BEIJING — The head of China’s largest mosque, a vocal defender of the Communist Party’s ethnic policies in the troubled region of Xinjiang, was stabbed to death Wednesday in the Silk Road city of Kashgar, state media reported on Thursday.

The religious leader, Jume Tahir, a vice president of the state-run Xinjiang Islamic Association and the imam of the Id Kah Mosque, a 15th-century landmark at the heart of the city, was attacked just outside the mosque shortly after morning prayers, the government-run Xinhua news agency said.

One local shopkeeper described the crime as an assassination, most likely retaliation for the imam’s support for China’s increasingly hard-line governance of Xinjiang, a vast, strategically pivotal region that is home to China’s Uighur minority, a Turkic-speaking people who are largely Sunni Muslim.

“Jume Tahir had a lot of enemies,” the shopkeeper, who declined to give his name for fear of angering the authorities, said during a brief phone interview.