Getting to Know Uyghur Muslim Women in Western China

Witness  |  A HELO interview essay with Cindy Huang, Oct-Nov 2009

[Witness stories are considered biased viewpoints. If you would like to counter or clarify the argument, please write to the editors. Only well-written and well-argued stories or comments will be considered for publication.] 

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When I met Peride, she was running a fruit stall near the Grand Bazaar at the heart of Urumqi’s Uyghur neighborhood.

Urumqi is the largest city in China’s far western Xinjiang region, which borders the Turkic nations of Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan as well as the South Asian nation of Pakistan. Predominantly ethnic Uyghur, and Muslim, Xinjiang’s Han Chinese population has grown tremendously over the past decades, so much so that economic challenges combined with social relations have contributed to political tension.

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Peride was married to a distant relative when she was 14 and he was 22. They moved to Shanghai to sell nan and save up money to start a small shop in Urumqi. Her son was preparing to take the college entrance exam. Every day she cooked nourishing foods, gave him ‘brain-enhancing’ supplements to drink and asked about his tutorials. In most ways, her everyday life was similar to millions of other parents across China. The first time I spent the night at her house, however, I saw how Peride’s life came up against certain constraints.  

She showed me her favorite religious DVDs that were banned by the Chinese government. One was a B-movie about a nightmare that changes a lounging and drinking boy into a pious man. It was in Arabic, which neither of us understood, but Peride narrated her interpretation of the scenes to me. She said this kind of film helps people love Islam.

Peride’s engagement with the Islamic revival was about acting in ways and doing things, like watching religious movies, which strengthened her and her family’s commitment to a pious path. One of the ironies of the religious restrictions is that they tend to politicize behaviors and people who are not threats to the government.

One of my closest friends, Ayshe, was struggling with a major decision. She was graduating from a Masters program and wanted to become a teacher. To do so, however, she would need to stop wearing a headscarf. Students are also officially prohibited from wearing a headscarf, but enforcement varies.

Ayshe and I spent hours discussing her options. She considered taking the doctoral entrance exam in Beijing, but worried that her written Chinese was not good enough to pass. She also thought about going to Turkey to study, but that would be difficult and expensive. There were no good options; such was the plight of Muslim Uyghur women in Western China.

I see that I was drawn to study the everyday lives of exceptional people: women who pushed against a boundary or pursue a path that people dream of, but rarely act upon. I've always been fascinated by the ineffable: the gap between reading or hearing about something and experiencing it.

In my ideal world, the anthropologist’s job is to experience and then try to bridge that gap through writing that is both empirical and beautiful. I was in Western China conducting research for my doctoral dissertation in anthropology. I lived in Western China in 2007, spending the first half of the year in Urumqi and the second half in the diverse crossroads town farther south, Kashgar. Urumqi, the region’s capital, is a city of more than 2.3 million people. Outside of the Uyghur neighborhoods, it resembles other cities in China, with an impressive number of high rises, flyovers and even a hi-tech zone.

In 2007, Urumqi’s residents were 12 percent Uyghur and 73 percent Han. In contrast, Kashgar’s population was 82 percent Uyghur and 17 percent Han. Overall, Uyghurs and Han comprise 46 and 39 percent of the Xinjiang population, respectively. The rest of the population is a mix of other groups, including Kazakhs, Hui and Kyrgyz.

The southern oasis of Kashgar and the northern hub of Urumqi are counterpoints in more than demography and geography. The Uyghur conversion to Islam began in the 10^th century in Kashgar, slowly spreading north and east over the next six centuries. For much of its history, Kashgar was under the influence of powers to the west and south. Urumqi began as a military garrison.

After the Qing dynasty’s defeat of the Zungharian Empire, it built the first walled city there in the mid-18^th century. It was the Qing victory that opened up large swaths of the north to Han and Uyghur settlers.

In the beginning, I harbored romantic fantasies of trekking with nomads. As I looked more deeply into the culture and history of the Uyghurs, I learned, inevitably, that their story is complex and that they have long been a settled people. On each trip I manage to find my way to the mountains to spend time with the Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Tajik herders in the area.

While I interviewed some Uyghur men and Han men and women, I focused on the lives of Uyghur women. Of course, Uyghur women themselves comprise a diverse group. From the beginning, I accepted that the whole is not the sum of the parts when it comes to writing about experience.

This is not to say that differences in ethnicity, gender, class, education, hometown, occupation and so on don’t matter. They do. But I thought of my task as capturing something salient about the time, not as conducting a representative study. I found that women from a wide range of backgrounds aspire to a middle class life. This is an aspiration that resonates throughout China and elsewhere.

Even though the tensions and challenges that Uyghur women face are particular, I see them as refractions of a central problematic of modernity: what group solidarities come to the fore as traditional family and social structures recede? For me, it’s about illuminating the zeitgeist, while always tacking between the questions of sameness and difference.

Clifford Geertz wrote a great essay on “common sense” as a cultural system. I think that’s a fair test for immersion: has the strange become commonsensical? I had hundreds of conversations with friends about love and finding a husband. At the beginning, there were a bunch of blips in my mind during these conversations.

For example, one woman from a village near Kashgar told me about meeting her husband through a misdial. She had angrily hung up because he was an unfamiliar man. Her indignation convinced him that she was a proper Muslim woman, and so he pursued her. When we met, she was eight months pregnant.

I later realized that her story fascinated me because a woman who appeared to be very ‘traditional’ had met her husband in this unexpected way.  It’s not unusual because she was a veiled Muslim woman from rural Xinjiang. Put differently, I let go of a lot of my assumptions about gender, piety and modernization.

The overwhelming concern for most people is how to make a living. This has strong ethnic dimensions because it’s important to speak good Mandarin Chinese and have guanxi (connections) to get a good job. There is a fair amount of resentment among Han Chinese who feel that Uyghurs benefit from policies, yet remain dissatisfied. For example, points are added to the college entrance exam scores of minority students.

These policies are important benefits, but focusing on them distracts from the overall picture. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get the overall picture because the government doesn’t release important figures broken down by ethnicity. According to scholarly estimates, Uyghurs tend to be poorer than Han Chinese as well as concentrated in less technical or industrial fields.

The differences in Han and Uyghur life begin with two basic categories through which we apprehend the world: space and time. In Urumqi and Kashgar, the Uyghur and Han sections of town are relatively distinct. This has more or less been the case since the imperial era. At the level of abode, Uyghurs compare their high ceilings with lower ones in Chinese villages and city apartments. The Uyghurs and Han, metaphorically enough, also use different times. China has only one time zone, an oddity given its east-west breadth. While Han use Beijing time, Uyghurs count their days according to Xinjiang time - two hours earlier than the official clock.

The constant awareness of and worry about one’s appearance and actions being perceived as too or not enough ‘Uyghur’ or ‘Han’ is pervasive. It’s a complicated dance. When ‘Han’ stands in for development or openness to change, it is a compliment. When it represents loss of culture or religion, however, there is no more stinging insult. I always tried to be careful of projecting the experience of American immigrants onto my observations in Xinjiang, but the dynamics were often strikingly similar.

The main difference, of course, is that Uyghurs have found themselves as ‘immigrants’ in their homeland. I do think it’s important to point out that Uyghur attitudes toward assimilation and autonomy are at least as varied as those of minority groups elsewhere. This fact is often lost in stories about rebellion and oppression.

Most Uyghurs I met distinguished between Han Chinese who moved to Xinjiang before and after the reform era, and often into even finer categories. Han who migrated west earlier are more likely to speak Uyghur and understand Uyghur customs. For example, several of my friends commented that earlier migrants refrain from eating pork out of respect and habit.

Later migrants, they felt, moved to Xinjiang because they couldn’t succeed in their home provinces. In my experience, there was a difference between Han who viewed Xinjiang as their home and those who considered it a more or less foreign land that offered new economic opportunities. Without making a particular effort, I met a number of Han who spoke excellent Uyghur.

One of my Uyghur friends, Erkin, was shocked when we saw a manager at a resort saying goodbye to his staff. The heavy snows had arrived and marked the end of tourist season. The Han manager gave a short farewell speech in Uyghur and warmly shook hands with each of the employees. According to Erkin, the manager’s Uyghur was more proper than his own.

It was the first time in our long friendship that I saw Erkin speechless. Again, while this event is far from representative, it gestures toward possibilities that are usually obscured - both by narratives of conflict and by the government’s idyllic images of ethnic harmony.

The most important thing to remember about the relative political crisis and the situation in Xinjiang more broadly is that it’s very complex. I was impressed by much of the global news reporting that sought to place the tensions within a demographic and economic context, rather than depict the conflict as one of an intrinsic, ‘age-old’ enmity.

I think most Uyghurs are fairly pragmatic. They don’t see an end to Chinese control in Xinjiang. If and when that happens, it will be a reflection of the nation-state system in decay, and few are holding their breath for that.

Uyghurs want fair access to jobs and economic opportunities, such as government contracts and trade permits. They also want to be able to practice Islam with fewer restrictions. One of the greatest challenges for observers is to gauge how ‘what people want’ varies and shifts as China continues to grow and change.

HELO

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Karakul, Xinjiang, China, DJG.