[2] He attended college on a government scholarship at Minzu University in Beijing, where he learned to speak Chinese in order to read novelists and philosophers whose works had been translated from other languages, including William Faulkner and Arthur Schopenhauer.
[1] After returning to his home region, Perhat worked as a researcher at the Xinjiang People's Arts Center.
[4][5][3][6][7] The specific reasons for his arrest are unknown, but it has been suggested this might be due to him signing a petition asking the Chinese government to respect the Uighur language.
[5] The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom noted that he was detained "amid a campaign of arbitrary mass detention in which [Xinjiang] officials targeted Uyghurs and members of other largely Muslim ethnic groups for reasons including expression of ethnic, cultural, or religious identity".
[9] Writing for Foreign Policy, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian described him as China's Salman Rushdie, due to the controversy sparked by his 1999 novel, The Art of Suicide.