In the history of the Uyghur people, Islam has become part of their ethnic identification by the republican governments of China. After isolation and control but local persistence in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in the first two decades of reform Uyghur Islam flourished, but was then subjected to severe state repression, first in the scare of secession after the breaking up of the Soviet Union, and then the post-9/11 scare that turned any Uyghur resistance into terrorism, culminating in the sinicization policy of forced assimilation. A distinctly Uyghur Islam has indeed come about, but it is now largely domestic, when public manifestations of Islam and public Muslim authority have been eliminated.