Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

1 6 4Islam i n World Cult u r e sChina were descended from Arab, Persian, Central Asian, and MongolianMuslim merchants, militia, and officials who settled first along China’s southeastcoast from the seventh through the tenth centuries. Later, larger migrationsto the north from Central Asia under the Mongol-Yuan dynasty in thethirteenth and fourteenth centuries added to these Muslim populations bygradually intermarrying with the local Chinese populations and raising theirchildren as Muslims. Practicing Sunni Hanafi Islam and residing in independentsmall communities clustered around a central mosque, these communitieswere characterized by relatively isolated, independent Islamic villages andurban enclaves who interacted via trading networks. However, these scatteredIslamic settlements shared a recognition of belonging to the wider Islamiccommunity ( u m m a ) that was connected by traveling Muslim teachers known locallyas a h u n g .Hui Muslims and Islamic Accommodation to Chinese SocietyIslam in China has primarily been propagated over the last 1,300 years amongthe people now known as Hui, but many of the issues confronting them arerelevant to the Turkic and Indo-European Muslims on China’s inner Asianf r o n t i e r. Though Hui speak a number of non-Chinese languages, most Hui arecloser to Han Chinese than are other Muslim nationalities in terms of demographicproximity and cultural accommodation. The attempt to adapt many oftheir Muslim practices to the Han way of life has led to criticisms among someMuslim reformers. In the wake of the modern Islamic reform movements thathave swept across China, a wide spectrum of Islamic belief and practice cannow be found among the Hui Muslims in China.The Hui have been labeled the “Chinese-speaking Muslims,” “Chinese Muslims,”and most recently, as “Sino-Muslims.” 1 H o w e v e r, this terminology is misleadingbecause by law, all Muslims living in China are “Chinese” by citizenshipand because there are large Hui communities who primarily speak the non-Chinese languages dominant in the areas where they live. This is the case, forexample, with the Tibetan, Mongolian, Thai, and Hainan Muslims of China,who are also classified by the state as Hui. These “Hui” Muslims speak Ti b e t a n ,Mongolian, and Thai as their first languages and learn Han Chinese in school,as the national language, along with the Arabic and Persian that some of themalso learn at the mosque. Interestingly, since Tajik is not an official language inChina, the schoolchildren among the Tajiks of Xinjiang (who speak a Darianbranch language, distantly related to old Persian and quite different from theTajik languages spoken in Tajikistan) go to schools where they are taught in eitherTurkic Uyghur or Han Chinese.In the past, accommodation to the Han way of life was not as much of an is-