Cultures
Uyghurs
Also Known As Uighurs (alternate spelling)
Peoples
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The Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Sunni Muslim people native to the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin and Dzungaria in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China, historically known to many as East Turkestan. Numbering more than eleven million people in China alone, with smaller diaspora communities across Central Asia, Turkey and elsewhere, most Uyghurs today follow the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam.
Facts
Origins
Origin RegionThe Tarim Basin and Dzungaria oases of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern China, historically called East Turkestan 1 Language Family Traditions
Principal Religious TraditionsSunni Islam, predominantly the Hanafi school 1 Overview
Diaspora PresenceCommunities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey and other countries, grown substantially since 2017 as Uyghurs have fled internment and surveillance in Xinjiang. 2 Status
Status TodaySeverely restricted under current Chinese government policy in Xinjiang, part of a documented campaign of surveillance, mosque closures and mass internment beginning in 2017. 2 Practice
Practice StatusLiving, and practised in varied local forms 1 Learn More
From the Uyghur Khaganate to the Tarim Basin Oases
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The name Uyghur first belonged to a steppe empire, not to the oasis farmers of the Tarim Basin who carry it today. In 744 the Uyghur Khaganate rose in Mongolia after its founders overthrew the ruling Gokturks, and in 762 its ruler adopted Manichaeism as the state religion, making the khaganate the faith's last great imperial patron anywhere in the world. That state fell in 840 to a Kyrgyz invasion, scattering Uyghur groups southwest into the Tarim Basin and Turfan, where some founded the Kingdom of Qocho, and toward the Gansu corridor.
The Turkic Muslim population of the Tarim Basin oases that the name Uyghur describes today took shape more slowly and from different sources. Islam reached the region through the Kara-Khanid Khanate from the tenth century, spread by Karluk and other Turkic groups who settled among the oases over the following centuries and gradually displaced Buddhism there. The Qing conquest of 1759 brought the region under Chinese administration as Xinjiang, New Frontier, and two short-lived East Turkestan republics declared independence in 1933 and 1944 before the region was incorporated into the People's Republic of China in 1949, becoming the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 1955.
A Contested Ethnogenesis and a Restricted Faith Today
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Historians disagree about how continuous the line from the eighth century Uyghur Khaganate to today's Uyghur people really is. James Millward's history of Xinjiang describes the modern ethnonym as substantially a twentieth century revival: Soviet and Chinese administrators promoted Uyghur from the 1920s onward as a unifying name for the mixed Turkic, Muslim, oasis-dwelling population of the Tarim Basin, a population that had mostly called itself by local town names, Kashgarlik or Turfanlik among them, rather than by a single shared ethnic label. On this reading the Khaganate supplies a name and a distant memory rather than an unbroken community.
Whatever the ethnogenesis debate settles, the Hanafi Sunni Islam that most Uyghurs practice today is documented as severely restricted under current Chinese government policy in Xinjiang. The United Nations human rights office's 2022 assessment described credible allegations of restrictions reaching mosque attendance, fasting and other religious observance, alongside the mass internment system this atlas records separately. The independent Uyghur Tribunal in London and the legislatures of several states have gone further, finding the campaign amounts to genocide, a conclusion the government of China disputes in full.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Asia directly: "diaspora communities across Central Asia, Turkey and elsewhere, most Uyghurs today follow the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam."
This source names Central Asia directly: "smaller diaspora communities across Central Asia, Turkey and elsewhere, most Uyghurs today follow the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam."
This source names China directly: "Autonomous Region of northwestern China, historically known to many as East Turkestan."
This source names Uyghurs directly: "an estimated one million or more Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities without trial in a network of facilities it called vocational education and training centers, while an estimated sixteen thousand..."
This source names Uyghurs directly: "James A."
This source names Uyghurs directly: "A signed reference entry on Manichaeism, covering Mani's life and teaching under Sasanian patronage, his death under Bahram I, the faith's spread into and suppression within the Roman Empire, and..."
This source names Uyghurs directly: "States its continued rivalry with Buddhism among the Uyghurs into the thirteenth century, the 1370 CE ban under Ming China, its subsumption into Buddhism and Taoism before the end of the fourteenth..."
This source names Uyghurs directly: "in influence among the scattered Uyghurs into the thirteenth century."
This source names Uyghurs directly: "human rights violations against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, including arbitrary detention, torture and forced labour."
This source names Sunni Islam directly: "today follow the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam."
This source names Uyghurs directly: "Nearly five centuries after Bahram I ended the faith's Persian patronage, the Uyghur ruler accepted Manichaeism as the official religion of his Central Asian empire in 762 CE, after meeting..."
This source names Uyghurs directly: "The Uyghur Khaganate, Manichaeism's chief remaining patron anywhere in the world, was destroyed in 840 CE by a Kyrgyz invasion that scattered the Uyghur people from their Mongolian homeland."
This source names Turkey directly: "communities across Central Asia, Turkey and elsewhere, most Uyghurs today follow the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam."
This source names Turkic directly: "The Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Sunni Muslim people native to the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin and Dzungaria in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern..."
Persecuted In
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