THE CHINESE CONUNDRUM
Urumchi, Xinjiang, China.
Urumchi (spelled Urumqi on the map with the Chicom insistence that we transliterate Chinese characters in English the way they want – as if English is their language not ours – with all these stupid x’s, j’s, z’s, and q’s) is the capital of Moslem China, or what the Chicoms call their Xinjiang (sin-john, see what I mean?) or "New Frontier" Province.
To the explorers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was known as Chinese Turkestan – controlled ostensibly by the Han Chinese government far away in Beijing (pay-ching), but populated almost exclusively by non-Chinese Turkic people whose religion was and still is Islam.
Thus the background article to read on Chinese Turkestan is The Sands of the Takla Makan from late October, 2008.
While there are Tajiks and Kirghiz in the southwest corner of Xinjiang, most natives here are Uighurs (wee-gurz), a Turkic people closely related to the Uzbeks of Uzbekistan. As I noted two years ago:
"Virtually all Uighurs are Moslem. There are tens of thousands of mosques in Xinjiang, and they are well-attended. At the Idkha Mosque in Kashgar, it’s normal for 20,000 worshippers to attend Friday prayers, and 50 to 70,000 on festival days.
"Yet the great majority of Uighurs practice Sufism, a peaceful, almost pacifistic form of Islam. It’s the opposite of radical Wahhabi Islam spread by the Saudis. I could find no evidence of Saudis spreading it here."
That was two years ago. It sure isn’t true today. In 2008, a woman wearing a veil – the Uighur version being a brown see-through towel over her head – was a rare sight. Not any more. Here’s one of many in Kashgar (Chicom-spelled "Kashi" on the map above):
What’s been happening is that Uighur men are now being allowed to go on a "Haj" pilgrimage to Mecca, where Saudi agents recruit articulate young guys to be Wahhabi missionaries. They are given intensive education in the tenets of the Saudi creed, then sent back home as official "Imams" with lots of money to set up a Wahhabi mosque and Islamic center providing health services.
Radical fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam is starting to spread through Xinjiang like an infectious disease. Why the Chicoms are allowing it is a mystery – for they are continually shouting wolf over "Moslem terrorism" in Xinjiang as an excuse to oppress the Uighurs.
But there is no such thing. Uighurs are not terrorists because Uighurs have been Sufis for centuries. (See Islam’s Anti-Osama for a discussion of Sufism or the Sufi website Naqshbandi.org.)
Sufism is the peaceful form of Sunni Islam (just as Ismailism is the peaceful form of Shia Islam as we discussed last week in The Pamir Knot). It promotes a mystical, personal relationship to Allah, rather than performing robotic ceremonies (like praying five times a day with exactly the same words and motions every day, no changes ever) and following rigid rules as do mainstream Sunnis.
Instead of robot rituals, Sufis engage in joyous musical dancing, couples whirling themselves into trances.
Which is why Wahhabis hate Sufis as much as they hate us Christian infidels. The interesting thing about the Saudi attempt to Wahhabize the Uighurs is that the only recruits are young Uighur guys in the cities and towns. Not the women, and not much of anyone in the villages, which is where most Uighurs live.
So far, the only women the young Wahhabi guys have been able to persuade to wear the veil are their mothers – which is why the only veiled women you see like in the picture above are older (you can tell by their hands). Try and tell this young Uighur mom (having her little boy wave to me) she’s got to hide her face in public. She’ll laugh in your face.
What would you expect from a culture that has as its most revered Moslem shrine The Tomb of the Fragrant Concubine?
This is not a mosque. It is a Sufi shrine in Kashgar, the tomb of several generations of the Apak Hoja family that ruled "Kashgaria" or southern Xinjiang from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s, revered for being a Sufi holy family. Entombed here is the great grandniece of Apak Hoja known to all Uighurs as Iparhan, "the fragrant concubine".
Born in Kashgar in 1733, in 1760 she was chosen to join the harem of the Chinese Emperor, Qianlong (1735-1796), in Beijing because of her renown for possessing an "exceptional bodily aroma." Becoming the emperor’s favorite, she was awarded the rank of Rong fei, "imperial concubine of the first rank." Upon her death in 1788, her body was reverently carried in a special casket all the way back to Kashgar.
With a shrine like this to support them, Uighur women are not about to become slaves to some Wahhabi husband.
Yet… the Saudis are doing their evil best to Wahhabize the Uighurs and deligitimize Sufism among them. If the Chicoms had any brains they would promote Sufism and invite Shaykh Hishan Kabbani – see Islam’s Anti-Osama – leader of the largest worldwide order of Sufis to tour Xinjiang delivering sermons on Sufism.
They would do the same for the Tajik region in Xinjiang, centered in Tashkurgan south of Kashgar by inviting the Aga Khan, leader of all Ismailis worldwide, to come and preach to them.
Evidently, in the way their perverted minds work, the Chicoms think that if they allow the Uighurs to be Wahhabized, they’ll get more radical and commit more anti-Chinese provocations which will then provide the excuse for more colonial oppression.
A far smarter way – aren’t Chinese supposed to be the experts on subtlety? – would be to support a full-on revival of Sufism as the traditional and genuine Islam of Uighurs that would then root out the Wahhabi infection.
And if we were smart – meaning those hapless folk at our State Department who suffer from microencephaly and testicular atrophy – they would explain the difference between different forms of Islam to the Chicoms, then launch a serious effort to have Kabbani (who after all is an American citizen living in Ann Arbor, Michigan) allowed to preach in Xinjiang.
Now if we were really smart, we’d start practicing aikido on the Chicoms in general.
Unlike other martial arts which involve blocking your opponent’s energy then counter-attacking, aikido accepts your opponent’s energy then redirects it to turn around against him. Applying this to the Chicoms, we need to deflect and redirect their antagonistic energy away from us, away from Taiwan and the South China Sea.
It is hard for Americans to grasp the level of pathological obsession the Chicoms have regarding "recapturing" Taiwan. The most senior officers in the PLA – People’s Liberation Army, the Red Chinese military – are simply off the wall irrational about it.
And the new generation of Chicom military officers are even more wacko than their older superiors, as my friend Ambrose Evans-Pritchard pointed out this week (9/07).
How do we finesse this? To where do we deflect and redirect their antagonistic energy away from us? To Siberia, Russian Siberia. For the background on why, see Chinese Siberia from November 2006.
In 2006, the Chicom strategy was to regain its "Maritime Provinces" stolen by Russia in 1860 through a slow patient process of demographic swamping. They have run out of time for this by now.
*They are running out of water in northern China – the water crisis becomes more acute by the day.
*Due to the monumental negative synergy between the Chicoms’ one-child-only policy and the Chinese obsession for sons, millions of baby girls a year for decades have been infanticided, leaving scores of millions of sons growing up single with no women to marry.
*The Chinese economy is teetering. E.g., more than 60% of the $800 billion stimulus spending after the 2008 economic meltdown was given to Chicom Party members to spend on the stock and property markets, which are now wildly overvalued. E.g., Moody’s late last month issued a warning that China’s state-run banking system is "credit negative," recapitalizing bank debt with a pyramid scheme of further debt.
An economic downturn, much less a recession, in China would be a tripwire for the Chicoms to launch a military adventure against a foreign devil to deflect anger away from them. We have to make sure that foreign devil isn’t us or our ally Taiwan.
We have to make sure the Chicoms understand the last thing they need during such an economic crisis is a surge of Islamic fundamentalism in their far west – just as we don’t want to see a surge of it anywhere. So they should promote Sufism and to a lesser degree Ismailism as a counter.
Then we have to get them to look at all that water in Siberia that used to be theirs, all that forested and virtually uninhabited land with so many resources that used to be theirs. A plethora of articles could be planted amongst the media, from scholarly historical analyses to cover stores in Time and Newsweek about how Siberia was once Chinese and what it would be like if it were again.
They need – desperately need – the water. They have to do something to control the crazed energy of scores of millions of unmarried males. They have to deflect an explosion of anger against them sure to come in an economic crisis. The solution is Siberia. The solution must be at Russia’s expense, not ours.
Urumchi may be the capital of Moslem China, but it is not a Moslem city – Uighurs are a small minority overwhelmed by millions of Chinese here. The city is huge, one vast faceless Chinese city of endless buildings. The airport is just as huge and vast. The Chicoms are absolutely determined that Xinjiang remains a part of China.
The "Sands" article linked above ended by commenting:
"Today’s China is a very formidable country, with which it will take a very serious effort by America to compete. China is a serious country, the antithesis of frivolous. The absolute last thing we can afford at this moment in history is to be the opposite, a frivolous country, the antithesis of serious."
That was written on October 30, 2008. Five days later on Election Day of November 4th, America chose suicidal frivolity instead of seriousness. We are paying a massive price for it now, as China gets stronger and we get weaker.
This Saturday is 9/11 – a day for remembrance and rededication to defeating Islamic imperialism. Yet we need to also remind ourselves that Islamism is not our most dangerous foe – it’s Red China.
This November 2nd, America will have a chance to start getting serious again. Serious enough to solve the Chinese Conundrum. It’s going to be exciting to see America take itself and its challenges seriously once more.
[Note: I’m off now to NorkLand where the Internet or even cell phones are not allowed. So you won’t be hearing from me for a couple of weeks. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, however, TTP is in good hands with Jack Kelly. See you when I get back.]