Day 3 of Ramadan.

A cultural genocide against Uyghur Muslims has been unfolding for years, with #Ramadab banned for about a decade.

China uses images and propaganda from outside of East Turkistan to portray an image of Islamic inclusion and acceptance, to distract from what is unfolding against Uyghur Muslims in their homeland.

As I wrote in 2018 👇ðŸ¼:

Islam is central to Uighur identity, and religious expression intimately tied to language and culture. But the War on Terror enabled Beijing to target the religious identity of Uighur Muslims to not only stifle aspirations for independence, but push towards full-scale ethnic cleaning. The universal policing of Muslim expression, in Western and Eastern nations, allowed China to first “throw the Uighurs under the geopolitical bus.†And in recent years, completely run them over with an interconnected set of policies that make American or French Islamophobia look pedestrian.

Suppressing the observance of Ramadan sent a clear message to Uighurs during the most emblematic period of Muslim life: that expression of Islam will be punished with impunity. In turn, the state ban on Ramadan bludgeoned a cornerstone of Uighur culture and life, and beyond the holy month, pushed forward the state view that Islam is “an ideological illness†that must be more than just criminally prosecuted, but pathologically cured.

Internment camps, called “re-education centres†by the state, grew in size and number beginning in 2013. Within these overpopulated camps, state agents are commissioned to heal the illness (Islam) through a litany of horrors, including forcing Uighur Muslims to eat pork and drink alcohol (both of which are restricted by Islam), memorise and recite Communist Party songs, forced into gruelling work, enroll in Mandarin language courses and comprehensive trainings devised to extract their religion and culture from out of them.

#China #Islam #ramadan