A Contested Ethnogenesis and a Restricted Faith Today

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Historians disagree about how continuous the line from the eighth century Uyghur Khaganate to today's Uyghur people really is. James Millward's history of Xinjiang describes the modern ethnonym as substantially a twentieth century revival: Soviet and Chinese administrators promoted Uyghur from the 1920s onward as a unifying name for the mixed Turkic, Muslim, oasis-dwelling population of the Tarim Basin, a population that had mostly called itself by local town names, Kashgarlik or Turfanlik among them, rather than by a single shared ethnic label. On this reading the Khaganate supplies a name and a distant memory rather than an unbroken community.

Whatever the ethnogenesis debate settles, the Hanafi Sunni Islam that most Uyghurs practice today is documented as severely restricted under current Chinese government policy in Xinjiang. The United Nations human rights office's 2022 assessment described credible allegations of restrictions reaching mosque attendance, fasting and other religious observance, alongside the mass internment system this atlas records separately. The independent Uyghur Tribunal in London and the legislatures of several states have gone further, finding the campaign amounts to genocide, a conclusion the government of China disputes in full.