After Xingiang Riots Muslims Pray in Beijing

In Beijing today many Muslims turned out at a city mosque for prayer sessions. Friday is the main day of prayer for Muslims, and this is the first Friday since riots broke out in Western China—a conflict that may have left as many as hundreds of people dead.

Hundreds of Muslims flocked to prayer sessions in Beijing on Friday. Meanwhile, in China's western Xinjiang region where riots broke out earlier this week, many mosques were still closed, supposedly to minimize further ethnic tension between the Uighur people and the Han Chinese.

At the millennium-old Grand Mosque in Beijing, the congregation was made up mostly of Hui Muslims, Chinas largest Muslim minority, but a handful of Uighurs were there, too.

Xinjiang has long been a tightly controlled hotbed of ethnic tensions, fostered by the Chinese regime's controls on religion and culture and an influx of Han migrants.

That control extended to todays prayers where there is an obvious security presence. The regime is known to deal harshly with those who speak to foreign media. And Uighurs here refused to comment on the violence in their home region.

[Unidentified Uighur]: (Mandarin, Male, no title bar)
"I am not in Xinjiang so I don't know about it. I don't understand what you're saying."

[Unidentified Uighur]: (Mandarin, Male, no title bar)
"I don't understand. I don't understand."

While Chinese authorities led foreign journalists on tours of Xinjiang's capital earlier this week, reporters were generally not permitted to speak to the local Uighurs there.

Uighurs are Turkic people who are mostly Muslim. They make up almost half of Xinjiang's 20 million people.

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