A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911)
The advent of the Qing Dynasty marked a sharp turning point for Muslims,
perhaps the worst period for them in Chinese history until Mao’s Cultural
Revolution in the 1970s. Ethnically Manchu (Altaic) and not Han in origin, the
Qing tended to be harsh, discriminatory, and xenophobic, and distrusted the Hui.
The Qing forbade the building of any new mosques and banned pilgrimages to
Mecca, immediately alienating Muslims. Discriminatory and declining Qing rule
eventually led to two huge Muslim uprisings, the Panthay Rebellion (1855–
1873) in Yünnan province in the southwest, and one in the northwest, the
Dungan (Hui) Rebellion (1862–1877). In the course of the two rebellions,
several million people died as a result of government policies sometimes
bordering on genocide. Many Hui fled to Russian Central Asia during these
bloody times where, known as Dungans, they still constitute a significant
minority group with ties to China. Anti-Qing rebellion was hardly unique to the
Muslims; there were increasing disorders, rebellions, and chaos all across China
as the Qing Dynasty moved toward collapse. A key conclusion here, perhaps, is
that as in Russia, Muslims have not seriously rebelled until presented with
egregious conditions, such as represented by Qing Dynasty oppression, and later
the Communist parties of both Russia and China.
SUFISM—that powerful Muslim force for facilitating interreligious contact via
its emphasis on mysticism—entered China by way of Central Asia and points
west in the Muslim world. A small but important number of Chinese Muslims
had managed to travel to Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, and
elsewhere to study Islam at a time when the Middle East was itself generating
renewal movements. These new ideas, called New Teachings, were brought back
to China to confront the traditional, almost frozen forms of Islam there. The
thrust of the New Teachings represented an intellectual renewal of contact
between distant elements in the Muslim world, as new scholarly figures sought
to bring Chinese Islam into closer conformity with thinking in the Muslim
heartland.
But as China moved into the 1930s, leading Muslim scholars were still intent
upon seeking synthesis of thought with Han Chinese culture and emphasis on
modern education and science to strengthen the Muslim community. Many
believed that only a strong, orderly, and well-administered China could provide

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the kind of cultural security Chinese Muslims sought. These efforts sought “to
make Islam comprehensible, moral and effective within a Chinese political,
intellectual, and cultural world without compromising its core principles.”
But the Chinese Communist regime put an end to all that: it harshly struck
down all religions and traditional values, not just Islam, especially during the
Cultural Revolution. Mosques were defaced, destroyed, or closed all over China,
as were religious institutions of other faiths. But the Hui have made a comeback
in post-communist China and are increasingly prominent everywhere. Hui and
Central Asian Muslim culture have become a source of popular romanticism in
Chinese epics—most recently in the popular film Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon—and influence Chinese costumes and music. Muslim restaurants, too,
are commonplace in Chinese cities. They serve halal (similar to Kosher) foods,
as well as many delicious lamb specialties not normally part of more standard
Chinese cuisine—reasons why they are frequented by non-Muslim Chinese as
well. Hui are likely to play increasingly important roles in China’s external
relations, as “models of Chinese coexistence.”
In 1995, an important colloquium—The International Seminar on Islam and
Confucianism: A Civilizational Dialogue—was convened in Kuala Lumpur with
scholars from around East Asia. The distinguished Malaysian statesman and
Islamist thinker Anwar Ibrahim opened the meeting and observed that
there are a number of striking similarities between Islam and
Confucianism, both in ideals and historical experience, in their refusal to
detach religion, ethics and morality from the public sphere. The Islamic
argument against secularism, that is the separation of politics and other
societal concerns from religion and morality, is not dissimilar to the
Confucianist perspective presented by Professor Tu Wei-ming in his
admirable book Way, Learning and Politics. A Muslim would have no
difficulty identifying with the Confucian project to restore trust in
government and to transform society into a moral community.

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