Demolishing Faith: The Destruction and Desecration of Uyghur Mosques and Shrines

By Bahram K. Sintash
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan
May/June 2020

The Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project uses its networks among Uighurs in exile and in Xinjiang to produce informative reports on the human rights disaster unfolding in that region. (I served for nine years on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, which supports the UHRP.) Demolishing Faith details a couple of dozen of what may be thousands of destroyed mosques, shrines, and Muslim cemeteries in the region, using satellite photos and interviews of Uighurs who cared about these sites. Another report from 2019, Detained and Disappeared: Intellectuals Under Assault in the Uyghur Homeland, profiles seven of what were at the time 386 known cases of detained Uighur intellectuals. The organization maintains an updated list online and believes that the known cases are only a fraction of the total. The UHRP report Repression Across Borders: The CCP’s Illegal Harassment and Coercion of Uyghur Americans gives chilling examples of the way the Chinese government uses threatening phone calls and text messages—as well as arrests of relatives still in China—to put pressure on Uighur Americans to stay silent and to inform on others.

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