Muslims In China Research Articles

English

English

Beyond “Chinese Diaspora” and “Islamic Ummah” Various Transnational Connections and Local Negotiations of Chinese Muslim Identities in Indonesia

Going beyond the paradigm of a “Chinese Diaspora” and an “Islamic Ummah”, this article examines various transnational connections, translocal imaginings and local negotiations of Chinese Muslim identities in contemporary Indonesia. By constructing Chinese-style mosques, Chinese Muslim leaders have forged a distinctive translocal identity through transnational linkage with Muslims in China and reconfigured it within Indonesian contexts. This transnational imagining is not a form of desire for return to China, but rather an effort to redefine Chinese Muslims’ social position in Indonesia. Moreover, a closer exploration of ordinary Chinese Muslims in Indonesia reveals that their transnational connections are not limited to Muslims in China, and their local participation is not limited to Chinese Muslim organizations.

Perceptions of Masculinity and Femininity among Uyghur Muslims in China

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) is the most frequently tested gender role instrument. However, many studies have examined the BSRI with convenient samples drawn from university campuses. Moreover, the link regarding the BSRI’s cross-cultural applicability is weak. To partly address these two issues, this paper examines whether the BSRI is applicable to Uyghur Muslims in China. Data are drawn from a survey on Uyghurs (N = 844) conducted in Urumchi in 2007. The sample was drawn from the general population using the probability proportional to size selection sampling method. Data analysis shows a satisfactory internal consistency of the BSRI and a good degree of similarity between Uyghur men’s ratings and the Uyghur women’s ratings for masculine and feminine traits. The BSRI seems to be more relevant for Uyghurs than Americans as the patterns of the desirability ratings arranged in rank seem traditionally gender typed. Data analysis also shows the need to modify the BSRI before it can be used productively inthe social contexts outside North America.

ISLAM IN CHINA

Unlike other Muslim minorities in the world, the one in China is : a. Divided between two large ethnic groups: Hui in China Proper, who are concentrated in major urban agglomerations; and Uighurs, of Turkish stock, who used to make up the majority in North-Western China, but are now outnumbered by Han Chinese, via a policy of settlement and dilution of the minority. b. Except for Xinjiang, the Muslims of China are not attached to any particular territory (like the Mongols in Mongolia or the Tibetans in Tibet), but are spread all over the country, something which dilutes them into an insignificant minority (1-2%) in spite of their large absolute numbers (25-30 million). The vast distribution of the Muslims all over that vast country has made for a huge diversification in their creed and customs, beyond the division between Hui and Uighurs. This great variety has created many sects and sub-sects, some of which are very special to China.

A New Entrance Gate in Urban Minorities: Chinese Muslim Minority, the Hui People Case

This article identifies a newly emerging young, urban, Chinese Muslim class that is evolving during a time of significant modernization. In this study, measures were developed to record each participant's degree of receptivity to modernization via background information gathered from test groups. The results identified those most open to new information (Entrance Group). An empirical survey to gather this data was conducted among 232 young, educated, urban (YEU) individuals from the Hui people and the Han Chinese majority. Results from the study suggest that the YEU's media and program preferences will strongly impact research regarding effective mission strategies. The analysis proves that the YEU-Hui is a distinct group within its traditional community setting, and accordingly, has distinct preferences and needs. As such, this modernized Muslim class is theoretically influential among its own people, open to new information, specific in its media consumption of similar applications, and similar in many ways to young adults within similar demographics from foreign populations. This article is based upon afield survey for my Ph.D. dissertation, “Receptor-Oriented Communication for Hui Muslims in China: With Special Reference to Church Planting” (2009).

“Apoliticization”: One Facet of Chinese Islam

Islam, a tradition that both spans and transcends conventional notions of “East” and “West”, has adapted itself as the religion and culture of a sizable minority in China from imperial times down to the present day. For their survival, Muslims in China have often found it necessary to downplay the political (and sometimes militant) emphasis of “normative” Islam, even as they have participated in the political life of Chinese society. However, beyond merely reacting to social, political and cultural intimidation, the tendency to “apoliticize” Islam among Muslims in China is also a reflection of Chinese Muslims simultaneity, a sense of belonging to two civilizations at the same time, without disjunction. Responding to rival pressures to assimilate and to resist assimilation to assert a distinct identity, common to many diaspora communities, Chinese Muslims have exemplified a long history of accommodation of Islam to local contexts, showing Islam to be an evolving, multifaceted tradition.

The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (review)

Reviewed by: The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China Kevin Caffrey (bio) Zvi Ben-Dor Benite . The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China. Harvard East Asian Monographs 248. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. xii, 280 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978–0–674–01774–0. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite's new book is an investigation of how seventeenth- and eighteenth century Chinese Muslims created Islamic texts that came to be known as the Han kitab—something like a Chinese Islamic canon. More particularly, the author delves into the very Chinese way in which this body of texts was put to work securing Chinese Muslims a particular place in the empire. I have waited for this book for some time, though this is not to say that the author has taken a long time to produce it. I mean rather to say that I was aware of the need for a fine-grained analysis of the Chinese Muslim network in eastern China that produced the Han Kitab, and I was waiting for someone to write on it in a way that I could learn about it and work from it. This is that work. It is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of historical and ethnographic work on Muslims in China, and all the more welcome because it contributes to several ongoing discussions about Chinese social history quite apart from the issue of Muslims. It is common to associate Islam in China with the peoples of Xinjiang, but this book shifts attention away from them toward a community flourishing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the eastern Chinese heartland. We read of Muslim communities in Nanjing and other cities that supported Islamic schools, scholarship, and publishing endeavors. Leading families in these communities traced their origins to Muslims who had served under past Central Asian rulers of China, and they kept up their traditions by participating both in the Confucian examination system and also producing sons who became experts in Islamic scholarship. Faced with their community's isolation from the wider Islamic world and its limited knowledge of Arabic, these men produced a body of Islamic literature in Chinese. The author documents how this network of literati emerged in the late Ming and early Qing, eventually developing the motivating notion that they were the curators of a specifically Muslim domain of literary Chineseness. The initial focus of the book is on the network of scholars who wrote or translated (from Arabic and Persian) the texts of the Han Kitab. The narrative is an analysis of the ways in which these Chinese Muslim literati negotiated their cosmological position as Chinese in a Confucian moral universe, with their social identity as Muslims and descendents of foreigners. It is most generally about the multivariate nature of identification processes, but more specifically it is a historical account of a dynamic educational network of Chinese Muslim literati in eastern China. The author argues that the Han kitab authors saw themselves as [End Page 376] Chinese literati, and ultimately for them Islam was seen as the completion of Confucian ideals. Built from Chinese Muslim sources and supplemented by imperial records, the picture that emerges in this narrative of the way this Chinese Muslim school of learning was generated does an excellent job of showing a slice of late imperial Chinese life and social history. Scholars who have followed the argument made by Crossley (1990, 1999), Elliot (2001), Rawski (1996), and others about the conceptual appropriateness of ethnicity as a social technology of the time will find in this work an additional vantage from which to evaluate that argument—not necessarily by directly enunciating a position, but by allowing the presentation of the historical facts to speak to that issue. Scholars who have begun to investigate colonialism in China seriously—something quite distinct from the colonialism of China by Western powers—will see here a case example of the means and mechanisms that were at the disposal of Chinese elites and officials by which ideologies and sentiments of affinity and estrangement were deployed in late imperial China. Similarly, in this example we also see the...

Islam and Global Dialogue

If there were ever a time that a book on religious pluralism and peace oughtto be required reading for politicians, public intellectuals, policymakers, andthe media, as well as a general audience, that time is now. Conceived as aresponse to the excoriation of Islam after 9/11, Roger Boase has put togethera remarkable book on the need for interreligous dialogue as the only way to“lay the foundations for a more peaceful world (p. xviii).” This need reverberatesthrough each chapter, be it written by a Jewish, Christian, or Muslimscholar. This means that, as in a symphony, even though each scholar writesgrounded in his/her own faith tradition (instrument), their collective voiceschorus the same song. It makes for very powerful reading.The book is divided into three parts, with a foreword on the importanceof bridge building between cultures by HRH Prince Hassan bin Talal, theformer crown prince of Jordan, a preface and an introduction by Boase, anda postscript by author Wendell Berry on the failure of war as a way to securepeace. After initially considering inviting scholars from all faith traditions tocontribute, Boase decided there was not space in a single volume to do thisin an adequate way. Therefore, the book focuses on contributions fromscholars from the three Abrahamic faith traditions: Judaism, Christianity,and Islam. He rightly says that this gives the book a tighter focus. Given theimportance of the West/Islamic civilizational divide these days, it is importantto have a book that focuses on these faith traditions. From a wider,global perspective, though, this may limit its potentially positive impactabout the need for interreligous dialogue only to those readers who identifywith one of the three Abrahamic faiths. Muslims in China, for instance,would need to appeal to whole different discourses in order to establish theneed for constructive Sino-Muslim dialogue for peace.Part One, “Defining the Issue,” has articles from three scholars who tryto set the terms of the discourse: John Bowden talks about the ...

The Mythology of Prophet's Ambassadors in China: Histories of Sa'd Waqqas and Gess in Chinese Sources1

This article attempts to understand and unravel how Chinese Muslims of the Qing Dynasty envisioned the way Islam arrived in Confucian China according to an eighteenth-century mythology, the Huihui Yuanlai. By studying histories of two mythic figures who appeared in this mythology—Sahaba Sad Ibn Abi Waqqas, the maternal uncle of Prophet Muhammad, and Gess (Gaisi), another ambassador—this article discusses the way in which Qing Muslim scholars artfully narrate the origin and history of Islam in Chinese Muslims. Through a textual and contextual analysis, this article argues that the creation of the Muslim mythology and its wide circulation among Chinese Muslims in the Qing dynasty is not merely a presentation of the early history of Muslims in China; rather, the mythology is closely linked to Qing Manchu expansions into Central Asia and Manchu interactions and relations with Turkic Muslims in the Hami-Turfan region. The mythology reflects the Qing encroachment upon this Turkic Muslim region and the impact of this incorporation on Chinese Muslims, as reflected in Han Kitab literature. The birth of the mythology reveals Chinese Muslims' reflections of and adjustment to the new Manchu Empire, which included much of the Turkic Muslim regions.

The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam

This remarkable collaboration of primarily Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun(with contributions from nine other mostly Muslim Chinese women who areduly acknowledged), contains a wealth of information on a subject that most scholars of Muslim communities have never considered or perhaps evenimagined: the existence of bona fide women’s mosques in China. Throughpainstaking historical, archival, interview, and field research, the authors layout a convincing argument that such mosques have existed in China and continueto experience a “rapid increase” (p. 15), at least since the late Mingdynasty (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries), proliferating in northern China’scentral plains region (mainly Henan, Hebei, Shandong, and Anhui) during theQing emperor Jiaqing’s reign (1796-1820) (pp. 67-69).This work sheds light on “how women [in China] engendered and sustainedfaith, aspiration and loyalties under often challenging conditions” (p.5) – which is putting it mildly. Strenuously caught between Confucian,Islamic, and patrimonial requirements, they developed an institution of learningand cultural transmission perhaps unique to the Muslim world. While theauthors never fully address why “women’s mosques” and madrassahs developedso fully in China (and almost nowhere else), they do richly demonstratethe extraordinarily important role these religious and educational centershave played in preserving and promoting Islamic understanding amongChina’s Muslims, known as the Hui national minority (with a year 2000 populationof approximately 9.8 million, out of a total 20.3 million Muslims inChina, according to the especially accurate PRC state census).While the authors claim these women’s “prayer halls” (the Chinese termis ambiguous) and the women who lead them are fully-fledged ahongs orimams (again, the Chinese term, like the Arabic and Persian equivalents, isnot clear about the teacher’s actual status), the issue here is whether they haveany authority over men. Since they clearly do not, ahong should be taken inits more general sense of “one possessing advanced Islamic knowledge” ortraining, and does not imply institutionalized authority beyond the sphere ofwomen (and children, which in most instances includes boys). Nevertheless,it is significant that they have such organized authority, training, and separateprayer halls or mosques among themselves ...

Review Essays

Books Reviewed: Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Taiyu’s“Great Learning of the Pure and Real” and Liu Chih’s “Displaying theConcealment of the Real Realm.”Albany: SUNY Press, 2000; Maria Jaschokand Shui Jingjun, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: AMosque of Their Own. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000; Jean A. Berlie,Islam in China: Hui and Uyghurs between Modernization and Sinicization.Bangkok: White Lotus, 2004; Sheila Hollihan-Elliot, Muslims in China.Philadelphia: Mason Crest Publishers, 2006.With a population conservatively estimated at 20 million (and, according tosome sources, as high as 50 million), the Muslims of China remain one ofthe least studied and most misunderstood Muslim communities in theworld. After decades of relative neglect, however, over the past few yearsseveral books have been published that seek to shed light on differentaspects of the historic, religious, and contemporary lives of China’s Muslims.This review essay will survey four recent works written by a wide range ofscholars.Research on Islam in China has been hindered by many factors, includingthe difficulty of gaining expertise in both Chinese studies and Islamicstudies, learning both modern and classical Chinese and Arabic, the longstandingprejudices of Han Chinese scholars regarding the country’s minoritypeoples, together with the similarly long-standing prejudices of manywestern scholars regarding Islam. The earliest major work on the Muslimcommunities of China was published in 1910, by Marshall Broomhall of theChina Inland Mission. Titled Islam in China: A Neglected Problem, its mainpurpose was to educate Christian missionaries in China about the location,customs, and history of the indigenous Muslims in order to facilitate proselytizationactivities among them ...

Ethnic differences in neighbourly relations in urban China

Using data collected in Lanzhou, this paper examines the effect of minority ethnicity on neighbourly relations in China. It shows that the Hui as a whole express a higher level of satisfaction at relations with neighbours than the Han do. It also shows that the Hui advantage is removed with key background characteristics controlled. Finally, this paper shows intra-group variation among the Hui. These findings suggest that social status is a better predictor of neighbourly relations than the focus on inter-group contrast in traditionality in the existing scholarship of the Hui. Both inter- and intra-group variation in urban life must be examined to attain a more balanced picture of Hui Muslims in China.

Some Issues of Ethnic and Religious Identity among China's Islamic Peoples

The paper considers the growth of identity among Muslim ethnic groups in China, especially the Sinic people called the Hui. It asks whether this identity springs primarily from ethnicity or religion. While affirming that Islam has grown in influence in China since the 1980s, the paper argues in favour of seeing the balance more strongly in favour of ethnicity. The paper also discusses the impact of the September 11 Incidents on Muslims in China. Addressing the issue in terms of ethnicity and religion, it discusses the ramifications of the recognition of the Uygur-based East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organisation by the US and United Nations. It explores important issues relating to morality and human rights and concludes that the Chinese have cause to worry about separatist terrorism based on Islamic fundamentalism in southern Xinjiang, but criticises using recognition of ETIM as terrorist as a weapon against the general religion of Islam or against Uygur identity.

Muslims in China: the social and economic situation of the Hui Chinese

This paper surveys the Muslim Chinese, the Hui, as a minority ethnic group in their social interaction with the non‐Muslim Chinese, the Han, in China. The findings show that the Hui in China remain a marginalized group with little influence on the political and economic affairs in China. It is also confirmed that since Islam is practised as a comprehensive way of life, which is different from the non‐Muslim Chinese ways, the Han majority recognize the Hui only as a minority ethnic group. The paper examines three phases of relationships between the Muslim Hui and the non‐Muslim Han. First, there is peaceful co‐existence between the two groups while the Hui resist the great force of assimilation and acculturation of non‐Muslim ways. In the second phase there is intensification of discrimination and persecution of the Hui by the non‐Muslim Chinese who perceive them as a threat, and both parties entertain mutual stereotypes, suspicion and hostilities. In the third phase, the Muslim Chinese cannot take the pressure of the intensified prejudice, persecution and discrimination, and so they revolt against the Han. These three kinds of relationships continue to exist between the Muslim Hui and the non‐Muslim Han in China depending on the delicate and complex situations of the two groups in various parts of contemporary China.

Myth as Memory: Muslims in China Between Myth and History

Cet article examine le processus de mythologisation de l'histoire du commencement de l'islam en Chine, et montre que plus l'histoire chino-musulmane s'est rapprochee de notre epoque, plus les musulmans ont du faire des efforts pour trouver leurs veritables racines. L'A. montre egalement que l'islam chinois, qui fut annonce dans la lutte contre de vastes communautes, a eu tendance a prendre appui sur des mythes presumes musulmans afin de consolider son identite.

Mythology and Folklore of the Hui, a Muslim Chinese People (review)

504 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 Li Shujiang and Karl W. Luckert. Mythology and Folklore ofthe Hui, a Muslim Chinese People. Translations by Fenglan Yu, Zhilin Hou, and Ganhui Wang. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1994. xii, 459 pp. Hardcover $59.50. Paperback $19.95. This is a collection of "Hui folktales" in translation. In this work, "Hui" refers to the group ofofficially-approved sinophone Muslims in China, that is, to the group designated "Hui nationality" (Huizu) by the modern Chinese state. The narratives in this collection are arranged thematically: genesis, quasi-historical, religious , didactic, and romantic themes are all represented. Whether 'historical' or 'modern', they are presented as authentic oral narratives. This work is the result ofa cooperative translation project between Southwestern Missouri State University and the University ofNingxia. Over half the texts were collected in the 1980s by a team ofresearchers from Ningxia's Nationalities Literature Center, directed by Professor Li Shujiang. The remaining texts were culled from previously published Chinese-language collections ofHui literature. Initially the texts were translated in Ningxia by Yu Fenglan, Hou Zhilin, and Wang Ganhui; the translations were then revised in the U.S. by Dr. Luckert with the assistance ofYu Zongqi. This is apparently the first work in a series of Chinese minority nationality folklore in translation; additional collections of Kazakh and Uyghur folktales are planned by the American author. The book is arranged as follows: theoretical and thematic introduction (pp. 3-33), photographs (pp. 35-71), and topically-arranged stories in translation (pp. 73-446). At first glance, the Hui, one ofthe largest groups in China to be accorded minority nationality (shaoshu minzu) status, defy facile categorization. Many (but not all) are practicing Muslims; they inhabit every province in China, but are concentrated in the northwest; they speak slightly idiosyncratic versions oflocal Chinese dialects; they are not physically distinctive from the local Han Chinese population; and the degree to which their customs (gustatory, sartorial, or ceremonial ) differ from those of the local Han population depends largely on locale, and on where a Hui individual falls on the religious-secular continuum. The Hui generally claim Sino-Arab descent. Despite these wide regional variations, the group ofpeople who currently call themselves Hui have developed a distinct group identity. In northwestern China, Hui identity is closely tied to Islam, while elsewhere this identity is secular and more nebulous. As defined by the modern Chinese state, the Hui are Muslim and sinophone. Actually, a large number of Hui are secular, not Muslim, and a small number ofpeople calling themselves Hui are speakers ofTibetan, not Chinese. What unites these people across China ofHawai'i Press Reviews 505 is that they have adopted and reinforced the Chinese state's definition ofthe "Hui nationality" (Huizu). In recent years in the West there has been a mild surge of interest in this group, including scholarship by Joseph Fletcher, Jonathan Lipman, Dru Gladney, and others. In addition, recent scholarship on ethnicity in China (particularly by Crossley, Harrell, Keyes, and Gladney) has moved beyond the situationalist/ primordialist debate and has advanced the notion that identity is processual, interactive , and localized, not static and objective. The Hui identity reflects an ongoing dynamic between the state, the Hui's own "ethnic consciousness," and the surrounding groups (Harrell 1994; Keyes 1976, 1981). This conception ofethnic identity as an ongoing process contrasts sharply with the theoretical basis ofChinese ethnography. The considerable Chinese scholarship on the Hui is based, in fact, on the opposite premise: that ethnic identity is fixed, global, discreet, and objectifiable. In the view of Chinese academia, each of the fifty-six officially recognized minority nationalities constitutes (and has always constituted) a bundle ofimmutable features: an efhnonym, a history, a language, a locale, and culturally variant customs.1 The task ofthe Chinese folklorist , then, is to identify a discreet body offolk literature that links the group in question to the most salient feature(s) ofits officially defined feature bundle. For the Hui, this is unquestionably Islam. (Other popularly accepted Hui features include their Sino-Arab ancestry, their business acumen, and, lest we forget, their white skullcaps.) Li and Luckert's work reflects this Chinese theoretical model in tone...

Islam

The study of islam in china has been strongly influenced by what Lila Abu-Lughod (1989:269) termed “zones of theory” in the general Western scholarship of Islam, in which studies of the Middle Eastern “core” have been privileged over Islam on the so-called periphery. Muslims in China, relegated to the distant margins of both Sinological and Islamic scholarship, have rarely received much academic attention. This summary attempts a brief overview of past scholarship on Islam in China and recent contributions to the field. It is concerned primarily with Islam among the people known as the “Hui,” as they are the “Muslim Chinese” proper, whereas the other nine Muslim nationalities identified by the Prc government do not speak Chinese as their native languages and belong more properly to Central Asian studies. The 1990 census revealed that there are a total of 17.6 million members of the ten mainly Muslim nationalities, with the Hui numbering 8.4 million. Like the U.S. census, religion is not a category on the Chinese census, so this figure includes some members of these nationalities who may not believe in or practice the Islamic religion, as well as excluding Han and other minority nationalities who might believe in Islam. Though some Muslims, especially Uygur, complain of underreporting of their populations, this is a fairly good initial estimate of the number of Muslims in China, indicating an increase of 1.2 million over the 1982 figure, a 13 percent increase (Gladney 1991:20).

The Cross Battles the Crescent One Century of Missionary Work Among Chinese Muslims (1850–1950)

Much has been written and published about Christianity in China, less has been known about the particular interest that the Mission had evinced toward the Muslims of China, much less has been recorded about the Muslim reactions to this activity, and almost nothing has been concluded in terms of the dialectical interaction between Christianity and Islam in that part of the world.

Sino–Middle Eastern Perspectives and Relations since the Gulf War: Views from Below

China is now becoming recognized as a nation with a significant Muslim population. With nearly 18 million Muslims (the recent 1990 census reported 17.9 million, with many Muslims still unaccounted for or refusing to register as members of the primarily Muslim nationalities), China ranks among the most populous Muslim nations. And, although its Muslim population is miniscule when compared with its total population (Muslims account for less than 2% of China's 1.1 billion), or insignificant when one looks at the vast Muslim populations in other Asian nations, such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, nevertheless, this article argues that the Muslims of China play an important role disproportionate to their numbers in influencing China's domestic and international politics.

Muslims in China. A Study in Cultural Confrontation

Muslims in China. A Study in Cultural Confrontation