By Leila Isa

Edited by Max Kabjian and Leïla Van Glabeke, Peer Reviewed by Sophie Bright and Alex Bagdade

Introduction

In 1999, a young Uyghur man called Abdullah argued with his local Imam after proclaiming “Amin” aloud at the end of the prayer, a minor offense for which he was arrested. Abdullah blamed his ordeal on this “government Imam” whom he accused of working for the “infidel Chinese” (in Smith-Finley, 2013: 252). By the nature of his position, this Imam was subject to oversight of the state-led Islamic Association of China and required to preach “patriotic and politically sound” sermons (Irwin, 2021), a tense flashpoint in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (“Uyghur region”) of the 1990s, [1] also known as East Turkistan, during which several “government Imams” were murdered by Uyghur militants for “disloyalty” (Thum, 2014: 334). This violence is contextualised by a wider struggle between the Uyghurs and the People’s Republic of China (“PRC”) amid an ongoing project to securitise and selectively eradicate Uyghur religious identity (Finley, 2013; Harris, 2020; Byler, 2022). Whilst this argument between the Imam and Abdullah was underwritten by the latter’s self-determination politics, this was also a theological dispute; the Imam likely opposed Abdullah’s “Amin” because it is a prayer rite from the Hanbali school of Islam, indicating a Salafi orientation and deviating from the customary Hanafi school of the Uyghurs (Waite, 2007: 170). This dispute illustrates how, by the late twentieth century, Uyghur Islam had become the site of two interrelated struggles: an externally oriented campaign against the Chinese state and an internally oriented religious dispute over orthodoxy.

Within this paper, I evaluate the foregrounding of the overtly political over the religious and the tendency in scholarship to portray Uyghur Islam as constitutive of resistance to Chinese colonial dominion in the region (Fuller and Lipman, 2004; Rudelson and Jankowiak, 2004; Smith-Finley, 2013). I then assess whether these arguments complement or contradict how many Uyghur Muslims understand and express their religiosity. To investigate the above, this paper asks: to what extent can the emergence and internal dynamics of Uyghur Islamic movements, and their engagement with modernity, be understood in relation to the Chinese state?

I first present and evaluate what I term a functionalist framing, where Uyghur Islam is analysed in relation to political structures. Many argue that Uyghur Islam is best conceptualised as an instrument of mobilisation and an expression of “symbolic resistance” to Chinese dominion (Smith-Finley, 2013: 258). Within East Turkistan, the northwesternmost region of contemporary China, it is thought that most of the at least 12 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities ( Byler, 2022: x) see Chinese rule as illegitimate (Bellér-Hann et al, 2009: 1). The Chinese state has been intermittently present in the region since the mid-eighteenth century (Gladney, 1990; Millward, 2021), traceable despite the transitions from the Qing Empire to the Republic of China to the PRC. Since the late twentieth century, the PRC has implemented a project of mass securitisation and assimilation against the Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities (Greitens, Lee, and Yazici, 2020: 24), which, since 2017, has manifested in mass detention and forced labour programmes (Tobin, 2021: 94). Partially, Uyghur Islamic movements can be understood through these extractive socioeconomic and political conditions.

However, this state-centric analysis lends to portrayals of Uyghur Islam as entirely reactive. A substantive framing, where attention is reorientated to historical scholarship and ethnographic accounts, seeks to foreground “human agency within structures of subordination” (Mahmood, 2001: 205) and emic dynamics within Uyghur Islamic movements. Applying this perspective, I argue that the two waves of Uyghur Islamic modernist movements have not been directed against this colonial structure but rather entail internal contestation over the appropriation of modernity in an Islamic context. “Modernity” is an epistemological structure carried by and constitutive of the empire (Quijano, 2007). Modernity is also not a stable category; Uyghur Muslims have been subject to late Qing civilisational paradigms, which, in the late twentieth century, transformed under an assimilative, atheistic nation-state into a standard of modernity measured by Sino-centric metrics. There have been two Uyghur Islamic movements shaped by these conditions, within which modernity has been salient: the “Jadidist” and the “Sünnätchi” movements, [2] part of the broader global wave of Islamic reformism from the end of the nineteenth century and the Islamic revival from the late 1970s.

I position the Jadidist and Sünnätchi movements within the same broad analytical frame to bridge a gap in studies of Uyghur Islam which frequently view them in isolation (Brophy, 2016; Smith-Finley, 2013). The Jadids and the Sünnätchi were both movements engaged with transnational Islamic thought in an effort to modernise Islamic societies by appropriating imperial epistemologies for distinct agendas. Within everyday non-religiously educated Uyghur communities, elite-led Islamic movements have been adopted in a piecemeal fashion, blending with “traditional” Sufi-influenced practices. A community of rural-urban migrants in Ürümchi and a female Quranic recitation group in the South suggest this synthesis amid intensifying persecution (Harris, 2020; Byler, 2022). In highlighting a wider range of Uyghur society, I illustrate a gap between the discourse of religious-educated male reformers and popular religious practice, where “modern” revivalist piety exists within a wide repertoire of Islamic paradigms used to give meaning and structure to subaltern religious communities. A substantive analysis of these examples indicates an internal diversity to Uyghur Islam beyond what can be rendered by a functionalist approach.

By illustrating the complex interaction of Uyghur Muslims with the concept of modernity, I suggest the limitations of positioning Uyghur Islam exclusively in relation to the Chinese state. I problematise the inclination in scholarship to overly instrumentalise deeply embedded religious belief in order to better represent Muslim subjectivities (Euben 1999). By extension, this paper pushes against both PRC rhetoric, which reifies Uyghur Islam into a reactive terror threat, and Western media narratives, which tend to flatten Uyghur religiosity into a response to episodic suffering. Instead, I indicate the need to consider the depth, dynamism, and multi-dimensional nature of Uyghur Islam, an approach integral for our understanding of the causes and stakes of the ongoing state violence and religious repression within East Turkistan.

Chapter One

Review of Uyghur Studies Literature: Looking Beyond the Chinese State

Whilst analysis of the Chinese state and its imperial past is essential for understanding the contemporary colonialism in the Uyghur region, rendering the internal dynamics of Uyghur Islamic movements requires looking beyond the state. However, scholarship on Uyghur Islam is largely overshadowed by state-centric political histories. The dominant historiographical debate has hinged on the depth and duration of Chinese hegemony over the indigenous Turkic population of East Turkistan. In 1759, the region was incorporated into the “Greater” Qing Empire, and by 1885, East Turkistan was governed as a periphery province (see fig. 2) (Thum, 2014: 3). In the early twentieth century, the Qing Empire splintered. After two brief periods of independence the Uyghur region was integrated into the PRC in 1949. Since then, the Uyghurs have had fluctuating but limited political autonomy (Thum, 2014: 4).

In Chinese state narratives, this history of conquest is obscured; the Uyghurs are imagined as one of China’s fifty-six interchangeable ethnic minority groups who “stick together like pomegranate seeds”, according to the popular metaphor (Embassy of the PRC in the UK, 2024). Chinese state historians, such as Zhang Dongyue, locate the roots of this relationship in the distant past; a narrative which “naturalises” the region as a “constituent” and “inseparable part of [the Chinese] motherland” (Bovingdon, 2001: 114). Gardner Bovingdon describes this perpetual minority framing as an “ideological incorporation” entangled with state power, designed to legitimise Chinese rule over East Turkistan as historically continuous (2001: 123 and 96).

Uyghur historian Turghun Almas presents a counter-history to Chinese state narratives and offers an ethno-geographic imagining of East Turkistan as a national homeland for the Uyghurs (in Bovingdon, 2001: 123); a land constituted by agricultural oasis cities rooted with transnational Islamic currents and tethered to the Turkic, Persian, and Arab worlds to the West (in Thum 2014: 4). In Uyghurlar (“the Uyghurs”), Almas points to the existence of a series of independent Uyghur polities across Central Asia (in Bovingdon, 2001: 124), such as the first East Turkistan Republic in Khotan from 1933 until 1934, and the second in Ghulja from 1944 to 1946 (Kamalov, 2021). These periods of independence complement the scholarship of the New Qing School of history, which emphasises the intermittent and persistently porous nature of Chinese rule (Fuller and Lipman, 2004: 332), discrediting claims of durable historic hegemony in its peripheral territories (Qian, 2024).

While these state-centric and imperial political histories, critical or otherwise, are essential for understanding oppressive structures, this approach is limited for conceptualising internal dynamics. Seeking to reorient Uyghur studies scholarship, Rian Thum posits a novel historical anthropological approach, focused on scriptural transmission and religious identity formation (2014). Thum accounts how, in the tenth century, Islam began to spread across the region and was syncretised with pre-existing Buddhist and Manichean practices. What we term “Uyghur Islam” evolved into a distinct religious system composed of extensive regional shrine pilgrimage routes, sustained by a popular canon of local hagiographies (Thum, 2014: 14). These practices formed an “imagined community rooted in land and devotional practice” (Thum, 2014: 15), in part constituting a religiously inflected Turkic Muslim identity autonomous from state structures. This land-embedded religious system substantiates the frame of indigeneity within Uyghur studies – a challenge to the positioning of the Uyghurs as either wayward Chinese subjects (Thum, 2014: 13) or a “borderland” people whose identity only gained shape through contact with China-based states (in Byler, 2022: 38). Thum’s work suggests a scope for a fruitful re-centring of Uyghur scholarship outside the confinement of Chinese political history.

This historical anthropological approach has opened a methodological avenue for subaltern perspectives. However, recent developments have impelled a return to state-centric analysis in efforts to conceptualise the intensifying repression in the twenty-first century. Contemporary scholarship has largely analysed Uyghur society within an ongoing “colonial system of settlement and extraction” (Millward, 2021: 106). The regional economy has been described as structured according to “ethno-racialised lines” (Byler, 2022: x), premised on economic dispossession, the exploitation of Uyghur labour, and the corresponding accumulation amongst settler communities (Ilham Tohti in Millward, 2021: 105). Scholars point to the reform and opening-up period of the 1980s and integration of the Uyghur region into the “circuits of global capitalism” (Harris, 2022: 15). In the twenty-first century, some have described the transformation of the “Uyghur homeland” into a region resembling “a classic peripheral colony” (Byler, 2022: 106).

In 2014, under the auspices of “counterterrorism” (Roberts, 2020), the PRC launched a securitisation campaign against religion in the Uyghur region as a part of a wider repressive structure shaping contemporary Uyghur Islam (Byler, 2022: xi). During the campaign, more than a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims were arbitrarily detained in “re-education” camps (Tobin, 2021: 16). Many Uyghur women have been subjected by the state into forced marriages to Han Chinese men and have undergone forced sterilisation (Worden et al, 2022). Between 2015 and 2018, birth rates in the two largest Uyghur prefectures fell by 85% (Zenz in Hayes and Sims, 2022: 436). Many experts have concluded that these policies demonstrate genocide through an intent to destroy the “group capacity to reproduce its cultural foundations” (Tobin, 2021: 97; London Uyghur Tribunal, 2021; UK Parliament, 2022). The 2026 “Ethnic Unity Law”, in its design to “subjugate ethnic minorities” (McDonell, 2026), may represent the latest stage in this “systemic and iterative dismantling of [Uyghur] cultural and religious heritage” (Criner and Szadziewski, 2026).

Understanding this campaign as rooted in colonial logics situates the persecution of the Uyghurs within a global proliferation of securitisation campaigns against Muslim minorities in contentious territories (Hussin, 2018; Harris and Woodman, 2020). Arguably, there has been a “mirroring” of infrastructures of detainment and surveillance between “Chinese-occupied East Turkistan”, “Israel-occupied Palestine”, and “Indian-occupied Kashmir”, in parallel efforts by these states to “systematically control colonised populations” (Byler, 2022: xvi). This comparative perspective situates China alongside other occupying states, conducive to challenging established narratives in which “colonialism is seen as something through which China was victimised [such as during the Century of Humiliation] but not as something China practices” (Anand, 2019: 133). Given the extent of this project of violent transformation and minority dispossession, scholarship has tended to theorise Uyghur Islam through the impact of these policies.

In many ways, this focus on oppressive structures is essential, particularly from a human rights perspective (Clarke, 2010). This is further reflected by many young diasporic Uyghurs who centre the Chinese state when offering their own “theodicies” to make sense of their experience of suffering and “reasons” for genocide (Mahmut et al, 2021). Nonetheless, these state-centric framings should not compose Uyghur studies in its entirety, and within the discipline of politics, there have been minimal efforts to look beyond the Chinese state. Whilst Joanne Smith-Finley presents a detailed account of Uyghur Islamic revivalism in the late twentieth century (2013), her political analysis is limited to the structural condition of Chinese rule. Recent ethnographic works have taken a productive direction, documenting how Uyghur religious communities are surviving and re-adapting amid this repression (Waite, 2006; Byler, 2022). These ethnographies illustrate internal dynamics, contestation, and gendered dimensions of Uyghur Islam (Harris, 2020), missing from state-level political analysis.

I contribute to the debate by conceptualising Uyghur Islamic movements as self-constituting, shaped by Chinese state state influence but not defined by it, to recover the nuance, discursive depth, and agency obscured by state-centric approaches. The following section outlines this paper’s theoretical framework, drawn from adjacent areas of study, to interpret the emergence and form of Uyghur Islamic movements.

Theoretical Frameworks

This paper develops a theoretical framework from scholarship on Middle Eastern Islamic movements. Situating Uyghur Studies outside of Sinology is an intent to reflect the shared Sunni Islamic tradition and orientations Uyghurs have to the Middle East as the “heartland and source of correct [Islamic] practice” (Harris, 2020: 6). I distinguish functionalist and substantive conceptualisations on the emergence and form of Middle Eastern Islamic movements from the late nineteenth century. “Functionalism” holds that Islamic movements are expressions of discontent (Lapidus, 1997: 444); religion is implied to be a spiritual abstraction, transfigured into an almost mechanical instrument of political resistance under “structural pressures” (Euben, 1999: 48).

However, religion should not be taken as a gloss for political context. There should be space for the intrinsic appeal of religion and a recognition of how faith is “actually constructive of different forms of personhood, knowledge, and experience” (Mahmood, 2001: 16). To represent this depth, I adopt Talal Asad’s anthropological approach where Islam is understood as a lived and practiced “discursive tradition”, grounded in foundational scripture, sustained through ongoing reasonings, arguments, and pedagogy (1986: 20). “Modern” Islam is a historically contingent “composite structure” forged out of the encounter between Muslim intellectuals and non-Muslim empire (Said, 1997: 144). As religion is not a “reified ideological typology”, an “automatic causal link between beliefs and behaviour” cannot be assumed (Gunning and Jackson, 2011: 383). A substantive conceptualisation adopts this understanding of religion and pushes against instrumentalising angles, complementing political structural analysis with historical scholarship, ethnographic evidence, and attention to Islamic theology.

From these diverse methodologies, studies of Middle Eastern Islamic movements have indicated the substantial engagement Muslim actors have had with the concept of modernity (Lapidus, 1997; Khalid, 1998; Euben, 1999). Modernity is a hierarchical order of Enlightenment knowledge, values, and binaries where the rational is positioned against the superstitious or spiritual, originating in late eighteenth-century European expansion, print technologies, and urbanisation. To adopt the decolonial understanding, modernity is a concept embedded within coloniality (Quijano, 2007: 7), the ideational superstructure to colonial domination based upon “proprietorial control, dispossession, and difference in power” (Anand, 2019: 130). As European empires expanded, modernity became a framework for categorising and ordering the colonised; a discourse naturalising and legitimating relations of domination (Said, 1978). Modernity and coloniality are intimately interwoven into a pervasive epistemological structure, with coloniality forming the “dark side of modernity” of the contemporary world order (Mignolo, 2011).

This structure explicates the emergence of Islamic modernism in the late nineteenth century, where Muslim intellectuals sought to “rethink or adapt Muslim institutions, norms and discourse” in light of the “challenges and opportunities posed by modernity” (Muhammad Qasim Zaman in Gunasti, 2024). Modernity continues to be salient to contemporary Islam, with Islamic fundamentalism, for instance, theorised as a dialectical engagement with the phenomena, in part a reaction to the modern world, but more profoundly an “expression” of it (Ira Lapidus in Euben, 1999: 19). The fundamentalists’ hostility to “non-modern” Islamic traditions, such as mystic Sufism, suggests this engagement (Euben, 1999: 17). These disputations within the broad discursive tradition of Islam demonstrate the possibility of multiple and contested iterations of Islamic modernity.

Nonetheless, there are significant differences between the late twentieth-century Islamic movements in the post-colonial Middle East and in occupied East Turkistan, where colonialism is ongoing and intensifying into the twenty-first century. Within Uyghur society, modernity has been a complex, shifting phenomenon imposed from two directions: horizontally, from European incursions in Eurasia and the carrying of Orientalist paradigms of Muslim backwardness (Said, 1978), and vertically, from Chinese rule and the translation of modernity into sinicised civilisational discourse (Tobin, 2021: 94). Thus, Uyghur Islamic modernist movements have emerged in distinct conditions, shaped by layered epistemological impositions, intellectual currents, and shifting political structures.

Despite such differing contexts, an understanding of the structures of coloniality and modernity drawn from Middle Eastern studies is conducive to giving theoretical shape to Uyghur Islamic movements. Hence, I present modernity not as a paradigm which Muslims have uniformly or mechanically appealed to in colonial conditions, but rather as a discourse adopted by specific movements and salient to “internal textual struggles” within Muslim societies, which are “discrete and differing” in various community settings (Pick, in Euben, 1999: 72).

Chapter Two

Functionalist Interpretations of Islamic Movements

This section critically engages with the dominant functionalist conception of Uyghur Islam,  in which religion is positioned as a “reactive phenomenon” to colonial governance and processes of dispossession and repression in the region (Smith-Finley, 2013: 263).  As Islam should not be reduced to political expression, this section concludes by illustrating dimensions of religious belief that are neither constituted or bordered by the state.

In the functionalist interpretation, Uyghur Islamic movements are interpreted in relation to oppressive political structures and are presented as a medium of resistance. The contentious relationship between Uyghur Muslims and the Chinese state, in shifting form, extends back  to the late eighteenth century. Islam has since developed into a critical site of contention; a politicised signifier of difference for the Uyghurs amid the consolidation of assimilative and extractive colonial governance in the twentieth century (Gladney, 1990; Millward, 2021). To an extent, this persecution is part of a wider targeting of Muslims across China; both the Hui and the Uyghurs are considered suspect due to their a priori loyalty to a divine power (Qian, 2024: 104) – by nature contrary to the totalising claims of the “Mandate of Heaven” of Imperial China or the state atheism of the CCP (Harris and Isa, 2019: 79). However, the Hui are adjacent to the Han-majority with a shared language and cultural repertoire. By contrast, an ethnonational Uyghur identity layers this religious difference. The “marginal position” of the Uyghurs to Chinese culture has further made Uyghur religion “prone to be viewed as deviant” by the state (Harris, 2020: 8).

During the twentieth century, this “suspect” identity was further politicised as the relatively pluralistic Qing empire was replaced by a nation-state increasingly influenced by Chinese ethnonationalism. Since 2012, Xi Jinping’s PRC has increasingly expressed the “cartographic desire” of a Han Chinese characterised state stretching up to the Tian Shan mountains, an imaginary that contrasts the Uyghur majority in the territory (Anand, 2019: 132). A 2017 statement by a Chinese government religious affairs official, Mehsumjan Mamer, indicates the ramifications of these imaginings:

“Break [the Uyghur’s] lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins. Completely shovel up the roots of “two-faced people,” dig them out, and vow to fight these two-faced people until the end” (in Human Rights Watch, 2021).

Mehsumjan’s description of the Uyghurs as “two-faced” demonstrates this disconnect; the Uyghurs are politically Chinese as “citizens”, whilst their Turco-Muslim “roots” are not. This “historical-cultural reality” of religious, linguistic, and cultural difference has thus positioned the Uyghurs in a suspect insider-outsider geography (Anand, 2019: 132).

This assimilative rhetoric is embedded in a structure of state violence across the Uyghur region, spanning the extensive religious persecution of Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 to the “counter-terror” crackdown of the 1990s (Waite, 2006: 167), during which over 200 people were executed for “state security crimes” (Clarke, 2010: 52). Such violence is in part a consequence of the PRC’s intent to subject religion to party policy. In the 1990s, the party implemented the “Strike Hard” campaign in the 1990s (Dillon, 2011) and issued Document No. 7 which sought to securitize “illegal religious activity” and “separatism” as existential threats to the “stability of the nation’s body politics” (Anand, 2019: 132). The prevention of Uyghur children from entering mosques, for example, indicates an intent to “reduce the distinct (and oppositional) identities of Uyghurs” by targeting community reproduction (see fig. 4) (Bovingdon, 2001: 34). Such policies suggest, as early as the 1990s, a region-wide interlocking process of the criminalisation of Islamic practice, methods of securitisation, and state violence.

To an extent, this campaign has politicised religion within the region; religious persecution and Islamic discourse have increasingly been the cause and expression of resistance, the wider violent context and ideational backdrop to the murder of the “government imams” discussed. In 1988, for instance, students at Xinjiang University mobilised based on a “lack of respect” for their “culture and religion” (Bovingdon, 2001: 8). In 1997, Uyghurs in Ghulja demonstrated against the penalisation of mäshräp, a traditional community gathering of Uyghur men where Islamic conduct is subtly enforced. Protestors marched behind a banner of the shahadah—a proclamation of Islamic faith through the oneness of Allah—and a minority chanted for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate of East Turkistan (Bovingdon, 2001: 8). The largely young demonstrators were faced with a violent police response, a massacre which further alienated Uyghur society from state authorities (Smith-Finley, 2013: 260).

The Ürümchi Violence of July 2009 continued this escalatory pattern, where interethnic clashes were met with widespread police violence and mass arrests targeting the Uyghur neighbourhoods of the city (Clarke, 2010). During the decade preceding this incident, researchers observed a “striking Islamization” of the city: more women adopted Arab-style hijab, men grew longer beards, Uyghur shops stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes, and larger crowds of men prayed outside the city’s mosques (Harris and Isa, 2019: 69). Despite the long-term nature of this “Islamization”, the Chinese state identified Islam as the “cause” of the 2009 unrest, obscuring the outrage at the government handling of the racialised attacks by a Han-Chinese mob on Uyghur workers in Guangdong and broader mobilisation for greater self-determination (Uyghur Transnational Justice Database, 2024). By 2014, the PRC launched the “People’s War on Terror”, a crackdown against the “Uyghur” security threat of “National Separatism, Religious Extremism, and Violent Terrorism” (see fig. 5) (Human Rights Watch, 2021). Consequently, religious materials were banned, beards and veils were prohibited from public spaces, and a system of mass digital surveillance was introduced (Xinjiang Documentation Project, 2014).

Through these measures, the Chinese state further embedded itself as an intrusive “monolithic entity” in Uyghurs lives (Harris, 2020: 4), which, contrary to intent, contributed to a consolidated Islam as a “natural counter-ideology” (Ayubi in Smith-Finley, 2013: 38). For most Uyghurs, religious revival can be characterised as “peaceful” and “cathartic” (Smith-Finley, 2013: 236). Nonetheless, for some, resistance was violent and framed in ostensibly religious terms. In 2014, five Uyghurs attacked crowds in Kunming train station, killing thirty-one people (Kaiman and Branigan, 2014). The presence of more organised groups based abroad, such as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and the Turkistan Islamic Party, has been noted since the early 2000s, but their stated aim to launch a “jihad” against the Chinese state has not materialised (Greitens, Lee, and Yazici, 2020: 28). Situating this violence within its colonial structure, Uyghur Islam can be partially explained as a “vehicle” opposition to repression, structured dispossession, and frustrated ethno-political aspirations (Smith-Finley, 2013: 260). As such, what might not be understood as resistance, such as wearing an Arab-style hijab or growing a beard, is often seen as a political symbol  – by the state and non-state alike – and is categorised alongside other forms of resistance, such as violent mobilisation.

Whilst understanding structure is essential for rendering these contentious dynamics, conceptualisations which consider Islam tantamount to resistance give insufficient space to the agency of Uyghur Muslims, reducing their worldviews and theologies to the political. Describing Uyghur religiosity as “symbolic” implies religion purely matters in terms of what it represents, such as desires for greater self-determination (Smith-Finley, 2013: 263). One Uyghur intellectual, interviewed in the early 2000s, expressed this view:

“For many people going to the mosque now, it is a superficial manifestation… it’s not a deep commitment or understanding. But it is a kind of resistance insofar as it’s an expression of discontent with government policy and with the Hans.” (in Smith-Finley, 2013: 259)

By arguing that the faith of many Uyghurs is “superficial,” this intellectual offers a functionalist interpretation. His argument is underwritten by class dynamics: religiosity is presented as a byproduct of deeper political conditions that the educated (and implied secular) can comprehend, but that the religious (and implied less educated) cannot. Islam therefore “expresses” yet “obscures the real source of the problem”, identified as a sociopolitical and economic structure (Euben, 1999: 21). Whilst an Uyghur man, this intellectual mirrors a tendency in Western scholarship to “fit” religion into chains of linear political causality – a rendering of Muslim modes of organisation, culture, and knowledge into a Western epistemological framework, often entailing reductive stereotyping of Muslim populations (Said, 1978).

To avoid this flattening, theorising resistance should weigh analyses of structural conditions against agency and intent (Johnson, 2003). Saba Mahmood problematises an “agency” that only “locates the political and moral autonomy of the subject in the face of power” (2001: 203), and through a study of the women’s mosque movement in Cairo in the 1990s, she criticises portrayals of these women-led movements as “really” being about Western feminism. Instead, Mahmood finds an Islam which “first and foremost” consists of the embodied practices of pious living (2001: 204). Patriarchal state power forms the backdrop of these women’s lives, yet it is not the structure through which their religion is directed against or mediated through. Therefore, my criticism of portrayals of Uyghur Islam as “really” about self-determination or anti-colonial politics is not to negate the latter’s relevance, but to challenge tendencies within structural analysis to overly simplify diverse modalities of Islamic practice.

A pivot to ethnographic approaches facilitates a “thicker” understanding of the personal and spiritual dimensions of Islam (Euben, 1999: 154), positioning religion as more than a reactive vessel. Given the scarcity of primary accounts, I draw from a set of interviews with young Uyghur women recently settled in Istanbul[3]. Whilst for some Uyghurs, particularly for organised militant groups, Islam is an overt symbol of resistance and anti-state mobilisation, these women account how they engaged with criminalised religious acts not as a political statement, but because they believed it was what they ought to do, divinely sanctioned. One woman, Subinur, recalled attending secret Qur’anic classes in southern East Turkistan (Yasin, 2026: 51). She hid her Qur’an under her clothes when passing police checkpoints and remembered how “it would stab into my sides, causing me to bleed.” Through this clandestine education, Subinur memorised the Qur’an. A second young Uyghur woman, Nefise, recalled how her aunt wrapped the Qur’an and other sacred texts in plastic and threw them into the Ili River. She sought to avoid confiscation of her texts by the Chinese state police with the hope that they would be retrieved by other Uyghurs across the border in downstream Kazakhstan (in Yasin, 2026: 52). Preserving religious texts – whether the Qur’an or ancestral hagiographies – were seen as eschatologically oriented acts, sanctioned by an authoritative moral order they saw as larger than the Chinese state. In the terms of these women, self-education, the cultivation of religious knowledge, and the preservation of sacred texts were primary religious duties.

Suggestive of the salience of such religious obligation to these women within the diaspora, Islamic scripture was broadly the transcendental framework through which these women narrated their experience of exile. Nefise described herself as “in a state of Hijrah”, referring to the transformative migration of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina (Yasin, 2026: 74). An Uyghur poet, Abdushukur Muhammet, also makes this comparison, describing his flight from China as being “chased from [his] country like the Prophet” (translated by Munawwar Abdulla in Elkun, 2023). Hijrah thus operates as a “key interpretative logic” for understanding exile as a Qur’anic imperative (Yasin, 2026: 61), illustrating how scriptural references have given shape to the lives of Uyghur refugees outside the immediate reach of the Chinese state. Islam is thus illustrated to encompass a comprehensive and resilient worldview, beyond simply a medium of discontent or resistance.

This section has situated Uyghur Islam in a long history of religious repression, processes of dispossession, and persecution of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities within East Turkistan. I have assessed the view that Uyghur Islam has primarily served as an instrument for resistance against such structures. However, I have critiqued this functionalist interpretation for providing a shallow account of Muslim agency, inattentive to the terms through which Islam is understood and lived by many Uyghur Muslims. My approach below aims to counter this flattening tendency, continuing my shift towards ethnographic and historical materials to provide a substantive account of Uyghur Islamic movements over the past century and a half.

Chapter Three

Substantive Interpretations of Islamic Movements

Movements of Uyghur Islamic modernism have been significant over the last century and a half, entailing efforts to redefine Uyghur religious society and Islamic practice “in accordance with the perceived requirements of modernity” (Waite, 2007: 167). Significant have been the Jadid movement of the late nineteenth century and the Sünnätchi movement of the late twentieth century.[4] The Jadid movement was led by intellectuals – an elite-oriented push to transform Uyghur religious practice into an “Islam” compatible with the swirl of pan-Turkic and pan-Muslim intellectual currents of Islamic reformism from Central and Western Asia. The Jadids were modernisers in a direct sense, seeking to adopt and appropriate Western discourses, nationalist thought, and technologies to their own advantage.

The Sünnätchi movement was similarly integrated into the global Islamic revival of the late 1970s and 1980s that emerged from the Middle East (Harris, 2020: 3). The Sünnätchi, meaning “followers of the Sunnah” (the body composed of the life and teachings of the Prophet), existed in parallel with other local Salafi movements calling for a return to the fundamentals of Islam. Unlike the Jadidist movement, Sünnätchi Islam was popularised in a heterogeneous and piecemeal manner, often blending with traditional Sufi-influenced practices.

While in many dimensions hostile to influences – Western or Chinese – deemed un-Islamic, I argue that the Sünnätchi were nonetheless Islamic modernists, lying within a longer history of reformist movements, following the Jadids in appropriating standards of modernity to reform Uyghur religious society. Both the Jadids and Sünnätchi translated modernity to an Islamic register, entailing ideas of scriptural orthodoxy and rationalised practice in efforts to define and border Uyghur Islam. For communities facing intensifying repressive conditions, this multifaceted engagement with modernity underlines dimensions of these movements that cannot be explained exclusively in relation to colonial structures.Whilst occurring within a structure of Chinese colonialism, here I argue that Uyghur Islamic movements have been more than a reactive phenomenon, constituting internally-orientated struggles over orthodoxy, practice, and Islamic modernity.

The Jadids: Islamic Modernism and the Struggle for Religious Orthodoxy

The late nineteenth century Jadidist movement can be understood as the first effort by Uyghur reformers to “modernise” Uyghur Islam. The Jadids were part of a global movement of “Islamic modernism,” spurred by the “breakdown of Muslim empires” and European “colonial intrusion” (Lapidus, 1997: 444). Islamic reformism was first discernible in the Middle East through Muhammad ‘Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani who sought to articulate an Islam compatible with “standards of reason and progress” (Aydin, 2017: 7). Modernising pressures were layered in East Turkistan: imposed from the Qing to the East, and from the Europeans, the Russians and the British, from the West caught in the geostrategic “Great Game” for Central Asia (Brophy, 2016: 70). Whilst the latter conceived of most Muslim societies according to Orientalist paradigms (Said, 1978), what separated the Uyghur Jadids from their Middle Eastern counterparts was the vertical pressures from the Qing of the civilisational “backwardness” of its Turkic Muslim periphery (Brophy, 2016: 72). Out of this layered encounter with non-Muslim empires, Muslim elites in East Turkistan were subject to the imposition of various epistemologies of empire – a dynamic through which modernity was globalised “by way of colonialist extension” (Falk in Euben, 1999: 22).

The Jadids became pioneers of this Islamic modernising movement; they sought to scrutinise Uyghur society according to global standards of “modern practice” (Waite, 2006: 251) and thus to “rationalise” Uyghur Islam into a “systematic and self-contained set of beliefs” (Eickelman in Khalid, 1998: 11). Orthodoxy became the theological terminology for rationalisation, wherein Islam is anchored to scripture – the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sunnah – seeking the revelations of Allah and the life and words of the Prophet and the early generation of Muslims, “purified” from the following generations of legal interpretation or the localised Sufi mysticism. This emphasis on written scripture relocated Islam from its embedded place within community structures, representing an epistemological shift towards a religion reconstituted as a “universal and uniform religious tradition” (Aydin, 2017: 3) capable of sustaining a “de-territorialised global imagined community” of Muslims (Casanova, 2012).

These modernisation efforts were measured against religious “traditionality” – worship premised on a “transmission that is characterised by repetition in an eternal sense” (Feuchtwang, in Waite, 2007: 256). Prior to Jadidist modernisation efforts, Uyghur Islam was “distinct” from the “constellation of technological, cultural, intellectual phenomena we call modernity” (Thum, 2014: 152). Uyghur Islam has been described as a religio-cultural identity and an “autonomous sacred tradition” (Brophy, 2016: 27), sustained by land-based worship, Sufi shrine networks, hagiographic culture (Thum, 2014: 152), and calendric life-cycle rituals (see fig. 6) (Ildikó Bellé-Hann in Harris, 2020: 6). The Jadids saw these traditions as regional and unorthodox. The Tatar reformist Nushirvan Yashev (1885-1918), for instance, offered a “scathing” critique of a revered Uyghur shrine and its “superstitious” pilgrims (Brophy, 2016: 87). An Ottoman reformist, Ahmet Kemal, criticised locals at the shrine of Afaq Khoja for what he saw as the “irrational” practice of “rubbing faces on sheep horn and on cow tails” (in Thum, 2014: 223). The denigration pilgrimages as “traditionalisms” was part of the wider reformist movement to change the nature of Uyghur Islam (Brophy, 2016: 87), conceived as necessary for their wider programme of rationalising Islam into a form compatible with the contemporary trans-imperial Muslim thought.

Essential to this vilification of traditional practices were “modern” innovations; printed periodicals were an example, facilitated a “redefinition of the nature of cultural production” and challenged the “ascendency of religious transmission through ritualised, face-to-face interaction” (Waite, 2006: 251). Circulating polemical texts were the Jadids’ mechanisms for disseminating reformist religious knowledge and rendering scripture through print (Waite, 2006: 116). These technologies initiated a democratisation of written religious knowledge, integral to the challenge Islamic reformers posed to traditional patterns of transmission based on oral Qur’anic recitation and the authority of local mullahs and sheikhs (Thum, 2014: 113).

Schools were further points of struggle and conceived of as a means to “cure the ills” of unorthodox society (Khalid, 1998: 4). Usūl-i-jadıd (‘New Method Schooling’) became the “modern” alternative to the Maktab which taught Qur’an recitals, catechisms, and Sufi poetry as the established “carrier of Islam” in Uyghur society (Thum, 2014: 172). In its place, Usūl-i-jadıd schools taught a reformist curriculum and separated “secular” subjects from “religion” (Thum, 2014: 5), constitutive of a “desacralisation” of understandings of religion as “embedded in everyday social practice” (Eichelman in Khalid, 1998: 11). In efforts to “cleanse” of both local Islamic peculiarities (Brophy, 2016: 96), usūl-i-jadıd schools sought a re-orientation towards the wider Islamic world, with one Kashgar school named in honour of the Ottoman Sultan, teaching Ottoman military marches (Brophy, 2016: 128). Given the adjacent linguistic and cultural spheres, the Ottoman empire to the Western was attractive to many of the Jadids. Modernity was therefore transcribed geographically as well as temporally with Istanbul as a paragon of progressive Muslim society, imbued with the religious authority of the Ottoman Caliph and the intellectual authority of the burgeoning Ottoman public sphere (Brophy, 2016: 97).

This orientation of the Jadids towards alternate “Islamic modernities” cannot be thought of as entirely autonomous or distinct from colonial epistemologies (Khalid, 1998; Aydin, 2017). As demonstrated, the category of modernity is itself imbued with coloniality. The Jadidist journal Sīrat-I Müstakim (‘The Straight Path’), for example, advocated to “reform” the “backwardness” of Uyghur society and adapt to the “exigencies of modern life” (Brophy, 2016: 109). In utilising these normative binaries, the Jadids reproduced Qing civilisational discourse on the need to remedy the parochialism of rural Uyghur society (Thum, 2014: 113). To an extent, both Uyghur intellectuals and the Qing officials were operating within shared colonial epistemologies, carried through imperial incursions into both Eurasia and indirectly through European influence over the semi-colonised Qing during the “century of humiliation” (Brophy, 2016: 7).

Despite drawing heavily from the imperial epistemologies prolific in the late nineteenth century, the Jadids were not simply reproducing modalities of Qing or European governance; it would be simplistic to categorise Muslim intellectual thought as either an external reaction to the empire or a complete capitulation to it. In a world prolific with, and even constituted by, such colonial epistemologies, it would be “futile” for scholars to look for movements outside of the framework of colonial knowledge (Khalid, 1998: 9). Reformist Muslims were in large an indigenous response to the colonial encounter; they utilised and propagated colonial epistemologies but were doing so with distinct aims and agendas. The Jadids were in line with Islamic reformers globally, co-opting discourse of modernity from hostile non-Muslim empires to “fashion […] their own version of modernity” (Aydin, 2017: 43) and challenge sedimented notions of the “orient” (Asad, 1993). Reformers sought to critique hierarchies upholding structures of Muslim subjection (Said, 1997: 9; Aydin, 2017: 40). Middle Eastern Islamic reformists, for instance, did not blindly “Europeanise” (Khalid, 1998: 43) but presented Islam as enlightened and rational (Casanova, 2012), capable of constituting an autonomous “force in international politics” (Aydin, 2017: 3).

Thus, for the Uyghur Jadids under Qing rule, the adoption of imperial epistemologies was motivated by an agenda to “advance” their own societies through integrating colonial knowledge into “native cultural production” (Khalid, 1998: 14). By appropriating the category of modernity, the Jadids sought to reform Uyghur religious society; the Jadidist movement was not an effort directed against colonial structures, but constituted an internally oriented struggle to align Uyghur Islam with adopted notions of orthodoxy.

The Islamic Revival: Sünnätchi Scripturalism and Sufi Syncretism

Even within the increasingly repressive circumstances of East Turkistan in the twenty-first century, I argue that the Sünnätchi movement was similarly internally orientated and cannot be interpreted entirely in relation to state structures. Illustrative of the limits of the structure–reaction account of Uyghur Islam, the contemporary revival of Uyghur Islam first emerged in the decades after the Cultural Revolution, a period when there was greater religious tolerance and state-sanctioned mosques were reopened (Harris 2020: 8). The Islamic revival was spurred by imports of Islamic materials, an increase in Uyghurs undertaking the state-sanctioned hajj, and the education of many Uyghur students in Islamic theology and Arabic in the Middle East (Smith-Finley, 2013: 240). Further to this orthodox orientation, the movement was characterised by a novel form of ethical self-cultivation and a revitalisation of family structures (Lapidus, 1997; Harris, 2020).

Despite their broad similarities, the Uyghur Jadids and Sünnätchi engaged with and adopted different standards of modernity. By the late twentieth century, the Chinese state carried more aggressively sinicised civilisational paradigms—to be “modern” was to be integrated with Chinese language and culture. To an extent, this constituted an “internal Orientalism”, an imagined hierarchy of modernity between the ethnic minorities of China (Schein in Anand, 2019: 133). This hierarchy has been widely reproduced in state discourses depicting the Uyghurs as an overly religious population in need of modernisation by a superior “civilisation” and corrective, for example, of the “backward” dress habits of minority women (see fig. 7) (Tobin, 2021: 94). The Sünnätchi, like the Jadids, did not necessarily contest these epistemologies but selectively appropriated elements in attempts to reform what they deemed the “unorthodox” elements of Uyghur religious society.

Ablimät Damolla, after studying in the Middle East in the 1970s, became a pioneer of the Uyghur Sünnätchi movement (Waite, 2007: 169) and sought to align Uyghur Islam with Saudi-Hanbali practice, which he viewed as emanating from “orthodox” practice (Waite, 2007: 170). Ablimät’s reformist program demanded that Islam be “purified” of the accretion of localised religious customs such as näzir prayers (held for the deceased at cemeteries) (Harris, 2020: 8) or payments to mollas (religiously-learned men) for reciting the Qur’an (Waite, 2006: 169). Furthermore, Ablimät criticised the age-based hierarchy of Uyghur society as contrary to Islamic egalitarianism; instead, Muslims should be committed to a more “abstract concept of community and moral authority” (Lapidus, 1997: 448).

Whilst the Sünnätchi revivalists had a similar modernising instinct to cleanse Islam of traditionality, their discourse of was less progressive than the Jadids; the Sünnätchi were scripturalist and sought to “return” Uyghur society to a “commitment to the basic principles” (Lapidus, 1997: 444). The Sünnätchi shared the fundamentalist tenet that Muslims’ lives should be ordered around the prescriptions of the Qur’an and the sunnah (Harris, 2020: 11), as suggested by the dawa missionaries who preached a life closely modelled on the Prophet Muhammad across the rural south of East Turkistan (Harris, 2020: 9). This strict scripturalism suggests a shared discourse and proscriptive program with Islamic “fundamentalist” political theorists such as Sayyid Qutb (Euben, 1999: 154), who was not a “critic per se”, but opposed a modernity rooted in bourgeois European Enlightenment (Euben, 1999: 155). The Sünnätchi were thus positioned within this Salafi fundamentalist tradition, tethered to the eighteenth-century anti-idolatry movement of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (Robinson, 2010: 17).

The fundamentalist instinct to look “back” to scripture does not negate that the Sünnätchi programme was modernising in a broader sense; the Qur’an and the Sunnah were transcendental frameworks through which accretions of local and syncretic religious customs were critiqued and reformist programmes articulated. Scriptural was the frame through which Ablimät Damolla offered his discernibly modern program of individual commitment, egalitarian social organisation, and articulations of a “new way of imagining the world” (Waite, 2006: 251; Khalid, 1998: 4). A central intention was to democratise religious knowledge, reflected by Ablimät’s 1988 school to teach young Uyghurs to Arabic and thus the ability to directly engage with scripture (Waite, 2006: 259). By 1990, the Sünnätchi had helped establish more than 938 Qur’anic schools, educating tens of thousands of Uyghur students (Irwin, 2021). Abdurähim, a father in north Kashgar, suggests that this movement was successful for his village:

“When you first came here, I didn’t know much about religion­­­—I just recited a few verses from the Qur’an. Now I have started to read these books and know much more. Mollas and other religious leaders could recite the Qur’an, but they couldn’t really understand it. Now there are many more knowledgeable people in Kashgar” (in Waite, 2007: 261)

Therefore, the Sünnätchi fundamentalist-influenced emphasis on scripture was in fact the means through which they critiqued local practices. Similar to the Jadidist movement, the Sünnätchi movement sought to decentralise religious knowledge, in part to undermine the traditional  ulema and the predominance of orally transmitted Islamic theology in Uyghur society. In an interview, a Uyghur lecturer in Kashgar also made the comparison:

[The Sünnätchi] are like the Jadids. People like Ablimät Damolla are called Wahhabi, but they are just good Muslims who believe in reform and progress (in Waite 2007: 172).

This lecturer alludes to the striking similarity between the Jadids and Ablimät’s stress on the “compatibility of Islam with learning and modern development in general” (Waite, 2007: 259), a parallel reflected in Ablimät’s 1997 sermon:

“In the past, oppressive rulers deprived the Uyghur people of education and science, economic and technical progress, and kept the people in ignorance and superstition. The only way out for the Uyghurs from the present grim situation is education, and everyone should do his best to promote it” (in Waite, 2007: 170).

Here, Ablimät only alludes to the structure of Chinese rule (their “grim situation”). Ablimät positions himself explicitly as a modernist by promoting education through the terms of “science” and “technical” knowledge, reflecting an intent to modernise Uyghur religious society through rationalised, scripture-based education.

Despite the efforts of religious leaders like Ablimät, Sünnätchi Islamic modernism was not popularised in a linear fashion; ethnographic work amongst marginalised local Uyghur communities indicates how the rise of these “pious practices” was not a “coherent trend in Uyghur society” or an “organised movement” (Harris, 2020: 10). For a group of pious rural-urban Uyghur migrants in an informal shantytown on the outskirts of Ürümchi, revivalist Islamic practices structured their underground religious community. These men were marginalised in a rapidly modernising city; their homes were in the shadow of rapidly built high-rises, at constant risk of demolition following the scheduling of an “urban cleansing” of their neighbourhood following the 2009 uprising (see fig. 8) (Byler, 2022: 191). Subject to both imminent dispossession and “uncertain and often punitive state policies to religion” (Harris, 2020: 20), many of these men engaged with a “covert circulation” of online Islamic revivalist content (Byler, 2022: 115). They regularly gathered in semi-underground mosques “to discuss unauthorised religious teachings [of] pious Islam” (Byler, 2022: 192), sometimes led by unofficial “wild Imams” (Byler, 2022: 210). By the late 2010s, this community had become “comingled with reformist Islamic practices”, their lives shaped by an Islamic ethos extending, for instance, to a widespread abstinence from alcohol and tobacco (Byler, 2022: 193).

Whilst social precarity contextualises the revival of community-based faith, a structural lens cannot render the complex manner in which revivalist practices often blended with traditional, Sufi-influenced, Islamic paradigms. Many within this community identified as both a Sünnätchi Muslim and as a musapir, the latter term for a wandering Islamic mystic rooted in “encultured” Sufi traditions for understanding migration and a sense of “psychic and material displacement” (Byler, 2022: 192). The musapir is envisaged as in atemporal transit towards the destination of his soul, rooted in unique understandings amongst Uyghur Muslims of belonging lying as much in “deathplace” as birthplace (Thum, 2014: 16). Within communities with often an “uncertain grasp of basic religious education”, these debates were often "enthusiastic" and “decontextualised” (Waite, 2006: 63); the salience of Sufi references to this community did not seem to weaken their revivalist orientation. One Uyghur man, for instance, conflated the two and “actively used his musapir identification to validate his religious persona as a reformist [Sünnachī] Muslim” (Byler, 2022: 193). Identifying as a musapir sat alongside Sünnachī piety as means to conceive and structure experiences of dispossession (Byler, 2022: 199) – complementary, not contradictory, frameworks for conceiving of dispossession. Thus, in practice, many less-educated pious communities adopted reformist paradigms but continued to operate somewhere between modern and non-modern epistemologies.

For a deeply pious group of women in the rural south of East Turkistan in the 2010s, there was a similar duality to their Islam; they structured their religious practice around Sünnätchi-influenced piety yet continued to reproduce embodied Sufi-influenced practices (Harris, 2020). These women traditionally practised through zikr – a recitation and repetition of prayer – held together by the Sufi concept of ishq (divine love). Their strictly female-only gatherings constituted an autonomous “women’s sociality” structured by a hierarchy of female Islamic knowledge (Harris, 2020: 27) – in some ways, a mirroring of the Cairo Women’s Mosque Movement’s implicit challenge to the “historically male-centred character” of “instituted standards of Islamic pedagogy” (Mahmood, 2001: 203 and 209). Instead of an intent to educate the subject in rationalised scripture, these women engaged in an Islam which sought to cultivate the spirit to “sound out” a way for the untethered soul to feel itself towards God (Harris, 2020: 32). In a sense, these women sought to “transcend” modernity through “countercultural” paradigms of self-definition (Euben, 1999: 55 and 167).

Under the influence of prolific Sünnätchi preaching during the height of the Islamic revival, these women began to incorporate revivalist piety with their community-orientated, Sufi influenced, forms of Islam. Many of their group began to engage with global circulations of Islamic revivalist thought, by, for example, learning the Quranic recitation style of Saudi preachers (Harris, 2020: 2). In part, this turn to “modern” Islamic practice can be explained as a response to state discourse of their practices as “superstitious” and “backwards” – not a reactive religious “backlash” but a response to social change that demonstrates the “considerable social and political agency of these women” (Harris, 2020: 28). Yet they did not abide by the strict scriptural orthodoxy of Sünnätchi like Ablimät Damolla – they incorporated revivalism into traditional practices such as zikr, blurring stringent definitions of Islamic modernism (Harris, 2020: 32). The Islamic revival was one of many paradigms these women drew from, often in a piecemeal fashion, to give structure and shape to their recitation community.

To conclude, the nuance in the manner that Sünnätchi revivalism was adopted across a wide cross-section of Uyghur society suggests a depth that cannot be rendered through state-level analysis. This substantive analysis has illustrated how, within alienating secular and colonial structures, these reformist and revivalist movements were not directed against the state but entailed dynamic internal engagement with modernity through a definitively Islamic register. Under colonial conditions, modernity was one of many grounds upon which Muslims have struggled and reinterpreted their faith. The heterogeneous and syncretic engagement with modernity across Uyghur society demonstrates the many novel ways in which religion has given shape to precarious lives.

Conclusion

Whilst shaped by the Chinese state, Uyghur Islamic movements have largely been self-constituting, defined by localised struggles over ideas of correct practice and religious authority waged within the Uyghur religious community and over the spiritual subject. I first outlined a functionalist conceptualisation, explicating religiosity amongst Uyghurs as a reaction to oppressive structures, rooted in a longer politicisation of Uyghur Islam into a marker of “deviant” ethnonational difference. Second, I offered a substantive interpretation, demonstrating how Uyghur Islamic movements have operated relatively autonomously, with a depth irreducible to structural analysis. Under colonial pressures, reformers sought to transpose global discourses of Islamic modernism onto Uyghur Islam. Sünnätchi Islamic piety, often blended with resilient Sufi-influenced traditional practices, held together marginalised religious communities amid the persecution of the early twenty-first century.

Beyond Uyghur studies, this more substantive approach could contribute to critical analyses on contentious state policies and counter-terror campaigns towards Muslim communities globally (Hussin, 2018), such as the complex relationship between repression, religion, and resistance amongst Palestinian Muslims (Khalidi, 1997). A substantive analysis should thus attend to the “inherent power” of religion as an “ethical-political vision of the modern world” (Euben, 1999: 154) – not analytically distinct from more overtly “political” questions of nationalist politics or anti-colonial mobilisation. An approach centring the agency of religious community within the structures of the modern states is salient – particularly considering recent efforts by the PRC to export its model of violent securitisation and mass detention, depicting “Xinjiang” as a “successful” “experience [which] can be introduced to countries” with other “problematic” Muslim minorities (Chinese diplomat Jiang Duan in Criner and Szadziewski, 2026).

This substantive interpretation could further ongoing debates over how to conceptualise the ongoing persecution in East Turkistan. If religion is within a cycle of repression–religiosity, understood functionally, then state policies towards religion could be envisioned as largely futile since, contrary to the intent, repression is likely to spark a reactive religious resurgence. However, my substantive interpretation approaches Uyghur Islam as an embedded system of meaning shaped by a multifaceted engagement with modernist epistemologies. Arguably, contemporary Uyghur identity – as a delimited ethnonational group based upon a shared territory and history – was forged by Islamic reformers out of the “raw materials” or “traditions” of regional religious identity maintenance (Thum, 2014: 12).

Given the significance of a shared religious community to contemporary Uyghur identity, the targeting of religious transmission becomes an existential question for Uyghur social reproduction. This is likely the PRC’s precise rationale; the closure of mosques, the banning of religious education, and the separation of Uyghur children from “religious” parents (UN News, 2023) form a systematic assault upon the foundations of Uyghur collective identity and national claims. Hence, Western scholarship and media, which present the ongoing campaign as delimited “religious” persecution, separable from political, misrepresent this existential dimension (Human Rights Watch, 2005). A more substantive interpretation, attentive to the depth and diverse dimensions of Uyghur Islam, is necessary to comprehend the assimilative or even genocidal intent behind the religious repression. Future scholarship could consider the recent 2026 “Ethnic Unity Law” and the legal institutionalisation of such policies in the Uyghur region nationwide, further eroding minority and linguistic rights (Criner and Szadziewski, 2026).

Turning to methodology, my substantive analysis has drawn on a diverse range of sources, including ethnographies and secondary historical materials, to look “outside” the state. However, since 2017, regional securitisation, the banning of researchers, and harassment of academics overseas (Wang and Ahmed, 2025) mean that knowledge of contemporary Uyghur society within East Turkistan has been limited to propagandistic state portrayals and the testimonies of Uyghur refugees abroad (Steenberg and Seher, 2023). How to render the political thoughts, religious beliefs, and experiences of a people under occupation is likely to become a more prominent methodological challenge, where the PRC is one of many states increasingly empowered by technological advances to securitise and surveil minority communities. The work of the Xinjiang Remote Ethnography Project provides one such space to think through the constraints of on-the-ground research, arguing for a “methodological medley” through digital discourse or diaspora networks (Remote XUAR, 2023). Thus, attempts to continue this paper’s effort to better present the subjectivities of Uyghur Muslims will likely continue to turn towards diaspora communities and more diverse methodological approaches (see Yasin, 2026).

This paper has illustrated the dynamism of Uyghur Islamic modernising movements, at times coexisting and contesting unique traditions of pilgrimage practices and Sufi worship, with a depth beyond what a structural approach can render. An implicit intention has been to better represent Uyghur life under colonisation and to “restore some of their authorship” to these religious communities (Byler, 2022: 219). By nature, this is limited: the contemporary Islamic movements which I have centred in this paper have been violently targeted, surveilled and enclosed, and their leaders arbitrarily detained (Byler, 2022: 218). In efforts to look beyond the PRC’s extractive reach, archival documentation efforts and human memory may make possible future scholarship on Uyghur Islam under conditions of such extensive persecution. For Uyghur society itself, the question weighs heavily in terms of whether the distinctive religious traditions and multifaceted modern dimensions of Uyghur Islam can be recovered from this project of suppression and possible eradication.

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[1] To reflect the vocabulary of many Uyghurs, I use “Uyghur region” interchangeably with “East Turkistan”. Xinjiang is a Chinese toponym translating to “new frontier” which the “majority” of Uyghurs see as a carrier of colonial violence (Bellér-Hann et al, 2009: 1). Avoiding “Xinjiang” – or “Xizang” for Tibet – is a commitment to decolonial methodologies.

[2] The Sünnät is the Uyghur pronunciation of the Sunnah, the way of life understood as prescribed for Muslims based upon the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and interpretations of the Qur’an. Sünnätchi means “followers of the Sunnah”.

[3] These interviews are drawn from an undergraduate thesis at Harvard University for which the author conducted nearly fifty oral history interviews in the Uyghur language (Yasin 2026: 5), valuable given the scarcity of first-hand testimonies.

[4] I use “Uyghur” when discussing the late nineteenth century to acknowledge the existence of a discernible religiously inflected “imagined community”, prior to the widespread use of the ethnonym by the early twentieth century (Thum, 2014: 15). This refers to cultural and religious identities, rather than to retroactively indicate a homogenous or pan-historical national group (Anderson, 2006).