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Ever since I was arrested, the thought of praying for a long life, good health, or well-being sickened me. Such prayers made it seem that I was only alive to keep living, that I struggled simply to pay off a debt to life itself. The misery of each day’s passage, the whole ordeal between birth and death—I wanted to bury it all. If you can truly long for death, I did, but the heaven I dreamed of wasn’t a jihadist’s paradise, filled with houris. It was a homeland for my people, where everyone is hur: free.

Today in the NYR Online, Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur linguist and poet currently living in Norway, writes about the fifteen months he spent in Chinese prisons for opening Uyghur-language kindergartens in his homeland. (“His supposed crime,” writes Ayup’s translator Avi Ackermann in an introduction, “kept changing…. The court eventually settled on ‘illegal fundraising’—though neither the interrogators who accused him of being a CIA agent nor the guards who made him wear a political prisoner uniform seemed to take this seriously.”)

Below, alongside Ayup’s recollections, we have collected six essays from our archives about Uyghurs and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, or, as Uyghurs call their homeland, East Turkestan,

Abduweli Ayup, translated and with an introduction by Avi Ackermann
A Thornbush in the Desert 

Memories of a Uyghur political prisoner.

Joshua L. Freeman
Uighur Poets on Repression and Exile

It is precisely because of poetry’s power in Uighur culture that these three poets, along with nearly every other prominent Uighur intellectual, disappeared more than two years ago into China’s internment camps.

—August 13, 2020

James Millward
‘Reeducating’ Xinjiang’s Muslims

A vast new gulag of “de-extremification training centers” has been created for Turkic Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang.

—February 7, 2019

Richard Bernstein
From China to Jihad?

Among the many stories concerning foreigners setting out to fight in Syria, the allegations about a group of Chinese Uighurs arrested in Thailand—many of them women and children—stand out.

—September 8, 2014

Ian Johnson
Beyond the Dalai Lama:
An Interview with Woeser and Wang Lixiong

Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong are an activist couple who have devoted themselves to chronicling ethnic unrest in China, and to finding solutions to it.

—August 7, 2014

Ian Johnson
China’s Sufis: The Shrines Behind the Dunes

Lisa Ross’s photographs are not our usual images of Xinjiang, the turbulent autonomous region in western China. Instead of representing political conflict, they show a little-known religious tradition—its desert shrines to Sufi saints.

—April 25, 2013

Jonathan Mirsky
China’s Areas of Darkness

“In Xinjiang today, as in the rest of China no matter how far from the capital, all clocks are set to Beijing time, as if the emperor was still in charge of chronological matters. I recall making appointments with several Uyghurs, Xinjiang’s largest ethnic group that is not Han—ethnic Chinese people. They would give me a sly look after pointing at their watches and holding up two fingers, indicating, as an act of defiance against Chinese chauvinism, that we would meet two hours earlier.”

—November 8, 2007

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