"harvest festival") is a traditional male Uyghur gathering that typically includes "poetry, music, dance, and conversation within a structural context".
[2] Each meshrep consists of a leader (yigit bashi, an older man), a disciplinarian (passip begi), and 30 younger men (ottuz oghul), who sit on a carpet according to seniority.
[1] As the meshreps were primarily male bonding events,[1] the women and children of the host's family were to stay inside the house and only interact with the men to bring them food or to otherwise serve them.
[5] Islamic[4] youth groups organized in the evenings grew in opposition to and eventually eclipsed the olturax, also serving "the foci for Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule".
[5] These meshreps, which have been compared to the Catholic Knights of Columbus,[8] were more formal than the olturax: tasked with providing "moral guidance", they kept strict membership lists and organized regular meetings, wherein members would read passages from the Quran.
[1] Meshrep practitioners were held to a strict code of Islamic conduct in their daily lives, including abstinence from alcohol and hashish.
[2] Initially, both social reformers and the local government supported the meshreps, as they provided an outlet for young Uyghur men in an environment rife with unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, and gambling.
[5] In 1997, a national anticrime campaign resulted in the arrests of meshrep leaders and talibes in Yining, leading to mass riots called the Ghulja Incident.