Religion and Politics

China’s Hidden Camps

BBC reports on internment camps for the estimated hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China. Recent satellite images reveal that the facilities are rapidly expanding, but the Chinese government, which perceives Muslims as disloyal to the country, denies that they are detaining them without due process and calls the camps “vocational schools” for combatting “terrorism and religious extremism.” The BBC writes, “Harsh new legal penalties have been introduced to curtail Islamic identity and practice – banning, among other things, long beards and headscarves, the religious instruction of children, and even Islamic-sounding names.”

Read at BBC

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