Often in discussions like this, someone claims that the Uighur crackdown is necessary “because Islamist extremism”. I strongly encourage everyone to familiarize themselves with the history of the Uighurs under Chinese rule, because this isn’t really about Islam.<p>Namely, there used to be a very strong secular movement among the Uighurs, whose main complaint wasn’t the inability to practise Islam (some of these activists were atheists, even Communists themselves) but rather defending the use of the Uighur language in public and in official usage, and resisting the heavy Han Chinese settlement that would lead to the Uighurs becoming a minority in their own province. What happened is that Beijing cracked down on these secular activists, either imprisoning them in China or forcing them into exile in Turkey or the West.<p>Thus by the early millennium, with the secular activists out of the way, the only forces remaining within Xinjiang that could organize were religious ones, with some support from other Muslim states. Beijing was pleased with the US War on Terror around that time, which allowed it to frame its crackdown on the Uighurs as a reaction to Islamist radicalism, but as I said, the roots really go back to ethnic and linguistic pressures, not religious ones.