In an interview on Uyghur Nationalism

Your fourth book is Andrew Forbes’ Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: a political history of Republican Sinkiang 1911-1949. Critics say it’s of relevance not only to the history of twentieth-century China , but also to the politics of Islamic reassertion in Central Asia – is that why you’ve picked it out?

Well, yes, it was a very important study. I think there’s a pattern emerging here because Andrew Forbes was also at Leeds University. This book was published in 1986 and it was really, following Lattimore, the first attempt to try and write a political history of the Republican period (1911 to 1949) in Xinjiang from a historian’s point of view rather than as a historical geography or an area study. He used the materials that were available at that time in the British National Archives. He was attempting to analyse the complexities of not only the different ethnic groups but also all the different political factions. That period can certainly be characterised as a period of Islamic resurgence, as indeed can the unrest of the 1990’s which was the precursor of the riots of July 2009. However, Forbes’ book is not solely focused on Islam but analyses the resurgence of a form of Turkic nationalism in Xinjiang at a time when there was much debate about the rise of Pan Turkism, the theory that all of the Turkish speaking societies, from Turkey, through Central Asia to Xinjiang were likely to emerge in a political alliance. What Andrew Forbes talks about is the fact that Islam is part of this Pan Turkism, this Turkish resurgence. The administrations that emerged from the political turmoil of that period in Xinjiang were Republican but also to a large extent religious and the people who came to power in these regimes insisted that they had certain Islamic characteristics.