I should begin this review of Dr. Äsät Sulayman’s recent work, Özlük wä Kimlik, with a note on the translation of the title. Both özlük and kimlik can be translated, in a sense, as “identity”, which is the focus of the book: the experiences and formation of group and individual identity. Özlük, translatable as “selfhood” or “individuality”, carries a strong sense of self-reflection – it indicates an individual’s concept of his or herself. Kimlik, a term used for one’s public identity, including his or her official identity card, could be translated literally as “who-ness” – it is the identity of a person in reference to his or her surroundings and community. The subtitle, in Uyghur, translates as “looking at the depths of Central Asia from Europe’s shores”.

We can consider the book in these terms. Özlük wä Kimlik is, first of all, a personal memoir of the year Dr. Äsät (Eset) Sulayman, a professor at Xinjiang University and an influential intellectual voice, spent at Stockholm University in Sweden, where he studied, taught, and worked. While living there as an immigrant, away from his family and native land, he spent several months in the Royal Archives of Sweden and the archives of Stockholm University, cataloging the records of Swedish missionaries who operated in Xinjiang from 1892 through the late 1930′s, records previously left nearly untouched by researchers. This forms the other half of the book, detailing the lives of these missionaries and discussing the ways in which their activities, especially in the fields of printing and education, altered the evolution of Uyghur society.

With evidence from these archive materials, Äsät Sulayman essentially argues that the introduction of printing technology to Xinjiang, coupled with the missionaries’ focus on primary education, aided the formation of a Uyghur intellectual class, as well as providing a foreign, Christian foil for an evolving local Turkic Muslim identity. He has since returned to this argument in a more focused academic work (also in Uyghur)¹. Apart from proselytizing largely unreceptive natives, many of whom received a “modern” or “scientific” education in their schools, the missionaries operated the only press in the region until 1938, producing texts beyond their own evangelical purposes, including some of the earliest printed works in Turki. Perhaps more importantly to the formation, codification, and promotion of a modern Uyghur language, the press produced early textbooks (including alphabet books) and grammars of “Altä Shähär Turki”. The story of Swedish or Scandinavian involvement in Xinjiang, dating back to the eighteenth century, forms the nominal backbone of the book, though it hardly makes its presence known in the text. True, Dr. Sulayman presents information about Swedish people in Xinjiang and analyzes the effects of their presence and activities, but, in terms of the book’s composition, the “cultural dialogue between Inner Asia and Scandinavia” is more of a general theme, incidental to the narrative, than it is a force to order that narrative or any argument.

Äsät Sulayman viewed the history he rediscovered through the eyes of an outsider in a strange land. It is his memories of life in Sweden that form the bulk of the book and that bring him to his final conclusions. His descriptions of the deepening Swedish winter and the people he encountered among the “fluttering” snowflakes become somewhat repetitive, but they are effective in framing the commonality he felt with other immigrants, even strangers, as well as with the Swedish, whose “national character” he spends a very long chapter describing and reassessing. He recounts, for example, his repeated need to explain where he is from, an experience common to Uyghurs who go abroad. How does one account for a Uyghur face and a Chinese passport? This constant defense of his own identity, as for many people who have lived abroad, causes him to reevaluate and reflect on it outside of the ever-present Chinese system of ethnic classification.

This, I believe, is Äsät Sulayman’s main point: Uyghur identity and history can be considered outside of the Chinese context. His points of cultural and historical comparison are located in Sweden and Xinjiang, respectively. When he speaks of his “homeland”, he clearly means “Xinjiang”, hardly making mention of China. Indeed, it seems that his natural place in Sweden’s international community is among Uzbeks and other Central Asians. He places Uyghur history and identity on the same level of importance as those of any other ethnic group or nation. His discussion of relative population size favorably compares the Uyghur population to that of most European countries, as does his contrast of the size of different language communities. The Uyghur community, in this narrative, does not simply generate or form within its test tube autonomous region. Rather, it is acted upon by and acts upon non-Chinese outsiders. This is, if not a direct challenge to or rejection of officially-approved accounts of Uyghur history and identity, a major paradigm shift in the more popular literature on ethnicity in China. In this mode, however, it remains very modernist in its outlook, never casting doubt on the naturalness or reality of ethnonational communities, no matter how they may be constructed. This is, I think, part of the book’s appeal to its target audience of at least moderately educated Uyghurs: it changes their ethnic world view in a way still seems logical and natural.

Özlük wä Kimlik, given its wide readership and popularity in the Uyghur intellectual world, has already changed and will continue to affect at least some of its readers’ attitudes towards the question of Uyghur ethnic identity. Äsät Sulayman, himself an historian of literature, recognizes and thinks in terms of intellectual, idealist history. This leads him, it seems, to begin to reassess accepted ethnonational narratives in China, which are overwhelmingly Marxist-materialist. The ideas of identity that he puts forth in this work, as well as its derivative papers, remind me a great deal of the theories of Frederick Barth, while his emphasis on print culture hints of Benedict Anderson, although he does not reference them – nor has he, to my knowledge, read them. This may be the book’s greatest contribution: a diversification of the popular discourse of Uyghur identity, a discourse that is currently primarily concerned, even among independence-minded Uyghurs, with elaborating the concrete trans-historical characteristics of a putative ethnonational group as defined by a state ethnological apparatus. It is, in a sense, a sign of a natural post-modern shift in thought arising from an awareness of and interest in history and literature, which are gaining more acceptance and intellectual freedom, along with anthropology, as fields of inquiry. Furthermore, this is a perspective that comes from (or appears to come from) within a group that regards itself as marginal, though the rejection of this marginal status seems to be a goal of Sulayman’s writing.

This perspective seems to be reinforced by the couching of intellectual inquiry within the structure of a personal narrative. This is reminiscent of a very common strategy for Uyghur writers who want to communicate about history – history is novelized (as in Iz, Oyghanghan Zemin, Ana Yurt, and other books) and, thus, protected from certain kinds of censorship. Äsät Sulayman is doing the same here, I think, with experimental ideas about history and identity that are not otherwise ready for academia.

Özlük wä Kimlik: Yawropa Qirghaqliridin Märkiziy Asiya Chongqurluqlirigha Qarap is an interesting piece of writing by any measure, as well as a possibly very important and influential work in the Uyghur intellectual work. Indeed, its place as a classic is assured, and not just by Dr. Äsät Sulayman’s well-established reputation – the book’s first and second printings, totaling several thousand copies, both sold out quickly, and the book is now a hard-sought favorite in Ürümchi used-book stores.

¹Äsät Sulayman. “‘Qäshqär basma buyumliri’ wä ötkünchi däwrdiki Uyghur tili mädäniyiti – Chaghatay tilidin hazirqi zaman Uyghur tiligha mäzgilidiki ‘ötkünchi däwr Uyghur tili’ wä uning tarixiy, ijtima’iy, mädäniyät arqa körünüshi” in Shinjang Pedagogika Uniwersiteti Aliy Zhurnali (Pälsäpä – Ijtima’iy Pän Qismi), No. 4, 2007, pp. 1-11.

Poppycock.

Xinjiang stands in an unfortunate position. The land known as Xinjiang, as we know it now, is a political unit with somewhat arbitrary borders, the product – at first – of a treaty between the Qing and Russian Empires following a war with the Junghar Mongol state that was started by Central Asian Sufi sheikhs and involved the Tibetans. Yaqub Beg, the Khokandi warlord, never kept a hold on the whole territory. What the Qing reconquered and reconstituted as a province under the leadership of General Zuo “Tso” Zongtang (of chicken fame) encompassed the old Junghar territories, small independent kingdoms, and two regions that had been held, at one time, by the Buddhist Idiqut and Muslim Karakhanid Empires. The borders were drawn with the involvement of the British, who had been interested in making it a buffer state. Xinjiang has been referred to as the “pivot of Asia” by Owen Lattimore and as the end of or a stop on the “Silk Road” by countless others.

So, the trend in Xinjiang studies has long been to emphasize the diversity of identities found among individual members of its ethnonational groups – though this is certainly changing – while the trend in popular media, which usually can’t handle diversity and still make them interesting, has been to try and simplify the region, to make it readable to the outside world. Even the idea of being “in between” is based on the assumption that something is positioned between identifiably homogeneous points. Uyghurs and Han become monolithic animals, one color each, who wrestle over an undifferentiated, homogeneous, and ultimately timeless national desert. Journalists, whose situation I must admit I understand, have to make something as alien as a peaceful Islamic women’s protest in a place like… Khotan? How do you pronounce that?… and make it accessible.

So, we have the convenient example of Tibet. It’s nearby, it’s big, it’s also in China, people there are violently suppressed, and no one really has a good understanding of it, so it’s an ideal parallel to make. Indeed, when asked at a loud and crowded party, “So, what’s Xinjiang?”, I have been known to answer, “It’s like Tibet, but it’s full of Turks.” It’s an easy analogy to make.

Let’s look at the facts, though. One of the reasons Uyghurs and Tibetans don’t network well is that they don’t like each other very much. The Muslim/Buddhist divide is very strong, especially in Xinjiang, where the above-mentioned Buddhist Idiqut and Muslim Karakhanid Empires fought each other, on and off, for several centuries. For a long time, the word “Uyghur” became synonymous with “idol-worshipping Buddhist”. Indeed, the Uyghur word but means “idol”, as in the kind you’re not meant to worship, the kind that Muslims used to whack the heads off of before the Eighth Route Army and the Red Guards took over for them. Pan-Islamism has been a major political force in Xinjiang for centuries. So has Pan-Turkism, disciples of which, returning or journeying from points west, were largely responsible for the Xinjiang that we see today. Tibet simply hasn’t had a similar intellectual history, a similar epistemological chain giving rise to a similar kind of separatism or nationalism.

Xinjiang’s only periods of “independence”, those looked to by nationalist groups, never covered the entire area of Xinjiang as we now know it. Otherwise, there were periods, which they do not invoke, when that land area was controlled as the personal fiefdom of some outsider, for example Yang Zengxin. Tibetans in Greater Tibet have a clear and internationally-respected (there’s the key!) claim to a historically verified Tibetan Empire focused around today’s Tibet, a religion particularly peculiar to that area, and all of the bureaucracy that comes with both of those things. Uyghurs have no Dalai Lama. They have a close-knit, but ultimately inefficacious intellectual elite that, even when it is hopping mad, prefers to write a mildly subversive allegory rather than raise an armed rebellion. Their modus operandi is to work for a better life for their families and for other Uyghurs now, not to organize actively for a future independent state. This does not necessarily go for the Uyghur diaspora, which is, in any case, too small to gain much notice.

In broader terms, Xinjiang is not as centralized as Tibet is. Ürümchi, which has only really mattered for about a century, is not the symbolic capital of the Uyghur spirit, nor is it even a particularly loved or revered city among Xinjiang people overall. Rather, the Uyghur population, which largely retains its home-town orientation, is found in clusters, linked by long highways across large, open spaces, with every city having some claim to authenticity and its own local problems. Protests and other expressions of discontent, I think, will remain local, not general, and led by unsung heroes of local problems, not by charismatic figures from abroad. One might actually suggest that the riots in Lhasa started the same way, but that’s a topic for another blog.

It was the above-linked post on Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times blog that really got me to notice the simplistic way in which Xinjiang is viewed, the way it parallels Tibet, a similarly nebulous image in the popular discourse. Everything is in a global context readable by post-9/11 Americans, full of familiar images, less information than an example of an already-hegemonic theory of the world. Terrorism is Islamic — a position accepted by many Chinese, as well — and dissent against China is Buddhist. The editors’ blog of Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine that should know better, even refers to the protests in Xotän as “the second front”, albeit only in passing. What, now Buddhism owns dissent in China? Does Falun Gong get this treatment?

It’s time to start studying and understanding Xinjiang on its own terms. I have only seen one newspaper – The Guardian – consult an actual expert on Xinjiang who is not a member of an Uyghur nationalist organization, Nicolas Becquelin. His reasoned and expert opinions show that there are factors internal to Xinjiang and in relation to the central government of the PRC that are responsible for recent displays of discontent.

We are also lucky that we live in a time when a field of “Xinjiang Studies” is forming around the world (outside of China), creating a broader and richer dialogue on this not-so-mysterious region – Indiana University’s Department of Central Eurasian Studies has a program for studying Xinjiang, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University has a position for a professor of Xinjiang Studies, and the field is booming in Japan. There are more examples, and I encourage you to find them.

In the meantime, there is already a long history of quality research on Xinjiang done by scholars from the PRC itself. This includes work in Chinese, Uyghur, Mongolian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and, yes, even Sibe, as well as possibly other languages. Xinjiang is home to several universities, which are home to scholars who do serious research, often of very high quality, on their own Autonomous Region. It would take a sea change in the way the world thinks of language and power to get this work the broad recognition it deserves, especially in the popular eye. However, an effort made by outside researchers to seek out these scholars and their work, in tandem with a greater effort on the part of news organizations to seek less biased sources, will make this region better-known. Perhaps someday we will hear some reporter ask, “Is Yunnan the next Xinjiang?” Maybe projects like our own serial translation of The Awakened Land will inspire someone to look a little further.

So, is Xinjiang the next Tibet? Michael Manning over at The Opposite End of China has, once again, beat us to the punch:

Q: Is Xinjiang the next Tibet?

A: Is Afghanistan the next Bhutan?

Finally, I should note that the PRC-funded Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee, a paramilitary group involved in the construction of a New World Order under the leadership of the Sino-Jewish Cabal (that’s irony, folks), suggests that the protests in Xotän were, in fact, incited by Amnesty International under the control of British intelligence agency MI-6. Their pigtailed puppet, Rabiyä Qadir, justified and encouraged the splittists’ acts of inharmonious violence with her snake-tongued lies. See? Now even crazy people care about Xinjiang.