Islam in China

James Frankel

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755638840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'Islam

In China there are up to 25 million Muslims living in the country, representing over 1200 years of Chinese-Islamic relations. However, little is known about the historical and contemporary geopolitical relations between China and the Muslim world, or the situation for the diverse groups of Muslims living in China today.
In this book, James Frankel studies the rich and dynamic history of Muslims in China from the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the present day. He shows that Muslims in China remain an internally diverse population separated geographically, ethnically, linguistically, economically, educationally, and along sectarian and kinship lines. But despite having its own local flavours and accents, Islam in China is recognisable as the same religious tradition practiced by approximately 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide and Muslims in China are inextricably part of society, living alongside other minorities and amongst the great Han Chinese majority.
Tracing 1200 years of history, this book shows that Muslim communities in China have undergone tremendous change, touched by the forces of Chinese history, the development of Islamic traditions outside China, and geopolitics. In highlighting the paradoxical situation in which Chinese Muslims have found themselves - living as both insiders and outsiders to Chinese society and state - the book examines why after so many centuries of habitation and naturalisation, Muslims in China are still stigmatized by their perceived alien origins. The book follows the 'yin and yang' of compatibility and difference and the connections and ruptures between two great civilisations.

Chapter 1

Muslim origins in China

The Tang emperor awoke with a start, terrified by the unnatural vision he had just seen. In his dream, the rafters and pillars of his palace shook, under attack by a monstrous entity, a demonic force that foreboded imminent death and destruction. Suddenly there appeared a strange man – a foreigner – dressed in green, his head wrapped in a turban, possessing the power to quell the monster and avert the impending doom. ‘Who was this stranger? What was the meaning of this terrible nightmare?’ were the emperor’s first questions to the ministers and advisors he summoned immediately upon awakening. One of the ministers replied, ‘A great evil threatens to destroy your realm. Yet a great sage has arisen in the West who can repel demons with his prayers. Only he can save the empire. You must find this man and bring him to China at once to assure the peace and safety of all.’ The emperor thereupon dispatched a delegation to travel westward in search of the holy man. They travelled well past the boundaries of the empire, beyond the remote Kunlun Mountains, deep into the heart of the barbarian regions. They finally arrived at a desert oasis, where the great sage ruled over his people in simplicity and security. The sage received the Chinese delegation. They told him of the emperor’s dream and desperately requested that he accompany them back to their country. But he told them he could not because he was occupied with affairs in his own land. Instead he appointed a delegation of his own, from among his followers, to go to China and bring glad tidings of peace. The emperor received the foreign emissaries, and in appreciation for restoring peace and stability to his realm he permitted them to remain in the empire, giving them land and permission to marry Chinese brides and establish their progeny in China.

This is a rendering of a story retold countless times, in spoken and written form, over centuries, by Chinese Muslims to account for the origin of Islam in China. The core elements – a mission sent by the Prophet Muhammad and received by the emperor, with some part of the Arab delegation remaining in China to become progenitors of today’s Chinese Muslim population – are consistent even as other details seem to vary with each retelling. A narrative of special significance to a particular group of people, transmitted from one generation to the next, expressing some of their most deeply held beliefs, values and communal aspirations, is an apt definition of a myth. Factual historicity has never been key to the value of myth. As the historian of religion Mircea Eliade explained, the value of myth is in its ability to connect people to the sacred, allowing them to be other than they are in their profane existence. The question of whether the events recounted in a mythic narrative actually happened is immaterial: ‘To tell a myth is to proclaim what happened ab origine. Once told, that is, revealed, the myth becomes apodictic truth; it establishes a truth that is absolute.’¹ An origin myth, as the one above, transports people beyond their history and permits them to conceive of themselves as part of a sacred reality, giving their existence ultimate meaning. Historical (or pseudo-historical) details in the narrative serve as reference points to the known world, tethering the sacred to the profane. Thus, myth and history are two separate, though sometimes linked, enterprises.

Living in a culture and society where genealogy is highly valued, where families trace their lineage back centuries, or millennia, Muslims in China quite naturally wished to promote a sense of belonging as well as communal legitimacy. They have tried to comprehend and make comprehensible their diverse, hybrid heritage. They do this mythically. By claiming a legacy traced back to the Prophet Muhammad they construct a powerful narrative and a noble identity. Chinese Muslims, in their profane existence, are embedded in China, a minority living amidst an overwhelmingly and enormous non-Muslim population. In their religious aspiration and collective cultural memory, however, they are linked to the roots of Islam in Mecca and Medina, and, spiritually, to the Prophet and his companions. We shall return to the mythic tradition later, after examining the historiographic record.

The arrival of Islam in China must be understood more as an historical process than an event. There is no identifiable singular moment, no discrete point of origin. The myth contains fragments that may be correlated to historical facts, but these too are part of a much more complex history. Gathering data about the history of Islam’s arrival in China is partly an exercise in speculation and deduction. Scholars have pieced it together from various sources, including early archival references, later written accounts, as well as archaeological evidence. These sources indicate that there were certainly multiple points of entry for Muslims into China and numerous significant historical events that paved the way for increased Islamic influence over time. The multipolar nature of this historical process helps to account for the tremendous diversity we see within Islam as it is practised and embodied by Muslims in China today.

The earliest Muslim engagements with imperial China took place within the larger context of a much older history of contacts between peoples from the eastern and western ends of the Eurasian landmass. Long before the advent of Islam on the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century CE, China had developed into one of the world’s most sophisticated civilizations. The Yellow River valley, like the Nile in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, and the Indus in the Asian Subcontinent, provided the fertility and richness of natural resources necessary to support widespread agriculture, economic surplus, the growth of large sedentary population centres at the dawn of recorded history, and later ancient cities and states. The peoples of these respective alluvial cradles gave rise to parallel bases of human civilization, which, when they had expanded sufficiently to outgrow their nascent geographic confines, continued to spread their cultures and territorial claims. Confirming that the contemporary phenomenon of globalization is but the latest phase of a process that began in prehistory, archaeological and written evidence proves that the movement of peoples and exchange of cultural ideas and products has been ongoing for millennia.

By the second century BCE, China, united under the Han dynasty (206 BCE–221 CE), had already expanded its political, military and economic interests westwards into Central Asia. The Han imperial envoy Zhang Qian

(d. 133 BCE) went to secure China’s commercial and diplomatic relations in the region. Chinese goods travelled by caravan along routes established by semi-nomadic Central Asian peoples, across the Eurasian steppes and deserts, until they eventually reached the markets of the ancient Mediterranean. Among the commodities that were most coveted by consumers in those markets was Chinese silk (sericulture at the time was a monopoly of China), and thus the network of East–West trade routes came to be known in history as the ‘Silk Road’, though it was never as single ‘road’ (we might rather call it the ‘Silk Roads’) and countless wares of many varieties passed along it. Nor was the traffic of commerce unidirectional: China imported horses from Central Asia as well as luxury goods, such as the Roman glass discovered in a Chinese tomb dating to the early first century BCE.

The overland trade routes that connected the Han and Roman Empires at the height of their power continued to function even after these empires declined and eventually fell. The stage was thus set historically for commercial and cultural exchange across Eurasia and North Africa long before the advent of Islam. So too were the peoples of pre-Islamic Arabia connected to the existing trade networks, both overland and by sea. Damascus was one of the principal trading posts at the western end of the Silk Roads and it was from there that goods were brought to and from Arabia. Caravans from Syria to Yemen travelled along a trade route that passed directly through the settlements of western Arabia, among them the cities of Yathrib (Medina) and Mecca and made the return trip carrying spices and fragrances – henna, musk, frankincense and ambergris. Thus, the pre-Islamic Arabs were aware of the existence of China, albeit from an indirect vantage point, as Arabia was peripheral to the main network of the Silk Roads. Arab traders in the marketplaces of the Byzantine Empire (285–1453) in the Levant and the Sasanian Empire (224–651) in Persia might have enjoyed exotic tales of China’s vast riches, though few if any of them would have made the great overland journey themselves.

To the south, Persian and Arab seafaring traders had ventured from the Gulf² into the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean at least two centuries before the Islamic period. Ships from Persian ports in the Gulf had almost certainly reached China by the late sixth or early seventh century CE.³ It is therefore conceivable that some pre-Islamic Arabs could have sailed to China around the same time. Trade routes in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea were connected via the narrow Strait of Malacca, comprising what has come to be known as the Maritime Silk Road, another means of conveying goods, people, and cultures between China and the vast Indian Ocean region unto the eastern coast of Africa. The ships brought with them a range of luxury goods from the Middle East and Africa, including spices and incense, pearls from the Gulf, and elephant ivory; they returned from China with such precious commodities as silk and ceramics. On the eve of the birth of Islam in Arabia, maritime trade between the Gulf and the southern coast of China was routine, and Arab and Persian merchants had long since landed in port cities like Guangzhou

later known to the West as Canton and called Khānfū in Arabic sources.⁴

While it is impossible to pinpoint the time or place of the first arrival of Islam in China, and leaving aside the mythic narrative for the moment, it is almost certain that the first Muslims to come to China were merchants. Since the first Muslims were Arabs, and the Arabs first came to China with the maritime trade, an initial arrival via the sea route is likely. Since it is unlikely that many Arabs would have made the journey along the entire overland Silk Roads, the Muslims who eventually entered China via the caravan routes were probably mostly not Arabs, but rather Persians and other Central Asians. And since these peoples were only converted to Islam after it had spread beyond Arabia, the arrival of Muslims in China overland was probably secondary. In the year 605 CE, the government of the Sui dynasty (589–618) undertook the massive infrastructure project of building a network of canals, including the Grand Canal, to link the port cities of southern China to the rivers and waterways of central inland China, unto the imperial capital of Chang’an

(present-day Xi’an

This network effectively joined the overland and maritime Silk Roads, further facilitating the movement of goods and people within the empire.

Trade was doubtless the principal means by which Islam was carried to China, as it was for countless other cultures and religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Judaism and Nestorian Christianity, all of which similarly travelled along the Silk Roads. Whether Arab, Persian or of some other nationality, the firs...