Identity
Throughout history, the term Uyghur has taken on an increasingly expansive definition. Initially signifying only a small coalition of Tiele tribes in Northern China, Mongolia, and the Altay Mountains, it later denoted citizenship in the Uyghur Khaganate. Finally it was expanded to an ethnicity, whose ancestry originates with the fall of the Uyghur Khaganate in the year 842 AD, which caused Uyghur migration from Mongolia into the Tarim Basin. This migration assimilated and replaced the Indo-Europeans of the region to create a distinct identity, as the language and culture of the Turkic migrants eventually supplanted the original Indo-European influences. This fluid definition of Uyghur and the diverse ancestry of modern Uyghurs are a source of confusion about what constitutes true Uyghur ethnography and ethnogenesis.
Uyghur activists identify with the Tarim mummies, but research into the genetics of ancient Tarim mummies and their links with modern Uyghurs remain controversial, both to Chinese government officials concerned with ethnic separatism, and to Uyghur activists concerned that research could affect their claims of being indigenous to the region. Victor Mair has stated that the Uyghur peoples arrived at the Tarim Basin after the Orkon Uighur Kingdom (present-day Mongolia) fell around 842 AD.
The first use of Uyghur as a reference to a political nation occurred during the interim period between the First and Second Göktürk Khaganates (AD 630-684).
Read more about this topic: Uyghur People
Famous quotes containing the word identity:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)