Routine religious practice can trigger detention for Xinjiang’s 11 million Uyghurs

Evidence

For me, the right to pray is protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, even during the War on Terror. For Abdulla and the 11 million other Uyghur Muslims who have always called Xinjiang (East Turkistan) home, prayer may be a one-way ticket to the dark and din of a Chinese concentration camp. Again, China has been reengineered into a total surveillance state, and the omnipresent digital gaze of the state is fixed most intensely on the Uyghurs. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 542

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The prayer-as-criminalized-act detail parallels the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ piece on how religiously mandatory practices get politicized and punished.