Kashgaris Erotic

Kashgaris are the Uyghurs of the Kashgar oasis, and the name works the way oasis names have long worked in the Tarim Basin. Before Uyghur was revived as a national label in the 1920s and 1930s, the settled Turkic Muslims of the region described themselves by town. A person was Kashgarlik, Khotanlik or Turpanlik, and the differences in accent, dress and temperament those words implied still count for something. Kashgar sits at the far western end of Xinjiang, where the roads around the Taklamakan meet below the Pamirs and the Tian Shan, far closer to Osh and Andijan than to Urumqi. That position made it a market town first, and Kashgaris keep a reputation among other Uyghurs as traders and craftsmen, and for religious conservatism.

The language is Uyghur, a Karluk Turkic language close enough to Uzbek that speakers can largely follow each other. Islam arrived early. The Karakhanid ruler Satuq Bughra Khan converted in the tenth century and is buried at nearby Artush. Two founding works of Turkic letters date to that era: Mahmud al-Kashgari's dictionary of the Turkic dialects, whose author's name means of Kashgar, and Yusuf Khass Hajib's Kutadgu Bilig, completed in Kashgar around 1070. Later the oasis was the stronghold of the White Mountain khojas, Naqshbandi Sufi lords whose feud with the Black Mountain line in Yarkand shaped regional politics for generations. Religion remains Sunni and Hanafi, colored by shrine pilgrimage, and by tradition men dance the sama in the Id Kah Mosque square at the two great festivals, to kettledrums and shawms played from the roof.

The name has a second life across the mountains. Each failed khoja revolt against Qing rule in the nineteenth century, then the fall of Yaqub Beg's Kashgar-based emirate in 1877, pushed refugees and migrant laborers over the passes into the Fergana Valley. Russian officials, and the Soviet census of 1926 after them, counted these settlers as a separate people, the Kashgartsy, distinct from the Taranchi Uyghurs of the Ili region. Most of their descendants around Andijan and Osh were later absorbed into the Uzbek population or reclassified as Uyghurs.

Kashgar prefecture holds several million people, overwhelmingly Uyghur, and the last two decades have been hard on them. Most of the mud-brick old city was demolished and rebuilt after 2009, and since 2017 the region has been at the center of China's campaign of mass detention, surveillance and restrictions on religious practice. Beards, veils and shrine festivals have come under pressure. What persists is the ordinary stuff of oasis life: the Sunday livestock market, tandoor bread, Yengisar knives, coppersmiths, instrument workshops, and a stubborn pride in being from Kashgar.