In a small building painted white in the Norwegian town of Bergen, an unusual Sunday school lesson is taking place. Abduweli Ayup is teaching a group of Uyghur children their mother tongue. Were this lesson happening in China it would be a dangerous political act. For the Uyghur minority, expressing their culture has seen more than a million detained in re-education camps. After establishing a series of Uyghur-language schools in China, Abduweli, a quiet, serious linguistics professor by training, found himself an unlikely political figurehead. He spent two years as a prisoner of conscience, escaping to Europe after his release in 2015. Since then, his poetry and political writing have been read by millions of Uyghurs and his prison memoirs are due to be published soon.
Norway, Abduweli’s adopted home, feels far from Xinjiang, the autonomous region in northwest China native to the Uyghur people. ‘There we had endless deserts. Here are endless forests,’ he remarks. But in teaching, Abduweli finds normality. And his desire to nurture and protect his language remains stronger than ever. ‘It’s the structure that holds our identity and soul together. We have to protect it.’
