OK beware of super long post. But! Im reading a history book called Ancient Religions, Modern Politics by Michael Cook and found this bit about Chinese Muslims super interesting. This is in a section talking about how much Islam has stayed the same vs. changed to adapt to other cultures. Cook says that Islam hasnt adapted many values from outside, but in China, Muslims adapted a lot, which makes them unusual: The situation of the Muslims of China was very different. They were geographically remote from the Muslim heartlands-in contrast to the Muslims of India, whose contacts were so close that to a large extent they transacted their affairs in Persian. Like the Muslims of India, those of China were a minority, but a much smaller one; and unlike them they never had a chance of achieving political and military dominance. They did indeed owe their presence in China to conquest, but the conquerors in this instance were the Mongols—pagans who later turned Buddhist. Thus it was thanks to the extensive patronage extended to foreigners by the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1260-1368) that a significant Muslim community came to reside in the cities of China. But the dynasty fell, the Mongols left, and patronage on the same scale was no longer available to Muslims under the ethnically Chinese Ming dynasty (1368-1644), nor was it restored under the Manchu Ching dynasty (1644-1912). This meant that Muslims left behind after the departure of the Mongols had no choice but to come to terms with the Chinese environment, becoming in effect Chinese Muslims and not just Muslims in China. More specifically, the way for elite members of the community to get ahead was now to demonstrate proficiency in Chinese literary culture by taking the official examinations that controlled entry into the bureaucracy. The result was the appearance of a Muslim literature in Chinese that pressed the argument that Confucian and Muslim values were fully compatible, if not identical. Thus an inscription purportedly dating from 742, but likely to have been forged by Chinese Muslims in the Ming period, says of Confucius and Muhammad that their language differed, yet their principles agreed. A seventeenth-century Muslim scholar told some officials who were inspecting a mosque: The ethics of our teaching and those of the Confucian teaching are the same. Whoever follows our precepts and laws takes loyalty to rulers and obedience to parents as a duty. Deftly exploiting internal Chinese religious tensions, he smugly contrasted Muslim ethics with those of the fatherless and rulerless Buddhists and Taoists. An early eighteenth-century biographer of Muhammad preserves an account of a consignment of books that the Arabian prophet allegedly sent to China; it states that these books teach about loyalty to rulers and filial piety to parents and that they do not differ from our Confucianism. Elsewhere this author explains why he had read deeply in the Chinese literary tradition: I am indeed a scholar of Islamic learning. However, it is my opinion that if one does not read the classics, the histories, and the doctrines of the hundred schools, then Islamic scholarship will be confined to one corner and will not become the common learning of the world. In a more autobiographical vein he goes on to say that after spending ten years living in seclusion in a mountain forest, he suddenly came to understand that the Islamic classics have by and large the same purport as Confucius and Mencius. From the point of view of the wider culture of Islam, this syncretic literature of the Chinese Muslim elite was very much confined to one corner. Even on its home ground in the cities of eastern China, we should probably see it as under a degree of threat on two fronts. On the one hand there were the hardline Muslims within the community. In the eighteenth century one of them wrote a pamphlet that included the warning: Anyone who says that the study of the means of assuring ones livelihood is more important than that of the sacred scripture will be excluded from Islam—for that is to ascribe importance to this world and to lack respect for the sacred scripture and religious doctrine. He also required Muslims to practice what by Chinese standards was arrogant incivility in their relations with adherents of other religions: If, while talking to someone, you refer to the true religion with the phrase my humble religion, and to another religion with the phrase your noble religion, you will be excluded from Islam—for that is to do honor to other religions and to disparage that of Purity and Truth. And on the other hand Confucianism could be very seductive for successful members of the Muslim elite: we learn from Matteo Ricci in the early seventeenth century that Saracens tended to apostatize once they had passed the official examinations and lost their fear of the Muslim clergy. Nor is Islamic-Confucian syncretism likely to have cut much ice with the Chinese elite. One prominent Chinese Muslim author was able to persuade some Confucian scholars to write laudatory prefaces for his books, and the title of his heavily Confucianized work on Muslim ritual found a place in an imperial compendium of 1773-1782. But the work was placed in the company of books that contained little that was praiseworthy and much that was contemptible, and an editorial comment, while conceding that the authors literary style is actually rather elegant, maintained that the clever literary ornamentation does him no good for the simple reason that Islam is fundamentally far-fetched and absurd. Nevertheless, what happened in this corner of the world provides a suggestive precedent for the Muslim interaction with the West as it developed in the nineteenth century: it shows that there are situations in which, confronted with the unquestionable dominance of a non-Muslim culture, Muslims could and would accommodate to its values. With this in mind let us leave China and return to the heartlands of the Islamic world.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 21:58:31 +0000