Volume 14, Issue 1, 2023
Sean Remz, Dilmurat Mahmut

, Abdulmuqtedir Udun, Susan J. Palmer

Pages 1-25
https://doi.org/10.5840/asrr2023825100
Towards a Uyghur Theodicy?
Comparing Uyghur Philosophical Discourse on an Ongoing Genocide with Jewish Religious Responses to the Holocaust
This study explores the new strands of an emerging theodicy among Uyghurs living in diaspora. This study is based on material collected from recorded discussions generated during online introductory classes on the Qur¡¯an, and from interviews with Uyghur Imams residing in Canada and Turkey. The ongoing persecution of Muslims in the Uyghur Homeland by the Chinese government (recently recognized as a ¡°genocide¡± by the governments of eight countries) has led many Uyghurs to attempt to explain these atrocities through an Islamic religious lens. Similar strategies have been noted in the Jewish theodicy that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust¡ªwhere the suffering of victims of genocide were interpreted as either a divine test or punishment. Using to these new examples of theodical thinking found among Uyghurs living in the diaspora, we have crafted a typology of four different approaches to the problem of evil and suffering. These include the gnostic argument, the mythic argument, the apocalyptic argument, and the mystery argument. Special attention will be given to the mystery argument because it appears to be an incipient pastoral theodicy that poses a challenge to the test-or-punishment paradigm by valorizing political activism and emphasizes the intergenerational transmission of Uyghur identity. Affinities between Uyghur theodicy and certain Jewish Holocaust theodicies are explored, with a focus on covenantal paradigmatic thinking, the political quietism of Hasidic Hungarian borderland Grand Rabbis in the early 1940s, and the dynamic ¡°broken theodicy¡± of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman Shapiro.