Silk Roads@ UNSW and School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales (UNSW)
Date: Tuesday 22 September 2020
Time: 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm AEST
This online event is free and open to the public, registration is essential.
REGISTER NOW
Worsening political repression in Xinjiang has raised the question of the degree, and nature of support for the Uyghur Cause in the wider ‘Islamic World’. Most discussion of Uyghur exile political activity in the Middle East begins with the 1949 Chinese revolution and the relocation of the prominent Uyghur activists to Turkey. This talk examines a series of individuals from Xinjiang who were active in the Middle East in the inter-war period, with an emphasis on Egypt as a hub of intellectual exchange. While in some respects these activities laid the foundations for the emergence of pro-independence agitation from the 1950s onwards, they also form part of a wider milieu of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thinking, which offered Xinjiang Muslims a role in mediating, as opposed to interrupting, the growing ties between Republican China and the Islamic world.
About the speaker
David Brophy: David Brophy is Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Uyghur Nation (Harvard University Press, 2016) and translator of the forthcoming In Remembrance of the Saints: The Rise and Fall of an Inner Asian Sufi Dynasty (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Hosted by the Silk Roads @ UNSW Initiative and the School of Humanities and Languages – History and Area Studies Group