[RFA] Chinese officials have issued a ban on 22 Muslim names in Hoten prefecture in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, threatening to forbid children with such names from attending school unless their parents change them.
A Uighur woman named Turakhan who lives in a suburban village of Niya county in Hoten prefecture said that the village chief and police had informed every resident about "the list of forbidden Muslim names."
She said, "My daughter's name is Muslim, so the village police came to our house and told us that we must change our daughter’s name as soon as possible. The police explained to us that a name such as Muslim was officially forbidden. Under such circumstances, we were forced to change our daughter’s name."
A photo of the official announcement banning 15 popular Muslim first names for males and seven for females first appeared on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, and was widely circulated by the messaging app WeChat. |