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China bans list of Islamic names in restive Xinjiang region

Authorities in China's Xinjiang region are prohibiting parents from giving children some Islamic names in the latest effort to dilute the influence of religion on life in the ethnic Uighur minority heartland.

 

"Muhammad," ''Jihad" and "Islam" are among at least 29 names now banned in the heavily Muslim region, according to a list distributed by overseas Uighur activists.

 

An official at a county-level public security office in Kashgar, a hub in southern Xinjiang with strong Islamic influences, says some names were banned because they had a "religious background." It is unclear how widespread the ban is or whether it is tightly enforced. The official refused to identify herself, as is common with Chinese officials.

 

The naming restrictions are part of a broader government effort to secularize Xinjiang, which is home to roughly 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic people who mostly follow Sunni Islam. Top officials including Xinjiang's Communist Party chief have publicly said that radical Islamic thought has infiltrated the region from Central Asia, protracting a bloody, yearslong insurgency that has claimed hundreds of lives.

 

Government-linked scholars and high-ranking officials, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, have urged local governments to better assimilate their Muslim minorities into the majority Han Chinese culture, and many ethnic policy hard-liners have decried a trend of so-called "Arabization" affecting China's 21 million Muslims.

 


פרסום ראשון: 04.27.17, 12:36