Paper abstract:

Drawing on a critical reading of a detailed 19-page verdict of a Kazakh community leader who was sentenced to 17 years in prison in Northern Xinjiang in 2018, this paper considers the effects of the criminalization of mollas and the books they read in the organization of Uyghur and Kazakh society in Northwest China. The sentenced community leader named in the verdict, a state-trained religious figure named Nurlan Pioner, was one of the only people in his community who could read the Quran. Because of the religious and ritual knowledge he had obtained, he was the one his community called upon to conduct marriages, funerals, and circumcisions in the proper manner, pulling families together, the elderly into the afterlife, the young into the world. Their relationships to each other and their ancestors flowed through him and the sacred texts of Islamic teachings that he held in his personal library. Through an analysis of Pioner’s criminalized behaviors and possessions, an interview with one of Pioner’s family members, and a reading of the legal discourse from the Xinjiang judiciary, this paper argues that the criminalization of carriers of tradition is part of an effort to render Uyghurs and Kazakhs a people without an embodied history.