By CUS Editorial Team
Since 2017, countless Uyghur families have been torn apart by arbitrary detention, imprisonment and enforced separation by the Chinese authorities. Thousands of mosques have been damaged or destroyed, while those that remain operate under extensive state surveillance and control. Uyghurs in the diaspora often avoid contacting relatives because communication from abroad can expose family members to interrogation or punishment. These are among the realities that the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regional government invited more than one hundred guests from twenty-four countries and regional organizations to look past on August 4, 2026, at an “international counterterrorism seminar” in Ili. And these are the realities that a Muslim institution, one that claims to speak for moderation, dialogue and the dignity of Muslim communities worldwide, helped Beijing bury a little deeper.
The seminar was bureaucratic cover for something much simpler: a sales pitch. Delegates representing the United Arab Emirates, Russia, the African Union and others were taken through an exhibition on the Uyghur region’s so-called “fight against terrorism and extremism.” An official account published on the website of Xinjiang’s Department of Civil Affairs claimed that participants considered the region’s counterterrorism and “de-extremification” practices “worthy of international reference.”
Pan Xi, vice chairman of the regional government and head of “Xinjiang’s Public Security Department”, said the authorities would “strike terrorism whenever it emerges” and maintain an unwavering high-pressure approach. He described a strategy combining punishment and “prevention,” including legal education, measures purportedly intended to address underlying causes, and state administration of religious affairs. Anyone who still believes the camp era simply ended should sit with that statement. Beijing is not apologizing for what it built in East Turkistan. It is now marketing it.
Of course, China could not sell that model alone. It needed Muslim faces in the room, and it found one of its suppliers in the World Muslim Communities Council (TWMCC), a UAE-based organization that presents itself as a voice for coexistence and moderation. While TWMCC’s own statement described the Council as having “participated” in the seminar, the official Chinese government account identified it as one of the event’s joint organizers. According to that account, the seminar was jointly organized by the regional government’s Foreign Affairs Office, the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and TWMCC, with support from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the regional government.
The same account confirms that Chinese and foreign participants visited the “Exhibition on the Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism in Xinjiang.” This time, therefore, a Muslim institution did not merely participate in one of Beijing’s carefully managed whitewashing events, it helped organize it. In doing so, TWMCC lent Muslim institutional legitimacy to a seminar that promoted the Chinese government’s policies in East Turkistan as a successful counterterrorism model.
This was not a one-time lapse. It forms part of an established pattern of engagement. In January 2023, TWMCC chairman Dr. Ali Rashid Al Nuaimi led a delegation of religious and intellectual figures from several Muslim-majority countries into the region. According to a report cited by the Center for Uyghur Studies at the time, Al Nuaimi “spoke highly of the region’s measures on countering terrorism and extremism.” He also congratulated China on what he called the “completion of the counter-terrorism plan in Xinjiang.”
In August 2025, Al Nuaimi returned for another counterterrorism seminar in Urumqi and met Chen Xiaojiang, secretary of the regional CCP committee. TWMCC’s own account stated that Al Nuaimi “praised China’s experience in Xinjiang” and its purported achievements in “safeguarding cultural and religious diversity.” It also said he commended the Chinese government for “promoting coexistence and social peace” and affirmed that TWMCC placed “special priority” on expanding partnerships with Chinese intellectual, academic and religious institutions.
Across these visits, TWMCC repeatedly accepted Beijing’s foundational premise: that the central problem in the region is Uyghur susceptibility to extremism, rather than the state’s campaign against Uyghur religious belief, language, culture and family life. An institution that repeats that narrative on government-managed tours, praises the policies behind it and then helps organize an event promoting those policies internationally is no bystander. It is lending its name and credibility to Beijing’s project.
The record TWMCC is helping Beijing paper over is not in serious dispute among those who have independently investigated it. In its landmark 2022 assessment, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights documented large-scale arbitrary and discriminatory detention, invasive surveillance, restrictions on religious identity and expression, and credible allegations of torture and other abuses. It concluded that the violations “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
The persecution has also targeted the custodians of Uyghur religious life. The Uyghur Human Rights Project’s report Islam Dispossessed documented the detention or imprisonment of imams and other religious figures as part of a campaign to disrupt the transmission of Islamic knowledge. Human Rights Watch has shown how regulations force religious practice and places of worship into conformity with the CCP’s “Sinicization” agenda. A separate Human Rights Watch investigation documented the closure, demolition, alteration and repurposing of mosques in Ningxia and Gansu, demonstrating that Beijing’s campaign to subordinate Islam to CCP rule extends elsewhere in China as well.
No institution that has read even a fraction of this record can plausibly claim, after Ili, that it did not know what it was legitimizing. Ignorance is not an available defense. What remains is choice, and TWMCC has made its choice repeatedly, publicly and on the record.
Nor is TWMCC alone in demonstrating how Muslim representatives can be drawn into Beijing’s propaganda system. In May 2026, Türkiye’s Diyanet Academy President Enver Osman Kaan joined a Chinese government-organized delegation to Urumqi and Kashgar. After touring officially selected mosques, religious schools, museums and communities, he gave an interview to the government-run Tianshan Net in which he praised the region’s development and spoke positively about coexistence, security and stability.
When the interview resurfaced in Türkiye several months later, Aydınlık presented Kaan’s remarks under the headline “Hear the truth about the Uyghurs from Diyanet.” The newspaper called the interview “the most meaningful response” to what it described as Western propaganda about the oppression of Muslims in the region. Remarks made during a controlled visit were thus repackaged as institutional validation of Beijing’s narrative.
Following public criticism, Kaan explained that he had used “diplomatic language” because he was representing Türkiye and the Diyanet during an official visit. He said that East Turkistan was the ancestral homeland of the Turkic people and a “red line.” In a subsequent statement, he asked Uyghurs hurt by his remarks to forgive him.
That clarification should be acknowledged, but it does not erase the harm caused by the original interview or prevent Beijing and its supporters from continuing to use it. The episode demonstrates that participants do not retain control over how their words will be used after such visits. Diplomatic courtesies, selective observations and carefully framed interviews can be detached from their original context and circulated as proof that a prominent Muslim religious figure has examined the allegations against China and rejected them. By the time a clarification is issued, the original remarks may already have served Beijing’s propaganda objectives.
What is being built here goes well beyond East Turkistan. Xinhuanet reported that China was willing to share its counterterrorism “concepts” and “achievements” with the world. The official Chinese government account went further, claiming that foreign participants regarded the region’s practices as “worthy of international reference.” The message is not aimed only at a domestic audience: China’s embassy in Oman promoted the Ili seminar on its official X account, underscoring Beijing’s intention to carry this narrative across the Arab and Muslim world.
Beijing has moved from demanding that the world stop criticizing what it did to the Uyghurs to urging the world to learn from it. The model is clear: expand the definition of extremism, hollow out independent religious authority, place religious life under permanent administrative supervision, subject an entire population to surveillance and ideological control, and call the resulting coercion “prevention.” Any government that adopts this model would pose a grave threat to religious freedom, while every Muslim institution helping promote it bears responsibility for facilitating its normalization.
Muslim institutions are uniquely valuable to Beijing in this effort. When Western governments or international human rights organizations criticize China, Beijing often dismiss their criticism as Western hostility or geopolitical rivalry. That argument becomes harder to sustain when Muslim scholars and institutions repeat Beijing’s language after visiting government-selected sites. Their presence creates an impression more powerful than any statement by a Chinese spokesperson: Muslim leaders visited the region, saw the situation for themselves and approved of what they found.
The involvement of TWMCC and the experience of Kaan should therefore serve as warnings to Muslim scholars, religious institutions, civil society organizations and public figures considering similar visits and conferences. Beijing does not invite Muslim delegations to East Turkistan to exchange views. Their presence, statements and photographs become part of a wider campaign to suggest that “Muslim representatives have examined the situation and found nothing objectionable.” Even when participants avoid explicitly endorsing Chinese policies, their involvement can still be presented as evidence of Muslim acceptance.
It is clear that delegations are granted access only to officially selected sites, schools, exhibitions and religious figures. Such carefully managed visits exclude former detainees, families of prisoners, independent scholars, Uyghur organizations and people in the diaspora whose religious and cultural lives have been destroyed by China’s draconian measures. Statements made during these controlled visits are often used to discredit victims, weaken international scrutiny and become part of China’s propaganda packages.
Muslim engagement with China must therefore be grounded in independence, transparency and accountability. Delegations should insist on unsupervised access to affected communities, consult Uyghur organizations and survivors before and after visiting, examine the findings of the UN and independent human rights organizations, and refuse to participate in events that present repression as a model worthy of international emulation. They must never allow their presence to become part of China’s whitewashing efforts of its genocide and crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs.
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