A Cautionary Summing Up

The picture of Chinese Islam depicted above can at best reflect the broad lines of the mainstream of Muslims in China, but is by no means applicable to every Muslim in every Muslim community throughout the empire.

Ambiguities, uncertainties, paradoxes and puzzles remain which defy definition, generalisation and analysis. For example, Chinese Muslims were described as trying to avoid contact with the Chinese and to focus their activities, economic and social, within their communities. Yet, many Muslims not only took part in the Chinese system but became prominent in it, especially (though not exclusively) in the military domain. Examples abound: Cheng Ho, the famous maritime explorer of the Ming who preceded Columbus by over a century, was Muslim; many high-ranking Muslim officials climbed through the examination system to some of the highest posts in Chinese government, as did Ma Hsin-i, Governor General of Fukien and Chekiang in the late Ch’ing.

This ambivalent attitude can be explained in terms of the pragmatic approach of Islam to the necessities of life, because Chinese Muslims did not, indeed could not, isolate themselves from a society on which they depended in many respects. But one might also think that Muslim inroads into the highest positions of power in the government, especially in the military, (which was the paradigm of power) may be attributed to a sublimation of their frustrations. They could thereby show to the Chinese who despised them that they, too, could make it to the top, despite their underprivileged position. Moreover, Muslims in top positions may have been thought able to intervene from within the system on behalf of their co-religionists, and that in itself justified their deed, since in the final analysis they helped protect and preserve Islam rather than turning their backs on it. The Holy Qur’an justifies such a measure: ‘Good deeds exonerate evil doings.’

The record shows that in China many Muslim communities and Muslim individuals have drifted away from their heritage and acculturated more fully to the host culture than the mainstream of Chinese Islam, especially in isolated places where maintaining one’s distinctiveness could become a matter of daily embarrassment and a constant nuisance rather than a source of pride and superiority.

So we hear of Muslims who practised ancestor worship and local spirit worship, of Muslims who adopted Chinese mourning practices, and even of Chinese who respect some tenets of Islam but are unaware of their Islamic origin. There are missionary accounts of Muslims who would gather to listen to Christian preaching and find similarities between their faith and Christianity, a thing unheard ofin the lands of Islam.

These phenomena are due to the organisational fragmentation of Chinese Islam and the absence of supra-communal authority that could look after the needs of small and isolated communities and save them from extinction. As Skinner has remarked, ‘the greater number of individuals who carry a species or a culture, the greater its chances of survival’. Local compromises that Islam had made during its expansion, and the incorporation of urf (local custom) into the Shari‘a, had brought about the spread of the faith. But that was achieved under a victorious conquering Islam, whose self-confidence allowed it to compromise.

This compromise, far from plastering over the incompatibilities between these two self-confident cultures, on the contrary exposed the built-in limitations of each of them to come half-way to meet the other. Therefore, Muslim dormant aspirations, which are inherent in the Islamic system of belief, erupted into a full-scale confrontation with the Confucian state, when coexistence was no longer feasible under the Ch’ing Dynasty.

The fact that the rebellions of the nineteenth century were suppressed did not lead to the submission of the Muslims, nor did the latter ever reconcile thereafter with the idea of a sizeable Muslim population ruled by the Chinese host culture. The Chinese, under the Republic, made tremendous efforts to appease the Muslims by recognising them as one of the ‘five peoples of China’. Sun Yat-sen himself became devoted to this aim, because he was aware of the numerical and political weight of the world Muslim community, of which Chinese Muslims considered themselves part and parcel.

The problem, however, was not one of compromise, because both the Islamic and the Chinese political traditions are such as to leave no room for accommodation. The Chinese state has always been, and still remains, Unitarian and shunning the idea of a multi-state federation, an idea which was accepted, at least in theory, by the Soviet Union. The Muslim ideology requires assumption of the political power, as the will of Allah has to be worked on earth by a political system; therefore, no Muslim would find his identity within a non-Muslim Unitarian state. No wonder then that even under Communist rule, outbursts of Muslim particularism erupted when the lax period of the Hundred Flowers gave the Muslims the opportunity to express themselves. More unrest may be in the offing if the present-day liberal policies and opening up of China proceed.

A Cautionary Summing Up

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