This spring, 14 men were brought into police offices, where, one by one, they were subjected to weeks of questioning about their online correspondence and political views.
Their offense? Buying Islamic books.
The men were detained in Yiwu, China, an international commercial hub on the country's wealthy east coast and home to a growing community of Muslims. The detentions are emblematic of increasingly harsh restrictions targeting spiritual and educational life for Muslims in China.
Once focused on giving minorities limited cultural autonomy, China's ethnic policy has shifted in the last decade toward an approach that favors complete assimilation with China's Han ethnic majority in language and religious practice. Muslims in China now fear that religious freedoms are regressing to those in the days of the Cultural Revolution, a decade of severe political and religious persecution in the 1960s and 1970s.
"Every household would burn their religious books in case they were searched. Shredders were sold out. People would flush the book ashes down the toilet, sometime clogging the pipes," one Chinese Muslim publisher says of that era. "The persecution we are facing now is worse than that time."
The publisher, who has fled China and continues to publish books from abroad, requested anonymity because at least 40 of his relatives have been detained or sentenced to prison for their religious beliefs or connection to him. Many in his publishing network have been arrested or fled the country.
"The state only wants its garden to have one type of flower," he says. "The red ones. Green, blue or white flowers: if they are not red, they will be cut down."
Targeting scholars and writers
"Intellectuals are the bearers of tradition. They're looked up to as the arbiters, the judges of what is the the real Islam, and so they make an attractive target for a government that is interested in either controlling cultural expression or trying to completely reengineer it," says Rian Thum, who studies Islam in China as a senior research fellow at Britain's University of Nottingham.
China is home to about 23 million practicing Muslims, according to its 2010 census, the most recent count — less than 2% of the country's population. Most are Uighur — a Turkic ethnic group — or labeled as Hui, ethnically and linguistically indistinguishable from China's Han ethnic majority. Chinese Muslims are most densely clustered in the northwestern regions of Gansu, Ningxia and Xinjiang, but live across the country, as they have for more than a millennium.
Last year, NPR reported that authorities had forced nearly all mosques in Ningxia and the eastern province of Henan to "renovate" by removing their domes and Arabic script. Demolitions have since extended to mosques in Zhejiang and Gansu provinces. But practicing Muslims say the most heavy-handed restrictions have targeted the intangible channels through which they have preserved their faith in China for centuries.
Beginning in 2018, new religious restrictions shuttered hundreds of Arabic language and Islamic schools across Ningxia and Zhengzhou, Henan's capital. Imams must now take political education classes as part of a revamped certification program. The program also mandates that they can only serve in the region where their household is registered, effectively disbarring hundreds of itinerant imams.
The restrictions have only intensified since then. Mosque demolitions have spread. The intellectual heart of China's Islamic community has largely been silenced as scholars, writers, religious leaders and their families are under constant state surveillance. A once-thriving academic and religious exchange between Chinese Muslims and centers across the Middle East and South Asia has halted, as those having business or religious ties abroad are subject to Chinese state harassment and detention.
"What dominates Muslim [government] cadres is the [Communist] party line and the official version of Islam promoted by government agencies and organizations," says Ma Haiyun, an assistant professor at Frostburg State University, where he studies Islam in China. "The result of this restriction is to make traditional discourses on Islam more commercial, patriotic and Chinese."
"We lived like ghosts"
The door to Qingzhen Shuju — Islam Books — remains padlocked, the shop full of stacks of books in their unopened packaging.
Located in an upscale university neighborhood in Beijing, the bookstore and its accompanying website were a prominent publisher of Islamic philosophy works and the newest Arabic works translated into Chinese — until publisher Ma Yinglong (no relation to Ma Haiyun) was arrested in 2017 on charges of illegal publishing and terrorism. Two people close to him say he remains in detention in China's northwestern Xinjiang region.
A second influential publisher, Ma Zhixiong (no relation to either Ma), ran a prolific imprint called Tianma Publishing from China's southwestern Yunnan province until he too was imprisoned for selling illegal books, in 2015. He was released on probation this year.
"The printing plant was closed and our equipment and all books were confiscated. In the first days [of my imprisonment], I was almost completely cut off from the outside world," Ma Zhixiong wrote in an essay widely circulated this fall among chat groups on the Chinese WeChat app. "During my prison days, human dignity disappeared. Every day, people had to take off their clothes for inspection and to hold our heads while squatting down while being interrogated... We lived like ghosts."
The two publishers were a critical link in a world of writers, publishers and bookstores, the backbone for religious studies in China. Their arrests are evidence of a crackdown widening from its epicenter in Xinjiang, where authorities have detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities, sentencing some to lengthy prison terms for practicing Islam.
Despite international criticism, Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared the detention and security policies in Xinjiang "entirely correct" and a "success" at a September meeting of party officials. "We must persevere in Sinicizing the direction of our country's religions," he said.
The crushing of China's Muslim writing community is a marked reversal from a period of literary openness after economic and political reforms took hold in the 1980s.
Despite some restrictions, Muslim writers thrived in the laissez-faire atmosphere of those decades. For example, unable to get the commercial book codes — similar to an ISBN number — allotted to state-sanctioned publishers for state-approved volumes, writers and editors self-published their works and distributed them by mail to readers and religious bookstores that were ubiquitous for decades outside larger mosques.
"Many people have been oppressed for their speech in China but among the Muslim community, those who get into trouble for their writing or publishing have gone unnoticed," a prominent Chinese Muslim writer tells NPR.
He fled China last year after friends warned that police were seeking to detain him. He requested anonymity out of concern for the safety of his immediate family, almost all of whom remain in China.
He and hundreds of other Chinese Muslims used to moderate online forums and events and curated websites that discussed issues of scripture and philosophy. By 2016, those sites were shut down or censored within China's Great Firewall. They moved to WeChat, where the writer now runs chat groups of 500 people each, but doing so requires constant vigilance: "Even on WeChat," he says, "it is a continuous process of continually being shut down by censors and starting a new group."
WeChat would also ensnare the 14 people detained in Yiwu earlier this year; all had purchased this writer's books on history, scripture and philosophy through the app.
"They interrogated them about their relationship with several Muslim intellectuals and overseas Chinese Muslims. The police had printed out the text records everyone had had on WeChat with writers and publishers," said a friend of one of those detained, who requested anonymity to avoid detention for speaking out. "Now the police say every time they travel, they have to report to them beforehand when they are leaving and where they are going."
As for China's Muslim community leaders, "There are no imams who dare to speak out," says a scholar who leads a Quran reading group in northwestern China. "You can renounce your state-given imam certification and leave the mosque in order to speak out — but then you can be sure you will be constantly monitored."
"They know what you are up to"
Beginning in 2017, Chinese Muslims outside Xinjiang watched with dread as hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic minority, were detained and sent either to "reeducation centers" or prison.
Soon after, Xinjiang security officers began fanning out to other provinces to send Hui Muslims with identity documents registered in Xinjiang back to the region.
One of those forcibly returned to Xinjiang was a young Hui woman who taught at a religious school in a mosque outside Xinjiang, after completing a theological studies degree at Egypt's prestigious Al-Azhar University. Last December, Xinjiang police abruptly detained her and brought her back to her hometown of Tacheng.
"We asked them, why send 30 men to apprehend a young woman and her infant at 11 at night. It was unbelievable," says a fellow teacher who asked to remain anonymous and keep his location withheld because he was detained and questioned after speaking to NPR.
He learned in March that the woman had been slapped with a seven-year prison sentence but doesn't know on what charges.
Four Hui Muslims born in Xinjiang told NPR they managed to change the registration of their identity documents, called hukou, to another province before 2017, as restrictions on Uighurs and practicing Muslims in Xinjiang became more draconian.
Others moved abroad, but even outside China, Xinjiang security officials continue to harass them through WeChat.
"My hometown police somehow knew that I had even moved apartments this year," says one Hui Muslim now living in Egypt who requested anonymity for fear of retribution from Chinese security officials. The police officers send "friendly" messages weekly, the person says, full of smiley faces, heart emojis and stickers, but their intent is clear: "It is meant to show they know what you are up to and to remind you of where you are from."
Efforts to co-opt Muslim leaders
Xinjiang policing has even reached a beachside city on Hainan, a Chinese tropical island province in the South China Sea. Home to a small community of historically Muslim Utsuls, Hainan's warm climes have begun attracting retirees and vacationers from other provinces during the winter months, including large numbers of Hui Muslims.
Last February, during Lunar New Year holidays, two Xinjiang public security officers set up a table at one of the six mosques in the city of Sanya to register identification documents of everyone who attended Friday prayers, according to two people who attended prayers that day. One of them evaded registration by slipping out through a side door.
In September, at the start of the fall semester, public schools in predominantly Utsul neighborhoods in Sanya began banning female students from wearing headscarves to class. Videos shared with NPR show the female students being cordoned outside the Tianya Utsul Elementary School because they refused to comply.
Local Communist Party regulations now ban party members from practicing Islam and call for increased governance of Muslim neighborhoods in Sanya, according to the South China Morning Post.
Chinese security forces have also been seeding the ranks of local branches of the Islamic Association of China, a state-run body which organizes the only officially permitted hajj pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia.
One Islamic scholar says his son was approached by Chinese security officers this year, shortly before his son's promotion as imam of a mosque and membership in the Islamic Association. NPR is not disclosing his name or location because he was detained and questioned after speaking with NPR.
"They offered [him] a full civil servant's salary and pension for the work and an appointment as board member of a local state company if he secretly worked for them," the scholar says.
His son refused the offer.
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