OPINION | Faith In The Shadows: How Uyghur Religious Life Endures Under China’s Tightest Controls

By Ashu Maan

For decades, Islam shaped the rhythm of daily life across the Uyghur towns of southern Xinjiang. Prayers marked the day, shrines drew pilgrims, and mosques functioned as both spiritual and social landmarks. That landscape has been dramatically altered. Under a sweeping security campaign, religious expression has been confined to the narrowest of spaces, scrutinised, monitored and often criminalised.

Yet, against expectations, faith has not disappeared. It has changed form, retreating from public squares into quiet, private acts that resist suppression by adapting to a new reality, one in which the state exerts near-total control over visible religious life.

A religious ecosystem dismantled

Over the past decade, the Chinese state has executed one of the most comprehensive transformations of religious space seen in the region’s modern history. Satellite imagery and field research by academics and rights groups show that numerous mosques, shrines, and cemeteries have been demolished, renovated beyond recognition, or closed to public access. Many that remain standing function under tight surveillance, their activities regulated through mandatory registration, patriotic education, and behavioural monitoring.

Alongside physical restructuring came the policing of everyday religious practice. Fasting during Ramadan, wearing veils, growing beards, using Islamic names for children, or owning certain religious texts were reclassified as potential markers of “extremism”. Families were visited by officials conducting home inspections; imams were detained or sent for political reorientation; gatherings that once revolved around religious holidays became state-supervised events.

For Uyghurs inside Xinjiang, this has created a dilemma: how to sustain faith under conditions where public worship may attract suspicion and private worship may be misread as defiance.

Prayer behind closed doors

What survives today is largely invisible. Residents who have left Xinjiang describe families praying in silence, often at dawn or late at night, taking care not to attract attention. The recitation of verses has become quieter; rituals are simplified to avoid anything that could be interpreted as non-compliance with state guidelines.

Former detainees recount that even minor deviations, an Arabic phrase sent by text, a Quranic ringtone on a phone, a prayer mat laid out in the open, were once enough to trigger questioning. These stories suggest that religious life continues in fragments, reshaped by caution but not extinguished.

This private, cautious practice is now one of the clearest signs of endurance. It shows that despite sweeping controls, the state has been unable to fully regulate an inner world that operates beyond the reach of cameras and checkpoints.

Shrines erased, memory preserved

Shrines once played a central role in Uyghur spiritual life, drawing families during festivals and marking transitions in the agricultural calendar. Many have been demolished or closed, and pilgrimage routes that once threaded through the region’s oases have faded.

Yet, for the diaspora, these sites remain vivid. Exiled Uyghurs often carry photographs of shrines that no longer stand, recounting stories of community gatherings and rituals that connected them to earlier generations. These memories circulate as oral histories, passed on to younger Uyghurs born abroad. In this way, the shrines continue to exist, not as physical locations, but as shared memory.

The state's restructuring of sacred spaces has inadvertently created a parallel archive outside China, where these vanished landscapes are kept alive through storytelling, photographs, and community recording projects.

Diaspora mosques as sanctuaries of continuity

Uyghur communities abroad have rebuilt religious life in ways that mirror both loss and renewal. In Istanbul, Almaty, Munich, Adelaide, and Washington, mosques now serve as sanctuaries for families who have lost touch with relatives back home. These spaces offer more than prayer; they provide a forum to teach children Islamic traditions that may have been curtailed inside Xinjiang.

Sermons often mention detainees, demolished shrines, and the importance of preserving religious identity. Imams from the diaspora, many of whom once faced pressure in Xinjiang, now teach without fear of surveillance. Community events, iftars, Quranic lessons, and Friday gatherings, function as reminders that religious practice can continue freely when unencumbered by state intervention.

For Uyghur parents raising children in exile, these mosques are critical. They ensure that a religious identity threatened at home remains intact abroad, transmitted without the constraints that have reshaped daily life inside Xinjiang.

How faith becomes resistance without confrontation

This form of endurance is neither loud nor confrontational. It does not involve rallies or public declarations. It is instead woven into ordinary routines, whispered prayers, discreet fasting, shared meals during religious festivals, lessons conducted at kitchen tables and community halls far from Xinjiang.

The state’s attempt to regulate belief has created a situation in which continuing to pray, teach, or fast becomes an assertion of identity. The actions themselves are simple. Their implications are not. They show that even the most extensive security architecture has limits: it can restrict public expressions of religion, but it cannot eliminate personal belief.

A spiritual identity that refuses disappearance

The transformation of religious life in Xinjiang is profound. Entire neighbourhoods have been rebuilt; mosques long at the centre of community life now stand silent; spiritual traditions that once flourished in the open air have retreated into guarded spaces.

Yet Uyghur faith has not vanished. It exists in reduced spaces inside Xinjiang and expansive ones abroad. It survives because families adapt their rituals. After all, diaspora communities rebuild them, and because belief, unlike public dissent, cannot be eradicated by administrative order.

What remains today is a religious identity shaped by endurance. It carries the weight of loss, but also the determination of a people unwilling to surrender the practices that sustained their ancestors. In that resilience lies a future, one not defined by the shrinking of sacred spaces in Xinjiang, but by the persistence of a spiritual tradition now carried far beyond its homeland.

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About the Author

Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. He is pursuing a PhD from Amity University, Noida, in Defence and Strategic Studies. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.