Chinese versus Muslims

Intellectually as well as practically, the Chinese of the Confucian tradition could hardly tolerate a guest culture such as the Muslims in their midst. This is all the more so under the Communist regime of contemporary China, the best evidence for that being the generally harsh policy of the Peking regime towards the minorities in general and the Muslims in particular.

In traditional China the reasons for this uneasy coex­istence could be identified mainly in the wide intellectual hiatus that separated the two communities. In fact, the Muslims differed from all other minority groups in that, although they were concentrated mainly in marginal areas of the empire, they were present in virtually every province and every sizeable urban agglomeration throughout the country, and their presence was not merely statistical. They had large communities in the capitals (Nanking and Peking), they handled some trade in many places and left their impact (though more as individuals than as a collective) all over the country. This may explain the ubiquitous nature of the hatred, jealousy and contempt in which they were held by the Chinese at large. Conversely, from the authorities’ point of view, no crash programme in a certain territory could force all the Hui to acculturate, since there was no such single territory. For this reason, while the other major minorities were handled under the Ch’ing by the Li Fan Yuan, which controlled them by controlling their territory, the Hui were free from such control.

Secondly, since the Muslims could not accept the principle of filial piety or participate in the ceremonies of the Ancestral Shrines in the Court, through which the Chinese attempted to ‘civilise’ non-Chinese barbarians, they chose to remain outside the pale of the sought- for ‘refinement and virtue’. Neither was the stratagem that the Ch’ing used with un-Chinese aborigines workable with the Muslims.

From a Chinese intellectual’s point of view, then, if Confucius means nothing to the Muslims, this signifies that they are outside the pale of civilisation. More specifically, if they lack adherence to the Confucian principle of filial piety, as exemplified in their ignorance of ances­tor worship, then all the socio-political and religio-ethical tenets that bind the Chinese together do not apply to Muslims. That is to say:

1. If Muslims are outside the framework of the father-son relationship, then they are bound to be unruly vis-à-vis their family hierarchy, the local authority and even the emperor. As such, they are detrimental, at least potentially, to the social order in particular and to the Chinese polity in general.

2. If Muslims do not respect the rituals due to ancestors and other spirits, they are exposed to the malicious needs of those spirits, and thus one had better keep away from them.

3. If the blessings of Heaven are transmitted to earth through the Son of Heaven, the Muslims, by being unfilial to the emperor, cannot rejoice in those blessings and thus cannot partake of Chinese civilisation.

4. Since the emperor, though claiming no superiority over Heaven, is the ruler of both temporal and celestial orders, the Muslims, claiming that celestial powers are beyond the emperor’s authority, are likely to fall short of respecting the Chinese monarch and what he represents. How, then, can they be expected to be his loyal subjects?

5. In general, ancestor worship and filial piety imply the acceptance of the ways of the Ancients. If the Muslims have their own calendar, celebrate their own festivals, have no attachment to their locale or domicile, and pay no attention to the Chinese way, how can they be considered Chinese?

Indeed, in the eyes of the Chinese literati, who would formulate their objections to Muslims in intellectual and rational terms, the gap between the two communities might have looked so hopelessly unbridgeable that they could easily come under the sway of popular stereotypes, which tended to make the gap look even wider.

Religion in China was closely intertwined with in­tellectual life and with the political and social institutions of the nation. Con­fucianism was identified with scholarship and was deeply entrenched in the habits of thought, affections and loyalties of the educated people. The state was committed to the existing faiths, especially Confucianism. Confucian classics were the basis for education and the examination system. Ceremonies were associated with Confucianism and maintained at public expense. Offi­cials, including the emperor, performed many of the duties usually assigned to a priesthood in other cultures. The very political theory on which the state rested derived its authority from Confucian teachings.

Religion also formed part of the village life. Temples were maintained by villages, festivals and ceremonies took place through general contribution. Guilds had patron gods and other religious features. Above all, the family, the strongest social unit, had as an integral part of its structure, the honouring of ancestors by rites that were religious in origin and retained a religious significance.

Muslims were out of place in this setting, since their social and religious norms were so different and could not displace the already well entrenched Chinese philosophies and traditions. They went their own ways in prayers and ceremonies, in their calendar and festivals, in their weddings and burial of the dead, in their socialising and eating habits, in their travelling and dwelling. So, no matter how much the Muslims wished to put on an appearance of being Chinese they were and remained Hui people, that is non-Chinese in the eyes of the Chinese.

Chinese Muslims, for their part, felt they were alien people, more akin to other members of the world Muslim community—the umma—than to their Chinese neighbours. Their main concern was their religion and their identity focused on the universal umma, and thus the deeply ingrained Chinese tradition of identification with the locus of domicile did not pertain to them.

The Muslim community consistently underwent indoctrination on various levels. First, the Muslims kept from becoming Chinese; they reinforced their sense of superiority and distinctiveness, and encouraged the Muslim to remain socially and economically as independent of the Chinese as possible. Second, the Muslims became better members of their community through strong communal organisation, inculcation of Islamic values, communal worship and activities, a total and unqualified identification with their fellow Muslims in the congregation and moral submission to the authority of the imam. Third, the Chinese Muslim was made a conscious member of the world Muslim community. This was achieved by cultivating in the Muslim the centrality of Arabia, Islam, the Islamic Empire and Islamic traditions and values. But this was not all.

The daily prayers in the mosque were not only a communal worship, but also a way of identifying with all Muslims who faced the same qihla (direction of prayer)—Holy Mecca, the place of inception of Islam and conception of the Prophet. Some Chinese Muslims who could afford it went on the hadj (pilgrimage), and participated with the Muslim multitudes in common rituals that must have generated a feeling of religious exaltation. On the way to and from Mecca some Chinese Muslim notables visited Islamic centres such as Cairo and Constantinople, and on their return home they told their fellow Muslims of the marvels of the Islamic world and of their brethren there.

Muslims from Persia, India and Turkey seem to have paid sporadic visits to Muslim communities in China. Some of them, espe­cially scholars, stayed for long periods of time and presumably shared their knowledge with their co-religionists. Chinese Muslims also met other Mus­lims in Asia on their way to the hadj.

The Muslims Resist the Assimilatory Pressures The Muslim-Chinese literature of the Ch’ing period made valiant efforts to convince the general public that the Hui people were not so different from their Chinese hosts. The manifestations of the Muslims’ smoothing over the built-in incongruencies between their faith and Confucianism do not neces­sarily have to be conceived as a conscious diversionary tactic on the part of the Muslims, but rather as a defence mechanism which sought to soften the intensity of hostility emanating from the Chinese dominant culture. True, the Muslim attitude as manifested in some of their writings can also be construed as an erosion of the sense of Muslim uniqueness and identity. But, judging from the Muslim revivalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen­turies, this erosion affected only the margins and surface of Chinese Islam, while its core retained a dormant vigour that became evident when the extreme anti-Muslim oppression under the Ch’ing Dynasty necessitated a vigorous Muslim reaction.

One of the main factors which enabled the Muslims in China to withstand these tensions and to continue to prosper as a commun­ity was their numerical strength. It is very difficult to ascertain how many Muslims were in China at any particular time, or even now. No reliable census has ever been taken, and evaluations, some of which were made through conscientious field work, still vary greatly, from 10 to 80 million, depending on the religious denomination or the political commitment of the author, and on the definition of who is a Chinese Muslim. The typical figure given by Muslims—Arabs and Chinese—is around 50 million. Muhammad Tawadu, for example, wrote back in the 1940s:

The total population of China amounts to 473,237,335 people, and the Muslims constitute no small part ofit.

This is not the proper place to go any deeper into this question, which will have to remain unanswered for the time being. Suffice it to say that the figure of 50 million is greatly inflated. Its recurrence in Arab and Chinese Muslim writings reflects, however, a state of mind that defies facts and reality as long as the Muslim ego can be boosted. (China’s popula­tion today, however, is over 1 billion, which means that Tawadu’s figure of 50 milhon Muslims should at least be doubled.)

One thing is certain—all of these estimates include the Muslims of Sinkiang, a Turkic ethno-linguistic group completely sepa­rate from the Hui, who have actually become Chinese in race and language. At any rate it is evident that the Hui community in China by Ming times had a membership of many millions and constituted the majority group or a very sizeable minority in many places throughout the country, especially in the north-west and the south-west, as well as a strong presence in virtually all the major cities of China. The Ming period was the crucial watershed because, as a result of the intensified Sinicisation under that dynasty, only minorities which had been numerous enough to form their own moulds of life previ­ously could survive the assimilatory process thereafter.

During the Ming, many mosques were built in the pagoda shape of Chinese temples, eliminating the minarets which are typical of Muslim houses of prayer elsewhere, making them indistinguishable from Chinese temples. With the obliteration of the minaret, the muezzin could no longer call the believers to prayer in the traditional way. But the muezzin stood indoors, behind the entrance to the mosque, and urged Muslims to join in the prayer. When one entered the mosque, one was struck by the tradi­tional Muslim flavour: cleanliness and austerity. Except for the Emperor’s Tablets that were mandatory in any house of prayer, there was no sign of Chinese characters or Chinese characteristics. On the walls there were Arabic inscriptions of verses from the Qur’an, and the west end of the mosque (the qibla) was adorned with arabesques. Once the believers were inside the mosque, they put on white caps, shoes were taken off, elaborate ablutions were ritually performed, and the prayers began in Arabic, with hearts and minds centred on Mecca. When prostrating themselves before the Emperor’s Tablets, as required, the Muslims would avoid bringing their heads into contact with the floor (which they do when they worship Allah). Thus, Muslims could satisfy their conscience since they avoided the true significance of the rite, and the prohibited worship of the Tablets became invalid because it was imperfectly performed.

Muslims used their Chinese names and spoke Chin­ese in public, but with other Muslims they would use their Arabic names and speak a Chinese mixed with many Arabic and Persian words. They greeted each other in Arabic ‘al-salam alaykum’ and got the reply in Arabic ‘alaykum al-salam’. This situation persists in both Chinas to this day.

In their domestic life Muslims also adopted a double standard of behaviour. Outside their homes, they pasted up red Chinese strips, like all other Chinese, but inside usually no Chinese paintings were in sight. The scrolls that adorned the walls bore Arabic script rather than Chinese characters, specifically verses from the Qur’an or from Islamic traditions. One of them, for example, mentions the caliph and the vizier, not the emperor or the mandarin. The same applies to Muslimobjets d’art, dating from the Ming period and still treasured by Muslims in China. Their style and design are typically Chinese, but the ornaments and inscriptions are unmistakably Islamic.

In the art of calligraphy, also, a combination of Chinese and Arabic was worked out. Muslim artists first formed the outlines of a Chinese character and then filled it with Muslim proverbs or poems in Arabic. So, in a large Chinese hu (tiger) or shou (long life), Arabic phrases could be detected on closer examination. Another form of calligraphy was the writing of Arabic words in Chinese transliteration.

Islamisation and Sinicisation are obviously a con­tradiction in terms, because these processes entail a clash between two very powerful and self-confident cultures. The proposition that Muslims in China have simply become Chinese Muslims is thus, and indeed turns out in historical perspective to be, a superficial observation at worst and a reckless generalisation at best. Chinese Islam, though it underwent a long process of coexistence with Confucianism during which it had to bend before the prevailing Chinese winds, preserved a surprising vitality that never allowed it to break. The vital power of Islam was manifested in the sweeping revival of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese Islam, which gathered momentum concurrently with the mounting oppression of Islam in China, and erupted in a series of violent rebellions which held the Muslim commun­ity in China in a deep messianic spell, and threw the whole country into chaos for a quarter of a century.

It is clear that the widespread appeal that the Muslim rebels had in nineteenth-century China stemmed from the social, economic and political difficulties which plagued China as a whole. But what made the Muslim rebellions crystallise around the novel ideology of the New Sect, despite its seemingly deviationist religious idiosyncracies, were, basically, the concepts that are likely to stir any Muslim’s emotions—the Mahdi and the jihad. Since these two concepts are common to both Sunni and sectarian Islam, though with different emphases and interpretations, an outlet pre­sented itself into which all Muslims could channel their frustrations. Hence, although the New Sect took the lead in the uprising, ‘rebel’ was not necessar­ily identical with ‘New Sectarian’. Perhaps members of the New Sect were more liable than others to participate in the rebellions, but not all rebels were part of the New Sect. Many non-sectarian Muslims who did not rebel probably sympathised with the rebels, but they waited to see the trend of success before taking sides.

The capacity of the New Sect to produce an over­arching organisational umbrella which would tie together the scattered and decentralised Muslim community or parts thereof, and the unmistakable political ambitions of this militant movement, i.e. the establishment of a separate Muslim state in China, were no doubt the traits that appealed to the anxieties and passions of the Muslim populace and to its belief in the immi­nent coming of a rightful leader who could end misery and evil, and thus inaugurate a new age of plenty and justice. These traits formed an ideology which, according to Geertz’s definition, ‘bridges the emotional gap between things as they are and as one would have them be, thus realizing the perfor­mance of roles that might otherwise be abandoned in despair and apathy’.

From the Chinese viewpoint, it was these very same traits which made Muslim sectarianism dangerous and therefore liable to persecution. Not only did the movement have a ‘heterodox’ ideology from the Chinese view, but it had forged the organisational tool to carry it out as an extra-imperial, and therefore anti-imperial, corporate activity. Ideology and organisation, efficiently combined, looked so alarming to Chinese authorities that they could not help likening the New Sect to the Chinese White Lotus. Thus, by both Chinese and Muslim standards, the militant movement of the New Sect, headed by Ma Hua-lung, was the thing to watch, although each side saw it its own way. Where the former saw danger, the latter saw hope. What was eminently destructive for one, was immi­nently promising to the other.

The interesting thing about the New Sect is that, although it raised the banner of Muslim rebellion and made no secret of its Muslim essence and Islamic ideals, it still needed Chinese symbols in order to make itself relevant in the Chinese environment. So, the Muslim leaders of the rebellion used Chinese as well as Arabic, and Ma Hua-lung, the head of the rebelling New Sectarians, resorted to Chinese heterodox symbols in order to make sense in the Chinese as well as the Muslim context. Paradoxi­cally, only if he resembled one of the Chinese sectarian lords (such as the master of a secret society) could he be trusted by his Chinese Muslim followers as their Mahdi (similar to the Maytreya Buddha of the White Lotus). Only if the symbol was a Chinese one as well as a Muslim one was it likely to be a living symbol, through which Chinese Muslims would share the experience of the Chinese sectarian movements at large.

Muslim disaffection in nineteenth-century China was universal and generated millenarian cravings in all parts of Chinese Islam; but it was in areas where Muslims constituted a major portion of the population that the Chinese-Muslim confrontation was the most acute. Thus, invariably, major Muslim rebellions in China took place in the north-west and the south-west where the sizeable Muslim population was both something of a threat to the Chinese host culture, and numerically strong enough to initiate a rebellion and maintain a revolutionary (if we can use a non-millenarian term) elan. It was no coincidence that Lanchou, the ‘Mecca of Chinese Islam’, which was largely populated by Muslims and situated in a heavily Muslim area, was also the scene of the inception and growth of the New Sect. It was also no coincidence that some of the great luminaries among Chinese Muslims, including Ma Te-hsin, who played a prominent part in the revivalist movement of nineteenth-century Chinese Islam, were from the densely Muslim populated province of Yunnan.

The rebellious wave of Chinese Muslims can be conceived as an impulse to revive Islamisation by a Muslim minority which lived under the stress of forced Sinicisation under the Manchu rule. The north-west in 1764 and 1781, and again in 1862-76, Yunnan in 1820-8, 1846, and again in 1855—73, were the staging areas of the momentous Muslim uprisings which cost millions of lives, and at times seemed on the verge of sweeping much of the Chinese Empire under the sway of Islam.

The rebellious wave, which was promoted in Cen­tral Asia in about 1760 by Muslim Khojas who raised the banner of jihad against the Chinese, was transmitted through the medium of the New Sect to north-west China and thence to the south-west. It took half a century of New Sectarian ferment in Central Asia and the north-west before the rebellious impulse reached Yunnan. This may be explained in terms of the proximity of the north-west to Central Asia, where rebellion was rife. By contrast, adjacent to the south-west was India, where the revivalist movement of Shah Waliullah was contemporary with the Chinese Muslim revivalist movement in general, which took a less militant stance at the outset and stressed ritual purity and the restoration of old Islamic values.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, when persecution of the Muslims by both the Manchus and the Chinese reached its peak, the junction was made between Chinese Islam in the north-west and the south-west, and the uprising, under the unifying symbols of the Mahdi and jihad, finally took the shape of a full-blown Chinese versus Muslim struggle. Thenceforth, it was no longer a question of merely defending Islam and preserving it, or an internal strife between the new and the old sects, but a definite trend of Muslim separatism, imbued with the militant ideas that had seeped through Kansu to Yunnan. The whole Muslim East was in turmoil (Central Asia, India and China), and the contagious sense of unfolding fateful events must have swept the Muslim community from the Indus to the Yellow River.

It was an age of unique opportunity for Chinese Islam to rise and take its fate into its own hands when the feasibility of secession from Chinese domination looked favourable, due to the break­down of the Chinese bureaucratic system and the impotence of the imperial Chinese troops. It was an era of widespread rebellion in China, of mush­rooming secret society activities, of socio-political fragmentation and power devolution which demanded that particularistic new forces under charismatic leadership should fill the vacuum. So, Chinese Muslim separatism, while it was generated and nurtured by its particularistic inner dynamics, was cer­tainly not incongruent with the outer Chinese context in general.

The swing between Islamisation and Sinicisation was due to the fact that although Chinese and Muslims could be classified into two different networks, they could not help interacting between themselves. After all, there was an interdependence between the two, the Muslims depending on the Chinese market for certain basic commodities, and the Chinese depending upon Muslim traders and artisans for others. But the interaction was structured by a categorical dichotomisation in the minds of both groups, of people who are like oneself and with whom one could have relations in all spheres of activity, and people different from oneself, with whom one could only interact in a limited scope of capacities. This situation is somewhat analogous to the relationship and communication between two different register-groups belonging to the same culture; they speak the same language but they can communicate only on a very limited level (e.g. an intellectual and an artisan, a taxi driver and a professional, etc.).

This peculiar relationship was the sum total and the outcome of the contradictory pressures to which Chinese Muslims were subjected. On the one hand, they were not pariah groups whose boundaries are usually strongly maintained by the excluding host majority—if anything, the Chinese majority would have welcomed them on an individual basis into Chinese culture, and it did co-opt those who wanted to join. On the other hand, under the disability of a stigmatised identity, Muslims sought to qualify themselves as Chinese, thus developing techniques to avoid sanctions from the Chinese majority: apologetic writings for the learned Chinese and material acculturation for the illiterate populace; thus, they were making efforts to show all Chinese their ‘Chineseness’, at least in time of peace and coexistence. Like the Lapp people of Norway, however, their guest relation­ships, language behaviour, dilemmas of identity, esprit de corps, orientations and social aspirations, all smacked of the cultural specific.

Chinese Muslims learned to differentiate between the general public sphere and their closed Muslim space and to behave self-effacingly outside, albeit determined about their goals inside. It was the Muslims’ desire to be nothing but themselves which also occasioned their uprising against the authority when they sensed they were pressured to forgo their identity. Their only recourse, then, would be separation from the state in order to find their own selves again.

Were Muslims who lived in China Muslims in China or Chinese Muslims? They certainly were both, at one time or another, and they have even attempted to go out of China while remaining there, by seceding from the empire. So, it appears that as no large-scale process of Islamisation of Confucianism has been possible in China, so no intensive and far-reaching Sinicisation of Islam has been feasible. The confrontation has been between two very self-confident cultures, both having a long history of swallowing others rather than being swallowed up. Their mutual inability to overwhelm each other, which was underlined by occasional outbursts of confrontation between them, persisted even when they encountered each other on a majority-minority basis. This is due, of course, to the potent sense of belonging to the universal umma, whose basis of power and centre of creativity, being outside China, kept feeding the inner strength of the Mus­lim Chinese community and its sense of self-confidence.

Paradoxically, only as long as Sinicisation was not pressed by the Chinese rulers, would this process go on unhindered, and more and more Muslims on the margins would fall off to Confucianism. But when Sinicisation was forced or Islam oppressed, the main body of Muslims would rise up, shrug off the outer signs of material acculturation, forget the amenities of good neighbourhood with the Chinese, and raise the banner of a separate identity. This seems to have been the case not only in imperial China, but under the Communist realm as well.