Two thousand, five hundred kilometers from his home in the countryside of China, just creeping into his teenage years, Hai Weiliang stood at the Kolkata Pier. The light of his faith has taken him there, leaving the journey home from pilgrimage pilgrimage, but now he does not know where to turn away. Finally, a good scholar found a cheap room in an inn near a mosque. Armed himself with a Chinese-English conversation book for travelers, Hai began to talk with local seminary students.

The fire will turn on throughout Central Asia because his speech is increasingly doubtful.

At the end of last month, new evidence emerged in the brutal detention of thousands of Xinjiang residents in the Chinese internal centers, which were formed to revoke the separation of religious-fueled self-unrest. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan were encouraged to use oppression of the revolving Islamic network, which the killing range was widespread from the Ferghana valley to the heart of Europe.

The extraordinary story of Chinese Muslim teenagers who arrived in Kolkata showed how India, a century ago, provided an intellectual foundation from which the global jihadist movement grew.

Ethnic-Turkik Muslims, Hai wrote in the 1934 essay, “Can have an unlimited Islamic state to Kashgar and its surroundings, but stretches from the eastern border of Afghanistan to the Great Wall of China.” Islamic nations, he urged, must help them, and “cut Chinese infidels who live there, whether they are traders or workers, and reject the Chinese consulate unless they are managed by Chinese Muslims.”

Students from Hunan

A little but the fragment of life Hai has survived; In English, there is only one significant biographical account, by Bachelor John Chen. Hai was born in 1912, in the village of Hunan in Zhimushan – closing, interesting, both in space and time for certain Mao Zedong. At the beginning of life, his poor mother sent him to study at the local Madrasa. The talent for the language made him enter the Peach Orchard Seminary in Shanghai. In the mid-1920s, Hai was chosen for pilgrimage pilgrimage, and unplanned dismissal in Kolkata.

Impressed by Hai’s extraordinary intelligence, Zakir Husain, founder of New Delhi Jamia Milia Islamia, allowing him to attend classes at the current famous institution. Then, he joined the Aligarh Muslim University, wrote a thesis about Chinese nationalist leaders Sun Yat-sen.

Then, right after his teenage years ended-and had mastered Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and English-hai moved to Seminary Dar-ul-uloom nadwat-ul-allema in Lucknow.

Fin Siècle’s ideologist in China has begun the process of importing Islamic purity ideas through the pilgrimage. Imam Ma Wanfu, historian Jonathan Lipman has recorded, trading to replace the culture of local Muslims in northwest China with normative new Islam. However, for the generation of HAI, the question is different: the relationship between faith, power and Muslim political aspirations.

Possibly, he first discovered the ideas of poet Muhammad Iqbal in Lucknow. Early theologians in Nadwat-ul-Ulama, Bachelor of Mashal Saif have recorded, crazy about Iqbal and Peans for the glory of Islam. Hi translates the 1930 famous address of Iqbal in Allahabad – the moment of the birth of the Pakistan movement – and recommends a broader relevance of his idea.

To the audience, Hai explained the project as follows: “To lead all Muslims in eliminating the boundaries placed in Muslim countries and advocating for the re-establishment of the Caliphate.”

Like in India, Muslims in China are quite large minorities, with demographic dominance bags but spread throughout the country. Like in India, Hai seems to suggest, they have a reason to fear the centralized country controlled by the majority of religions.

Then, in 1934, Hai moved to Cairo, to study at the great Seminary of Al-Azhar-multiplying the attention of anti-colonial right-wing theologians such as Rashid Rida. Along with his contemporary people, Hai had brought China to the Pan-Islam movement center.

Fire in Ferghana
At the beginning of the last century, Hai Weilan was not the only Turkish student who was involved with new ideas in Indian Seminary. The preacher of the birth of Kokand Muhammad Rustamov arrived at the famous Seminary Dar-ul in Deoband around 1925, after studying at religious institutions in Bukhara and Ajmer. Possibly, historian work Michael Fredholm showed, he was recruited by Missionary Deoband who began visiting Central Asia from 1925.

The religious message brought by Rustamov from Deoband is not impressive KGB. He was arrested several times and was finally sent to a prison camp in Siberia.

Appearing in 1943, to fight as a soldier in the Soviet army, Rustamov continued to settle in Tajikistan. He works as a cleric who works in the state, and then in the Tajik Academy of Sciences.

However, from the mid-1970s, Rustamov began to establish the Klandestin sermon group. His students will form a pioneer of the jihadist movement in Central Asia. Inspired by ideologists such as Sayyid Qutb Egypt and Pakistan Abul Ala ‘Maududi, Vitaly Naumkin has written, they are looking for an Islamic revolution. The increase in the Taliban in Afghanistan gave military muscles for these ideas – marked a barbaric rebellion, journalist Ahmad Rashid had written, throughout Central Asia.

Jihadist Xinjiang also cut their military teeth in Afghanistan. From the mid-1980s, economic development in Xinjiang, brought migrant floods. Demographic pressure, graduate Graham Fuller has noted, making many people conclude that progress is “Placing their existence as people under threats.” From the mid-1990s, communal violence broke out, making China crack down on scholars. That, in turn, triggered the recruitment of jihadist.

Ethnic Uighur from Xinjiang, and their colleagues from Central Asia remain active on the battlefield of Jihadist from Syria, and northwest of Pakistan. Hai’s vision of the Islamic state that stretches throughout Central Asia, from Afghanistan to a large wall, still alive – in the minds of jihadists who never read their work.

Ideology and politics

Like all revolutionary ideologies, jihadism involves intellectual traditions. Historian Ayesha Jalal shows that jihadism has a deep root in pre-colonial India. Syed Ahmad from Rai Barelvi fought against the Sikh Empire, which still made jihadist imagination. Head of Jaish-E-Muhammad Masood Azhar Alvi retreated to his last battle site, Balakote, to find inspiration for the disposal of the Koran. The eighteenth century jihadist, Stephen Dale has recorded, held a suicide attack on colonial forces in South India.

However, some ideologies, survive with the real world that is not tarnished.

Longly was ruled by the Ethnic War Commander-Han, the leaders of Xinjiang who were inspired by Pan-Islamism-created an independent East Turkestan Republic in 1933. The rebellion was destroyed by MA Zhongyingy, a cousin of the Chinese MA War Family and the Guomindang Nationalist Commander. There is an estimate that several thousand civilians were slaughtered by Guomindang troops. Hi broken heart.

The involvement of Iqbal’s poet with Hindu-Muslim tensions led him to advocate for dividing India into “one or more states, without which sharia imposition was impossible.” “The only alternative,” he wrote gloomically, “is a civil war.” Xinjiang has seen a war that feels like that – but both sides are Muslims. Elite Muslims in China, Yufeng Mao argued, to the opposite conclusions from Iqbal: the best hope for security, they concluded, lying in governing themselves in a strong central country.

Hi has planned to stay in Cairo, and returned only after obtaining further theological qualifications. However, in early 1940, he was recruited by Muslims affiliated with Guomindang, who wanted to show their community’s contribution to the war against Japan. In 1942, Hai was posted to the Chinese mission in Tehran, and was moved to New Delhi five years later. Following the revolution in China, he served Taiwan controlled by Guomindang for three decades.

“To the most great Emir,” Read the dedication of the last work HAI: Bow for Warlord Ma Bufeng, Xinjiang meat. Aparted by a revolutionary Chinese, MA finally made friends with Hai; Scholars teach children of warlords in Arabic. Until the end, Hai hoped that the warlords and rebels who formed the East Turkestan Republic would unite to form an Islamic state.