China’s Islamist Separatist Threat: An Interview with Dr. Harold Rhode

by Jerry Gordon (January 2015)

Dr. Harold Rhode at Xian University China with Lecture Announcement
November 2014

When Islam swept along the ancient Silk Road a millennium ago, it found new adherents in what is now the People’s Republic of China. One ethnic group that responded were the Uyghurs (pronounced “wee-ghurs”), an indigenous Turkic-speaking people who adopted Sufism. The Uyghur heartland was contested by Turkic groups, Mongols and China. In the 18^th Century the Qing Dynasty in China asserted control over Xinjiang. However, during the 19^th Century, the Czarist Russian advance across Central Asia conquered the neighboring Khanates of Kokand and Bukhara. That led to Kokand general Yaqui Bey establishing a de facto Uyghur state in Kashgar in 1865.

Uyghurs in Urumqi

mysteriously died on a plane flight back from Moscow, some believe on orders from Stalin.

The PRC established Xinjiang as the Uyghur Autonomous Region in Xinjiang (UXAR). In 1955, the PRC began a program of conscious resettlement of Han Chinese and investment of billions to exploit the vast natural resources of Xinjiang that encompasses fully one/sixth the land area of the PRC. This was in line with China’s strategy of “Go West” to exploit the rich agricultural, oil and gas resources. The PRC has been building a new Silk Road Eurasian Land Bridge  rail network through Xinjiang connecting Russian and Chinese Pacific ports across the adjacent Central Asian republics into Russia leading ultimately to ports in the EU. The resettlement and enormous investments came at the expense of Uyghur ethnic presence in Xinjiang. Today the Muslim Uyghurs comprise roughly 45 percent of the Xinjiang’s population, approximately 10 million with the balance being Han Chinese settlers. There is an estimated Uyghur diaspora of over one million. Uyghur refugees who fled Xinjiang after the PRC takeover in the early 1950’s found refuge in Turkey that included creation of a permanent community and economic opportunities. Under Islamist President Erdogan, that role has continued most recently reflected in a dispute with China over repatriation of Uyghurs from Thailand.

The East Turkestan Flag

Uyghur irredentism coupled with increasing Muslim extremism found support from Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the Taliban in Pakistan and Central Asian republics after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. That led to armed Uyghur separatist attacks under the banner of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. This Muslim extremist separatist group, recognized as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department seeks to establish a supra national Turkic state composed of “sections of Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).” According to a US State Department study Uyghurs have received “training and funding” and joined the ranks of Al Qaeda fighting US and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Hasan Mahsum, a Uyghur from Xinjiang’s Kashgar region was killed “by Pakistani troops in 2003 during a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda hideout near the Afghanistan border.” His successor Abdul Haq was killed in Pakistan in 2010. Co-founder of the ETIM Memetuhut Memetrozi, serving a life sentence for terrorism in China was educated in a Madrassa in Pakistan. In 1996, China concluded the Shanghai Treaty “with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, using the accord to pressure Central Asian states to deter their ethnic Uighur minorities from supporting separatism in Xinjiang and to guarantee extradition of Uyghurs fleeing China.”

2013 car bombing attack in Tiananmen Square in Beijing killed five and injured 40. It was “officially blamed on the ETIM” by the PRC. It worsened in 2014, according to a Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder on the ETIM:

In March 2014, aThere is suspicion that among the foreign recruits of the Islamic State are Muslim extremist Uyghurs who are believed to have filtered into Syria via Turkey. China’s difficulty in controlling the rising Muslim fundamentalism in Xinjiang is reflected in recent draconian bans by Chinese authorities in Urumqi, of Muslim veils and head scarves for women and men growing long beards.

Hui Muslims, Source: Reuters

The problematic Uyghur Muslim extremist separatism and fundamentalism is apparently not reflected in another Muslim group in China, the Hui Muslims who number 11 million. The Hui can be found throughout China but are concentrated in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The Hui people are ethnic Han Chinese who were converted by or intermarried with Persian and Arab traders who brought Islam to the Eternal Kingdom. Hui was also a term used to describe both Nestorian Christians and Jews who came to China. The last Chinese-Jewish congregation in Kaifeng was scattered at the time of the Taipeng Rebellion in the 1850’s. Hui people had illustrious leaders, including the fabled Admiral Zheng He who led the famed treasure fleets to Indonesia, India, Africa and Arabia in the 15^th Century.

Ma means Mohammed in Chinese). Clearly, the Hui people have evinced more loyalty to China than to Islamic Jihad imperatives. There is a reason for it. The Hui adopted their Islamic practices to fit the Confucian-influenced Chinese culture to the extent that their mosques have “traditional Chinese dynastic architecture with Islamic motifs.“

The Savior of Iraqi Jewish Heritage (Dec. 2013) and The Future of the Babylonian Jewish Archives (June 2014).

Jerry Gordon:  Dr. Rhode thank you for consenting to this interview.

Harold Rhode:  Thank you for inviting me, again.

were the purposes of these talks?

Rhode:  This was my third trip to China for an organization called SIGNAL (the Sino-Israel Global Network of Academic Leadership). Their goal is to strengthen academic intellectual ties between Israel, the Jewish people and China. This was a three week trip. Each of my previous trips were about the same length. On this trip I spoke at a few universities in Beijing. Then we went to Xi’An where thousands of terracotta soldiers, horses and other objects from 2000 years ago were discovered. From there I traveled to Kunming which is near the Burmese border to Yunnan University and from there to Chongqing for some academic conferences and lectures. Thereafter, I flew to Israel via Beijing and Moscow.

Gordon:  What topics did you lecture on in China?

Gordon:  Have the Chinese invested in Israeli Venture Capital Investment?

Gordon:  Does this reflect Confucian ethics or the culture of the regime?

Rhode:  Chinese culture is about 5,000 years old. In some ways, they ascribe to ancient ethics, ancient traditions. In Confucianism where you can question your teacher it is done very differently and more gingerly. It could seem to Westerners that it is rare, but Chinese culture has its own protocols of interaction. 

Gordon:  You went to lecture on a topic that you know well. It is something that the world is immediately concerned about which is Islamic extremism, in this case, Sunni extremism. Do the Chinese have an interest in that topic?

Rhode:  Yes. They consider the terrorism sourced in Xinjiang to be very serious. Xinjiang is the Northwest Territories of China historically inhabited by a people called the Uyghurs who are a Turkic Sunni Muslim people. The Uyghurs number approximately 10 million people. Xinjiang is about 1/6^th the land mass of China, and is rich in natural resources which the Chinese need. There are apparently more Han Chinese now in Xinjiang than there are Uyghurs. These Han were brought in to settle the province. The Chinese certainly have the people to do that. The Uyghurs are a Turkic people. Their language and their culture are very much related to the language and culture of the other Turkic peoples in the world including, the Turks of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and a few others. It is one language group, one family and the Chinese have this particular Muslim group in Xinjiang. There are other Muslim groups in China which we will address a little later.

Russia has a similar problem as the Chinese do with their Muslims. With the exception of the Azerbaijanis, and a numerically insignificant numbers of others, all former Soviet Muslims are Sunni. About one fourth of Russia’s population is Muslim. Over one third of the population of Moscow is legal and illegal resident Sunni Muslims. The Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Israelis recognize this problem. If Americans had a little more sense, and definitely the same is true in Europe which has very little sense, they would all understand that they suffer from the same problem: Sunni fundamentalism. The latest version of this scourge is ISIS/IS. The fanatics all want to live in one united state: the Islamic caliphate. The word Caliphate comes from the Arabic word Caliph which means “the single ruler” who was to replace their prophet Muhammad who died in 632 CE.

The question back then was who was going to inherit and rule after him? Very deep in the Sunni psyche is a longing for being ruled by a Caliph, to be living in one centrally ruled Islamic State. That state includes the entire Arab world, non-Sunni Shiite Iran, Central Asia, and Xinjiang – today’s northwestern China. There is reason to believe that Turkey’s President Erdo?an wants to be that ruler. If not him, then maybe a member of the Ottoman family. Erdo?an and his Prime Minister Davuto?lu have tried to bring back the Ottoman ruling family, which ruled the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire from 1389 through the early 1920s. However, Erdo?an is in big trouble at home and may just end up falling flat on his face.

Gordon:  President Erdo?an in Turkey has reached out to the Uyghurs.

Rhode:  Yes, he sure has. Now what is interesting is the language in Northwest China is a dialect of Turkish, which is closely related to the language spoken in Turkey today. Turkish, I would say is about 30 percent intelligible to a Uyghur speaker. But that percentage increases the more Uyghurs and Turks from Turkey listen to each other’s languages. The rage in Xinjiang is movies from Turkey and especially among the young Uyghurs. What is interesting is these movies glorify Islamic history, especially the early Islamic conquests and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. These movies are produced in Turkey and they go like hotcakes in Xinjiang. It is these films and propaganda from Saudi Arabia and other rich Gulf Sunni Arabs that arouse fundamentalism among the Uyghurs in China. Sunni Islamic fundamentalism is an existential threat to China.

Now for example, Muslims ruled Spain from 712 CE to 1492 CE when the Muslims were kicked out of the Iberian Peninsula. There is a society today in Cordoba in Southern Spain which claims it is there to preserve the glorious heritage of Muslim Spain. However, when they are among fellow Muslims, this organization makes clear that their true reason for existence is they are preparing for the reconquest of Spain for Islam. They lost in 1492 that was 522 years ago. However according to Islamic doctrine Spain is Muslim because it was conquered and ruled by Muslims and it will thus always be Muslim.

That is also the case for Israel. Muslims conquered what is today Israel in 637 CE, and, like Spain and Xinjiang, therefore must be ruled by Muslims forever. 

Gordon…not only the United States but the world.

Rhode:  I agree with you. I hate what I am saying. I wish it were not true. I wish the Sunni world had a concept of compromise. 

Hui. They are ethnic Han Chinese Sunni Muslims. They have been living as a minority in Chinese society. Over the centuries, they seem to have figured out a way to get along with their non-Muslim rulers; this is, in a Western sense, compromise. Maybe these Hui Muslims have the answer. Maybe they could be a model for the Sunni world at large. There is only one problem. Most of Hui, when they travel to the Muslim world – i.e., to the Arab world, to Turkey, to Afghanistan – if they start talking the way they do they would be labeled as non-Muslims.

Gordon:  They would be viewed as apostates.

Gordon:  How were the university audiences when you spoke about this issue in China?

Gordon:  Lee Smith has a book called The Strong Horse which explains this Middle East culture that you have described.

Rhode:  Great man!

Gordon:  From your conversation with people in China I gather they do not understand that.

Gordon:  Part of their pollution problem stems from dependence on coal used to produce electricity, heat and power industry as well as their transportation system. Going back to the topic we were discussing, are the Chinese, in a kind of a Casablanca film scenario, “shocked, shocked” at what you told them about Sunni extremism? What do they perceive as the solutions?

The Chinese seem to have decided that in their universities Middle Eastern centers which they are establishing, that in a few cases they are using Israel as a guide to help to set up these institutions and want Israeli academic expertise. There are a lot of Chinese students now in Israel studying all sorts of things. How does Israel make itself work? Many Chinese are fascinated by little Israel, and they want more connections.

Rhode:  During the recent summer war in Gaza, the Chinese were very much in the background. They were not criticizing Israel during this operation. The Russians really were not very much against Israel during the Gaza operation. The American people also strongly supported Israel. That is also the case for the American Congress.

Rhode:  I have an odd thought here. America is basically a religious country much to the chagrin of the academic community and much of the intellectual self-appointed establishment in the United States. I would call them the “I hate America crowd” that is teaching in universities and in some high schools in the United States. They are saying that the greatness of America is past.

Gordon:  Do you see that as a danger?

Rhode:  Yes, It’s a danger.

Gordon:  Who are the strong horses involved in world class support of terrorism now in the Middle East? I raise that because we had a recent visit in Northwest Florida from the Qatari Ambassador to the US.

We should not think that because the Iranians are Shiites and ISIS and the Turks hate Shiites with a passion that bygones are not bygones. They are fighting a war which took place when their prophet died over who would inherit the mantle of Islam. That war forced the major division of Islam between the Shiites versus the Sunnis. 

Gordon:  I want to commend you for being clear-eyed about what threats that really afflicts the United States, Israel and the World at this moment And thank you for your intrepid adventures, some of which have really been on behalf of claiming the heritage of the Jewish people.

Rhode:  Thank you Jerry. God be with you.

 

Listen to this recent Voice of Israel radio interview by Melanie Phillips with Dr. Harold Rhode and Michel Gurfinkiel on “Chinese Enigma, French Jews in Peril and the Liberal Conscience Stirs.”

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Also see Jerry Gordon’s collection of interviews, The West Speaks.

 

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