Chinese police raided an alleged terrorist camp in a western mountain region near the border with Pakistan, killing 18 suspects and arresting 17, a police official said Monday.Song Hongli, director of the general office of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, said the raid occurred Friday at a training camp run by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM.
One police officer was killed and another was injured in the shoot-out, Song said.
Police are searching for suspects who are believed to have escaped during the raid, Song said, but did not say how many.
Police found 22 grenades and material for 1,500 more, he said.
Song said the camp was located in the Pamir Plateau, a sprawling high-altitude section of China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region near the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Song did not give an exact location.
China has long claimed that militants among the region's dominant ethnic Uighurs are leading a violent Islamic separatist movement in Xinjiang. The Uighurs are Turkic-speaking Muslims with a language and culture distinct from the majority of Chinese.
Persian helped promulgate Islam in China: Iranian cultural attaché:
TEHRAN, Jan. 8 (MNA) – The Persian language has clearly contributed greatly to the promulgation of Islam in China over the years, the Iranian cultural attaché in China said at Nanjing University on Monday.Posted on 09 January 2007 @ 14:11 GMTAt a seminar on Xiao-Er-Jin, Mohammad-Javad Aqajari said, “Xiao-Er-Jin script, which is a combination of Persian, Arabic, and Chinese scripts, was used by the students of Islamic science in China with the aim of accessing Islamic sources.”
Xiao-Er-Jin is the practice of writing Sinitic languages such as Mandarin (especially the Lanyin, Zhongyuan and Northeastern dialects) or the Dungan language in the Arabic script.
The Xiao-Er-Jin writing system is similar to the present writing system of the Uyghur language in that all the vowels are explicitly marked at all times. This is in contrast to the practice of omitting the short vowels in the majority of the languages for which the Arabic script has been adopted (like Arabic, Persian, and Urdu).
“According to some sources, the Persian language has been used regularly in Chinese Islamic centers and many Chinese scholars believe that this fact has promoted the Persian language among the Muslim and even non-Muslim Chinese,” Aqajari noted.
“Studies by Islamic bibliographers show that many of the old Islamic manuscripts of China were written in Persian.
“According to some historical sources, some Chinese rulers even used the Persian language in their correspondence with European kings in previous centuries.
“The large number of antique Persian translations of the Holy Quran, Persian exegetic, mystical, astronomical, medical, and Islamic historical texts, and Persian dictionaries in China indicates that Persian was China’s official Islamic language, and we Iranians are proud of this,” he explained.
According to Wikipedia, since the arrival of Islam during the Tang dynasty (beginning in the mid-7th century), many Arabic or Persian speaking people migrated into China.
Centuries later, these peoples assimilated with the native Han Chinese, forming the Hui ethnicity of today. Many Chinese Muslim students attended madrasahs to study classical Arabic and the Quran. Because these students had a very basic understanding of Chinese characters but would have a better command of the spoken tongue once assimilated, they starting using the Arabic alphabet for Chinese.
This was often done by writing notes in Chinese to aid in the memorization of suras. This method was also used to write Chinese translations of Arabic vocabulary learnt in the madrasahs.
Thus, a system of writing the Chinese language with Arabic script gradually developed and standardized to some extent.