O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. Indeed, Allah is all-knowing and all-aware.
(Qur’an 49: 13)
Narrated Narrated Kathir bin ‘Abdullah that the Prophet said to Bilal bin Al-Harith: “Know.” He said: “I am ready to know O Messenger of Allah!” He said: “That indeed whoever revives a Sunnah from my Sunnah which has died after me, then for him is a reward similar to whoever acts upon it without diminishing anything from their rewards. And whoever introduces an erroneous innovation which Allah is not pleased with, nor His Messenger, then he shall receive sins similar to whoever acts upon it, without that diminishing anything from the sins of the people.”
(Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 41: 33)
It is lunchtime on a Friday, and the sidewalks and buses on the main street running through the center of Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province, are packed with men wearing small white hats and toting prayer rugs, from scrawny teenagers in patent leather blazers to wispy-bearded old men in long, gray coats. Most of them are headed to Dongguan (东关) Mosque, where so many Muslims attend prayer each Friday that the prayer hall overflows into the courtyard, and more of Allah's devotees spill out of the front gate to cover the sidewalk and at least one lane of the street. Each Friday, when the sun is at its zenith, the Islamic faith requires all male believers to attend prayer in a congregation of at least three people, but in Xining virtually all devout Muslims converge in just three groups, leaving forty to fifty other mosques virtually empty. Xining is perhaps the only Chinese urban center in which most Muslims belong to the Yihewani (伊赫瓦尼, from the Arabic Ikhwan, or “brothers”) revivalist sect and attend a single mosque en masse. Loudspeakers broadcast the imam's voice so that tens of thousands can move as one. On Muslim holidays, traffic is diverted, and the entire street is filled with prostrating, white-hatted masses. First built in 1380, the mosque is the oldest in town and its congregation is the largest in China. Many renovations have combined Chinese temple-style prayer hall and classroom buildings with Arab-style dome and minarets over the front gate. The mosque's architectural style and the Yihewani religious movement it houses illustrate the work in progress that is Chinese Islam, a constant struggle between Chinese-style syncretism and globalized Islamic universalism.
China is home to more than 20 million Muslims, divided into ten different ethnic groups. The Uygurs of Xinjiang Autonomous Region are the most widely known outside China due to violent separatist incidents and limits on Islamic practice within Xinjiang. However, the Hui are the most populous and influential Muslim ethnic group in China, and in Xining as well. It is tempting to call the Hui “Chinese-speaking Muslims,” because most of them are indistinguishable from Han Chinese except for their Islamic beliefs and practices, but they actually speak a variety of local dialects and include a variety of ethnic traits. Many of them can trace their ancestry back to Arab, Persian, or Central Asian traders who came to China in numerous waves beginning in the Tang Dynasty, married Han women, and raised Muslim children who spoke Mandarin or other local dialects. Many Hui live among other non-Muslim ethnicities, speaking their languages and physically resembling them, but their legal identification cards and self-identifications proclaim them to be Hui. Hui live scattered all over China in virtually every major city, but the largest concentration of them is located in eastern Qinghai Province, eastern Gansu Province, and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Most other Chinese ethnic groups share a common language, history, and territory, and Uygur separatist movements have largely been inspired by the threat Han migration poses to this heritage. However, I did not encounter such sentiment or sympathy for the Uygurs among the Hui. In fact, most of the Hui I encountered in Xining who were dedicated to practicing, studying, and preaching Islam regarded their hereditary ethnic label and local religious traditions as old-fashioned and virtually irrelevant in the modern world. These devout Hui sought to replace their parochial ethnic label with a universal religious identity that would transcend local traditions and politics by connecting them with an imagined transnational community.
On the eastern fringe of Xining's historic Muslim quarter, three blocks from Dongguan Mosque, members of Yangjiazhuang (楊家庄) Mosque prostrate in unison under green and white minarets that were until recently encased in bamboo scaffolding as a new Arabic-style mosque that rivals the size of Dongguan took its place on the site of an older Chinese-style mosque. The only significant contrast with the other mosques in town is the presence of incense cauldrons, which facilitate a uniquely Chinese ritual practice proscribed by the more orthodox reform movements like Yihewani and its more recently arrived rival, Salafiyya. Worshippers here are eager to remind a curious outsider that their Gedimu sect (格迪目 or 格底木), (a transliteration of the Arabic qadīm, meaning “old”), a Sunni sect practicing the Hanafi school of law, is popularly known as the Old Teaching (老教) in order to differentiate it from both Sufi sects that began arriving in China during the Ming and Qing eras and the aforementioned reform movements. The Old Teaching contains the majority of China's Muslims, and its adherents note that the unusual prominence of Yihewani in Xining is merely the legacy of a Guomindang (国民党)-allied Muslim warlord named Ma Bufang (马步芳, 1903–1975). He supported this more unified and nationalistic, and thus easier to control, movement over the more fractious Gedimu and Sufi sects in the 1930s and 1940s. But these Gedimu worshippers are reluctant to openly criticize other sects, and one student here even tells me that which mosque one attends is just determined by one's family and place of birth. While numerous Sufi brotherhoods exist all over China, only the Qadariyya is prominent in Xining, and its members are still so few in number that they often attend the Gedimu Mosque and are generally considered adherents of the “Old Teaching” in contrast to the “New Teaching” (新教), as Yihewani is commonly called.
Between the large and imposing Yangjiazhuang and Dongguan Mosques, down an alley off the main street, a third congregation meets for Friday prayer. The old Shulinxiang (树林巷) Mosque had no minarets, and one could easily overlook its modest doorway topped with Arabic lettering, but its prayer hall's Middle Eastern-inspired arching windows were unmistakable once one stepped into its courtyard. This modest edifice was smaller than the previous two mosques, but its two-story prayer hall also would fill to capacity each Friday with members of the Salafiyya movement, the smallest and most recent to emerge among China's Islamic sects. Many non-Salafis refer to it as Santai (三抬), meaning “three hand raises,” as raising the hands three times during each cycle of prayer is the most readily apparent practice characterizing this movement. During my time in Xining, the old Salafi mosque was demolished to make way for a new hotel development, and the temporary prayer hall in a run-down apartment building looked even less mosque-like. However, the congregants are building an ornate new building, which will rival other local mosques in size and “authentic” Arabic-style architecture.
Salafis are a much-maligned minority among Chinese Muslims, but they are quick to remind outsiders that their sect is dominant in the original homeland of Islam, Saudi Arabia. While imams and theological students at other mosques wear keffiyeh wrapped around their heads and trailing down their backs during prayers, as is common in Iran and Central Asia, the learned Muslims at Shulinxiang drape red and white keffiyeh over their heads Saudi-style as one way of laying claim to a more authentic Islam.
Both Yihewani and Salafiyya regard Sufism as heterodox and Gedimu as too Sinified, but Salafis also claim that the Yihewani did not go far enough in removing cultural accretions and returning to the original, universal Islam. Yihewani and Salafiyya both descend from the eighteenth-century Wahhabi movement that advocated a return to the practices of the Prophet and his followers, as described in the Qur’an and Hadith, which required purging the perceived innovations that arose in the latter days of the Ottoman Empire. Yihewani is related to the global Ikhwan or Islamic Brotherhood movement, but its Chinese manifestation has become strongly nationalistic, engaged in Chinese politics, and supportive of modern education. As the once-puritanical movement took on these characteristics (a process described in Chapter 2), it also gained the sponsorship of Ma Bufang and other warlords, and more recently of the Chinese Islamic Association, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bureaucracy dedicated to monitoring and controlling Islam in China.
The Salafi in China gradually emerged out of the Yihewani movement in the 1930s and 1940s in response to perceived Sinification and loosening interpretation of the Qur’an as the Yihewani became entangled in Chinese politics. Today, Yihewani make up about one-fifth of China's Muslims, but the sect is inordinately represented among powerful urban elites and bureaucrats. The Salafi remain a tiny minority making up about less than 1 percent of China's Muslims,1 but the sect is rapidly growing, and Salafi ideas are very influential among foreign-educated Muslims, international businesspeople, and Arabic language teachers. Small, but important, contradictions in ritual practices and theology mean devout Muslims must choose membership in just one of the aforementioned sects, but there is one movement that manages to transcend these sectarian bounds.
A few hours after Friday noontime sermons, many Muslims return to the same mosque for afternoon prayer, but some prefer to gather in a small hotel prayer room instead, where a particular kind of religious study will follow prayer. Twice every day, after dawn and late afternoon prayer, participants in Tabligh Jama’at2 (“conveying [message of Islam] group”) sit in a circle on the prayer room floor and listen to one of their number talk. Eventually, he3 designates a small group of four to ten people, including a local guide and usually some amateur preachers visiting from out of town, to go out and knock on doors to invite other Muslims to join the study session. He chooses another to stand at the door to welcome and guide inside any Muslims this group manages to recruit. One more person sits and lectures the few people who remain behind on one of six virtues of Muhammad's companions. Finally, an older man is entrusted with what they regard as the most important responsibility; he sits in a corner, facing Mecca and prays for the endeavor's success. Eventually, the group returns, with or without new recruits, and one of its members delivers a sermon that concludes with the need for Muslims to leave their homes to embark on proselytizing trips in which they urge every Muslim they meet to more actively practice and promote Islam. Someone stands up and asserts that it is every Muslim's responsibility to go out on such a preaching trip, or jama’at, for three days each month, forty days each year, or at least four months in a lifetime. Then he takes names and contact information of volunteers, so that the organizers may pray that they follow through on their pledges, drop by their houses and visit them, and help them form groups to embark on such trips in the future. Since the movement's founding in 1920s India and its arrival in China in the 1980s, this practice has attempted to combat nominal adherence to Islam by striving to imitate the purported deeds of Muhammad's companions in the early days of Islam when believers were few and they all had to struggle to spread the faith.
The Yihewani, Salafiyya, and Tabligh Jama’at movements in Xining and across China continue a historic cycle of reform and revival movements led by Chinese Muslims who return from abroad preaching new ways of attempting to return to the original faith. Salafis claim that Salafism is not a sect, but a methodology of strictly interpreting the Qur’an and of solving disputes by looking for evidence in only the Qur’an and Hadith, without regard for unsubstantiated claims by imams of the past or present. Likewise, participants in Tabligh Jama’at attempt to transcend all sectarian divides by inviting everyone to live the simple lifestyle of Muhammad's companions and refusing to discuss any contentious issues. Despite these attempts at inclusiveness, Salafis face opposition because they reject many Chinese Islamic practices as innovation, and Tabligh Jama’at is accused of criticizing existing sects by claiming that its method of embarking on proselytizing journeys is the only way to perfect one's faith.
Proponents of Salafism in the 1930s and 1940s brashly highlighted the shortcomings of China's other sects, including the Yihewani movement from which Salafism emerged. The result was a backlash both from leaders of those sects and from ordinary Muslims, who still tend to regard Salafis as ill-mannered extremists. Thus, today's Salafis favor a more academic, inwardly focused and nonjudgmental approach to theological issues. Despite very different tactics, practices, and beliefs, adherents of both Salafiyya and Tabligh Jama’at claim a stronger link to the legacy of the Prophet because of their association with transnational movements very much in vogue throughout the Islamic world. These linkages to movements in regions of geopolitical importance create legitimacy as well suspicion in the eyes of the government. The adherents engage in some public service projects in China, but the party's wariness of an emerging Chinese civil society also makes these movements and their activities subject to strict supervision even though both movements assiduously avoid politics.
Salafiyya, Yihewani, and Tabligh Jama’at all advocate a return to the original, authentic, and universal form of Islam practiced by Muhammad. Thus, all three of these movements can be considered modes of Islamic revival, but the exact definition of what they want to revive and the means of doing so are different in each case. There are also many Muslims who seek to revive Islam without participating in any of these movements. The same Hadith from the al-Bukhari collection inspires both Salafis and Tabligh Jama’at members: “The most superior among you (Muslims) are those who learn the Qur’an and teach it” (66: 50). Salafis insist that one must thoroughly learn the Qur’an before teaching; participants in Tabligh Jama’at emphasize the need to teach whatever one knows. While these modalities differ in goals, practices, and some theological aspects, it is important to remember that almost all of Xining's Muslims still greet each other with a friendly “Asalaam alaykum!” and sometimes even pray at each other's mosques. They each view their past and present differently, but they all aspire to a common future goal in which China's Muslims will be more pious and united with the global ummah. Despite their differences, most adherents of all these congregations agree that all Muslims are brothers, and many of their ancestors have shared the same neighborhood for centuries. Together they compose the shifting theological terrain that is Xining's Islamic landscape.
The ethnographic context: seeking universality between Han majority and ethnic minority
Xining, a bustling city of 2 million (small by Chinese standards), is capital of China's largest, least populated, and westernmost province (excluding the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang). Qinghai Province also has the unique distinction of sitting between China's two most restive regions, Tibet and Xinjiang, with its capital situated at the confluence of Han (汉族), Tibetan (藏族), Mongolian (蒙古族), Uygur (维吾尔族), and Hui (回族) cultural realms. The Hui and Uygurs are two of the ten Chinese national minorities that traditionally adhere to the Islamic faith.
Traditionally, the Hui served as middlemen between more sedentary Han agriculturalists and the mostly nomadic neighboring ethnic groups. In Xining and other Chinese cities, Muslims historically lived outside the city gates in a buffer zone between the Han and other non-Chinese peoples. In spite of recent tensions between Hui and Tibetans, the two groups historically enjoyed a symbiotic economic relationship in which the Hui would bring agricultural trade goods from Han cities to Tibetan camps (Fischer 2005; Gaubatz 1998). Today, the vast majority of Xining's mosques, and most of its Muslims still reside in the historic Eastern District (城东区) that once lay outside the city gates. Thus, Dongguan, whose name means “east gate,” and many of the city's older mosques (or their modern incarnations) have names reminiscent of Muslim exclusion: Beiguan (北关, “north gate”), Nanguan (南关, “south gate”), Xi Guan (西关, “west gate”), and Shui Cheng Men (水城门, “Water City Gate”). During my time in Xining, I lived just outside the southern wall of this suburb, located on the fringes as a foreigner traditionally would be. The Hui, however, were neither fully within the city's inner walls nor separate from Han settlements; both in imperial times and the present, they straddle the line between minority ethnicity and membership in the Chinese cultural and political community.
According to the 2010 census, Hui make up 16 percent of Xining's population and 29 percent of that of the Eastern District, which contains all of the prominent mosques. Since these numbers include only those with an official hukou (户口, residence permit), the number of migrant workers and other transient residents doubtlessly makes the actual Hui population much higher. While the ambiguous nature of Hui ethnic identity gives religion an inordinate impact on members’ identity and makes them ethnographically interesting, Xining's cosmopolitan Islamic revival movements include members of the Salar, Dongxiang, Kazakh, and Uygur ethnicities, as well as a few Han, Tu, Mongolian, and Tibetan converts to Islam. In contrast to the Hui, each of the other Muslim minorities has its own distinct language, common ancestry, and traditional territory within China. The Han and Hui sometimes regard other minorities as less civilized than the more assimilated Hui, but members of these minority nationalities themselves often take pride in their status as “pure Muslim people.”
In spite of clear differences among minority nationalities, Chinese people of all ethnicities commonly use “Hui” as a catchall category for Muslims in China. Indeed, the term Huijiao (回教) or “teaching of the Hui” was the most common translation for “Islam” until the 1950s, and it is still the preferred nomenclature in Taiwan. Today, mainland revivalists correct those who use t...
