Thursday, October 28, 2010
FULYA ÖZERKAN
KASHGAR - Hürriyet Daily News
The Turkish foreign minister kicked off his weeklong trip to China on Thursday with a visit to one of the important centers of the historic Silk Road, the city of Kashgar in the Xinjiang autonomous region.
The tomb of Mahmud Kashgari was one of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s first stops in a region that experienced ethnic unrest in 2009. Uighur Turks make up the majority of Kashgar’s population of approximately 350,000 people.
“We are starting the China trip with Kashgar, which is one of the most important cultural centers of the Turkic world,” Davutoğlu told a group of journalists. “The growing Turkish-Chinese relationship will put our Uighur Turk kinsmen at ease.”
Davutoğlu is being accompanied in China by a large delegation of businessmen, ruling party and opposition deputies and researchers from several think tanks, as well as his wife, Sare.
The foreign minister later visited the mausoleum of Yusuf Has Hajif, a well-known 11th-century poet, scholar and thinker from a Uighur noble family in Parasakun, in Central Asia. Hajif spent 18 months in Kashgar, the capital of the kingdom at that time, and wrote the epic 85-chapter “Sources of Happiness,” considered the first important literary work in Uighur cultural history.
The 500-year-old Id Kah Mosque, one of more than 800 mosques in Kashgar, was Davutoğlu’s last stop in the region. Some 2,000 to 3,000 Uighurs come each day to worship at the Id Kah Mosque, one of the largest mosques in China with an area of 16,800 square meters.
The foreign minister later flew to Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, and attended a dinner given by Gov. Nur Bekri.
Source: Hurriyet Daily.
Link: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=fm8217s-culture-trip-kicks-off-in-kashgar-2010-10-28.
An Open Letter to Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan
9 years ago
i ask allah subhanahu wata ala, that this relationship with china brings a full ease and comfortability for our brothers and sisters in china, and we from now on we should bring our full resources of islamic knowledge to our people in china, as it has been forgotten by many, and that was because communism, victory of truth shall come inshaalah,
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