Assessing China’s dealing with own Muslims and those of other countries

By Samuel Baid

While suppressing Islam or even trying to eradicate it in China, the country’s President Xi Jinping supports India-specific Islamic terrorists in neighbouring Pakistan.

President Xi does not hide his abhorrence for Muslim signs, customs and even food. He is for sinicisation of religion that can take away Muslims’ and Christians’ sleep in China. Xinjiang has turned into a laboratory where Uyghur Muslims are made to forget their Islamic culture and its practices and customs to learn Communist culture and history. Here the success of sinicisation will mean end of Islam in this province

Xi does not like to see domes on top of mosques, prayer caps on Muslims’ heads or beards on their faces. He even does not like to hear that Muslims don’t eat pork. He makes fun of Muslim’s insistence on halal meat. Muslims or for that matter Jews, don’t touch pork non-halal meat. Their faith restrains them from consuming it. The cross on church building and a dome on a mosque are an eye sore for Xi’s government. It has ordered removal of crosses from church buildings and told Muslims not to have domes on their mosques. This order goes against China’s world-wide boast that, being a Godless Communist country, it allows religious freedom in the country.

China has about one crore Hui Muslims. Of them largest number, seven lakh, live in China’s south-west province of Yunnan. Here Muslims are up in arms against a 2020 court order which asked for the removal of a domed roof and minarets added in recent years to the 13th-century Najiaying Mosque in Naga town. This has led to clashes between the police and local Muslims. Some people threw stones at the police. Many Muslims have been arrested so far.
This is the second time in about five years that the Muslims are protesting against the government’s move to demolish a mosque. In 2018 hundreds of Muslims came out in Ningxia region to save their mosque from being demolished. The Muslims saved the mosque from being demolished but agreed to erase some signs from it.
The same year three mosques in Yunnan were shut because they were running what the government called “illegal religious education” perhaps it means madarsas.

In the face of Muslims, determination about their mosques, President Xi announced his sinicisation programme to transform religious beliefs to reflect Chinese culture and society.

President Xi has been duplicitous in his attitude towards Muslims in his own country and Muslims in neighbouring Pakistan. He, with his money power, has convinced Muslim countries that the camps for Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang are to cure them of terrorism. But they refuse to admit that the whole programme in camps is designed not to fight terrorism but to wean Muslim inmates from Islam and its practices,

Xi’s government wants to be in the good books of Pakistani Islamists. None of them, except Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), has sympathised with encamped Muslims in Xinjiang. On the contrary, Pakistan’s top fundamentalist party, Jamaat-i-Islami has good relations with Xi’s Administration.

The reason for Pakistani fundamentalists love for China is the latter’s hostility towards India. Therefore, they are grateful to China for trying (failed) to save Hafiz Saeed and his accomplice to be nominated as global terrorist by United Nations Security Council for organising 2008 massacre in Mumbai. Again China persistently tried to save Jaish-e-Mohammad Chief Masud Azhar from being nominated global terrorist.

Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinion of the author.
Source: asianmail.in