Abdüweli Muqiyit (also rendered Abduweli Muqiyit; Chinese characters for the name have not been published by any located source) is a Uyghur educator and cultural activist from Ghulja in the Ili region of Xinjiang, born in 1945.
According to community-sourced biographical reporting, Muqiyit served as head of the education directorate of Ghulja and was a central figure in privately funded Uyghur education. In 1994 he was placed in charge of managing the Ili Halis Fund, the region’s first private higher-education fund, whose first grants allowed 800 students who had dropped out for lack of money to return to school. He later set up day-to-day operations for a privately funded school for orphans founded by the Ghulja entrepreneur Nurtay Hajim Iskender, and in 2002 he organized the centenary of Ghulja School No. 2, the region’s oldest middle-and-high school. In 2014 he founded the Bilal Nazimi bookstore in Ghulja, which became a gathering place for lectures and conversation among Uyghurs of different social strata.
Muqiyit was among the Uyghur intellectuals and entrepreneurs targeted when the Chinese state renewed its campaign in the region in 2017. He was sentenced in 2019. The length of the sentence is reported differently by different sources: one list of imprisoned Uyghur intellectuals gives 17 years; a statistical analysis of witness testimony from Istanbul gives 15 years; and the Xinjiang Victims Database (entry #9042) records life imprisonment, consistent with reports from relatives’ unofficial channels that he had received a life sentence. China has provided no official information, and the exact term cannot be independently verified. Witness-statistical reporting indicates that prisoners sentenced from the Ili region were transferred to the prison system of Heilongjiang Province.
Rights Defense Network’s Issue 131 (August 31, 2026) lists Abdüweli Muqiyit among reported current-custody political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. No published source states the charges against him, the court that sentenced him, the name of the facility where he is held, whether an appeal was filed, or the Chinese characters of his name.