Forgotten History of the Uyghurs and Islam in China | Dr. Zohair Abdul-Rahman

The prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that believers are like one body, if one part of the body feels pain, the whole body should feel that pain, however, many people are not aware of the atrocities and persecution of the Uighur people and that is The purpose of our event today is to educate ourselves and raise awareness about this genocide. To begin the program, we have a presentation from Dr. Zuhair Abdul Rahman, who was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, now resides here in Brisbane and practices as a physician. He studied Islamic. sciences with several local teachers and he is currently a volunteer imam at many of the masajid here in Brisbane, where he lectures to young people and adults.

He has a strong research interest in Islamic theology, Islamic spirituality and mental health along with his Islamic research. He is also published in medical journals and presented at psychiatric conferences. suhain bismillah. Thank you so much to all the guests who came out this Saturday night to listen, learn, discuss, converse, engage and get involved in what I believe is the biggest humanitarian crisis we face in this world right now and possibly in

history

. of humanity. Now this part of the program, insha'allah, will be about

history

and the reason why I felt it was important to go into history is because as Muslims this part of the world, China has always been a very strange part of the world, it has been a part of the world that we are not familiar with in terms of the history of Islam in that region and that is why we find that the Chinese communist party has taken advantage of the ignorance of Muslims around the world and given them propaganda so that they do not support the Uyghur cause and this propaganda is essentially trying to say that in this part of China they are trying to say that Actually, this is part of China.

You know that there are some racial tensions, there are ethnic tensions, there is this and that and what not, and that it is all Western propaganda. This is all from the United States, the United Kingdom and NATO and all those, you know, allied governments that don't. It's not like China and that's why they are trying to make this up in a very sensational way about the persecution of Uyghurs, but it's not true and they post videos online, spend money on this and pay people to do this too. and they will pay the muslims in

china

and the muslims will see the muslims in

china

the chinese muslims may be saying oh this is not true this is not true and the muslims say oh yes this is just western propaganda they are always making a story in the media like They have to do with Islam and terrorism and all that, that is the game that they are playing and therefore, in order for us to become immune to that game and to be able to understand its reality, we have to learn about the history of that region and I will be very surprised to learn the beautiful history of the Uyghur people of East Turkestan and why this topic is so important to us as ummah because it breaks my heart to say this, but it is true and you know, I put myself in the same boat. like everyone else, as ummah, we have abandoned the Uyghur people as ummah, we have abandoned the Uyghur people, you look in the Middle East and subhanallah, you find it as we go into forced orbit, collecting who they are selling and trading to. halal organs who is going to want to have halal organs to help them with their transplants is Muslims, there is a market for it and of course this is in the Muslim world and we look at our community how often we talk about Palestine. and we should talk about the philistines, may allah subhanahu wa ta'ala be released, I mean, how often we talk about farces in Yemen, how often we talk about what is happening in different places in the Muslim world that we should talk about, but how often are we doing it. du'a for our Uyghur brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers and scholars and imams it is on our minds it is on our dua tonight it is about taking the first step because as ummah we are behind the line We need to take the first step to the front of the line so that the Uighur people are in our minds, they are in our duas, they are in our conscience and we are ready to take action when necessary, so please be patient.

With me this presentation, inshaallah, will have two parts: it will be the history of Islam in China and the reason why I think this was important was, in fact, because I wanted to make sure that people understand that Islam in China is a separate history. of the history of the Uighurs there are two different stories and to do that I wanted to review what this Islam is in China and why are the Chinese Muslims there and what the problem is and who the Uighurs are and why they are so different. Allah, let's go to the prophetic era, we will start with the prophetic era, this is the time of the prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, and we are going through the history of Islam in China, so the prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, never went to China .

None of our sources have reported whether or not the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, went to China during his lifetime. It is something that is not within our sources. It is not among the sources of Muslims. We have a narrative that does mention it. china by name but of course this is a very well known fabricated narrative and it is that narrative seek knowledge even if it takes you to china seek knowledge even if it takes you to china and this is a very well known fabricated narrative which comes from our sources but when you look at Chinese sources, particularly those from Chinese Muslims, they have a different interpretation of the events.

They have three different versions of how Islam first came to China. The first two don't really make any sense when you compare them to what we know. According to our own tradition, the third may be plausible. All three say that Muslims came to China during the time of Prophet Sallam, so the first version or the first story is the emperor of the Sui dynasty, this was in 587 AD. Paul is here, when was the prophet born in the asylum? Does anyone know what year 600 was, nothing before 570 570 AD, so this story doesn't make much sense anymore because the prophet saw he would be 15 years old at this time and no.

He did not receive nubua but in any case essentially this emperor was called sui gonei he saw a bright star in a dream and it was interpreted that a great man was going to appear who would come from arabia and that is why he sent a delegation to the prophet sallam and asked him to come and the prophet sallam sent four companions and the king was so impressed with them that he built them a mosque in guangzhou the second version of events is the second emperor of the tang dynasty now here for years Sume which is 6 27 to 644 AD, so this is during the life of prophet Sallam and it is also when he is actually a prophet and it is said that this emperor of the Tang dynasty saw a dream of a beast attacking him and then a person dressed in a shawl and he had a white turban and was wearing the suchby or the rosary and it was interpreted that it was a prophet who was going to be born in Arabia and then the Tang emperor asked why the prophet saw the presence, but instead he sent him some companions, the third version of events, so both versions, from our point of view, are quite unlikely to have happened because if something like that had happened, I mean, within hadith literature.

I have all the details about the prophet's mountains, about the companions, where they went, where they went and what expeditions they carried out in the delegations. If this was not mentioned, it is quite unlikely that colleagues were sent and that a person from China entered. the peasants saw the presence of the prophet, so we can rule them out. This one is interesting. The third. This because we can't really fake it if it happens. This is a story where one of the companions who was in Abyssinia now pauses. Here, for those who don't know the Muslims who are persecuted in Mecca, they were told to go to Abyssinia, they were told to go to Abyssinia, which was in Africa, modern-day Ethiopia, to escape persecution and they were there for many years. years during the life of the prophet he saw and even after, so according to this version, this companion goes to unnamed Abyssinia and essentially does not like living in Ethiopia in Abyssinia, he does not like the lifestyle very much, it is difficult for him , so he decides to get on a boat and sail across the Arabian Sea and, sorry, into the gulf, the Persian Gulf, and into the port on the southern aspect of China, which is close to where Guangzhou is, and this fellow then he comes ashore and essentially lives his life there and introduces Islam to people because he's a Muslim at the moment, but of course he doesn't know much about the Quran because it hasn't all been revealed yet, but he doesn't know it that well.

You know all the different updates of Islam and what. He didn't see what was happening during the lifetime of the prophet, but he comes and tells them about this idea and all that, and then the Arab traders who would come to China and that was something that was there, the silk road and all that. , but later. There you have the commercial connections of the Arabs and the Chinese, so some Arab merchants would go to meet this person, this companion, the companion would give dawah to these Arab merchants, they would accept Islam, some of them would stay, like this what have you This community is now forming in China and it is said that the people were so impressed with them that they built a mosque there in Guangzhou, in the canton province uh, and there has been some interesting archaeological evidence dating back to early 618, You know? 626 ceramic that has writing in ancient Arabic like you know, pre-orthodontics, uh, you know, uh, Arabic writing, Allahu Akbar, God is the greatest, so, whether this story is true or not, it's in chinese sources and it would make sense that assad and our sources because how would anyone know something like that?

So Allah, in this version it is quite possible that Islam came to China during the time of the prophet. That's an incredible point to understand about that region as well. that the world is a big part of the history of Islam now in the Tang dynasty and this is the version that we have in our sources and historians generally recognize that this was during the time of Uthman Radhila. Okay, after the prophet saw who passed away? becomes the leader abu bakr then uthman three then al-baqara is for how many years two years very well you saw my two fingers then um it is for ten years then twelve years after the prophet saw assalamu they said here it is established and final That Radiologist Uthman actually sent a delegation of Muslims to China to establish relations and trade relations and that kind of thing because the Muslim empire had expanded and was bordering the Tang dynasty at that time, so the companions went there and they went well received.

You know, there are different accounts from Chinese sources that it is one of the ten promised Jannah, one of the best companions that Prophet Sallam had was among them, but it is nothing from our sources, if this is true, they have a tomb there which is outside and that. The mosque is actually the mosque that to this day is there and is still standing. Actually, it's not the original, obviously, but that same region is where the mosque in Guangzhou is located, which was the first mosque built in China in its original form. Originally during the time of Uthman, they have a tomb there and it is attributed to Adam, but according to our sources, he did not die in China.

Allah could have been someone who was a student of Saddam Hussein. Do you know someone who was close to sadness? Why is there that kind of focus there on Saddam Aqas? Because every story you see, even in Chinese sources, they always mention well, so the Tang Dynasty, the Muslims are there now during the Tang Dynasty, so this is from 6 to 18 to 906 in this era and in this time. Muslims are sitting there while mostly traders and other Muslims are coming and forming their own communities. The Tang Dynasty treated them quite well and in fact, the Muslims were saved at this time during the Tang Dynasty.

In reality, they persecuted all other religious minorities. The Zoroastrians, the Christians, but the Muslims were saved because they were very impressed with how they were in their akhlaq and adab and how they traded on their integrity, their nobility, their honor and their respect, so the Muslims were saved from this persecution by Same time. There were Muslims living there, there were also some battles that took place because the Tang Dynasty tried to expand their territory into the Abbasid Caliphate even before the Amayas, so there were some battles there and the Muslims were able to stop them. since the advance now at this stage the muslims are in the tang dynasty they are a small minority that keep to themselves now the song dynasty comes after the tang dynasty and this is 960-1279 at this time the muslims start to become a part of one of china's ethnic minorities they start bringing their families, they start marrying other chinese and they also start gaining positions in the government, so they become part of chinese culture, they are an ethnic minority, they are not just you.

I know the Arab merchants there, now they have become ethnically Chinese andThey have mixed with the Chinese population and also maintained their Islam and religious identity and during the Song dynasty they started to build many different masajid, this masjid actually I was lucky and blessed to be able to visit this mosque, in fact it is known like Shi'an great mosque, deshi'an great mosque and subhanallah I was surprised to see this mosque dating back to the Song dynasty. This mosque has obviously been expanded from its original, but there was some original wood, you know, that was actually there in part of the structure and what I see there with my hand is that inscription which is the Quran and there are 30 panels throughout. the mosque and on each panel is inscribed a Jew from the Quran, so do the math, thirty panels, thirty ajah, that's the entire Quran Kareem.

It's written on the walls and described on the walls of the mosque here and at the bottom there's a translation into Mandarin, so you see, this is not just, you know Islam was kind of peripheral and all that, they lost their religion. or something like that. At this time you see that Islam was something that was flourishing enormously, although I must say that that inscription took place about 200 or 100 years ago, it was not a thousand years ago, okay, that is the Song dynasty, now we go to the dynasty Yuan, not the United Nations market, the Yuan dynasty, uh, and that's from 1279 to 1368.

And here we have Kublai Khan. Kublai Khan was one of the Mongols and one of them was the grandson of Genghis Khan and of course for anyone who knows the history. genghis khan was literally an earthquake in the history of mankind, he disturbed the entire political balance from which he came, he united the tribes in mongolia and he expanded eastward and westward and he devastated the muslim world and he went and conquered and conquered and conquered part of the world. The conquest was also actually China itself. This was, you know, a time when China was now governed by a non-Chinese type of ethnic law.

This is a Mongol empire that has been taken over by the Mongols. Later, they actually became Muslims, they actually became Muslims. and they accept Islam, they are very impressed with the religious ideology, the theology, the culture of the Muslims, so they discard their own and actually adopt the culture and religion of the people they conquered, which is something incredible if you think about it subhanallah, generally when you conquer a place you implant your culture your morals your ethics your values ​​in the people in this case the Muslims responded in such an incredible way that the conquerors themselves adopted the way of life of the people they conquered and so In China right now which is controlled by the Mongols, you see a lot of import of Persian culture and Muslims.

More Muslims are also coming to China during this time so they are starting to get a boost in their status because their numbers are also increasing, that is a must. By the way, in Xi'an it also dates back to the time of the Yuan dynasty and was actually written, I believe, from Persia and was sent to Shi'an. Now we move on to the Ming dynasty. is where Islam is really reaching its uh one of its peaks and so in the Ming dynasty this was between 1368 and 1644 the Han now, who are the Han the Han are the majority ethnic group of China, so they are the main Chinese people. , the massive majority of China is Han Chinese, so of course the Yuan dynasty was Mongol, so a lot of the ethnic Chinese were trying to get their land back, so the Han rebelled several times and didn't have much success, but they finally succeeded and established the Ming dynasty and this.

It dates back to 1644. and at this time Muslims began to establish madrasas and madars and places of learning and places to become scholars, there was also a mass translation movement where they began to translate Arabic and Farsi books because of course the Persian influence comes during the time of the Mongols, so you get these books, you get this mix of ideas and they translate them into Chinese languages ​​and you start to see Islamic concepts become part of the Chinese language and you see that with most the cultures that Muslims went to in the world, where you know local cultures and languages ​​start to adopt their own way of saying things, uh, and so, for example, if you go there even right now, halal is known as ching zhun qingjun is the equivalent.

Halal is not just a translation, that's the word they use, so we see this flowering of Islam in China, we see Zheng He, who is the Chinese admiral. Many of you may have heard of the naval zheng he, who was a Muslim Chinese naval admiral who had a fleet of thousands of ships, you know, and sailed all over the South Sea. It is said that he came to America, but these are just baseless legends, nothing that has really been definitive about that, but some have said that he got there. before uh uh columbus um what was really fascinating subhanallah is the hundred word eulogy and this was written by the emperor of the Ming dynasty hong woo he is the emperor of the Ming dynasty and his imp was so impressed with the Muslims and the Muslim way of life and the prophet, sallallahu alaihi, he wrote this eulogy now, what is this eulogy?

I actually have this praise written on the slide. I'll read it to you out loud. The universe began with the celestial tablet that records his name referring to the prophet. sallam and the celestial tablet that refers to the elohim, the religion that delivers to the great sage born in the western kingdom, who confers and receives the celestial scriptures in 30 parts, which is the koran in 30, which universally transforms all beings created, teacher of the billion rulers, leader of the ten thousand wise men, assisted, which is referring to the companions of the prophet salam, the ten thousand wise men assisted by the protective destiny of the community in each of the five prayers that he silently begs for their complete well-being, their intention is that Allah remembers the needy and delivers them from tribulations to no place of safety. of the invisible exalted above all soul and spirit free from any reprehensible act a mercy for all the worlds whose path is preeminent forever renouncing spiritual ignorance returning to that which is the religion called

islam

muhammad is the noblest sage subhanallah who it's actually from emperor ming, this is not just some petty guy, this is the emperor of china at that time and the ming dynasty which is one of the biggest dynasties in china, and this is the respect they had for

islam

Now that we move forward.

We move on to the Qing dynasty and this is where we see the meeting of Uyghur history with Chinese history. Look how far we've come and now we're going to move on to Uyghur history, but at this point, basically the Qing dynasty. it's an ethnic minority, the Manchu people, they're still Chinese, but they're a minority, they take over the Ming dynasty and during this time you have imperialism from the west, the decline of China in general, economically and politically, um, and that's the uh. the Qing dynasty and after the Qing dynasty will come the Republic of China and all these things that will happen after, so I'm going to skip some slides here and get to the history of the Uyghurs, so now that we've done the history of Islam in China, we have a general basic understanding of what happened there.

There is no mention of the Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are not part of that story. There is a completely separate phenomenon. They are completely separate people. and china itself is a completely separate region of the world, that's the point I want to delve into here and we go all the way to the 19th century because the Qing dynasty sorry, the 20th century, the Qing dynasty ended around that time, so now Let's go to the history of the Uyghurs known more recently as the Islamic Republic of East Turkestan that was the official name in 1932 Islamic Republic of East Turkestan Let's start inshallah at the same time we started with the Muslims of China Let's start In the 7th century, the time of the prophet, obviously, you can go on and on thousands of years, obviously there's a rich history there, but we'll start so we can have that parallel in our minds, so now we're talking about the Uyghurs. people so the story at this point in the 7th century starts in this area in this region of the world you can see on the screen the gok turk nate is what you can refer to as it's pretty much where you see most of Russia and Central Asia at this time, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan or much of Hazakistan, that region and much of present-day Russia, which is the Gok Turks and the related Gok Turks, was home to basically many Turkic and Mongol peoples and most of these cultures and tribes.

They were nomadic people and they moved here and there the Uyghurs were among the Turks who were in the gokturk khagnet now what happens are the oigars and they because of the way they speak their own language it is called old and that is their that is Its that was their original language now that language has become extinct but there is another language which is the new Auger language that they do speak but in any case the Uyghurs ally themselves with two groups, the Basmals and the Karluks to defeat the Gok Turks and so on. They defeat the Gok Turks and then this alliance between these three groups the rumors make the Karluks and the Uighurs fall apart remember the name Karluk by the way it will arise again and the Karluks will be the descendants of them, the one of the main reasons why which the Uyghurs actually become Muslims, so this alliance falls apart and essentially the Uyghur people actually dominate between the two, so they established the Uyghur cognate and this is from 744 to 840. and during this time, as You can see on the map, it is bordering the Tang dynasty remember we talked to the Tang dynasty now the relationship with the Tang dynasty was very interesting they were the saviors of the Tang dynasty every time there was a rebellion and a revolt trying to re-establish within China who wouldn't the ghostbusters call They would call the Uyghurs hognate, they would call the Uyghurs and the Uyghurs would come to drive out the rebellion for them and they would leave and then so many things kept happening and finally the wiggler said, "Okay, look, you have to pay us some tribute." We are not doing this service for free and then there came a point where they were paying and now, even then, when the riots even stopped, they said you should still pay us, you have to pay tribute to us at this point, how?

Many times we help you, so that was the relationship between the Uyghurs and the Tang empire, and as you can see here with the related Uyghur, there is a Tibetan empire in the south and then there are the Kyrgyz in the north and they were constantly involved in fought on both fronts, so in the north the Kyrgyz people Kyrgyzstan and then the Tibetan people in the south and they were constantly involved in this war they themselves allied themselves with some of the Persian peoples who lived in remember this name the terum basin the terum basin terum is where we see now occupied East Turkestan East Turkestan is the term basin, which is the region in which our times, modern people, themselves identify very strongly with that land there, which is the terrestrial basin and It goes back to the eighth century and then in this basin of terror there were the Sagnians and they had some relations, good relations between them, in fact, the Uyghur people, who are a Buddhist people at this time, actually convert en masse at Zoroastrianism due to Persian influence. and there is no real Muslim influence at the moment, as you can see, they are quite far away from the Abbasid Caliphate at the moment, eventually, all these fights are happening and they lose and the empire falls to the Kirkus in the north, so What do they do?

The Uighur people are divided on this point. Now there is a division in the Uyghur people. And this is what happens in the year 840 AD, a group of people who are known as the yellow eugers, the yellow yugers, essentially established gongzo, which is basically around Tibet and they eventually lose this status within a few hundred years. and they never ruled their own sovereign state, they become part of the Tibetan Buddhist kind of system there and somehow they get absorbed there and to this day there are really only fifteen. thousand who identify as yellow people uh yogurt and are mainly Buddhist now the other Uyghurs establish a kingdom known as the kingdom of kocho in the basin term so these are the Uyghurs that we see now the Uyghurs all return to this group Here in this division and this is in the Terum Basin, this is where East Turkestan is and uh, they ruled there in the kingdom of Kocho, this is in the year 840 AD, we're talking, okay, this is not yesterday, this is in the 840 AD, the Uyghur people were there. and essentially they have a very diverse state, you have the Persians and some Indo-Europeans and you have the Turks, they are all interacting and it becomes a very diverse culture and you can see here on the slide the yellow yogurts as you can.

I see a lot more of that kind of Chinese characteristic in the image and then on the right you see the Uyghur people, so they are much more of a Turkish origin. Now, how did the Uyghurs become Muslims? You have the kingdom of Kocho, it is there in the terminus. basin, of course, that's in the area of ​​modern, you know, occupied East Turkestan, so how did they become Muslims? that they were then able to establish their own kingdom, but then they had a small breakup, so it seems that Kara settles down right next to theKocho kingdom.

Now who is the kingdom of Kocho. They are good people, very good, excellent, so next. they are the self look the descendants of the self look and they establish what is known as the khanate try to say that eight times fast and they became rivals to the kocho because of course their history is well known and they go back they go back a lot um essentially harakanins become muslims first become muslims first in 934 a man called satok now took the book a very important figure in Uyghur history, all the people here owe Allah the blessing of Alhamdulillah of Islam in that region, who was descended from the carloacs and then you know he essentially becomes a muslim because he was actually the son of the emperor and he was interacting with muslims who came from Bukhara during trade and these muslim traders who came from there is said aloha, it is most likely true, maybe may not be the person you know, but probably many people, it is said that there is one particular individual who kept coming and going and meeting him, but He became very curious why are you praying this way, the same way you pray salah and this kind of thing, because the thing about Islam, of course, is that it is as described in the Quran, faith is a tree whose branches extend towards the sky.

Islam is not a thing or faith is not a thing that you are only in your heart and no one sees the effect of it. People know when they see a Muslim because there are many things about being a Muslim that are external to the way we pray. body and this kind of thing in any case, then he starts having this relationship and finally accepts Islam. This is the prince of kharaganiz. He accepts Islam and then gets a fatwa. I am not saying that he agrees with this fatwa. I am not giving this fatwa, but this is what happened historically.

He receives a fatwa and obviously you can see at this point that there is a special interest there. He gives a fatwa that he can go and kill his father and become the people's emperor. I think they used it a little bit in this sense, but in any case the Sabbath goes and kills and murders his father and becomes the ruler of the Koran, so now you have right next to the kingdom of the coach of the Uyghur people a Muslim state Sunni and Sabbath, after it becomes Muslim, the whole harahan system becomes Muslim, so now you start to see this gradual cultural exchange in the infiltration of the Islamic way and culture into the Uyghur people.

Now the Mongols are coming. Remember the Yuan dynasty in China. The Mongols are coming. The same. The Mongols who have also taken over China, those Mongols have also taken over this region, the Mongols have also been brought to these regions and the Kocho kingdom becomes a vassal state of the Mongols, what that means is basically which is Mongolian, but you guys. You can manage your affairs to maintain your kingdom of Kocho, but they have to pay some tribute to the Mongols, but since it is all Mongol territory now, there are less fights between the Quran and the kingdom of culture between the Uyghurs and the Karluks, etc. then the influence was great on the Mongols and the Uyghurs and as we said remember when the Mongols conquered they were very impressed so the Mongols became Muslims and then they established the Chagtai dynasty who was actually the first Chagtai ruler uh in converting to Islam. the name was mubarak shah mubarak shah becomes muslim and then that whole area now becomes islam and muslim even the kingdom of kocho and this is where now the modern occupied eastern terum basin becomes a bastion of sunni islam there is an infiltration of the culture, you know? the Turks and the Persians and the books that are to come, the scholars that are to come, everything is happening, massages, they are being built this is at this time in the 15th century, so 14 in the 15th century, so now it's 600 years of Islam in the history of Islam.

In this region, again, this is not yesterday subhanallah and I talk to those who are not Uighur subhanallah 600 years, how are they not part of the ummah? 600 years of Islam in this region is incredible and, in any case, the scholars are also seen at this time. who come from that region like mahmoud al-kashgari mahmood al-kashgari from kashgar and kashgar is one of the regions in the basian term mahmoud kashgari was a linguist and he wrote a dictionary actually from Arabic basically to Turkish languages, so he wrote a complete dictionary of turkish languages ​​and he was a great scholar and there were many other scholars also now in this region at this point you had the chagtai dynasty under which was the kingdom of kocho now they become muslims but now what happens when that place turns?

Largely a bastion of Sunni Islam, you have the Sufi movements beginning to occur in this region, particularly the Naksh Bhandi leaves. Now Nakshbandi Suvism is a well-known form of Sufism in Sunni Islam and it's in all the different regions, uh, that we Maybe, uh, you know, you might have heard of this term before it's basically an order. . What are Sufis? Basically, they are heart-centered people who do their circles and do it differently. You know they are very kind. of spiritual monks, you can say it's the English equivalent of the approach of the Sufi type of people, but these, the next Buddhism, were known to be a little bit more politically active, they weren't just in their mosque just praying.

I would also try to look for change and as you see, the Nakshband Sufis actually replace the Chagtai cognate and become the rulers of the Terum basin and then there was this internal struggle, unfortunately, between two types of descendants of the main Sufi. which happened between the Athakri or white mountain khojas and the ishaqi or black mountain leaves because it was based on where they were, there were some mountain ranges that were white and others that were black and essentially there are and that's why they govern the basin of the term. and this is where we start to see what is really sad in our history, the infighting, so the afaques who lost go to the neighboring tibetans and particularly to the fifth dalai lama the dalai lama in 1677 said come and help us so that we can take control. the term basin and then the Zungar Buddhists, so that is in that Tibetan region, the Zungar Buddhists take over the term basin again, these are not Chinese, by the way, they are Tibetans, they are different, so the Zungar Buddhists took over the region in 1680. and they install a puppet, a false ruler, which is really sad, but you see it repeated in history because of the way this is not just this region.

You see this happening in Palestine in their history with before Salahuddin about the Fatimid alliances with the crusaders and all this kind of internal stuff because they would ally themselves with external enemies just because they wanted to be in charge and this was something that we see repeated in history and it is a very sad part of history, so the Zungar Khanate rules over the Terran Basin for a short period of time of only 16 years and during this time the Uyghurs were treated very badly, they were cruelly treated and persecuted and the only People who benefited were that Sufi's family, eventually, so if you remember, remember, I said the qing.

The dynasty is where Uyghur history and Chinese history come together, so now when they are in this state, how are they going to get out? I mean the people they are going to help, how are they going to rebel? How are they going to cause a revolution to get out of the difficult state in which the Qing dynasty is now trying to expand its territory and that is why the Uyghurs They allied themselves with the Ching to remove the Zumgar Buddhists from the region because they were being treated very badly and then the Qing dynasty took over that region now this is the first time this is 1696 this is the first time in over a thousand years that a Chinese empire has taken control of this particular region and they hadn't really taken control because they actually carried out, by the way, a Zungar Genocide, they killed a lot of these Buddhist jungle Buddhists that were there, over 500 thousand , they left the Uyghurs there, although obviously because the Uyghurs were the ones who were helping and wanted to eliminate them, the Qing dynasty allowed the Uyghurs to have their own kind of semi-autonomous state and it was known as the Kumal Khanate and this lasts until 1930.

Very recent, the Kumal Khanate in which they rule themselves were in that region under the Qing dynasty, now in this era the Uyghurs were not called Uyghurs they were actually called Muslim Turks because of course in the time of the dynasty Qing, the Chinese just looked at them as Muslims or you are just a Turkish Muslim, so right now this is not a part. of the identity of the people there, they don't see themselves as Uighurs per se, we'll get to when they start to see themselves that way at this stage, the Turkmo Salman or Shanto, they called them, which means turbine head and a They were often works grouped together with the Hui, no, I forgot to say this, who are the Hui, the Hui Muslims were those Chinese Muslims that I was talking about at the beginning of the presentation, so those Chinese Muslims who were in China are the Hui Muslims .

They're ethnically Hui, so they're Chinese and they have the Hui name given to them and they're Muslim in China, okay, so the chai for the Chinese is that oh, you're Muslim, you're Muslim, like they're pretty. very similar but ethnically they were different now all the jazz they tried to rebel against their jazz because they were in power before the kumu so they tried to rebel against the kuma khanate this was something that was not really good because of course the kumukhanet you have It is already there and everyone can live under the qing dynasty, but the judge who wanted to regain their power and read led a rebellion and this rebellion was by jahangir muhammad and muhammad yusuf khoja and finally they were put down and the resistance died out in 1860, so basically a lot of this type of civil struggle between 1862 and 1877 you had this revolution by an Uzbek called Yakube and you can see it there in the lower left corner of Uzbekistan where it joins the Hui. to establish kashgaria so they rebelled against the qing and the kumulhanit and tried to have their own autonomous region, they are called kashgaria and that is one of the main muslim regions of the term basin, in particular kashgar is very close to the rest of the center Asian country, so that was the area where most of that Muslim culture was, but eventually the Ching reconquered them because the Uyghurs didn't like this kind of foreign government that was over them and imposed on the Hui that they didn't are theirs. and the Uzbeks who are not theirs either, then the Chi, the Ching reconquered in 1877 and the Kumukanit continued now.

This is where the name Xinjiang comes from. 1884, in that region, when the Qing reconquered the territory, they called it Xinjiang, which means new frontier, and it became the Australia of China what do I mean by that then, what did the British do when completely when what would the British do when They colonized Australia and invaded and expelled the indigenous population uh in the very sad history of this country what did they do? They did it very well, they brought the convicts, so the same thing that China did in the Terum Basin, they sent all the Han convicts to the Terum Basin and what happened was that there started to be tension between the people, obviously you are sending a group of convicts. to the region you are not receiving the good Han Chinese that you are receiving, you know, the riffraff are the worst of the worst and the tension is directed towards them, these Han people who are being forced into that region that is not of their land and that we are going to start to spread a little further into the basin because these Han are being sent there now, that is where for the first time you begin to see the tensions between the Han and the Uyghurs at that time and it is with the convicts the republic of china was established in 1912. at this point the kumal khanita is still there, but in this period of time you have the era of warlords in china very unstable, you know, this is kind of postcolonialism and all that and so All these warlords are taking over the different areas and right now Mongolia is separating from China because after the Qing empire falls a Republic of China is being formed and then these non-Chinese people say: " Well look, then we have our own place, so Mongolia and Tibet secede from the Republic of China and this is where we will start to form their own identity and say that we also need our own independence and this is where Uyghur nationalism begins to grow up because they were not Chinese. the qing they took there was all these battles and all that, but we, this is our land, so right now you have Soviet influence in that region, so the Soviets of course were communists and had established their influence throughout Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan.

Those places, all those fanatics, were under Soviet rule and it was devastating for that area of ​​the world in terms of Islam because the Russians, when they arrived, destroyed the Islamic culture of that region, destroyed the masajid, killed the imams, eliminated that faith. of them from the people because they saw him as a threat to their communist government and that is why theySoviets, however, the Soviets, the reason everyone said that because the Soviets were selling this idea to all these people saying, look, this is a new part of the world. people are starting to establish different things, empires are falling and that's why they say: we will help you establish your own ethnic state, so you will be, you know your own Uzbeki people, you will be this, this, this and them. he said the same thing to the Uyghurs and then in Tashkent, which is in Uzbekistan, they had a conference and at this conference the Soviets sponsored this conference, the people, the delegations that came from the Terran Basin embraced again the name of the Uyghur people because obviously that They were their ancestors and they said we are good people right and we need our own homeland and that is our land anyway and then the Soviets tried to spread Uyghur nationalism because they wanted their own interests the Soviets wanted control of obviously the Chinese region that they wanted control of practically the whole world, really the Soviets and that's why they kept expanding. but the Chinese, of course, wouldn't do that, so they want to put pressure and say, look, we have these minorities, they take advantage of that kind of ethnic tension and they say, "Okay, you guys can have your own state and We can help you and we will, and then you'll have Soviet influence there.

In any case, they made promises like Kazakhstan, the ROC conquered Soviet propaganda and said, look what's happening with the whole heritage of Islam and all these things. In the ROC region, look at what's happening in those areas: their entire religious heritage was lost and eventually the Kumu Khan was abolished in 1930 and you have these three competing interests, you have the number one Chinese Communists. , you have the Soviets number two. and then there is the Republic of China, which is more far-right. These three people have their eye on the prize because it is a key region between the Soviets and the Chinese, and the Wakers wanted their own interest in their own independence in their own republic. and eventually the oegers of hotan province were able to push their agenda for a sovereign state led by sabit damola

abdul

baqi and supported by muhammad amin bukhara and his two brothers

abdul

lah and nur ahmad jaan completely separate from the completely separate soviets of these three they did what theirs and they established the Islamic republic of East Turkestan and you can see the flag that was actually there and they adopted that Ottoman flag as you see, they saw themselves as part of the ummah as part of Islam and you see the ilaha muhammad rasulullah which is written there at the bottom and they establish this and implement sharia in that region and some aspects there that might not have been the best in terms of modern sensibilities, but at that time There were many Swedes who sent Christian missionaries to treat of diluting the Uighur culture and all that, so they expelled them, however, they allowed religious freedom and allowed Christians to practice their religion and stay in their churches and in this In a period of two years, in the Islamic Republic of Turkestan began to nationalize the mining resources of the industry because that area has a lot of resources and then what happened was that it is very sad, this is wallahi, the saddest part of the history of the Uyghurs, of course, the saddest.

Some of it is what's happening now, but this is incredible. You have the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, it is its own state, it is its own people, it is the will of the people, but the Republic of China wants that land, it wants to take that land and they use the Hui Muslims. as soldiers to fight the Uyghur people and put that land under the control of the Republic of China and that's why right now you have these community militias of Hui people who are killing the generals of the Uyghur army, in fact you I have stories like who he was a Hui general and executed a Uyghur rebellion leader named Temurbeg and Subhanallah.

Sorry, there are no children here, but these are very gruesome details, but this is part of the story that Subhanallah showed the head of this Uyghur leader. at the mosque in Kashgar and you see the mosque, since it's one of the few, I don't know if it's still there right now because they've decimated and destroyed at this point almost all the masajid in that area, uh. and the hui armies crushed because of course the hui armies are getting backing from the republic of china and all that and they crush the armies of east turkestan and then the islamic republic and the soviets fall at that point of chaos, although the republics of china are Trying to gain control, the Soviets go into chaos and they put their own puppet leader there who was also Chinese, which gets very confusing, but that's politics for you if you remember three influences: the Soviets, the communist chinese and the republic of china, so here's a chinese.

The person who is with the Soviets is the one who is now in charge of that region and the Republic of China. He then looks at how things changed so quickly before they were destroyed. Now they say, "Oh, we don't want Soviet influence in that region." They then supported the Uyghur uprising against Soviet control, but were unsuccessful. In the end the leader who was there during the East Turkestan mandate base that was placed there betrays the Soviets and becomes a Chinese communist and then at this stage now both Soviets. and the republic of china wants to take this guy out and at this time and this is also in the wake of World War II, East Turkestan is also established for five years with the help of these, you know, other powers that are there, but This does not lead, you know, this does not last long and East Turkestan is absorbed by the communist regime of China.

This is the People's Republic of China, which is in power to this day. This starts in 1949. So to this day. 1949 we see that this region was not, we were able to get an ethically different people ruled by the Uyghur people from the vast majority, we are talking about thousands of years here and there, people coming and going at this point, the communists begin to encourage immigration They have to that region to dilute the population and discourage nationalist attitudes because they saw the Uyghur people subhanallah may Allah give strength and continue to give strength to the Uyghur people they never fell twice they resisted the Soviet Chinese communists and the republic of china and They established their own state twice in just a few decades and therefore they were tired of the will of the people, so they diluted the population so that they would not see that, oh, this is a Uyghur land because there will be so many Han Chinese . living there so they started sending them in the way the Israelis did the exact same tactic and it was around the same time also subhanallah, while what was happening in Palestine, the exact same thing was happening to the Uyghur people and then, essentially, they claim that you know I won't talk about it again and then I'll have to refute it?

We'll leave it at that. The PCC saw the biggest threat, the biggest threat to the government, their government in that region. It was particularly Islam because they had already diluted the culture that the Han Chinese had there, but they knew that Islam was the unifying force that could unite these people and could then lead them to regain their independence, so they began at this point to limit. their religious freedoms and these kinds of things and they started to impose sanitization of the Uyghur people, like imposing the Chinese language and these kinds of things, we're talking in the '60s right now and essentially there were separatist movements that were emerging at this time, but none of them were successful, many of them were supported by the Soviets because the Soviets again, as I said, wanted that control, but nothing could really work in 1962. 60 60 000 Uyghurs actually went to Kazakhstan under the The Soviets felt that It was better to be under the Soviets than under the Chinese and then there's this interesting point in history which is a flash point where it's like what's happening exactly here and this is during the Soviet war in Afghanistan so in 1979 we know The Soviets start trying to invade Afghanistan now, who is on which side are the Soviets trying to invade Afghanistan?

That's number one. Afghanistan is very close to China, of course, so the Chinese do not want the Soviets to invade Afghanistan and maintain their influence in their region. So the Chinese are supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan to resist against the Russian invasion, but the Soviets supporting the Uyghurs in China tell the Uyghurs that they obviously feel one with the Afghan people, no, they are not allowed to go and help the resistance. there because we want to invade that land, so it is a very complicated, almost Shakespearean situation that was seen at this particular moment and because of the way in which the Chinese used as propaganda again the Soviet cruelty towards the Ghani people towards the Uyghurs they should not show look, you know, don't ally yourself with the Soviets etc, which to be honest is probably a good point, the Soviets and the Chinese, they are both foreign forces anyway, neither of them have in mind the best interest of the Uyghurs. now we have in 1991 the collapse of the soviet union, so there is no more soviet threat, but this now, after the collapse of the soviet union, what happens to central asia, all these countries begin to form in 1991, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, all of these are forming now in 1991. with the fall with the fall of the Soviets and now, what do you think the Uyghurs think?

We are also part of that same camp, that's who we are, we are ethnically to a large extent, we are actually from that Uzbek people and all that, there are cousins. That is the Turkish people, so we also need our own state. This is in the 90s and at that time there were many Muslims because at that time you had the Islamic University of Medina, which was actually formed in the 60s, but at this time. It's time for them to start having an international outlook and start sponsoring and encouraging governments of other countries to sponsor students for free to go to Madinah and of course Madinah is one of the ones you know, it's the second largest city in Islam. it is the homeland of the prophet salallahu he is buried and that is why the people of east occupied east turkestan for easter go to the islamic university in madina and they are learning islam there now of course in that region there is a very strong salafist influence there and the Salafi influence is It's a lot about destroying any nationalist ideas and focusing on a kind of ummah and this focus on activism and action and political action, of course this movement was going to have a bad influence on later jihadist movements, but this kind of Salafist attitude and We know that the culture is now coming to the Uyghur region and this is now starting to spread and this idea that we are a Muslim people, you know, and these people who surpass us, they are not Muslims, they are not of us , we need to establish ours. land, this becomes the rise of Salafism and in that region now the Chinese claim that they are jihadists.

The jihadists have now come, they have been influenced in Saudi Arabia and they have come and now they are committing acts of terrorism and this type of thing. very unclear because obviously number one, I don't trust for a second anything that comes out of CCP reports of any kind, you know, because they'll say, oh, they did this and the indiscriminate murder and all these different things, obviously if that happened if it really happened then we are against that is not what Islam teaches and the Uyghurs will be the first to say that this is not right but in any case if that were the case they would be a marginal people, now the Chinese of course, they are very afraid because they know that a revolution is very imminent and they are going to regain control of that region because now they feel that type of Islamic spirit and they want their own land, their own region, which is their own and this is where you now start to see the systematic and absolute annihilation of Islam in that region, they destroyed 5,000 masajid, they arrested all the imams in the region, the open practice of Islam became illegal, even saying something like that lock you up became Islamic. illegal too and this is where the cultural genocide begins and subhanallah I will share some highlights and we will get into it inshallah at the panel discussion point but we are talking about modest estimates, modest estimates of one to three Million people in these camps of internment and I want everyone to leave with this one thing: why are they in those camps?

Which is the reason? because there are Uyghurs who are not in those camps either. There are us good Muslims who are not in those fields. Why are they put in the fields and why do they stay in the fields? Why do they enter and why can they leave? They come in because they say Rabbi Allah. I'm not just saying that as a cliché, it's literally a fact the only reason. they go to internment camps if they prove that they practice Islam, that's not what it's about and by the way, this is not even like oh, this is what someone themselves are saying this, they say this, this is not, uh, you already know this.

It's notcontroversial any small practice of Islam, you go to an internment camp of a re-education center and you saw what the situation is like there and Subhanallah, when you are there, why do they stay there? It is because they refuse to abandon their Islam if everyone What I am saying is that I have become an atheist and I promise that my injuries to China will return to the family if everyone did that in that region this would all end almost overnight if all good people there said we have nothing to do. with Islam, that's fine, we reject it, but they refuse, they refuse, they stick to their deen, they stick to their iman and subhanallah, you know, some journalists were able to go to the internment camps, of course, with government permission and, honestly, it's ridiculous, it's absolutely ridiculous. when you see the videos of the chinese government trying to make it seem like these educational camps are a good thing, you just see the inside, you can see, you know, subhanallah, like you see the souls that are just crushed in all of them inside and the journalists even They said they went to the bathroom afterwards and they saw on the bathroom that it was written oh my heart don't break these are people who are taken from their families taken from children their children who are taken torture forced persecution organ obviously we're going to go into details because it's very important for us to know what is happening this is a holocaust nothing less than that I don't know any clearer example of religion and ethnicity genocide than this we say neverAgain, but when you have three million people who are locked up for nothing More than just practicing Islam and having their souls crushed and brainwashed into atheists, the Chinese are pledging allegiance to the government.

Well, light death is easier than that, so subhanallah, I come. Until the end of my presentation we have reviewed the history of Islam in that region from the Chinese and from East Turkestan and I want us to remember this this is not China this is not China this is East Turkestan they have established it twice and they were there during thousand years, just like we talk about what happened to israel and palestine, we are talking about the exact same timeline, israel went and took over palestine and did what they did even worse, wallahi, dozens of times worse than what's happening to the Uyghurs what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinian people and that's a difficult statement to make if you know what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinian people.

All I said was that my goal with this presentation is that we all collectively know that this is an international movement, we take that step above that first line and that step is always the first step of the believer and that is a dua and that is a dua and you might think oh I'm making dua making dua that's what it's going to do magically, things are going to happen, etcetera, etcetera, when and insha'allah it will happen, the Uyghur people are free and you made dua, you are part of that liberation, you are part of that liberation because when things happen in this world Allah makes the asbab the means for what has happened in that world causality and there are two levels of causality: there is the natural causality, but then there is the causality with Allah, so you say, for example, that someone is making du'a and to get a job. for example, and then they go, they do well in the interview and then they get the job, what caused them to get the job was their resume and all that, yes, from one angle, that's a layer, but what also caused it , what was the main level. the dua the dua caused it, so when it happens, don't you want your duas to be counted as that tongue of yours that whispers to Allah becoming a subhanallah sword that will free these people?

Dua is the most important thing we can do as Muslims. The first step to wanting any change is dua of dua action comes when you have sincerely asked Allah when you have pleaded with Allah when you felt what you felt then you have seen what you have seen and you are going to see what you are going to see and you pray to Allah for this, then you think how am I going to do this and you do it with the help of Allah, but the first step is with that dua and insha Allah when we have our interview, inshaallah, I want. that we put ourselves in their shoes I want us to put ourselves in their shoes and understand well what they are going through it will be heartbreaking it will be heavy it will be difficult to assimilate it is not easy to listen to these stories it is not how we like to listen to these stories, but these are the things that They can soften hard hearts.

May Allah deliver the people of East Turkestan. May Allah protect you from the oppressors. May Allah invigorate you more strongly and may iman and faith be spontaneous male and may he reunite you all with your families. May Allah patronize him to be a light, a strength and an iza for this ummah as he was for hundreds of years, Allah.