The New Dominion

A week ago Norway unpleasantly discovered that it, too, Nobel Peace Prizes and fjords and all, was a potential target for Al-Qaeda planned terrorist attacks. Norway’s security apparatuses revealed that they had successfully apprehended three individuals plotting to bomb targets in Norway. While the fact that a cold, unassuming, and generally uncontroversial Scandanavian country would come under the threat of an Islamic terrorist attack is pretty surprising in and of itself, another surprising facet of the case is the origin of one of the suspects, Mikael Davud, who apparently is a Uyghur who immigrated to Norway in 1999.

This would be the second newsworthy case of a Uyghur immigrant from China accused of terrorism on foreign soil. The two suspects in the first case, where they were accused of planning on bombing a statue in front of the Chinese “Dragon Mart” shopping center in Dubai, were just sentenced recently to 10 years in jail followed by deportation.

For years, China has insisted that organized Al-Qaeda-linked Islamic extremism, which at various times has been labeled the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement,” the “East Turkestan Islamic Party,” and the “Turkestan Islamic Party,” is a clear a present danger to both the PRC and nations abroad. Invariably government documents and media reports has attempted to link nearly every incident of violence in Xinjiang, whether premeditated or spontaneous, to the machinations of TIP. Accordingly, given the haphazard and jury-rigged nature of most terror attempts in Xinjiang, alongside the government’s ham-fisted attempts to force mass demonstrations and riots into the “terror” narrative, many scholars and analysts have dismissed or at least questioned China’s claims, particularly in light of the benefits the Party would gain from an Islamic bogeyman and its capacity to manipulate, exaggerate, and fabricate information to serve this end.

These two incidents outside of China may mark a turning point in the discussion. Much is left to be said and discovered: does the presence of one, two, or three disaffected Uyghurs involved in Islamic extremism truly constitute proof for the existence of an organized Uyghur threat? After all, even the United States has its own renegade sons. Will Mikael Davud even be found guilty? Even though, in my opinion, the existence of three alienated Uyghurs with violent plots doesn’t get anywhere near “verifying” an organized “ETIM” threat, the Norway plots in particular are a PR coup for the PRC nonetheless since the intended target country and the identity of the suspect make good press. All it takes is a good news story to instantly put Uyghurs into the Islamic terrorist rubric: see, however, the almost decade-long struggle of the Guantanamo Uyghurs for how much blood, sweat, and tears must go into undoing the terrorist label.

It has been interesting following the chatter on the forums of the Uyghur American Association following the announcement of the arrests. If one thing is plain, it is that diaspora Uyghurs are extremely nervous about the damage a single allegation against a Uyghur terror suspect in a Western country could do to the international reputation of Uyghurs as a whole. For example, on the 10th, a forum visitor excitedly made a post titled, “Good news! It looks like he’s [Mikael Davud] is not a Uyghur!”.

According to the latest information, which I’ve posted below, his name apparently is “Mikael Dawut.” This thug is definitely someone who’s just calling himself a Uyghur, Uyghurs don’t use the name Mikael. Uyghurs in Norway should immediately get in touch with the Norwegian government and make it clear that he’s just someone who’s called himself Uyghur. We must do this to end anxieties among the Uyghurs and clear the name of the Uyghurs!

Of course, having a weird name is pretty poor evidence, and other forum-goers noted this. In a response titled “Don’t be to too quick to claim this is good news,” a replier said:

I’m always happy to hear good news, and if that were the case that would be great, but when you attain Norwegian citizenship it’s possible to adopt a new name, maybe he’s one of those who decided to adopt a foreign name.

Diaspora Uyghurs for the most part live in tight-knit communities, and so it didn’t take long for the channels between and among the American and Norwegian Uyghur communities to take note of Davud’s presence – or in this case, absence – among the local communities and at community events. A most informative post, apparently written by a Norwegian Uyghur, titled “He is Uyghur, his original name was Rashidin Muhemmet,” had this to say:

Today’s issue of VG [Verdens Gangs], one of Norway’s biggest newspapers, revealed everything.

The 39 year old terror suspect is indeed Uyghur, his original name is Rashidin Muhemmet, he’s from Ghulja, and in 1999 he applied for political refugee status at the UN Refugee Commission’s Almaty branch, gained asylum, and with a few other Uyghurs was set up in Bergen city in Norway. In 2003 he disappeared from Bergen and was later discovered that he had moved to Sarpsborg, a city in southeast Norway near the Swedesh border. When he applied for Norwegian citizenship in 2007 he changed his name to “Mikael Davud.”

The author then apparently departs from VG’s exposes and goes on to share some information on Norwegian Uyghurs’ thoughts on Mikael Davud.

A vast majority of Uyghurs living in Norway had no idea that such a Uyghur even existed in Norway. Even people who had originally known of him gradually forgot about him. This was because he would never come to any Uyghur get-togethers – Nowvruz celebrations, demonstrations, wedding celebrations – in any event, he lived ten days’ journey away from any place that had Uyghurs. When he lived in Bergen, other Uyghurs who lived there knew of him, but other than a few other radical Uyghurs living in Bergen he spent most of his time with Arabs. “I won’t study an infidel language,” he would say, and studied Arabic instead of Norwegian. In public, if someone would ask him “What’s your ethnicity, where did you come from?” he’d answer, “I’m a Muslim from Turkestan.”

The terror suspect Rashidin originally was a Uyghur, a descendent of Uyghurs from East Turkestan, however, after he grew up, left his homeland, and “had his eyes opened,” he changed and insisted that calling himself “Uyghur” was wrong, was against Islam, becoming one of those people who says he is of the “Muslim” ethnicity.

And so it’s not wrong if we say that “He’s not a Uyghur” and throw him out from the ranks of Uyghur-ness, however, because he said “I’m a Uyghur” when he was applying for asylum to the UN Refugee Commission and wrote as such on his paperwork, and because a “Muslim ethnicity” wasn’t available as an option, the Norwegian government has outed him as a Uyghur and will continue to treat him as such.

A couple things of note. If we’re to believe this personal account, then Davud explicitly subscribed to a form of Islamic extremism that called for one’s Musilm identity to supersede and replace one’s ethnic identity. This is not an idea that’s foreign to Al-Qaeda rhetoric, or even to Islam in general, where one’s identity as a Muslim is meant to be primary and singular. In other words, it’s not strange to see a terror suspect such as Davud disavow an ethnic identity for the sake of a religious one. Should this be true, it’s important that analysts and scholars to distinguish between a nationalist cause and a religious one among Uyghurs, especially if the two on their own are making efforts to separate themselves, and they are, with Davud saying “I’m a Muslim” when asked about his ethnicity, and, obviously, with forum posters like this trying to make it clear that Davud was separate from the “community” and vocal about the precedence of his religious beliefs.

More fascinating for the realm of identity politics is the idea, implied strongly here, that should one publicly disavow his Uyghur identity, as Davud did, and adopt another one, then he or she is no longer a Uyghur. Perhaps my translation is a little clunky, but the last sentence uses the rarely seen (for me anyway) Uyghurluq which I take to mean “Uyghurhess” or “Uyghurhood,” and the verb in the sentence means to completely, entirely throw or eject Davud out from the hallowed halls of “Uyghurhood.” The writer even emphasizes that such a person has disavowed his Uyghur identity even though he is the descendant of “Uyghurs from East Turkestan.” In other words, he has un-Uyghured himself even in spite of his blood heritage.

Much has been written about the “ethnogenesis” of the Uyghur, and much also has been written about the existence of a tangible ethnic identity in the Tarim Basin even before the term Uyghur was revived. Some apologists for the PRC gleefully point to the traceable rise of the term “Uyghur” as indication that there is something inauthentic or fake about their ethnic identity. I think the implications of this one person’s understanding of “Uyghurness” indicate that Uyghurs themselves often realize that “Uyghur” is a flexible ethnic category, and even acknowledging this in no way detracts from the strength or authenticity of the Uyghur ethnic identity. I find such a unique take on what it means to “be Uyghur” a fresh perspective – coming from a Uyghur individual – to the idea of Uyghur identity.