Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who live primarily in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. Described by some as Muslim Mongolians who look like Italian peasants, they are generally larger and darker and have more Mediterranean features than Han Chinese. Blue eyes and light skin are not uncommon among them. Uyghurs mostly follow moderate traditions of Sunni Islam, and culturally have more in common ...

Michael C. Brose (University of Wyoming) Abstract and Keywords The medieval Uyghurs became a political entity in the mid-8th century when they established their steppe empire as the inheritors of the ancient Türk steppe tribal confederation. They ruled their empire for a century from their capital city in the heart of the Mongol steppe. Their empire ended when rival Kirgiz tribes attacked it, and the Uyghur ...

The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) announces the publication of Uyghur Voices on Education: China’s Assimilative ‘Bilingual Education’ Policy in East Turkestan. Since UHRP’s first report on bilingual education in 2007, the Chinese government has accelerated and expanded an education policy that has effectively marginalized the Uyghur language from the education system in East Turkestan. The ‘bilingual e ...

Authorities in the Chinese capital have sent dozens of volunteer teachers to the troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang in a bid to boost comprehension of Mandarin among local ethnic minority Uyghurs, official media reported. The move was promptly slammed by exile groups as a bid to further wipe out Uyghur language and culture, assimilating it into the culture of the majority Han Chinese population. Forty ...

By Tatiana A. Anikeeva Uyghur Initiative Papers No. 3, October 2014 Attributed to the ancient Uyghur literary tradition are some texts written in Uyghur and Arabic script in the 8th-9th centuries and some literary monuments written a couple of centuries later in the 11th. These texts are as a rule connected with the main, established religious traditions (though some of them have only jural or household con ...