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Taroudant, Morocco- Chinese authorities are targeting Muslim Uighurs with beards and veils in western China’s restive, Muslim-majority Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, according to Aljazeera.
In an attempt to restrict Muslims the freedom to express themselves, the local authorities in the Muslim-majority region are rewarding locals who report their neighbors for “wearing beards.” In fact, “Informants in Xinjiang can earn up to $8,000 for reporting neighbors who wear beards, seen as a sign of Islam,” according to Aljazeera.
Responding to a foreign reporter’s question about “why young men of the Uighur ethnic minority do not have beards”, a young Uighur man answered angrily: “It’s because the government doesn’t allow beards,” according to Associated Press.
The Chinese government’s restrictions may be counter-productive though, as religious oppression may lead to extremism. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s self-perpetuating.
The more they crack down on it, the more people re-Islamize. This is a pattern we see all over the world,” Joanne Smith Finley, an expert on Uighurs at Britain’s Newcastle University, was quoted by AP as saying.
“The Chinese state has created a growing terrorist threat where previously there was none. It has stimulated an Islamic renewal where there wouldn’t necessarily have been one,” she added.
In fact, the Chinese authorities in the Muslim-majority Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region did not stop at prohibiting Muslim clothes and beards in public.
Last year, the authorities hanged the Chinese flag over the Mihrab, a semicircular niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the qibla, the direction (Kaaba) that Muslims of the world face when praying, to force worshipers to bow before the flag every time they kneel down for their prayers.
Also, during the holy month of Ramadan, the Chinese authorities imposed a ban on Muslim students, teachers, and civil servants in the northwestern province of Xinjiang from fasting.
Students at Kashgar Normal College, located in the far west province of Xinjiang, were forced to eat and drink during daylight in Ramadan or face expulsion.
Experts and human rights activists around the world are concerned that the infringements on personal freedom in Xinjiang could lead to extremism.
