern Asia to the Pacific. In Siberia and other eastern regions they were eventually displaced and absorbed by Mongoloid peoples, although isolated pockets of European genes have survived in northern Asia until this day. The mixed-race Ainu people of Japan are an example.The credibility of this theory has been dramatically strengthened in recent years by the remarkable discovery of more than 100 naturally mummified European corpses, ranging from 2,400 to 4,000 years old, in the Tarim Basin region of western China. Amazingly well preserved by the arid climate in the area, the mummies give evidence of a Nordic people with an advanced culture, splendidly attired in colorful robes, trousers, boots, stockings, coats, and hats. In one large tomb the corpses of three women and one man were discovered. The man, about 55 years old at death, was about six feet tall and had yellowish brown hair that was turning white. One of the better preserved women was close to six feet tall, with yellowish-brown hair dressed in braids. [Image: Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan), largest province in China, site of the Tarim Basin mummies.]
Items found with the bodies included fur coats, leather mittens, and an ornamental mirror, while the woman also held bags containing small knives and herbs, probably for use as medicines. At Cherchen, on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, the mummified corpse of an infant was found, probably no more than three months old at the time of death, wrapped in brown wool and with its eyes covered with small, flat stones. Next to the head was a drinking cup made from a bovine horn and an ancient "baby bottle" made from a sheep's teat that had been cut and sewn so it could hold milk. One male mummy even had traces of a surgical operation on his neck, with the incision being sewn up with horsehair stitches. [Image: Tall, blond European, buried 3,000 years ago in western China. The mummified bodies of dozens of his kinsmen have been disinterred in the same area.]
Several European mummies had in fact already been found in the Tarim Basin area early in this century, one of which was reminiscent of a Welsh or Irish woman, and another of a Bohemian burgher. All were dressed in fine clothing, including jaunty caps with feathers stuck in them that bore a striking resemblance to alpine headgear still worn in western Europe today. But these earlier discoveries, not much more than 2,000 years old, were dismissed as the bodies of isolated Europeans who had happened to stray into the territory and so were regarded as being of no cultural or historical significance.
Indeed, modern scholars, attuned to Politically Correct historical fashion, have tended to downplay evidence of any early trade or contact between China and the West during this period, regarding the development of Chinese civilization as an essentially homegrown affair sealed off from outside influences. Any diffusion of people and culture, moreover, was held to have been from east to west, with the Europeans being civilized by the Chinese. The very eminent prehistorian Gordon Childe, for example, in 1958 summed up European prehistory as being the story of "the irradiation of European barbarism by Oriental civilization. [1]
But the latest mummy finds in the Tarim Basin region are too numerous, too ancient, and too revealing to dismiss in this way. Most important, they have helped to reopen the debate about the role which Europeans played in the origins of civilization in China, with some archeologists again beginning to argue that Europeans might have been responsible for introducing into China such basic items as the wheel and the first metal objects. This is actually reaffirming theories that were advocated at the beginning of the century, but which were subsequently buried in an avalanche of Political Correctness. In 1912, for example, the distinguished Cambridge scholar A.C. Haddon noted in The Wanderings of Peoples the possibility that the progressive element of the old Chinese civilization was due to the migration of a semi-cultured people from the west. Now, according to Dr. Han Kangxin, a physical anthropologist at the Institute of Archeology in Beijing, the skeletal and mummified evidence clearly points to the fact that the earliest inhabitants of the Tarim Basin region were White people related to the Cro-Magnons of Paleolithic Europe. This theory is supported by Dr. Victor Mair, a specialist in ancient Asian languages and cultures at the University of Pennsylvania, who stimulated the major search which found the mummies. He has emerged as the main advocate of the theory that large groups of Europeans were present in the Tarim Basin long before the area's present inhabitants, suggesting that Turkic speakers did not move into the area until about the eighth century B.C. Subsequently, he believes, the newcomers displaced the Europeans, although the major ethnic group in the area today, the Uygur, includes people with unusually fair hair and complexions.
Actually, evidence of a now-extinct Indo-European people who lived in central Asia has long existed. Known as Tocharians, they are described more accurately as Arsi, which is cognate with Sanskrit arya and Old Persian ariya, meaning "Aryan": "that which is noble or worthy." Their language, which has similarities to the Celtic and Germanic branches of the Indo-European tree, is recorded in manuscripts dated between the sixth and eighth centuries A.D., and solid evidence for its existence can be found as far back as the third century.
Despite the fact that Tocharian manuscripts are found only for the later period, linguists have isolated occasional Tocharian words embedded in manuscripts written in Gandhari Prakrit, a northwest Indian vernacular that served as the administrative language for large parts of the Tarim Basin during the third through the fifth centuries. Also, the Tocharians were earlier known as the Yuezhi (or Ruzhi), to whom references occur in Chinese texts as early as the fifth century B.C., within the time frame of the Tarim Basin mummies.
The Tocharians are vividly displayed in ancient wall paintings at Kizil and Kumtura (near the modern Chinese city K'u-ch'e, in the Tien Shan Mountains north of the Tarim Basin) as aristocratic Europeans, with red or blond hair parted neatly in the middle, long noses, blue or green eyes set in narrow faces, and tall bodies. The Yuezhi from the first century B.C. also are depicted in striking painted statues at Khalchayan (west of the Surkhan River in ancient Bactria). They too are shown to be Europeans with long noses, thin faces, blond hair, pink skin, and bright blue eyes. It is known from historical sources that during the second century B.C. the Greater Yuezhi moved from northwest China to Ferghana and Bactria, which lie on the far side of the Pamirs. From there they moved south across the Hindu Kush into Afghanistan and the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, where they founded the mighty Kushan empire. The latter, in turn, extended its power back into the Tarim Basin and with it spread Buddhism, which eventually reached China.
"The new finds are also forcing a reexamination of old Chinese books that describe historical or legendary figures of great height, with deep-set blue or green eyes, long noses, full beards, and red or blond hair. Scholars have traditionally scoffed at these accounts, but it now seems that they may be accurate." (Victor Mair)
One hypothesis gaining increasing support is that the migration of these Indo-Europeans began with their invention of wheeled wagons. Working with Russian archeologists, Dr. David W. Anthony, an anthropologist at Hartwick College in New York, has discovered traces of wagon wheels in 5,000-year-old burial mounds on the steppes of southern Russia and Kazakhstan. This line of investigation has a direct bearing on the question of the European mummies in China because tripartite disk wheels similar in construction to those found in western Asia and Europe during the third and second millennium B.C. have been found in the Gobi Desert, northeast of the Tarim Basin. Similarly, spoked wheels dating to the early second millennium B.C. have been unearthed at a site nearby.
Most researchers now agree that the birthplace of horse-drawn vehicles and horse riding was in the steppes of Ukraine, rather than in China or the Near East. As Dr. Anthony and his colleagues have shown through microscopic study of ancient horse teeth, horses already were being harnessed in Ukraine 6,000 years ago. Also, wooden chariots with elaborate, spoked wheels have been shown to date to around 2,000 B.C. in the same area. In comparison, chariots do not appear in China until some 800 years later. Ritual horse burials similar to those in ancient Ukraine also have been excavated in the Tarim Basin, as well as remains of wagon wheels made by doweling together three carved, parallel wooden planks. Wagons with nearly identical wheels are known from the grassy plains of Ukraine as far back as 3,000 B.C.
A number of artifacts recovered from the Tarim Basin mummy burials have provided important evidence for early horse riding. These include a wooden bit and leather reins, a horse whip consisting of a single strip of leather attached to a wooden handle, a wooden cheek piece with leather straps, and a padded leather saddle of exquisite workmanship. This seems to confirm that the mummies belonged to a mobile, horse-riding culture that spread from the plains of eastern Europe. It also supports the growing belief of archeologists that the spread of Indo-European genes, culture, and language may be linked to the gradual spread of horse riding and the technology of horse-drawn vehicles from their origins in Europe 6,000 years ago. These discoveries have extremely important consequences for understanding the origins of Chinese civilization, since the chariot has now been demonstrated to have entered China only around the middle of the second millennium B.C., at roughly the same time that bronze metallurgy and writing developed there. The evidence suggests, therefore, that wagons and chariots were introduced into China from the west by Indo-Europeans. It also shows that the European penetration of China did not begin with the opening of the transcontinental Silk Road trade route that history books usually place in the second century B.C., but at least 2,000 years earlier at the turn of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, when the whole of Eurasia became culturally and technologically interconnected by migrating Europeans.
Waves of migration over a period of at least 7,000 years (8,000 B.C.-1,000 B.C.) carried Aryans from a homeland north of the Black Sea into western Europe, northern India, western China, and North America (via the Bering Strait).
Actually, as early as 1951 the German archeologist Robert Heine-Geldern sought to show a series of similarities between the metalwork of Europe and China around 800 B.C. His evidence included horse gear, two-edged swords, socketed axes, and spearheads, which he believed originated in the Hallstatt and Caucasus metallurgical centers. Arguing that a "Pontic Migration" had taken place from Europe across Asia, he suggested that the Dongson culture of south China could best be explained as the result of influences carried directly from Europe during the 9th and 8th centuries B.C. [2]
Two years later the well known Russian archeologist S. I. Rudenko noted the existence of mummies with European features in the royal tombs of Pazyryk in the Altai mountains, dated to the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. This evidence was subsequently added to by John Haskins of the University of Pittsburgh, who argued that the Yueh-chih (an ancient Chinese name for the Tocharians) of the Pazyryk region of the Altai might have been related to the Celts of continental Europe.
Significantly, the Tarim Basin mummies have provided further evidence which supports Heine-Geldern's theory. Some of the grave goods found with the mummies strongly suggest a connection with the "socketed celt horizon," typified by socketed bronze celts (axes which have bent wooden handles inserted at the end opposite the blade) and other distinctive bronze objects, such as knives with zoomorphic handles. The "socketed celt horizon" is dated roughly 1,800 to 1,000 B.C. stretching across Europe and correlates well with certain facets of a horse-riding and chariot/cart culture which emphasized hunting with composite bows and perhaps crossbows. Thus, new credence has been given to previously ignored and ridiculed theories for the origins and development of civilization in China. In light of the new evidence, Edwin Pulleyblank of the University of British Columbia recently argued that European influence may have been an important factor in the unification of the Chinese states and the establishment of the first centralized Chinese empire by Ch'in Shih Huang Ti in the year 221 B.C. He points to the external arrival on the Chinese steppe frontier of the military technique of mounted archery, first explicitly mentioned in Chinese sources in the year 307 B.C. In the west mounted archery appears with the Scythians, closely related to the Celts, who are first mentioned in Near Eastern sources around 800 B.C. and whose way of life is described at length by the Greek historian Herodotus. Ironically, it was the technique of mounted archery that defined the classic nomadism that dominated the European steppe and made possible the great steppe empires of the Xiongnu, the Turks, and the Mongols that later terrorized Europe.
Pulleyblank effectively suggests that European technology was copied by the Chinese and turned against its original inventors. Indeed, a suggestive analogy to the spread of mounted archery eastward to the borders of China can be seen in the way in which the acquisition of horses by the Indians from the Spaniards in Mexico and their use in warfare transformed the Great Plains of North America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This theory of Mongoloid imitation is also reflected in the many words of Indo-European origin in the earliest known layers of Sinitic languages. These include words for "horse," "track," "cart," "wheel," and "cow" and suggest further that it was Europeans who brought these things into China.
Textile samples from the late second millennium B.C. found in the Tarim Basin graves also provide evidence of the diffusion of European technological sophistication to China. One fragment was a wool twill woven with a plaid design which required looms that have never before been associated with China or eastern Central Asia at such an early date. Irene Good, a specialist in textile archeology at the University of Pennsylvania, has confirmed that the plaid fabric was virtually identical stylistically and technically to textile fragments found in Austria and Germany at sites from a somewhat later period. 
Dr. Elizabeth J.W. Barber, a linguist and archeologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the author of Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton University Press, 1991), confirms that the Chinese did not use and did not even know twill, but obtained knowledge of the weave from the West, and only after the Han period. Significantly, there appear to be many connections between the Tarim Basin mummies and the 5,000 year old "Ice Man" found in the Austrian Alps in 1991. These include the type and style of clothing, personal artifacts, solar-religious symbolism, and tattoos for healing and decoration — as well, of course, as the distinct racial commonality. The evidence, therefore, increasingly seems to confirm a Celtic culture extending across Eurasia at least 4,000 years ago. As one academic, James Opie, an expert on design motifs in ancient rugs and bronze implements, has pointed out, it is highly significant that Celtic endless-knot motifs, swastikas, and animal-style decorations have been discovered from Europe, through Iran, to China. The religion of the Celts — including the Scythians — was solar, and three- and four-armed swastikas as solar symbols are an omnipresent element in Celtic art. Likewise, the Tarim Basin Europeans displayed a definite penchant for spiral solar symbols, painting them on their faces and engraving them on the bridles of their horses. This in itself suggests that they were Nordics who were and always have been worshippers of the sun and sky, and more generally of Nature. As Dr. Michael Puett, a historian of East Asian civilization at Harvard University, has argued, the Tarim Basin mummies reveal clear processes of a cultural diffusion from Europe outward.
All of this supports the thesis of the pioneering archeologist Colin Renfrew, who challenged the previously accepted idea that prehistoric culture began in the Near East or Central Asia and was only later "diffused" into "barbarian" Europe. It confirms that the cultural prerequisites for civilization are much, much older in Europe than has been acknowledged, and suggests that far from Europe being civilized from outside, it was rather the rest of the world, including Asia, which was civilized by colonizing Europeans. [3]1. V. Gordon Childe, Antiquity , 32 (1958), 70
2. J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London, 1989), 59.
3. Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization (New York, 1974).
From:http://library.flawlesslogic.com/china.htm
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