Repression against Uighur Muslims in China has been making news since a while now | Photo Credit: AFP

Beijing: Amid the ongoing crackdown on China’s Uighur Muslim minority, the Communist Party of China has announced that it is preparing to rewrite the holy books of Islam and Christianity. The party has also clarified that the revised versions of the books will not include parts that go against the beliefs of the party. This modification is being considered a part of a project calling for a comprehensive evaluation of the existing religious classics aiming at contents which do not conform to the progress of the times.

China has been repeatedly pushed by the International human rights organisations in order for them to have access to investigate reports of disappearances and arbitrary detentions, particularly of Muslims in Xinjiang. This push has come across after an estimation by the United Nations and human rights groups that between 1 million and 2 million people, mostly ethnic Uighur Muslims, have been detained in harsh conditions in Xinjiang as part of what Beijing calls an antiterrorism campaign.

According to the United Nations, at least 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims have been detained in what China describes as “vocational training centres”, China has, time and again said that these centres are helping people learn new skills and has also repeatedly denied any mistreatment of Muslims in these centres. Several media reports have suggested that this crackdown is a part of China’s de-extremification policy which, apart from detaining Muslims, also includes banning of certain Muslim names for babies. There also have been reports of brutal torture inside the so-called ‘reeducational centres’ in various parts of China.



Researchers have, through various researches, also found that China has a long history with detention camps. They have also found that Chinese officials started detaining these Muslims in 2014, which was, interestingly, the same time as the Chinese government started blaming them for a series of terrorist attacks in the country.