Abduweli Ayup is a Uyghur linguist and writer who was imprisoned for teaching children his own language. Born in Kashgar in 1973, he lectured for nine years at Northwest Minzu University and Xinjiang University before a Ford Foundation scholarship took him to the University of Kansas, where he earned a master's in linguistics in 2011. He returned home and opened a Uyghur-medium kindergarten in Kashgar in 2012. Authorities shut it within a year and refused to license the school he tried to open in Ürümqi.
Police arrested him in Kashgar in August 2013 and held him incommunicado for nine months before filing charges. He was accused of collecting illegal donations for the schools, convicted of misusing public funds after a one-day trial, sentenced to 18 months, and released in November 2014. He fled China in 2015 for Turkey, founded Uyghur Hjelp there in 2016, and has lived in Bergen since 2019 under the International Cities of Refuge Network.
Uyghur Hjelp documents the disappeared. Ayup compiled its public registry of Uyghur intellectuals imprisoned in China — 449 names as of the end of 2022, among them 51 university professors — and a companion list of 518 imams detained between 2016 and 2018. The registry states plainly that the real number is far higher. He testified before the Uyghur Tribunal in 2021, received the Linguapax International Award and the Linguistic Society of America's Excellence in Community Linguistics Award in 2023, and wrote the prison memoir Black Land. He still teaches Uyghur to diaspora children in Bergen.
