[Image source: Calligraphy by Haji Noor Deen Mi Guang Jiang]

Here are three texts by Liu Zhi, who is considered one of the greatest Muslim scholars of the Han Kitab era.

• Nature and Reason of Islam (天方性理)
• The Real Record for the Greatest Prophet of Islam (or The Real Record for the Great Prophet Muhammad) (天方至圣实录)
• Islamic Principles and Rites (天方典礼)

Here is an explanation of the titles of these books by my friend Linfan Zhu. 天方(Tian Fang). “The literal meaning of Tian Fang is somewhere that only has one direction. In the History of Ming Dynasty, it says, In the western direction of China, far away from Persia, there is a city called Tian Fang, or called Heaven, or called Mecca. In Chinese, Tian Fang (天方 or 天房) refers to Kaaba in Mecca. Thus, if we say Tian Fang, it deeply and meaningfully refers to Islam.
3`典礼(Dian Li). This is the hardest one in these names. Dian Li in current Chinese it exactly means what you said “ceremony”. But in the past, it has different meaning. As much as I can see, Dian Li should be two words and two different meanings. Dian means books and principles or laws; Li means rites and principles or orders. Confucious has a book named “The Book of Rites”, so I think it is a good way to use “rites”. For this reason, I think if we use Islamic Principles and Rites, that may be better, but not the best.”

Note: These texts written in Classical Chinese by scholars who were well versed in Confucian and Taoist philosophy as well as classical Islamic learning and may be thus too dense for most people to read, and are especially not meant for people who are beginners in this field or are not familiar with classical Chinese Philosophy or with Islam as these texts would be too dense for them.

Acknowledgement: I would like to especially thank brother Linfan Zhu for providing these texts.

[Image source: Calligraphy by Haji Noor Deen Mi Guang Jiang]

Here is a complete text of 清真大学 Great Learning of Islam (or Advanced Learning of Islam) by Wang Daiyu. Here is an explanation of the translation of title of the book by my friend Linfan Zhu. “大学(Da Xue). The meaning of Daxue nowadays is university. However, at that time, university was called Guozijian(国子监). In traditional Chinese, Xiaoxue(小学) means the knowledge of language. Daxue(大学) means the knowledge of philosophy or the principles of study. Therefore, 清真大学(Qingzhen Daxue) should mean “Great Learning of Islam” (or “Advanced Learning of Islam“)”

[Download Complete Text]

Note: These texts written in Classical Chinese by scholars who were well versed in Confucian and Taoist philosophy as well as classical Islamic learning and may be thus too dense for most people to read, and are especially not meant for people who are beginners in this field or are not familiar with classical Chinese Philosophy or with Islam as these texts would be too dense for them.

Acknowledgement: I would like to especially thank brother Linfan Zhu for providing these texts.

About James Frankel: James Frankel is an Assistant Professor at University of Hawaii. His area of expertise is the history of Islam in China and his areas of interest include comparative history of ideas and religious and cultural syncretism in China. His PhD dissertation was on the subject of Chinese Islamic scholarship during the early Qing Period. He has traveled extensively in Asia and Europe and has interacted with Muslim scholars and leader in many Muslim communities. His book, Rectifying God’s Name, on the great Chinese Muslim scholar Liu Zhi was recently published by the University of Hawaii Press.

James Frankel Faculty Page at University of Hawaii

[Image Source: University of Hawaii Website]

Interview of James Frankel: On June 22nd, 2011 I had the good fortune of sitting down with James and interviewing him, and discussing things of interest. Here is the transcript of the interview.

James Frankel Interview Transcript

Islam in China: Can you tell us something about your background? How did you get interested aspects of the Chinese Islamic Culture?

James Frankel: Well, I have been doing it for quite a while. I have been working on this topic for a while, since the senior year of my college days. I came to it through two different directions. It’s a hybrid topic, so I came from it from both directions. From the Chinese direction, I was an East Asian Studies Major at Columbia University and that comes from my family background. My parents deal in Asian art, so Chinese culture was around me when I was growing up. So it was only natural that I started to study Chinese culture at university. That was the first part. As an East Asian language and culture major, I studied Chinese culture, Chinese philosophy and Chinese history. And within that I also studied Chinese religion. Now the other part, the Islamic part, is a little bit harder to frame but what it comes down to is that during that time in my life, (when I was) in my late teens and early twenties, I was engaged in a personal search for meaning and understanding of the world and life. That led me to the study of religion independently and that led me eventually to the study of Islam. These two interests converged when I was twenty one years old when I was writing my bachelor’s thesis and I had to write something original about Chinese culture and I decided to write about Chinese Muslims and ever since then I have been doing that.

Islam in China: So your recent book, Rectifying God’s Name, talks about the work of Liu Zhi and also the broader context of the Han Kitab, can you please tell us something about that?

James Frankel: Well, in my early research, even from that Bachelor’s thesis, whenever I read about Chinese Islamic intellectual history the name Liu Zhi always came up. Every article, every chapter of a book in English which dealt with Islam in China always mentioned Liu Zhi. It actually mentioned the three great Han Kitab writers: Wang Daiyu, Ma Zhu and Liu Zhi, but Liu Zhi was clearly the most accomplished of these writers from all the descriptions. So I wanted to know what this person was writing. It was from there I worked backwards. I acquired my first copy of the Tianfang dianli from a family friend in Hong Kong, from a Chinese Muslim family. And I tried to read it but it was impenetrable at that time and so I had to backtrack and I wanted to learn the context of the kind of language that he was using which leads us back to the history of the Han Kitab. And that history begins with the long history of assimilation of Muslims in China who arrived some time in the Tang period (618-906) in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, and then after several centuries working with the Chinese language and Chinese culture, some of them lost contact with the Islamic sources. So then during the Ming period (1368-1644) in the sixteenth century, there emerged a great figure, Hu Dengzhou, who was so unsatisfied with the amount of Islamic knowledge available in China that he went westward in pursuit of Islamic learning. He returned bringing with him what may have been Sufi teachings and all sorts of books in Arabic and Persian. Then he and his associates back in China began to translate these works. That’s the origin of the Han Kitab. And then from those original translations, generation after generation, teachers transmitted and expanded upon this knowledge, in a scholarly network spread throughout central  and eastern China. Then, from these beginnings, the more innovative, original Han Kitab works of Wang Daiyu, Ma Zhu and Liu Zhi emerged in the two centuries after that. It was in this context that I then delved deeply into Liu Zhi’s thought.

Islam in China: It seems that the Han Kitab represents the acculturation of Islam in China with respect to the Confucian and the Daoist philosophies of China. Would you say that that tradition still survives or did it die out in China?

James Frankel: I think it continues amongst those of us who are reading the Han Kitab today and there is a small group of Chinese readers, Chinese Muslims readers, who are probably studying the Han Kitab but the tradition, the Han Kitab itself, there was an interruption in the Han Kitab tradition which had a lot to do with the upheaval in China in the late 19th century, all the way up to the 20th century. The Chinese Islamic intellectual tradition evolved and was transformed into something quite different. If you look into the research that some of my colleagues are doing into the early 20th century intellectual history of Muslims in China, it has a lot to do with the reformation of China: the Chinese education, the Chinese intellectual tradition at large, the modernization and to some extent the Westernization of that intellectual tradition. So the Han Kitab may have been transformed into something else, like apologetic works by Chinese Muslims which were much more concerned with a new order and not the Confucian order that they were interested in previously. I think today there is resurgence in interest in Han Kitab but that represents a revival rather than a continuation.

Islam in China: There seems to be a general revival of Confucian teachings in China, do you think that this would feed back into this (Sino-Islamic) tradition?

James Frankel: Yes I think so. I do think that after the heights of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, there is a resurgence of Confucian thought in China. Confucianism never disappeared from China but it was subordinated just as Islam and other religions and philosophies were subordinated during the heights of the extremely ideological period in China’s history. Now that they have been discovered by Western scholars there has been a recognition of the Han Kitab as not only Muslim books but also as part of the Confucian tradition. So as Muslims rediscover or redefine their identity in China, I do think that there will be a synergy between the rise of Confucianism in China and the Sino-Islamic tradition.

Islam in China: Were there any influences, from the Muslim Confucians in the other direction as well, i.e., on the wider non-Muslim Confucian scholars?

James Frankel: I think minimally. It was not as profound or influential as the Jesuit and the Chinese Catholic thought and writing that penetrated China from the 16th through the 18th century. There may have been some subtle influences but I think that the scope of the Han Kitab was limited to the Chinese Muslim community, and a particular elite amongst the Chinese Muslim community, to express themselves and express their self-identity. So I do think that there was limited influence. I do know for example that Liu Zhi’s Tianfang dianli was included in the Siku quanshu, or the Qianlong emperor’s (r. 1736-1796) compendium of literature. So it gained a certain modicum of recognition but I do not think that Islamic thought penetrated Confucian circles that deeply.

Islam in China: And why do you think that is the case?

James Frankel: If you look at the description of the Tianfang dianli in the imperial compendium in the Qing period, I think the answer is right there. The Confucian editor who reviewed Liu Zhi’s work said that Liu Zhi was a brilliant scholar who writes beautifully, that his style is very eloquent but he says that Islam is fundamentally absurd and therefore all the clever ornamentation that Liu Zhi used, all of his Confucian training was to no avail. So the dominant Chinese world view would see Islam as being inherently inferior to Confucian thought and I think it was the utmost obstacle to any kind of serious influence by Islamic thought on Chinese culture.

Islam in China: Can we make a parallel between Islam and Buddhism in this context? For the longest time Buddhism was also considered to be a foreign religion in China?

James Frankel: Buddhism is unique amongst the foreign religions in China because it really was transplanted and naturalized in China to the point that it became one of the so-called Three Teachings alongside Confucianism and Daoism. No other religion has been able to achieve that level of acceptance in China. So although it was foreign, Buddhism integrated into Chinese culture and society. Perhaps it has to do with historical circumstances, the manner in which the missionaries and then Chinese Buddhists translated this tradition into Chinese. May be all of these factors contributed to why Buddhism became so widely accepted in China. I think it is because of a number of things – historical circumstances, the timing when Buddhism entered China, and that it was an attractive religion at that time. Also, in the field of comparative religion we often hear the generalization that Asian religions are less exclusive and more inclusive, whereas the Abrahamic monotheisms, as similar they are to each other, are exclusive of each other not to mention other religions in the world. So Judaism, Christianity and Islam demand an exclusive commitment to their truth claims that can’t really permit the acceptance of other religions simultaneously. Buddhism does not require that same kind of faith commitment. Buddhism traditionally has been more of a practice rather than a doctrine and so it managed to find a way to coexist with Confucianism and with Daoism often in terms of syncretism and blending of traditions. So there is a parallel between Islam and Buddhism, or Buddhism and other foreign religions, but Buddhism, as I said, has a unique distinction of successful transplantation of a foreign religion in China. Of course throughout the centuries it has had its opponents as well, but you cannot separate Buddhism from Chinese culture today. The same cannot be said about Islam.

Islam in China: Going back to the topic of Liu Zhi’s teaching, what do you think other cultures, especially Muslim cultures and Muslim minorities, can learn from that particular era in time and that culture?

James Frankel: Well, in many ways, I actually think that Liu Zhi’s, and not just Liu Zhi’s but the Han Kitab phenomenon and the scholarly enterprise developed by Muslim intellectuals in China, is consistent with some of the earliest and the most deeply held values of Islam. There is a Hadith[1] which says that the “word of wisdom belongs to the Believer and he should take claim of it wherever he finds it.” And we know the oft-repeated Hadith, “Seek knowledge even though be it in China” And that is exactly what the Han Kitab writers were doing. They were finding wisdom in the tradition of Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism which also blends Buddhist and Daoist ideas. And they were finding parallels with Islamic ideas and values. As I have argued in my own book, this is just an expression of their simultaneous existence as Chinese Muslims. I think Muslims around the world, especially minority communities, can learn a lot from this. Rather than the rejectionism that we see, the exclusivity of Islam for lack of a better word, that is, the thinking that Islam is completely independent and bears no relation with any world tradition except in so far as traditions which preceded it may have been divine revelations which may have been distorted. Rather than looking at it simply in those terms, we can see the universality of human wisdom and Liu Zhi made this argument that the wisdom of the Chinese sages is identical to the wisdom of the Arabian sage, the Prophet (pbuh). That is something that all of us can learn from and we can have a civil discourse based on finding common ground. A lot of inter-faith dialogue in Western countries is based on that principle but I do not think that it has been as successful for European or American Muslims as much as the Han Kitab enterprise was successful for Muslims in China. So I think that is a lesson for all of us.

Islam in China: Ever since China opened up to the rest of the world, there have been a number of pressures on Chinese Muslims in terms of national policies and also influences from the outside with respect to “purging” Islam of Chinese influences i.e., mainly influences coming from the Middle East. How does this affect the local Chinese Muslim tradition?

James Frankel: From its inception in China, Islam has never been a monolithic entity. Islamic communities in Northwestern China are different from Islamic communities in Eastern China. The further East we get, we see greater assimilation into the mainstream Chinese culture. That has been true even earlier and includes the Han Kitab, which were works of assimilation. So I think there will always be different Muslim communities in China. We see it everywhere; there are different Muslim communities in Muslim countries and there are different Muslim communities amongst Muslim minorities in the West and elsewhere. I think that would be the case in China as well. I do think, however, if I can give my personal opinion, for the lack of a better word – the Arabization of Chinese Islam that we see will continue to some extent. I think that it threatens to undo some of the efforts of the luminaries of the Han Kitab three hundred, four hundred years ago. If the idea of an exclusive or “purified” Islam is to be promoted in China, I think that will only serve to further separate China’s Muslims from their non-Muslim neighbors. That will put Muslims in a more unfavorable position in Chinese society. I think assimilation i.e., some sort of integration, is vital. I am of course not advocating the loss of Islamic identity. But if the pendulum swings too far in the direction of differentiation then you leave these communities vulnerable to intense segregation and ghettoization. I do not think that that would be a good outcome.

Islam in China: Now moving in the other direction, outside of China was there any influence of the Confucian and the Daoist traditions on the Islamic world?

James Frankel: Not that we can document. Buddhist, yes. Buddhist influences in early medieval Islam are documented but that did not come from China. It probably came from India and Central Asia. Daoist and Confucian influences in the Central Islamic lands, I do not think that we can really document this. We can speculate but the evidence is very very scant. I think it behooves Muslims everywhere to learn more about other religions of the world, including Chinese religions.

Islam in China: In general, would it be correct to say that within the larger Islamic, and even Confucian and Daoist, context the influence has been a one way street intellectually or is that too strong of a statement?

James Frankel: That is too strong of a statement, but I think the preponderance of evidence in the Han Kitab shows mainly the influence of Confucianism on Islamic thought and that is because they are written in Chinese. The Chinese language carries within it certain ideological and cultural assumptions; any language does. Now there may be subtle influences of the Islamic culture on the Chinese culture. There certainly have been influences in terms of material culture. There have absolutely been influences on the Chinese culture because trade went both ways, but intellectually and religiously I think that the vast majority of influences haves been one directional. Maybe further research will reveal more bidirectional influences.

Islam in China: Mainly because of the rise of China on the world stage, China has started reappearing in the consciousness of the wider Muslim world once again. Do you think that such influences and such interaction will once again become prominent?

James Frankel: I am sure of that. China is so integral to the global community and there are more Muslims in China than most people realize. With the opening of China, and Chinese people traveling abroad, a certain percentage of the traveling Chinese population will be Chinese Muslims, including Chinese Muslims performing the Hajj[2]. The Hajj has traditionally been not only the religious obligation that it is, but also a meeting place for Muslims around the world, a pan-Islamic, almost universal marketplace not only of goods but also ideas. So I think that the Chinese Muslims and Chinese Islam will be further integrated into global Islam just as China is being integrated in the global civilization.

Islam in China: Based on what I have read about the Han Kitab, owning to the peculiarity of the Chinese language, the translation of Arabic and Farsi terms into Chinese, when they are translated back, may lose some meaning or sound strange. Can you comment on that?

James Frankel: Any attempt to translate from language x to language y, and then back to language x, is bound to produce oddities of expression. I think with translation comes increased complexity. In the encounter of civilizations, I write in my book, translation is the necessary first step but also the greatest barrier to communication. We try to finds ways to communicate when we encounter the other and then we have to find a certain accommodation to an entirely different set of ideas and worldview. I think that the ideas that are written in Liu Zhi’s work are based on some very sophisticated ideas from Islamic mysticism and metaphysics, which would be difficult for most Muslims to understand even in their original language, not to mention that the Chinese language which Liu Zhi used is the most refined and literary language of that culture, of China. The Neo-Confucian texts are very hard for most Chinese people to penetrate and so multiple layers of complications exist. And so you may ask, who can read these? And I would have to say that at this point only a very few people can read these overlapping literatures. And of course when we translate back to English, another layer of complexity is added. But hopefully our attempt i.e., the my attempt and that of my colleagues, will open up this up to a whole new audience in what is the Lingua Franca of our day. With reference back to the Chinese and the Islamic context, we can understand the meaning of these books in both contexts and finally in an English speaking context.

Islam in China: Can you say a few additional things about the work of Liu Zhi and the Han Kitab?

James Frankel: If we look at their name, the word itself shows their complexity. The word Han is the Chinese word for the Chinese language (and people) and the word Kitab is the Arabic, or rather the pan-Islamic, word for the book. It has been borrowed by many other languages too. So Han Kitab shows that the writers and the readers of these books were an audience that was equally comfortable with the Chinese literary tradition and the Islamic religious tradition. As such some people call them works of apologia which seek to explain and defend Islam. I think that is part of their purpose, but there is another aspect. For the scholars who wrote and studied, these were also works of inner transformation, they were works of personal devotion. In Islam, for a scholar, an alim [3], his work is an act of devotion and I do not think that Liu Zhi and Chinese Muslim scholars were any different in this regard from other Muslim scholars. I think that they thought that they were doing a service to Islam and they were serving Allah and his people by writing the works that they were writing. At the same time they completely embodied the Confucian ethic of education and self-cultivation that takes place through learning and scholarship. And so the Han Kitab, just as the name suggests – their hybrid Chinese-Arabic name, they were simultaneously works of Islam and Confucian, or Neo-Confucian, (works of) self-cultivation by these scholars. They also served a more general purpose of educating the Muslim community in China and to some extent speaking to the non-Muslim scholarly elite, the Confucian elite, in China and showing them aspects of Islam which they hadn’t seen previously. So they actually serve multiple purposes. A personal purpose for the writers themselves, a communal purpose for Chinese Muslims in general, and a wider purpose in the encounter between the Chinese and the Muslim civilizations.

The work of the Han Kitab writers was so important and so remarkable. They were showing that there was not only a genetic, blood connection between the Han and the Hui, but also that there is a profound intellectual, ideological, ethical, moral and even, dare we use the word, spiritual connection between the Chinese and the Islamic traditions. The stigma of otherness or foreignness that Muslims have carried for so long, if it is ever going to be, I would not say eliminated, but minimized, there needs to be more communication between these communities. And I do think that this example, which admittedly occurred at the most elite and scholarly level of society in late imperial China, may hold a lesson for Han and non-Han relations in China in general. If you want to call it a meeting of civilizations, there is a lesson to be learned from that meeting and that lesson, as I said earlier, can be transferred to other Muslim minorities elsewhere, even in the United States. There is a lot of common ground; it sounds so cliché that I almost feel embarrassed to say it, but we do have so much in common than that which separates us and differentiates us – our DNA itself. I think there is a lesson to be learned here. I would not be doing the work that I am doing if I did not believe that there was some relevance of this work to the bigger picture and when I say bigger picture what I am talking about is our relationship with one another and to the world in which we live. And I do not mean to sound so grandiose but that is what motivates me.

Islam in China: A number of authors have argued that, historically and even now, Islam has been the “Other”, or at least one of the “others”. Do you think that through the process of acculturation and non-Muslim Chinese getting to know more about Islam, the Chinese people will stop thinking about Islam as the “Other”?

James Frankel: I think that the Chinese conception of Muslims is best captured by the title of my colleague and mentor John Lipman’s book Familiar Strangers. That is exactly what they are. They are other, but they are an other that has been in the midst of Chinese culture for so long that they are a known other. They are not a complete other, they are not a complete enigma. Will they ever be a not-other? I think China will have to become, and it is becoming, a more cosmopolitan society but for the most part among the great Han majority, as it is described in Chinese sociological and anthropological studies and policies in China, there is an attempt to make China very homogeneous. That, to some extent, requires minorities who are “other”, who are heterogeneous, and who must conform to a certain cultural standard if they are to belong to China. As long as that attitude persists, there must be an other, especially insofar as Muslims insist on differentiating themselves. And the Muslims in China who are not-other are the Muslims who have assimilated to the degree of losing their Islamic identity. So I think there must always be some degree of otherness as long as there are self-identified Muslims in China.

Islam in China: My last question, what future works are you thinking about?

James Frankel: I am contemplating my next major writing project, my next major research project. Perhaps a second book, which is basically the outgrowth of the work that I did on Rectifying God’s Name. It is to look at the parallel, the intertwined history of Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Chinese context. Recently, during my visit to New York, when I spoke to a group at local synagogue, I was talking about this very topic of Jews and Muslims and how they have assimilated in China and we noticed so many parallels, and not only parallels but also ways in which these two groups have influenced each other. We also see that the Christians were an integral player in this drama. One of the responses that I got from an audience member in this mostly Jewish audience was that she “never realized how similar we were.” She meant, or course, how similar Jews and Muslims are, and we can add Christians to that equation as well. And in the Chinese context perhaps it is easier to see in the stark relief of Chinese society. the relationship between Jews and Muslims than it is to see this relationship in the politically charged climate of the Israeli-Arab politics.

Explanation of terms:

[1] A Hadith is a saying of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)

[2] Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and Madina which is in present day Saudi Arabia.

[3] The Arabic or rather the pan-Islamic term for a scholar

Rectifying God’s Name

Here is the description of James’ new book from the University of Hawaii Press.

“Islam first arrived in China over 1,200 years ago, but for more than a millennium it was perceived as a foreign presence. The restoration of native Chinese rule by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), after nearly a century of Mongol domination, helped transform Chinese intellectual discourse on ideological, social, political, religious, and ethnic identity. This led to the creation of a burgeoning network of Sinicized Muslim scholars who wrote about Islam in classical Chinese and developed a body of literature known as the Han Kitab. Rectifying God’s Name examines the life and work of one of the most important of the Qing Chinese Muslim literati, Liu Zhi (ca. 1660–ca. 1730), and places his writings in their historical, cultural, social, and religio-philosophical contexts. His Tianfang dianli (Ritual law of Islam) represents the most systematic and sophisticated attempt within the Han Kitab corpus to harmonize Islam with Chinese thought.

The volume begins by situating Liu Zhi in the historical development of the Chinese Muslim intellectual tradition, examining his sources and influences as well as his legacy. Delving into the contents of Liu Zhi’s work, it focuses on his use of specific Chinese terms and concepts, their origins and meanings in Chinese thought, and their correspondence to Islamic principles. A close examination of the Tianfang dianli reveals Liu Zhi’s specific usage of the concept of Ritual as a common foundation of both Confucian morality and social order and Islamic piety. The challenge of expressing such concepts in a context devoid of any clear monotheistic principle tested the limits of his scholarship and linguistic finesse. Liu Zhi’s theological discussion in the Tianfang dianli engages not only the ancient Confucian tradition, but also Daoism, Buddhism, and even non-Chinese traditions. His methodology reveals an erudite and cosmopolitan scholar who synthesized diverse influences, from Sufism to Neo-Confucianism, and possibly even Jesuit and Jewish sources, into a body of work that was both steeped in tradition and, yet, exceedingly original, epitomizing the phenomenon of Chinese Muslim simultaneity.

A compelling and multidimensional study, Rectifying God’s Name will be eagerly welcomed by interested readers of Chinese and Islamic religious and social history, as well as by students and scholars of comparative religion.”

By Esther Reiser

Abstract
This paper explores the dynamics of Islamic education in China and the mobility it offers to female students, focusing on the Hui Minzu (Chinese Muslim ethnicity).  I  will first consider the history of the Hui and draw attention to the hybrid discourses of Islam and Confucianism that have shaped Muslim women’s self perception. I will then look at the nuanced character of the Nusi/Nuxe (traditional mosques and Madressas exclusively for women), and their modern manifestation of mosque education of Muslim communities-the Sino-Arabic School. The resurgence of interest in Islamic education in China since the 1980s has provided Hui women with greater opportunities in public leadership roles in both religious and secular domains and has given them more room for expressing their hybrid Chinese and Muslim identity .  This activism on the part of Hui is part of a trend of Islamic activism in the larger Muslim community and will provide a fascinating voice in transnational discussions on Muslim women’s rights.

“Ah! Muslim Sisters! Let us go out this door and purify ourselves in the light of the sun, release our life-energies, give our existence still greater meaning, and our life, splendour! Sisters, let us walk arm-in-arm!”- Lu Jiye and Wang Hailan “For Our Muslim Sisters.”

Globally, efforts have been made by Muslim women to create spaces for themselves and to challenge the highly patriarchal worldview upheld by much of the traditional corpus of classical Islamic law and Qur’anic exegesis, as well as contemporary efforts to uphold this status quo, both historically and now.  It is difficult not to make this statement without fear of playing into orientalist stereotypes, but to deny the highly patriarchal character of much of both traditional and modern Islamic scholarship is not only inaccurate, but does a great disservice to Muslim women’s activism. Exclusion from public religious practices and discourse leads Muslim women to develop their own religious spaces, paralleling those of men. As diverse as Muslim women are, religious outlets for women unsurprisingly vary greatly from community to community.

One such example is that of the women’s only mosques and seminaries, known as Nusi and Nuxe in Chinese. These spaces have been utilized by Chinese Muslim or Hui women for over three hundred years. Now although the presence of such establishments may lead the observer to claim, for whatever reason, that Muslim women in China are somehow more advanced in religious knowledge and suffer sexism less than women in other parts of the Islamic world, it must be said that this assumption is not entirely correct. Both Nusi and Nuxe have traditionally taught a very basic religious curriculum, emphasizing basic religious practice, the filial obligations of Muslim women and upholding patriarchal family and societal norms. However, as with other parts of the Islamic world, Chinese women have voiced opposition to male hegemony and, especially in the modern context, have fought to maintain their autonomy. This struggle coincides with the liberalization of Chinese legal policies restricting religious teaching and practice. The resurgence of interest in Islamic education in China since the 1980s has provided Hui women with greater opportunities in public leadership roles in both religious and secular domains and has given them more room for expressing their hybrid Chinese and Muslim identity. To establish this argument, I will analyze Hui history, religious scholarship and praxis.

The Hui People: Identity, Islam and Gender
Before delving into to the importance of Islamic education in Chinese Muslim communities, or considering how mosques function as organs of such knowledge, it is important  first to consider the history of Chinese Islam. Islam arrived in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-906 CE) with the arrival and settlement of Persian and Arab traders and subsequent intermarriage with Chinese women.  In the early periods of settlement, Chinese Muslims lived in isolated and insular communities, speaking Arabic and Persian and paying little attention to learning Chinese language or to greater intellectual currents. This dynamic would change significantly in the 17th century with the onset of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 CE), with its less than tolerant view of minority faiths and the decline of knowledge of Persian and Arabic due to the Sinoization  of Chinese Muslim communities.

This set of circumstances led to a movement within Chinese Islamic scholarship wherein Chinese language (as opposed to exclusively Arabic or Persian) was adopted and Neoconfusian concepts and idioms were used to explain religious dogma. This was a highly pragmatic shift: not only did this move present a vehicle to explain Islam to the populace, it also presented Islam as a religion that could exist within the Chinese cultural framework.   The choice was also  wise  for a religious minority fearing persecution from state powers. From the 17th century onward a distinctly Chinese Islamic, or Hui (hitherto referred to as such) identity developed.  Islamic concepts such as Tawhid (unity within monotheism) were likened to Neoconfusian concepts of Tao (way of path) and living in harmony with the natural world.  Similarities between Islamic and Neoconfusian social and family values,  with a shared stress on females refraining from sexual contact (Jie –purity in Chinese) and female subservience within a patriarchal family structure, were exploited.

Wang Daiyu, perhaps the foremost scholar in early Chinese Islam, followed the Confusion idea of sangang wuchang (Three Principals and Five Consents), which for women include segregation and sancong, obedience to the father, husband and son. Yet, even with such restrictions, women, as Muslims, were encouraged to study Islamic doctrine on the basis that it was zhengxue (with an attitude of complete humbleness and obedience to scripture) and, most pragmatically, to ensure children had an understanding of Islam.  The later scholar Liu Zhi took Wang’s restrictions a step further, describing women as having greater yin and being therefore morally debased compared to men. This notion of lesser moral status was used to justify the same Confusion-Islamic rhetoric that Wang has espoused earlier. Yet, using examples from exemplary female figures , Liu believed that women could overcome their debasement and even transcend the moral fortitude of men. This view is summarized in his maxim, “a man is a thousand times worthier than a woman but a virtuous woman is a thousand times worthier than a man.

Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun in the groundbreaking The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: a Mosque of Their Own credit these scholars’ beliefs with the necessity of Islamic education in the establishment of Nusi and Nuxe . Even with such limited parameters of expression, there have been noted female Hui scholars. One example is Sumingdashishi, a woman from a scholarly family who attracted much praise for her religious learning. Male scholars were also among her admirers, a fact which suggests that she had some contact with unrelated men. A meticulous scholar, she attained the title of nu junshi or female scholar. All this was before the advent of jingtang, or standardized religious learning, wherein women would find their scholarly pursuits curtailed.

For Hui communities, the center of the dissemination of religious teachings was the mosques. Mosques play a vital role in the resilience and revitalization of Hui communities.   Safeguarding knowledge being the key to communal survival, the Hui mosques across China became centers of Islamic learning. Started in the 16th century by the educator Hu Dengzhou , men training to become Ahongs (religious scholars and leaders) would receive a basic Qur’anic education; the more academically inclined would remain for a 12 year program in which Qur’an, Tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis), Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and philosophy would be taught.   This method, known as jingtang became the standard of Hui religious education . The most distinctive innovation of the Hui educational program was the establishment of mosques and madrassas (religious schools) for women only: mosques known as Nusi and madrassas known as Nuxe.  Marshallsay maintains that the development of these female-only learning centers was a product of pragmatism to ensure cultural survival;  however, Shui maintains that these learning centers had provided for women a space of religious autonomy, beyond the grasp of patriarchal legal and dogmatic interpretations, depending on the leadership and financial independence. Even with the traditional strong hold Ahongs may have had over Nusi/Nuxe curriculum, Hui woman have utilized this space as a platform to voice their agency and challenge patriarchal interpretations of Islamic doctrine.

Nusi, Nuxe and Nu Ahongs: the Traditional Face of Women’s Islamic Education in China

The very concept of women’s mosques has caught the eye of the present Muslim world, with some communities quickly imitating this process.  Some have hailed it as a progressive feature for women’s rights that developed remarkably on the fringe of the Islamic world. Others have questioned this interpretation, both from a feminist standpoint, where women’s mosques are dismissed as agents of male hegemony,  and also from a religious stand point; as Ingrid Matson points out, where women’s mosques are seen as causing social disruption (Fitnah in Arabic) by encouraging women to leave their homes, thereby becoming neglectful of filial obligations.  While I do not intend to explore the theological arguments for or against the women’s mosques in this paper, I have found strength in both arguments with respect to women’s mosques as centers of re-enforcing patriarchy, but also the possibility they can serve women’s interests in developing a female friendly space .

The  leadership of the Nusi/Nuxe comes under a female teacher known as a Nu Ahong (female Ahong-scholar).   How independent these teachers are from the male-controlled Mosques and their respective Ahongs varies depending on circumstances: single (divorced or widowed) Nu Ahong in independent Nusi has greater autonomy than Nu Ahong who are married to Ahong and teach in the Nusi/Nuxe connected to the main (male) mosques.   It is important to recall that, the tradition of the Nusi/Nuxe is old indeed, dating back to the 16th century, thanks to Hui scholarship that found it necessary to provide future Muslim youth with educated mothers.  In the past, in Nusi/Nuxe, women’s education was hardly comparable to the lengthy academic careers of their male peers. Women did not learn Arabic or any advanced Islamic doctrine. Instead, they studied what is known as the “woman’s Qur’an”, Persian text which is a collection of Qur’an and Hadith (prophetic traditions) which dealt mainly with basic Islamic rituals (especially involving purification) and home practice.  Women were also instructed  how to be proper wives and mothers and, if need be, provided with emotional and spiritual support by the Nu Ahong and other women in religious and family matters.

Still, it would be erroneous to paint the Nusi/Nuxe as purely agents of male hegemony. Historically, there have been examples of noteworthy Nu Ahong who not only challenged male scriptural interpretations, but who also served the larger Chinese community as political actors. One such example is Yang Huizhen, a Nu Ahong of a Nusi in the Henan province of central China. Committed to women’s rights, she preached an Islamic theology that called for female engagement in the public world.  Living through the long and bloody Japanese occupation of China, she was also very active in providing for families left destitute by war and famine: she made her Nusi into a make shift shelter and started soup kitchens. What is also noteworthy is that her activism knew no religious boundaries; Yang provided much needed assistance to members of both Hui and Han communities.  However, her actions were seen as nefarious by the male mosques leadership, who issued an edict that, by violating codes of gender segregation, she would have to be removed from her post. Yang was thereby ejected from her Nusi and replaced with a more compliant Nu Ahong.  It is important to bear in mind, however, that Nusi/Nuxe do provide women with some degree of education, and this traditional paradigm of religious education offers women in isolated agrarian parts of China some form of schooling, where government provisions for education leave much to be desired to this day.

As Jashok and Chan illustrate by their interview in the with a Nuxe pupil who claimed that, as a farmer, secular education was useless to her; Islamic education however, provided her with useful and illuminating knowledge on how to prepare for the next life.  More and more Nusi/Nuxe are also providing secular education as well as religious education, which although irrelevant for some farmers, do provide educational and work opportunities for young urban women.   Moreover, some Nusi and Nu Ahongs have come to be highly independent of male control. One example is the Beidajie Nusi in Zhengzhou, Henan province. The Nu Ahong of this Nusi, Du Shuzhen, is a fiercely independent woman whom, after becoming a widow at eighteen, refused to remarry and devoted her life to Qur’anic study, supporting herself as a seamstress. In this Nusi, Du Shuzen has trained eight Nu Ahong, who have taken up positions across the country, including urban areas with large Hui populations such as Xi’an. The Beidajie Nusi is independent of the local (male) Mosques. All funding comes either from communal donations, services the pupils provide such as washing the dead, or simply from Du’s personal income, generated by her sewing.  Changes have taken place in regards to the understanding of women’s education throughout China with the Hui communities being no exception. At this point we turn to the modern variant of Islamic education in China, the Sino-Arabic school, and what this means for the education of Hui Women.

The Sino-Arabic School and the New Frontier of Hui Women’s Education.
The 1980s saw an explosion in the supply and demand of Islamic education in China .  This was due to the immense change in the Chinese political landscape that was supposed to make up for wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution.  Another factor in the rise of Islamic education was the establishment of diplomatic ties and trade relations with predominantly Muslim countries, specifically the Gulf states.  This combination of pragmatism and liberalization of government policy has resulted in both a widespread trend in minority (including Hui) re-affirmation of identity  and in external funding for both Islamic schools and programs to study abroad. The funding for these schools comes principally from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan and Iran.

Even with the reputation these countries may have as Islamic ideological centers, the funding received is usually poor and most Hui look to their own communities for funding.  With the exceptions of Xianjiang and Qinghai (where the Chinese Government fears separatist activities), Sino-Arabic schools are usually overlooked by the Chinese government and sometimes welcomed as a financial break for the large education budget.   What exactly do these schools teach? Modernist movements in the Islamic world, according to Mazen Hashem, can be divided into roughly three catagories: the Salafi (Literalist) praxis  the Mathhabi (legalist) praxis  and the Eclectic praxis, which favors modernist reform and cultural relativism.  These pan-national trends in Islamic thinking are reflected in ideological debates found in Hui religious publications, and Sino-Arabic school curriculum.  Sino-Arabic school curriculum varies from isolationist, Saudi-inspired rhetoric that is limited to religious matters and Hui history and where only Arabic language is taught  , to modern schools and colleges that, in addition to religion, teach various secular subjects, including math, Chinese language, and Chinese history and computer sciences. The aim of the latter is to produce educated “Chinese Muslims” who can write University entrance exams and even travel abroad to study.

A retired principal of the Dali Muslim Culture College in Yunnan, points to the “student led” May Fourth Movement (Wusi Yundong) of 1911, with its espousal of nationalism and incorporation of material sciences as his schools guiding ideology. , and women’s rights is one of the main platforms.  The Hui were not exempt from this movement and advocacy for a “modernist” integrated Islam that promoted women’s education and continued well into the 1940’s. This period saw the birth g of  the Hui women’s journal Yisilan Funu Zazhi (Islamic Women’s Magazine), put out by the Shanghi Islamic Women’s Association. This magazine appealed to Hui nationalism by calling upon Hui woman to reclaim their rights as Muslim women, yet, following larger Chinese sentiment, spoke out forcefully against Japanese Imperialism . This ideological basis is significant, still what does this mean for Hui women in

Sino Arabic schools today ?
The answer depends on a number of factors. Location within China dictates whether or not schools will be segregated. In Yunnan, in the South of China, four out of twelve Sino-Arabic schools are girls only (the remaining eight are mainly male, but allow for female enrollment), whereas in Ningxia, in the conservative North, schools are mainly segregated. Yet, even in conservative areas just as Ningxia, these schools offer opportunities for women to pursue a public career within a cultural setting in which such an opportunity would otherwise be non-existent.   One such example is in the Northern city of Linxia, where an Ahong, Ma Zhixin, opened up a Sino-Arabic school for boys in the 1970’s and later girls in the 1980’s. The girls’ school was later put under the control of his daughter, Ma Xiulan, who expanded the school and even launched from it a Muslim women’s quarterly journal.

As Alle, points out, the formation of all female schools in this region is notable, for there is not a strong Nusi/Nuxe tradition here and Islamic (and Confucian) ideals of female segregation are still staunchly upheld.  With the Cultural Revolution era closure of all same sex schools, Northern Hui women’s literacy rates were, to quote Michael Dillon, “severely affected .”  The lift on same sex schools and a shared focus on secular and Islamic learning opens up doors for Hui women of Northern China, granting them a modern education while respecting the cultural sensitivities.  In less conservative areas, such as South/Central China and the major cities, women in Sino-Arabic schools are trained in secular subjects and often do enroll at secular universities in various fields. Furthermore, many female graduates of these schools even travel overseas to study . This feat is quite remarkable, for the travel of young and unmarried women is equally contradictory to Islamic and Neo-Confucian traditions, as both place high priority on women’s filial obligations.

Travel to other parts of the world, Islamic or otherwise, also opens up young Hui women to global discourses on Islam, gender and human rights, and likewise, enables them to share the Chinese experience of said ideas. With the current multitude of Islamic praxis through the Islamic world, including a rapidly growing Islamic feminist movement, it is critical to broach the subject of how such ideological trends will influence the next generation of Hui women. Perhaps most importantly, Sino-Arabic schools present Hui girls with an atmosphere in which they can learn and be comfortable within their own identity. As one young student remarks of her experiences in a state run school: “If you are a Muslim, you come to school in a headscarf . . . everyone will . . . tease you by saying ‘disgusting, in a head scarf!’ So nobody (wears it), all of us care for face (ai mianzi) . . . Muslims themselves will also certainly say so: ‘what? Wearing a headscarf in the school, in the classroom? Are you mad?”  Sino-Arabic schools give young girls (and boys) a sense of pride and solidarity in there ethno-religious identity.

Gender Inclusion or Gender Exclusion? Looking at Islamic Education Critically
Although Hui women often boast that, unlike Han (Chinese) women, they have a lengthy history of education and therefore more rights,  when compared to the religious education of men, Hui women still face gendered discrepancy: the traditional curricula  upholds a patriarchal Weltanschauung . As Shui points out, religion is something very much looked down upon is contemporary China: it is often dismissed as foolhardy and “superstitious” . Following this rationale, any womens ’ religious activism would only re-affirm antiquated patriarchal status quo. Women of faith (including the Hui) in China face a patriarchal double bind: they are constrained by sexist attitudes in the larger cultural context as well as sexist interpretations of faith. Although a supporter of the establishment of reformist Nusi and Islamic education, Shui admits that tradition plays a large role in the operation of many Nusi, which upholds a patriarchal status quo.

Financial concerns also play into concerns about the future of Nusis and Nu Ahongs. As Nu Ahong Sun Chengying states, the pay for a Nu Ahong is extremely low. Sun blames this for the fact she has not had new students for six years. Most young women look toward more affluent careers which they can provide better support for their families. An argument could be made from this assertion that the existence of the Nusi/Nuxe does more harm than good. As long as they are split off into separate communities, Ahongs will always be privileged in both Hui and the larger Chinese society simply by virtue of being men.

Although Islamic education could be looked to as one possible area, this presents points for concern as well. As Deniz Kandiyoti and Nadira Azimova state in their study on Uzbek women and their relationship with Islam after the fall of the communist government, women saw their role of preserving religion in the domestic sphere and in informal (and illegal) religious gatherings usurped by the again powerful male religious authority. This re-emergent ‘ulama (scholarly class) espoused a more orthodox religious praxis, and often denounced women’s religious practice as heretical, as they are not grounded in textual modes of worship. Women who attended these male dominated madrassas were exposed to a heavily andocentric religious doctrine. Even if sufficiently educated, they would not be considered equal to men in traditional Islamic jurisprudence.

The situation in Uzbekistan makes for an interesting parallel with that of China: both countries have experienced recent periods of political liberalization surrounding religion, and both have experienced popular movements by Muslims to re-discover their religious past.  When considering Hashem’s analysis of the financial resourcefulness and globalizing tendencies of traditional and literalist Islamist movements that are highly patriarchal,  it is clear that there is validity to the concern that the growth of Islamic education in China may, by  and large, not present Hui women with a new reading of Islamic texts, but may only serve to re-enforce a patriarchal reading of Islam, and reduce the Nusi/Nuxe to a heretical fringe movement, thereby robbing Hui women of their religious autonomy .

Conclusion
Islamic education in China has a very real potential to improve the lives of Hui women. It offers educational opportunities that have been often denied, either due to extreme poverty, life styles, poor government policy or a combination of all three. It is too soon to tell if the  direction Islamic education will ultimately take in China with the greater funding and the passing of time will be, or what the implications will be for Hui women. Yet, as examples of educated Hui women moving into the career world and traveling abroad show, greater opportunities through Islamic education are already being realized. The  actions of Chinese Muslim or Hui women in pursuing modern education and greater social mobility, while maintaining both their Chinese and Muslim identity in an often hostile Communist environment, is an example of what Meena Sharify-Funk calls “negotiating the self-other” : maintaining multiple identities (women, Chinese, Muslim) and negotiating the place they have in their lives. Sharify-Funk goes on to describe the transnational character of  “othering,” or diminishing all identity and agency of Muslim women to a set of pre-conceived notions, from both within, and without, the global Muslim community.

Historically, Muslim women had little chance to define themselves (at least in broader social terms) and were defined my either the male ‘ulama class or the male colonialist. Modern Muslim women’s activism represents a break with this precedent, allowing women to voice their own identities and develop an Islamic hermeneutic that is more reflective of women’s experiences.   It is easy to see how this rhetoric applies to Hui women, who face discrimination as Muslim women, both within the religious framework and in the larger society: in the religious context they are relegated to secondary leadership roles, where as in the larger Han context, they are dismissed as “irrational” religious women or “backward” minorities. The question remains, how will (or can) Islamic education remedy this?

In her memoir A Border Passage: From Cairo to America–a Woman’s Journey, Leila Ahmed explores the power of male hegemony in Islamic societies and how, traditionally, women, owing both to wide spread illiteracy and personal choice, drew upon their own understandings of Islam, what Ahmed calls “women’s Islam”, to navigate their beliefs and practices.  Widespread literacy, Ahmed maintains, is both a blessing and curse, as it does open up women to wider opportunities in scholarship and employment, yet it also diminishes their spiritual autonomy, that female- centric religious space and rituals offer.

For Hui women, at least, the Nusi/Nuxe serves this purpose of an independent space, especially as modern Nusis become more robust and independent of men’s mosques.  Although one may think that these Sino-Arabic schools limit Hui women and girls religious agency by exposing them to male hegemony directly, it is important to remember how Sino-Arabic schools have either been inspired by,  or sources of, Hui women’s publications  and have presented Hui women exposure to global Islamic currents and debates, including those on matters of gender. The voice of the Hui woman, both as a Muslim and as a Chinese citizen, is rising. As women-only mosques are springing up in other parts of the world, the question is, what further influence will this voice have and how will it will be implemented and articulated .

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About the Author: Esther Reiser is a fourth year religious studies student considering the possibility of Graduate school. She has various interests in Chinese Islam, especially the modernist movements, the Xidaotang and the Yihewani, with particular interest in the Salafi turned nationalist reformer Hu Songshan. Esther visited China when she was seven years old, and judging by her interests, a part of her never left.

Image Source: Anne Darling Photography

Q: You have written about and also done a photo book on Muslim women in China. How did that project come about?
Anne: While I was still living in the UK I came across a newspaper article about a nu ahong, the Chinese Mandarin term for a female imam. She was living and working in Ningxia in the Central Mosque of Wuzhong. Her husband was also an ahong and he ministered to the spiritual needs of the men while she ministered of the spiritual needs of the women.

I was fascinated by the story and determined that when I was in China I would try to visit her and make some photographs. I was lucky enough to spend 8 days in Wuzhong. Yan and her husband Tian were delightful people and very hospitable, and I am very grateful for the time spent with Yan and her friends and congregation.

I also spent several weeks in Gansu Province where I met many more Muslim women and nu ahong and realised I had enough material for a book. I approached one or two publishers including Saudi Aramco World, with my proposal and had 19 of my photographs published in their global magazine. They also published some of them online at: Link

I have published the rest of the photographs myself as a print-on-demand book. There is an intro to the book and a link to a preview on my website at: Link

No doubt being a woman helped me to get access to the all-female mosques I visited! This would not have been possible for a male photographer. I was also very lucky to meet a man who was an Islamic scholar and he gave me many contacts and introduced me to my interpreter in Lanzhou, Aisha, who was invaluable to me as my Mandarin is very limited!

Q:  What is the primary focus of your work i.e., not just limited to Chinese Muslims but with respect to your work in general?
Anne: My work is very varied. I love documentary photography but there are fewer outlets today for documentary stories as the magazine market has changed drastically due mostly to the internet. I also love travel photography, macro photography and making photo montages. I have exhibited extensively and I am currently showing 18 macro flower photographs at Le Pictorium Gallery in Jonzac, France. If any of your readers live in France, they are very welcome to come to the private view of the 15th April – it starts at 5pm. Otherwise the exhibition is on for two months, until the end of May.

Q: Nu ahong and all female mosques are a unique Chinese Muslim phenomenon, what roles do nu ahong play in the hui culture?
Anne: Whether or not an all-female mosque is built within a given community, depends on the needs and wishes of the local Muslim people. I visited a mosque in Lanzhou in Gansu Province for example which is financially self-sufficient from its male counterpart nearby as it is supported by donations from the local people. You can see some of the photos here: Link

But other mosques may just have a separate room in which women pray or simply a curtained-off area, and the mosque may or may not employ a nu ahong.

So the precise role of a nu ahong varies from mosque to mosque. It is a position that offers a measure of security and high community status, and a nu ahong most often plays a very full role in the life of her local community. In addition to presiding over nu si (women’s mosques) a nu ahong’s duties include ritual guidance at marriages and funerals, preaching, resolving political and social disputes, and offering moral guidance and counseling. She also acts as educator, a role which is highly valued within Islam.

There are many schools for hui woman and girls and they are often attached to mosques and run and financed by the hui people themselves. Some help women with illiteracy, others teach the Arabic and the Qu’ran, and still others give girls from disadvantaged backgrounds a basic education that enables them to teach themselves or even to go on to university. This aspect of hui society has been instrumental in keeping Islam alive in China.

Education for a girl in China may be her route out of poverty. In the past, the high illiteracy rate among women in China meant that most Muslim women had to stay at home as they had no opportunities to receive education or join in a broader social life. Now young people are learning Arabic as part of their religious instruction and this increases their chances of finding a job in the private sector as a translator or interpreter in the blossoming Mideast-China trade where they can earn very good salaries.

It should be noted that nu ahong do not lead prayers and that when attending the mosque they are not allowed to stand in front of the women but take their place among them. The prayers are piped through on a loud speaker from the men’s mosque nearby, even in financially self-supporting mosques. Because of this, some men will argue that the role of nu ahong within the hui community is not as powerful as that of their male counterpart, however, from what I have said above it is clear that their role within society is an extremely important one where they have the opportunity to shape society according to the ideals of Islam.

Q: Can you comment on the relationship between the nu ahong and the Chinese non-Muslim community?
Anne: When I was working in Ningxia, my interpreter was han Chinese and although a well-educated man, he had little first-hand knowledge of the hui people. This reflects the fact that the hui community is a little isolated from the rest of the society they live in but this may just be my limited experience. China is officially atheist so I think the majority of Chinese people are just not interested in the hui people who they see as being ‘religious’. So there is a bit of a divide but I don’t think it is in any way antagonistic. The Muslim community lives alongside the rest of the Chinese population in peaceable co-existence.

For the nu ahong, I think the same thing goes. Plus they live very much for their job. Ding Gui Zhi is the nu ahong at Lu Lan Women’s Mosque and her whole life is devoted to her work and because she lives at the mosque, she doesn’t get much time to socialise with han Chinese. All the nu ahong I spoke to consider their job highly important and want to give themselves to it as fully as possible. And they are busy women! So not much time left over after work unless it’s for their family.

China is a land where 56 minorities co-exist, generally very peaceably so overall I don’t think there are any problems. The problems that exist with the uighar Muslims is a totally different issue as they are seeking independence, an issue which unsettles the Chinese government. The hui people, as you know, are not descended from the uighurs and lead quite separate lives from them as well.

Q: Your work on nu ahong cuts across two stereotypes regarding Muslims i.e., Muslims as being mostly Middle Eastern and Muslim women as being subservient. Can you comment on the depiction of Muslims and your interaction with Muslims in China?
Anne: I have written at length on the subject of the media’s depiction of Muslim women and their clothing in an article on my website: Link

It is an interesting and potentially lengthy debate! I will say though that in China, I never met any Muslim woman who felt repressed or subservient. One nu ahong I met lives with her husband who is a successful businessman. She doesn’t have to work for financial gain but does so because she knows her job is important. Her husband doesn’t make her stay at home as we in the west might suppose, he supports her wishes and she feels free to do that which she loves which is support and guide the women in her community.

Q: What can the rest of the world learn from Chinese Muslims?
Anne: Photographs have the power to show us life as it is lived by other people and these same photos can help to dissolve stereotypes we hold about other cultures. So it is my hope that my photographs contribute in some small way to changing peoples’ views. How they will be changed is for them to say, not me!

Visit me at: www.annedarlingphotography.com

China’s Nu Ahong’s

(Image Source: Anne Darling) Click on the images for a larger view

Image Description from Anne: The first two photos show the nu ahong, Ding Gui Zhi, in her sitting room. The second photo shows her surrounded by wall hangings with sayings from the Qu’ran. She only has one other room at the mosque which is her bedroom. She lives in these two rooms. The third photo shows the exterior of the prayer room which is on the first floor of the mosque. The final photo shows a glimpse into the prayer room and some of the women are in prayer. This was a quiet night as there can be over 100 women in the prayer room on a busy night such as a Friday.

Here is a list of some books related to Islam in China and or Muslims in China. Please feel free to suggest books if something is not in this list.

1. Atwill, David G., The Chinese sultanate: Islam, ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in southwest China, 1856-1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
2. Ben-Dor Benite, Zvi,  The dao of Muhammad : a cultural history of Muslims in late imperial China (Cambridge: Published by the Harvard University Asia Center ; dist. by Harvard University Press, 2005)
3. Dillon, Michael, China’s Muslim Hui community: migration, settlement and sects ( Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999)
4. Gladney, Dru C., Muslim Chinese: ethnic nationalism in the People’s Republic (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University: dist. by Harvard University Press, 2nd ed. 1996)
5. Israeli, Raphael, with the assistance of Lyn Gorman, Islam in China: a critical bibliography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994)
6. Israeli, Raphael, The cross battles the crescent: one century of missionary work among Chinese Muslims (1850-1950), Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (1995), 203-221.
7. Jaschok, Maria, and Shui Jingjun, The history of women’s mosques in Chinese Islam: a mosque of their own (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000)
8. The Legacy of Islam in China : an international symposium in memory of Joseph F. Fletcher, Harvard University, 14-16 April 1989 / sponsored by the John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies & the Andrew D. [sic] Mellon Foundation.
9. Leslie, Donald, The integration of religious minorities in China: the case of Chinese Muslims (Canberra: Australian National University, 1998)
10. Leslie, Donald, Islamic literature in Chinese, late Ming and early Ching: books, authors, and associates (Belconnen: Canberra College of Advanced Education, 1981)
11. Lipman, Jonathan, Familiar strangers: a history of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997)
12. Wang, Jianping, Concord and conflict : the Hui communities of Yunnan society in a historical perspective (Stockholm : Almqvist & Wiksell, 1996)
13. Wang, Jianping, Glossary of Chinese Islamic terms (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press on behalf of Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2001)
14. Xinjiang : China’s Muslim borderland, ed by  S. Frederick Starr ( Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2004 )

According to figures from the Chinese census on the order of 2% of the population of the People’s Republic of China is likely to be Muslim in their religious identity. 2% may seem like a trivial fraction, but that number is between 20 and 30 million people. In other words if the Muslims of China were their own nation they would be as populous as Iraq. And though Muslims are a very small minority of the Chinese population, approximately 1/4 of the area of China is likely dominated by those adhering to Islam. This is due to the fact that the Turkic majority province of Xinjiang is so expansive in relation to the rest of the China. But the Muslims of China are not an undifferentiated mass; rather they can be divided into two broad classes, those who are part of the Turkic cultural world, mostly Uighur, and those of the Chinese world, the Hui.

Image by Wlodek Cieciura

Though the Uighur are fascinating in their own right, it is the Hui that I wish to focus on. Xinjiang, the “New Territories,” were conquered by the Manchus two centuries ago, and administered as a personal domain of the dynasty which was distinct from China for much of that period. An analogy to a colonized people is very appropriate for the Uighur, for though they have long resided on the margins of the world of China, they have not been of that world. The Hui in contrast are of China, as they speak the dialect of whatever region of China in which they reside, and in general resemble the Han Chinese majority physically. In fact Hui auxiliaries played a role in pacifying Xinjiang and serving as intermediaries between the central government and the local Turkic Muslim population. In China the Hui were distinctive because of their Islamic religion, but in Central Asia they were, and are, notable for their Chinese culture (they are called Dungans in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia).

Though China is notable for its relative isolation from the other civilizations of the world until recently, the presence of Muslims likely dates to only few decades at the latest after the rise of Islam itself. During the Tang dynasty, which peaked in the 8th century, Western religions such as Manicheanism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam arrived in China. It seems possible that the Jewish community of Kaifeng, now absorbed into the Han or Hui populations, dates from this period as well. While Western traders moved along the Silk Road and settled in Xi’an, there was also a notable colony of Arab traders in the south in Guangzhou. Though Muslims were noted as presences in the cities of China during the Tang and the subsequent Song dynasties, it seems likely that the permanent nature of the community was established during the Mongol Yuan dynasty, who promoted many Central Asian Muslims into positions of power in China proper and recruited Muslims to staff the bureaucracy and serve in the army. It seems likely that Muslim openness to professions which the Han traditionally disdained, such as the military and mercantile sector, played a role in their dispersion to various regions of China. Several prominent generals during the Ming dynasty were Muslim, as was the famous explorer Zheng He.

While the presence of Muslims is clear from the textual and physical records during the Tang and Song dynasties, after the Yuan Mongol interlude Muslims are much more prominent. The aforementioned Jews of Kaifeng expended a great deal of effort at distinguishing themselves from the Hui, because the Han Chinese naturally observed the similarities of their religion to that of the Hui (the remnants of the Kaifeng Jewish community who were absorbed into the Hui often wear a black cap instead of a white one to prayer to signify their origins). Today the Hui are the generally the most numerous minority in areas where the Han are the majority. Though to outsiders they are not distinguishable from the Han physically and they speak Chinese dialects the People’s Republic classifies the Hui as a National Minority, and not as Han who happen to be of the Muslim religion. In other words a Hui who is an avowed atheist is still a Hui, a Han who converts to Islam becomes a Hui, while a Han who converts to Christianity remains a Han. Because of benefits conferred to National Minorities some assimilated groups of Han in China whose ancestors were likely Hui have attempted to reclaim the identity purely on ethnic grounds (as they do they not maintain any Islamic religious identity). The idea that Hui are always Hui is a modern fiction, insofar as genealogically it is almost certain that most Han have some Hui ancestry within the past 500 years.

Because of the demands of Islamic orthopraxy, most notably the ban on the consumption of pork, there are obvious barriers between the Hui and the Han. But a population resident in China or centuries, speaking the Chinese language, trading with and living amongst the Han, is certainly going to be influenced by the dominant culture. In fact by the very physical appearance of the Hui it is clear that even if their forefathers were Arabs, Persians and Turks, Han women married into the community generation after generation, and so brought with them their own cultural presuppositions. Books like the Dao of Muhammad recount the influence which Chinese high culture had upon the Islamic intellectual class in China. Unlike in Africa or among the Turks, Muslims confronted in the Chinese a high culture of great antiquity which was confident in its own claims of access to ultimate truth. Unlike South and Southeast Asia Muslims did not come to China with military power or mercantile connections which gave them advantages over the native population. The Chinese had often considered the outside world superfluous, a trivial detail to be ignored in the ideal. As a small minority the Muslims had to engage with the majority on their terms, so they integrated Chinese metaphysical concepts into their theology and sketched out exactly how Islam complemented the traditions of China. These early modern scholars had Christian analogs, during the late Ming and early Ching period there was an attempt by Jesuits to convert elite Chinese to Roman Catholicism by reframing their religion as a complement to the secular principles elucidated within Confucianism. This accommodation was stillborn due to the infamous Rites Controversy which precipitated the banning of Christian missionaries in China in the early 18th century.

But Islam does not have such a centralized institutional framework as Roman Catholicism, and the relative isolation of China from other centers of the Muslim world meant there was little outside sanction to innovation. It was in this manner that Islam could develop with Chinese characteristics. In Islam in China: Religion, Culture, and Politics, several essays explore the peculiar cultural terrain that the Hui traversed in their status as fundamentally Chinese and yet orthodox Muslims. Frictions between the Manchu ruling class of China, the Hui minority and the Han majority came to a head in the 19th century and resulted in several massive Muslim rebellions in the northwest and southwest. Though the Muslim specialization in martial professions served them in good stead, the reality of numbers took their toll and these uprisings were defeated. Concomitant with the religious conflict a series of reformist impulses were moving through the Muslim community, likely enabled in part by greater ease of communication with other Muslim communities. And yet despite this shift toward world-normative orthodoxy and the decline of the project to integrate Islam into a Chinese Confucian framework, Muslim movements often had to make recourse to Daoist inflected imagery and metaphor in their exhortations to rebellion. This can be understood in light of various religious secret societies, often Daoist and Buddhist, in fomenting uprisings against the political status quo throughout Chinese history, often in concert with peasant unrest. It stands to reason that as Chinese rebels the Hui would attempt to leverage apocalyptic rhetoric which their audience would be familiar with. But this fact goes a long way to suggesting how indigenized the Islamic identity of the Hui had become, during a phase of reform and shift toward world-normative Islamic belief and practice combined with greater consciousness of their distinctiveness due political mobilization, they still existed within a Chinese framework, and had to appeal to Chinese motifs as a means toward achieving the ends of the Muslim community.

Again I believe the special and very distinctive history of Chinese Muslims by the 19th century must be reaffirmed. There is one school of thought which contends that Muslims have an obligation to emigrate if a non-Muslim power conquers the territory on which they live. This was the reason that a mass migration of Muslims from the former Ottoman lands north of the Black Sea occurred in the 18th century after the Russian conquests under Catherine the Great. Of course another school of thought is that Muslims may reside in non-Muslim lands so long as they can practice their religion freely, and those Muslims who remained after the Russian conquest appealed to this tradition and extended it. During the time of the Muslim rebellions in China India was ruled by the British East India Company, but the Mughal Emperor remained a figurehead, a nod to the fact that Muslims were by rights still the notional ruling caste on the Subcontinent. The fact that the secular Muhammad Ali Jinnah succeeded in creating a separate Muslim homeland out of British India is a testament to the numbers of South Asian Muslims, but also to the unpalatability of the inevitably dominant political position of non-Muslims in a united India to the Muslim upper classes. In much of Africa Muslims might have been the minority, but they were culturally and economically dominant. Even in areas where Muslims have been under the colonial rule of non-Muslims for generations, such as in Java, their religion received due deference. The Dutch even facilitated the final conversion of the Hindu kingdoms of East Java to Islam in their wars against Bali. In the 19th century the Muslims of China were sui generis. Their ancestors had emigrated to a land ruled by non-Muslims, never ruled by Muslims, and with little prospect that Muslims could ever come to power. Though during the initial centuries Muslims seem to have played a conventional role as merchants, after the Yuan, and into the Ming and Ching dynasties, Muslims served the Emperors of China as soldiers and diplomats. They were not simply strangers in the land, but they were of the land, and furthering the interests of the Chinese state in their lives.

In such a way I believe the Chinese Muslims can serve as a model to Muslims around the world who are minorities, and who are making the transition from being in nations to being of nations. Intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan are simply treading on the same ground Wang Daiyu and Liu Zhi did long ago, another instance of “it happened in China first.” Naturally the outcome will be different because Ramadan is a man of the West, and specifically the French intellectual world, which different tools and goals. But the principle is the same. Not only do Chinese Muslims serve as a model for how to exist within a plural society where Islam is not dominant, but it seems likely that within the next generation China will become the largest economy in the world and begin to reassert its conventional position as the preeminent power on this planet. Western Muslims are wont to assert that they have much to teach as members of the most dynamic contemporary societies, but it may be that in the 21st century Islam will start looking to the Far East. As Chinese geopolitical interests spread to the Middle East it would seem likely that just as Hui aided the expansion of the Manchu into Turkic Central Asia, so they would serve as intermediaries between Muslim nations and the Chinese government. Before the Asian Flu of the late 1990s Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed had given signals that perhaps the new developments in Islam would come from Southeast Asia. But while the economies of ASEAN are relatively quiescent China is a relative dynamo, and it will be interesting to see what changes are wrought among its Muslims, and these these Muslims might eventually shape the nature of the conversation in the Muslim world as a whole.

About the Author: Razib Khan is an American blogger who blogs at Gene Expression.

Image Credits: Umar Jaspal

While other provinces and regions may not have that many Muslims but Muslims are nonetheless found in all parts of China. One of the reasons is because traditionally Muslims were involved in trade in China.

Brief Bio: Wang Daiyu is a doctoral student and the editor of the Islam in China webzine. He also maintains the blog Islam and China.