A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Cross-Cultural Influences
As in Russia and India, Islam in China reached some fascinating
accommodations with ambient Chinese culture. And in China, as elsewhere in
the world, periodic Islamic renewal movements cropped up, designed to scrub
the faith, remove the accretions of non-Islamic thought and practice, and
maintain a sharp focus on the essentials of Islam. Both of these contradictory
trends—absorption of new ideas versus a rejection of innovation—affected Islam
in China.
Fairly early on, Muslim thinkers in China were impressed with the huge body
of Chinese philosophical thinking that was already in place upon Islam’s arrival.
As the historian Jonathan Lipman notes:
The influence and permeation of Chinese Islam by Confucian thinking
seems to have given late Ming and early Qing Islam, which was tending
toward decline, a transfusion of fresh, new blood, a new vitality…. A
group of Sino-Islamicists sprang forth. They used Confucian language and
Confucian ideas systematically to study, arrange, and summarize Islamic
religious doctrine; they constructed a complete Chinese Islamic
intellectual system, writing a set of Chinese-language Islamic works with
a uniquely Chinese style. These works are called by the Muslims in China
the Han Kitab—that is, the Chinese canon—and they have had a definite
influence in Sino-Muslim society.
In China, mosques were all built in the style of Chinese traditional temples
and pagodas. The Hui also created a unique Sino-Arabic script to render Chinese
in Arabic script. Muslim scholars seeking some accommodation between Islamic
and Chinese culture actually found their most accessible philosophical
counterpart in Confucianism. One of China’s most important Muslim scholars,
Yusuf Ma Dexin, worked on establishing a synthesis between the two. Born in
Yünnan province in the southwest, he made the hajj in 1841 and stayed in the
Middle East for eight years, studying at al-Azhar in Cairo, and then traveling at
length through the Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem. He had an excellent
knowledge of both Arabic and Persian, and was the first to translate the Qur’an
into Chinese. He also brought back to China the latest currents of Islamic and
political thought in the Middle East.
Muslim gravitation toward Confucianism might at first glance seem unusual,

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given the latter’s essentially “secular” and ethical orientation, verging on
philosophy rather than transcendental religious emphasis. Yet precisely because
Confucianism primarily provides an ethical and moral framework, it was less
challenging to Islam on a theological level. Confucianism is also the most
“Chinese” of all religions in China, making it important for Muslims, under the
watchful eyes of oppressive and suspicious Qing Dynasty officials, to convince
the authorities of the compatibilities of Islam with Confucianism, demonstrating
that it favored order, justice, good governance, and supported the Emperor.
Some Muslims believed they could enlist Confucianism as a gateway for
spreading Islam among the Chinese. But full accommodation between the two
religions was always a stretch, especially since the main body of Muslim belief
extends well beyond the dispassionate, this-worldly, nontheistic moral precepts
of Confucian thought. The powerful ethnocentricity of Chinese culture,
furthermore, made difficult any acceptance of distant and exotic Mecca as the
center of Islamic faith, while the miraculous elements and beliefs of all three
Western revealed religions strained Chinese credulousness. Thus, Muslims had
little success in acquiring new converts to Islam among Han Chinese. Buddhism
was an even greater stretch for Muslims to identify with, being of Indian origin,
nonnative to China, and too abstract, otherworldly, and nontheistic for Muslim
sensibilities.

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