Islam in China

Poceski, Mario. Introducing Chinese Religions. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. Also available in an e-book format, as Chinese Religions: The eBook (published by JBE Online Books), and in a Portuguese translation: Introdução às religiões chinesas, published by Fundação Editora da UNESP, Brazil, 2013.

Generations of Chinese Muslims believe that the Ming emperors, starting with its founder Zhu Yuan-Zhang, were Muslims. Using historical facts and artifacts, this presentation discusses the evidence gathered by a few researchers. The influence of the Ming emperors conclusively multiplied the Muslim population and improved their life in China through integration on the one hand and

Although Hanafism historically was, and remains, the largest school of legio-ritual thought (madhhab) in Islam by number of followers, it has not garnered as much attention in the occidental academe as it's lesser adhered to counterpart Sunni schools of thought.  Amongst contemporary Hanafis there is a debate, which recently emerged about what actually was the ‘true’ early Hanafi legal theory (usul al-fiqh) that was espoused by the eponymous Abu Hanifa (699-767 C.E). A pair of British Hanafis wrote Hanafi Principles of Testing Hadith to repudiate contemporaneous Hanafis who allegedly adopted hadith criticism methods from the Shafi’i school (Shukurov 2015). Meanwhile, the accused textualist Ḥanafīs said regarding the book Hanafi Principles of Testing Hadith, “The only thing worthwhile in the book is its binding and the quality of paper used” (Cheema 2016). These polemics are both engaging in ritual critique demonstrating not only the heterogeneity of Hanafism but also how a legio-ritual school in Islam is a series on continuing debates between various Muslim scholars. Hanafism emerged out of early debates between, the Ahl al-Hadith (AH) and the Ahl al-Ra`y (AR). Abu Hanifa, like his teachers, was from the Kufan camp of the AR. This historiographical secondary literature review aims to give a broad history of the madhhab from its inception to contemporary times with an emphasis on ritual theory, ritual practice, the various strains of Hanafi doctrine, and their genealogies. In the terms of ritual studies, ritual theory is the “myth,” or way of explaining why the ritual practice should take place (Dudgeon 2019, 90-92).

China’s dazzling infrastructure and energy-driven Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a US$1 trillion investment across Eurasia and beyond, has lost its shine. Increasingly, China’s leveraging of the initiative is being perceived by a growing number of recipients and critics alike as a geopolitical power play, a tool to shape a new world order partly populated by autocrats and authoritarians, and progressively characterized by intrusive surveillance, potential debt traps, and perceived as a self-serving way to address domestic overcapacity

[From the introduction].
The Reb gong Vale  is a densely populated high-altitude agricultural oasis that runs north-to-south for approximately twenty kilometers through the northeastern Tibetan Plateau, surrounded by barren pastoral hills that rise to rocky snow-capped peaks. The majority of the vale's residents self-identify as Tibetan, but this population contains considerable diversity along religious, sectarian, and linguistic lines. We explore how the linguistic diversity of the region might have been maintained despite communities sharing a common identity, being engaged in inter-communal ritual networks, sharing common trade and pilgrimage sites, and living in close proximity in the absence of geographical barriers. Given their contiguity and interconnectedness, what enabled certain communities to remain distinct from nearby populations? Under such circumstances, how did relatively small communities maintain distinct languages? What prevented them from being linguistically assimilated into the Tibetan population?

Округ Алтай находится в северной части Синьцзян-Уйгурского
автономного района Китайской Народной Республики. Рус-
ские старообрядцы из Российской империи и Советского Союза
жили в этом округе в деревнях вокруг озера Канас с середины
XIX в. до 1960-х гг. Большинство из них являлись старообрядца-
ми часовенного и спасовского согласий1.
Богатый природными ресурсами, округ Алтай привлекал
внимание Советского Союза, США, Англии, Японии и ряда дру-
гих стран. Вместе с тем округ был постоянным полем сражения
коренных этносов за национальную независимость.
Русские казаки-белоэмигранты играли важную роль в воен-
ном противостоянии в Синьцзяне в первой половине ХХ в. Об их
мобилизации опубликовано много исследований. История же во-
енной мобилизации русских старообрядцев в Синьцзяне изучена
крайне мало, несмотря на то что старообрядцы этого округа тоже
принимали участие в военных действиях в 1933 и 1940-х гг.
Цель статьи – опираясь на изученную литературу и новые
интервью со старообрядцами, показать, как Китайская Республика
(правительство Гоминьдана), Восточно-Туркестанская Республика,
Советский Союз, Соединенные Штаты Америки и
Китайская Народная Республика мобилизовали русских старо-
обрядцев и как они участвовали в войнах в округе Алтай в 1933
и 1940-х гг.

Hai Weiliang a.k.a. Badr al-Din (Hayy) al-Sini (1912–?), a Chinese Muslim from rural Hunan, led a deeply transnational life. Hai was the only Chinese Muslim known to have studied in both India and Egypt in the modern period, spending considerable time at the Nadwat al-‘Ulama in Lucknow and al-Azhar in Cairo. After Chinese, he learned four more languages in two decades: Arabic, Urdu, English, and Persian. While the Second World War transformed him into a Guomindang diplomat, his time at the Nadwa and al-Azhar in the 1930s was largely devoted to questions of Islamic unity. Hai first pursued these questions in a doctrinal mode informed by Salafi currents, then in a political mode influenced by his translation of Iqbal’s “Allahabad address.” His move to Cairo brought him closer to the network of al-Fath and its editor Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, a strong voice on behalf of Islamic unity, but geopolitics soon intervened. Disillusioned by the failure of the East Turkistan Republic, Hai coped by turning toward a cultural-historical mode of imagining Islamic unity, one that required no immediate political action. The eventual result was his Arabic-language opus, Relations between the Arabs and China (1950). Overall, Hai’s story defies both Sino-centric and Arabo-centric understandings of Chinese Islam, showing that early-twentieth-century Chinese Islam can be used to write a highly integrated history of the modern Islamic world. To that end, this article contrasts Hai’s numerous Arabic and Chinese writings to show how he embodied the tensions between national and transnational community felt across the Islamic world during this period.

Islam in World Cultures gathers the work of ten eminent scholars, each of whom has expertise in the Muslim culture of a particular country or geographical area. Individual chapters explore contemporary developments in the Islamic experience in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Central Asia, China, Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the United States. This broad treatment provides an introduction to the full range of issues relating to Islam in the context of globalization.

Highlights
Of use to the general reader seeking a broad introduction to modern Islam
More than just an examination of a set of religious beliefs, this work emphasizes the social dynamics of both majority and minority Islamic cultures
A glossary of key terms, with emphasis on comparative usage and how common terms differ in definition from place to place

Economic growth and private sector development have been sluggish in China’s western regions, where ethnic minorities make up a sizeable part of the population. In the northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the state maintains a steady presence in the small but growing urban private sector, largely populated by Han-owned firms and entrepreneurs. A small group of minority Uyghur entrepreneurs have positioned themselves in markets where they hold a cultural and linguistic advantage, particularly in trade with neighbouring Central Asia and the production of Muslim foods. However, clustering in similar industries and markets limits the growth of Uyghur businesses in the private sector where they have little presence. To understand how these new entrepreneurs adapt to this environment, and their move toward ‘modern’ business practices, this thesis analyses the characteristics of Uyghur entrepreneurs and their role as ‘agents of development’ in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi.

Since the institution of China’s national economic reforms, Uyghurs have progressively engaged in traditional merchant and ‘bazaar’ economic activities, generally outside the registered, firm-type private sector. In Urumqi, the majority of new Uyghur entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in operating firms by a lack of management experience, skilled employees and start-up capital, so that they primarily rely on resources within the Uyghur community for support. Entrepreneurs who seek to modernise their business and ‘break out’ of traditional Uyghur market niches tend to broaden their networks outside the Uyghur ethnic group. Social networks with larger Han firms and government officials allow better access to resources and financing for Uyghur entrepreneurs. In this way, the shift to ‘modern’ business practices entails cooperation and networking with the majority Han, rather than within the Uyghur community alone.

This thesis presents Urumqi’s Uyghur entrepreneurs, traditionally operating on the fringe of the private sector, as agents of social change through business modernisation and cooperation with Han. In Xinjiang, where economic development is often conflated with the state and increasing numbers of Han migrants, Uyghur entrepreneurs are engaging in the market and contributing to the development of Uyghur society as a whole. This thesis demonstrates how these new entrepreneurs integrate into the Han-dominated private sector and thus participate in development in Xinjiang.

This study aims to analyze the ethnic dilemma in the Pamir region, or Badakh Mountains of the Badakhshan region, that became the reason for the call of independence of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region from Tajikistan. This paper also examines the socio-political linkages among the various Pamiri groups in Badakhshan Region. Likewise, the impact of a declaration of independence by Gorno-Badakhshann region on Pamiri ethnic groups in other geographically linked countries, especially in Gilgit- Baltistan is also highlighted in this study.

The dichotomy between China’s claim to respect, protect and promote Tibetan culture in the education system and its actual practice of alienating Tibetans from their linguistic and cultural heritage and identity through a vigorous imposition of Chinese curricula under its Han-Chinese nationalist agenda has only resulted in a failure to achieve the kind of domination it seeks over the Tibetan people.

"Like all multi-lingual computing, Arabic computing is now firmly in the domain of Unicode. Unicode is an industrial protocol with the status of international agreement. It is designed to encode the elements of all known script systems in such a way that they become interchangeable between programs and operating systems. Its implementation is well underway.

Unicode eliminates the need to tamper with fonts to get special characters, but it is not a font. For legible text on screen and paper, Unicode depends on compatible fonts with the required characters, where necessary with additional dedicated font technology."

The Chinese provinces are a crazy patchwork quilt of languages and dialects, where the histories of migrations and cultural enclaves, the tides of influence from empire and commerce, the sperm trails that follow rivers and railway lines ... are recorded in a tangle of codes that no one has yet made a serious attempt to untangle. Note that these comments are obviously informal, not a part of systematic research. Chinese scholars themselves are now (2013) taking a much more thorough interest in dialects than was the case even in 2000.

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

The 20th Century revolved politically around competing interpretations of Capitalism, Communism, Socialism and Fascism. These are all ways to organize the lives of people on a large scale. Are real alternatives or new interpretations likely to emerge in the challenging years ahead? What might they look like?

Given the prominence of calligraphy in the traditional arts of both the Islamic world and China, it is only natural that Islamic calligraphy plays an important cultural role in Chinese Muslim communities. The art form’s survival over the centuries in China, even during prolonged periods of isolation from the rest of the Islamic world, reflects the strength of Chinese Muslims’ religious traditions, as well as the critical function of the written word within these traditions. 

The history of Islam in China remains among the most understudied topics within the fields of both Islamic and Chinese studies. The development of Islamic art and architecture in China has been particularly neglected, and like the recent article on mosque architecture in China published as part of this same series, this essay seeks to begin to address this deficiency. The following examples of Chinese Islamic calligraphy tell the stories of diverse Muslim communities in China, the challenges they have faced through the centuries, and the different ways they have adapted this traditional Islamic art form.

This article is one in a series produced by the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC: “'All About China' is a journey into the history and diverse culture of China through essays that shed light on the lasting imprint of China’s past encounters with the Islamic world as well as an exploration of the increasingly vibrant and complex dynamics of contemporary Sino-Middle Eastern relations."

Link to all the articles in the series:
http://www.mei.edu/content/map/all-about-china

Link to this article:
http://www.mei.edu/content/map/islamic-calligraphy-china-images-and-histories

Before the founding of the People’s Republic
of China, Chinese administrations in different
periods had varying approaches and policies
concerning their own ethnic affairs. After 1949
the Chinese Communist Party as well had to deal
with the question of how to transform peoples
and lands of the heterogeneous Qing Empire
into a unified nation state. Ethnic minorities
are scattered across the country but they have
traditionally inhabited in strategically important
border areas which are extremelyrich in natural
resources. Historically relations between
Han majority and minorities have rarely been
easy

Die Situation in Chinas nordwestlicher Region Xinjiang hat in den letzten Jahren zunehmende internationale Aufmerksamkeit erfahren. Berichte über Masseninternierungen von Uiguren und anderen ethnischen Gruppen in Umerziehungslagern, Zwangsarbeit, Zwangssterilisation und weitere Menschenrechtsverletzungen beherrschen die Schlagzeilen und belasten die Beziehungen zwischen China und seinen Kritikern. Die chinesische Regierung rechtfertigt ihr Vorgehen hingegen als Kampf gegen Terrorismus, islamistischen Extremismus und ethnischen Separatismus. „Xinjiang – China und die Uiguren“ präsentiert erstmalig in deutscher Sprache eine tiefergehende wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit diesem kontroversen Thema. Prägnant und anschaulich führt der erste Teil des Buchs in die komplexe Geschichte der Region ein. Der zweite Teil stellt die Entwicklungen im 21. Jahrhundert dar. Hierbei zeigt sich ein facettenreiches Bild der sozioökonomischen Entwicklung, der ethnischen Identität sowie der Sprach- und Religionspolitik. Der dritte Teil hinterfragt die gängigen Deutungen des Xinjiang-Konflikts, analysiert Proteste und Terrorismus ebenso wie die staatlichen Repressionsmaßnahmen und die internationale Dimension der Auseinandersetzung. Quellennah, basierend auf den Ergebnissen der neuesten Forschung und in einem unaufgeregten Ton vermittelt „Xinjiang – China und die Uiguren“ ein ausgewogenes Bild der aktuellen Konflikte.

This book is undoubtedly a major contribution to the study of the history of Islam in China. The conclusion that there are no extant Islamic buildings in China which can be securely dated to earlier than the fourteenth century is extremely important. The review points out that Professor Steinhardt's work is not entirely unproblematic.