Former Kenan Summer Fellow’s writing published
Aydin Anwar’s writing during a Kenan Summer Fellowship is published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. Anwar talks about her experience interviewing Uyghur refugees in Turkey and the horrific occurrences in East Turkestan.
A Brewing Genocide in Occupied East Turkestan
I sat in a room with around thirty refugee women in Istanbul during summer 2016. We were listening to Munawwar, an Uyghur activist and Islamic teacher who fled China in the 1990s, explain the meaning of a chapter in the Quran before ending the session with a prayer. Soon into the prayer, I heard faint cries that quickly turned into sobs. Some of the women were using their hijabs to cover and wipe the tears off their faces, and some were clutching one another. Munawwar was asking God to ease their pain and to alleviate the hardships the Chinese government was inflicting on their families. Like me, they are all ethnically Uyghur. All are refugees from East Turkestan, a nation that’s been under the occupation of China since 1949 and what Chinese government calls Xinjiang (meaning new territory)…..
