If you’re a Muslim in the hyper-repressed Xinjiang region of China, one of the many things you mustn’t do if you hope to avoid imprisonment or worse is privately study or publicly recite Koranic verses. According to Gu Ting’s report for Radio Free Asia (“Xinjiang police detain ethnic Kazakh who sang Quranic recitations at Muslim wedding,” August 25, 2023):
Kusman Rehim, 56, was detained on July 14 after performing readings from the Quran in a melodious art form revered across the Islamic world, the head of the Kazakhstan-based rights group Atajurt, said in an interview on Thursday.
“Kusman Rehim was arrested on July 14,” Atajurt chief Bekzat Maksutkhan said. “The main reason was that the police found a Quran in his home.
“Also, he had performed Quranic recitations in people’s homes during Eid al-Adha [June 27-July 1] and taken part in a Muslim wedding,” Bekzat said.
The arrest comes against a backdrop of renewed attacks on religious worship under Chinese President Xi Jinping, with Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and other religious adherents forced to submit to party control and the censorship of their religious lives under the government’s “sinicization” program.
China outlawed reciting the Koran in 2017. According to Kusman’s brother Bilal, Kusman has been detained twice in recent months. The family has not yet been notified of the most recent detention or of the charges he faces, and RFA was stonewalled when it sought information from the police station where he is being held.
Many others in Xinjiang have fallen prey to the same arbitrary anti-religious policies. One example Gu Ting notes is that of an elderly Uyghur man, Abdurusul Memet. In 2017, he was sentenced to almost 14 years in prison, in part for having studied the Koran as a child. At age 71, he died there.
