‘They Feel Like They Can’t Go Home’
For Hui Students of Islam in China and Abroad, Growing Restrictions and Rising Fear
In September 2014, while waiting for access to photograph Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, a Chinese photographer who calls himself “Ali” came upon a large group of students from his home country at a local restaurant. He knew that many young Chinese people study in countries like the U.S. and Australia, but he wondered why they’d choose to study in Jordan. The students explained that they were Hui, members of a group of roughly 10.5 million Chinese Muslims the People’s Republic of China designates as a distinct ethnicity. They were there to study Islam.
While Uighurs, members of a separate, Turkik-speaking, predominantly Muslim ethnic minority, have long faced discrimination and persecution, the Hui have until recently enjoyed a comparatively more comfortable place in majority Han society. They have had the latitude to practice their religion. As recently as a few years ago, the Chinese government showcased their culture and religion as a lure for investment and tourism. Today, Hui people face mounting restrictions and surveillance which, writes Emily Feng for National Public Radio, many fear may be a prelude to more draconian measures like those employed in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, an increasing number of individual testimonies suggest that Hui in Xinjiang, particularly those who have studied Islam abroad, have also been victims of mass incarceration.
Kelly Hammond, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas who studies Islam in East Asia, says “the state wants to assert more control” over what Hui learn and prefers they learn Arabic “purely for commercial and economic connections with the Middle East and North Africa” instead of for studying “the Quran or other theological texts.”
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Last Call to Prayer
Ali, who is Han, sensed this shift over his five years following the students he had met in Jordan, as well as friends of theirs studying in other Muslim countries. During Ramadan in 2015, one of the students, Kashim, invited Ali to his hometown in the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture of Gansu, a center of Hui cultural life known as China’s “Little Mecca.” “It was all fine back then,” Ali says, “I could still go to mosques with him and wander around.” A year later, he visited the city of Kaiyuan in Yunnan province with Kashim’s friend Umar, who studies in Jordan. There, he noticed mosque-based Islamic schools were starting to get shut down. In 2017, another friend of Kashim’s, Ibrahim, who studied in Egypt, chose to stay in China after he came back during Ramadan because he feared deportation if he returned to school. That year, at Beijing’s request, Egypt rounded up dozens of Uighurs and deported them to China.
Uighurs who had studied, traveled, or worked abroad were among the first to be detained in Xinjiang’s sprawling network of internment camps. Recent reports suggest the campaign has reached beyond Xinjiang into other regions of China. Ali says the Hui students he knows have been required to check in at local police stations when they return to China. “They’re anxious when they’re at school. And when they have holidays, they feel like they can’t go home.”
Ali believes the students he photographed may be the last group of Chinese Muslims able to receive an Islamic education growing up in China and then continue their studies abroad.
Ali had limited knowledge of Islam or of the situation of Hui people before he began the project. He says he now views most Han people as “blindly Islamophobic.” He believes persecution of Chinese Muslims will continue to intensify and that its victims are too few in number to effectively resist. “They will die out slowly,” Ali says, “and the way Han people are acting, maybe that’s what the authorities want.”