![]() ![]() Over the past six years, the sacred shrines have been destroyed, and the people who visited them detained for “re-education” in the camps, or given long prison sentences on spurious charges of “religious extremism”. Dawut went to the police station and persuaded them that her student was not listening to the Qur’an because she was a religious extremist, but because she was a student of Uyghur folklore. Another time, she rescued one of her students who was detained when the police found a recording of the Qur’an on her phone. Dawut went into the police station and persuaded them I was an academic studying Uyghur music, and not a hostile foreign agent. The local police confiscated my passport and held on to it (they told me they’d lost the key to the drawer) until the morning of my return flight. One time, I arrived in Urumqi in July 2009, just before the forceful suppression of a peaceful demonstration and subsequent outbreak of inter-ethnic violence. ![]() She amassed an unparalleled collection of audio and video recordings of Uyghur shrine festivals, rare documents on Uyghur religious traditions, and interviews with the people who inherited and transmitted this vibrant culture.ĭawut got me out of a tight spot more than once. In pursuit of her research projects she led her students (and occasionally a stray foreign academic) on gruelling field trips, facing hostile travel conditions, sleeping in impoverished villages, and explaining her mission with a ready smile and unfailing courtesy to suspicious local officials. She was a generous colleague and treated her students like an extended family. As director of the Minorities Folklore Research Centre at Xinjiang University, she trained a new generation of Uyghur anthropologists and was invited as visiting scholar and research partner to several universities in the US and the UK. She received numerous grants and awards from Chinese and international funders. Following a groundbreaking PhD on Uyghur pilgrimage sites, she published prolifically in Uyghur, Chinese and English. She was an internationally respected scholar, a professor in the region’s top university, and she was leading several government-funded research projects on Uyghur intangible cultural heritage.ĭawut spent 25 years researching the religious traditions and expressive culture of her people. But why would she feel personally in danger? She was not a critic of the regime her work was entirely apolitical. Why didn’t she run then? Wasn’t it clear what was going on? The authorities were already building the network of internment camps, already rounding up religious people in the south.
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