It has become a cliché to refer to the writing of a book as a journey, but in writing this manuscript, I now understand why this is a well-worn metaphor. As my first book, I can honestly say that the work that went into it draws from my entire three-decade career in studying the Uyghur people. The book’s content has been informed by fieldwork I conducted for my dissertation among Uyghurs in Kazakhstan and the Uyghur region of China in the 1990s as much as it has by my last fieldwork in Turkey during the summer of 2019 and everything in between.
Given that, at least indirectly, this work is the product of 30 years of studying the Uyghur people, I feel obliged to thank an army of people who have all played a part in facilitating its research and writing. To begin, I must thank my graduate school advisors who welcomed my enthusiasm for studying the Uyghur people while I was at the University of Southern California. This includes Ayse-Azade Rorlich, who taught me the importance of wading through sources in Turkic languages and cultivated my inner historian, as well as the recently deceased Eugene Cooper, whose wisdom and humor kept me sane and inspired. I also must thank the entire Uyghur community of Kazakhstan who welcomed me into their lives between 1994 and 2000. In particular, I owe great appreciation to my adopted Yärliq father Savut Mollaudov and my adopted Kitäiliq father Abbas Aliyev. I wish they had both lived to read this book, but I am also glad that they are unable to witness the destruction of Uyghur culture in their homeland today. In addition, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my adopted Yärliq sister Sayinur Dautova and my adopted Kitäiliq sister Dilyanur Kasymova, who helped me endlessly during my fieldwork in Kazakhstan.
I also must thank the Elliott School of International Affairs for their support of my more recent research. I thank both Michael Brown and Reuben Brigety as successive Deans at the Elliott School for their support in this project and patience with its completion. I also want to acknowledge the support of both the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) for their direct support of this research. The Sigur Center provided me with a research assistant for a semester when I first began the project and financed my final research for the book in Turkey during the summer of 2019. IERES has also provided me with a research assistant for two semesters over the last two years, which has been critical to the completion of the project, and has always worked with me to organize events and symposia on Uyghur-related topics. Additionally, I must thank my colleagues in the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS) for providing me with endless intellectual stimulation and feedback on my work over the years. In particular, this book’s initial conception emerged from a working paper I presented to these colleagues at a PONARS workshop in 2012, and their subsequent encouragement helped me undertake this project. Finally, I want to thank my research assistants over the last few years, who have helped me by digging up sources, transcribing interviews, and serving as critical sounding boards for my ideas. This includes Shirin Arslan, Allison Quatrini, and especially Bekzat Otep-Qizy, without whose assistance I would never have gotten this done. I hope all of you can see your work in the finished product.
I also must thank the many Uyghurs in the US, in Europe, and in Turkey, who graciously helped me with various parts of my research. They were always willing to share contacts, provide information, facilitate introductions, and frequently offer hospitality. While many of these people must go unnamed for their own protection, there are some whom I can acknowledge given that they are already outspoken public figures. These include Abduwali Ayup, Tahir Imin, Rabiya Kadeer, Omer Kanat, Alim Seytoff, and Seyit Tumturk. These people, and all the others who will go unnamed, have been very gracious with their time and assistance. While he is not a member of the Uyghur community, I also want to thank Ben Venzke from IntelCenter for his willingness to offer me discounted access to his organization’s treasure trove of videos made by the Turkistan Islamic Party, which have been critical to deciphering this group’s history.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the ever-growing international community of scholars who study Uyghur issues. While I have gained great insight from all of the scholars whose works are cited here, I owe particular thanks to those who have read drafts of chapters and provided extremely helpful feedback, including David Brophy, Joanne Smith-Finley, James Millward, and Rian Thum. Additionally, I want to thank Michael Clarke and Darren Byler for their feedback on other writings that fed into the ideas expressed in this book, as well as James Leibold for encouraging me to undertake the project. I must especially thank the anonymous reviewers of the draft manuscript, who are inevitably also members of the Uyghur studies community, for their expeditious and meticulous review and extremely useful recommendations. To the many others in this community with whom I have spent hours discussing Uyghur culture and history, I thank you for your insights, work, and friendship. I imagine there are few other scholarly communities in academia that are as welcoming and collegial.
Since writing a book requires dedicating extensive personal time, it should also go without saying that I owe a great deal of gratitude to my family for having patience with me as I put this manuscript together. In particular, I thank my wife, Asel, for giving me the space to finish the manuscript, especially during its final weeks of production, and I thank my daughter, Aideen, for the inspiration she provided my writing through her enthusiasm for life. I dedicate this book to these two strong Kazakh-American women – my ‘A-Team’ at home.
Although I am writing this before I have taken full advantage of the work they will inevitably put into the final manuscript, I also want to thank the teams at Manchester University Press and Princeton University Press for their hard work in getting this manuscript ready for publication. In particular, I especially want to thank Jonathan de Peyer for his dedication to this project from the start and patience with lapsed deadlines, as well as Fred Appel for his enthusiasm and confidence in the project.
Finally, I want to thank the many Uyghurs I have interviewed over the years in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Europe, and the US. With the exception of those who have very public profiles, I have refrained from naming these inspirational people or providing much identifying information about them to ensure their anonymity and safety. However, please know that without your willingness to talk with me, this book would not exist. I am in awe of your resilience in the face of tragedy, and I wish you and the entire Uyghur nation a much brighter future.