Chinese thoughts on Islam and Muslims

[313ghazi]

I was reading a disaster of a thread called "Religions must be Chinese in orientation" and came across a message which struck a chord with me.

I urge Muslims friends to live and let live. In fact it is deeply disturbing to non-Muslims around the world that there are people out there dead set on making the world mono-theistic. Seek to understand others first and help from a genuine place, not a egotistical moral high ground.

I am a Pakistani Muslim and I know very little about China and Chinese people and culture. I also think Chinese people know very little about Islam and Muslims.

I agree wholeheartedly with the two highlighted statements. I want to help change the perception of the statement in between them. Perception inherently is not wrong, because is it built on what you know, it can only change based on what you know.

What I would like to do is hear your honest opinions and concerns and perhaps try to explain any misconceptions and also to learn about your prespective.

My intention is not to prove the superiority of my culture over yours, or to ask anyone to adapt my culture and abandon yours, or to even prove anyone wrong.

 

[313ghazi]

----
This is an interesting discussion point I have thought of.

Many misconceptions about Islam are also held by Muslims. This can be due to low literacy levels in our communities, or a poor level of teaching of history or Islamic principles.

 

[Menthol]

I live in the world biggest Muslim country.

I think, Islam is just a pretty normal religion like most religion, with Middle East characteristics.

The Muslims people are just normal people, nothing special, except they are more religious than me. As religious as another Middle Eastern religion, the Christianity, even more.


But I agree there are misconception about Islam and Muslims people, especially from the country who never know about Islam and Muslims directly.


I actually don't care what other said about my religion and my tradition. Is that so important to get acknowledge from other people???

In every human being, there's an ego, to be recognized to be world most pure, righteous and knowledgeable person. But that's a stupidity and a sign of childish behavior. Mature people will never do it, a kind of shameful actually.

Do you dare to go up to the public stage, grab a mic and declare it in front of everyone else and while your girlfriend present too?

Mature people and mature religion don't need other people acknowledgement. They even make a joke about themselves and their own religion, but it doesn't mean they insult themselves and their own religion, it's a sign of confidence and maturity actually. A sign of a great person and a great religion.

----
This is an interesting discussion point I have thought of.

Many misconceptions about Islam are also held by Muslims. This can be due to low literacy levels in our communities, or a poor level of teaching of history or Islamic principles.

Lol

I think not just Islam, many religion followers are also have misconception with their own religion too.

=================================

I think there a huge different between Eastern and Middle Eastern religion.

Eastern religion is more Spiritual (similar to Sufism and Gnosticism).

While Middle Eastern religion is more Dogmatic.

While Chinese people is more toward spiritualism, but strong in tradition.

 

[313ghazi]

I actually don't care what other said about my religion and my tradition. Is that so important to get acknowledge from other people???

I agree and this is not my intention with this topic. Islamic identity has been politicised by the west because the neocon Americans need a mask for their imperialistic ambitions. While they destroy countries for oil and other resources they use the media machine to create a narrative of "clash of cultures", or "islam vs the west" whereas the truth is the only people fighting America, are those whom America is waging war against.

Unfortunately this narrative has caught hold and influences negatively how people consider individuals and countries which have a Muslim religious identity. China and Pakistan have been allies for 70 years but our people to people contact is limited.

CPEC will increase this people to people contact and this will include positive and negative experiences. Those who are against the best interests of Pakistan and China will try to exploit the fact we have limited people to people contact by using religion as a tool.
Already today we see western media printing fake news about Xinjiang province portraying China as oppressive towards it's Muslim inhabitants. Only those people who have access to Chinese people can get refutation to this fake news.

At the same time they will and are trying to portray Islam as a religion which is authoritarian, forceful and does not respect the boundaries of other people or cultures or countries. Under CPEC projects there will a great security risk with enemy state using their agents to cause harm to Chinese in Pakistan and project attacks as "Islamic". Pakistan is countering this by providing very heavy security to the project and the people involved.

What we as a people need to do is make sure we have a better understanding of who each other are, so the space for exploitation is reduced.

 

[MultaniGuy]

There is a lot of ignorance about Islam.

But I think the Chinese are more tolerant and accepting than the west is.

 

[lastofthepatriots]

According to the historical accounts of Chinese Muslims, Islam was first brought to China by Sa'd ibn abi Waqqas, who came to China for the third time at the head of an embassy sent by Uthman, the third Caliph, in 651, less than twenty years after the death of prophetMuhammad. The embassy was led by Sa`d ibn Abī Waqqās, the maternal uncle of the prophet himself. Emperor Gaozong, the Tang emperor who received the envoy then ordered the construction of the Memorial mosque in Canton, the first mosque in the country, in memory of the prophet.[2][3] Hui legends seem to confuse the 651 visit with the initiation of Islam as early as 616/17 by earlier visits of Sahabas.

While modern historians tend to argue that there is no evidence for Waqqās himself ever coming to China,[3] they do believe that Muslim diplomats and merchants arrived in Tang China within a few decades from the beginning of Middle Ages (Hijra).[3] The Tang Dynasty's cosmopolitan culture, with its intensive contacts with Central Asia and its significant communities of (originally non-Muslim) Central and Western Asian merchants resident in Chinese cities, which helped the introduction of Islam.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Islam_in_China

@beijingwalker @Chinese-Dragon

 

[Stuttgart001]

There is a lot of ignorance about Islam.

But I think the Chinese are more tolerant and accepting than the west is.

indeed, it is good manners to respect other's culture and tradtions in Chinese traditional confusionsim.In return, we hope ours get respected either.

 

[MultaniGuy]

indeed, it is good manners to respect other's culture and tradtions in Chinese traditional confusionsim.In return, we hope ours get respected either.

Absolutely that is how I see it as well.

 

[lastofthepatriots]

indeed, it is good manners to respect other's culture and tradtions in Chinese traditional confusionsim.In return, we hope ours get respected either.

It's like you guys consider Muslims as the Yellow Turbans of modern era.

 

[313ghazi]

It's like you guys consider Muslims as the Yellow Turbans of modern era.

Who are the yellow turbans?

---
Something the rest of us should consider... on another thread a Chinese member said Chinese people don't recognise a pan-Islamic identity, rather they see the world as different countries with different cultures. I wonder if that is the personal opinion of that person, or something more widespread.

 

[Stuttgart001]

It's like you guys consider Muslims as the Yellow Turbans of modern era.

Not exactly. China media has the tendency of anti-US .Most of Chinese people has sympathy on Middle east muslim people who suffered a lot.
As for Islam, most of non-muslim Chinese got their impression from the experience dealing with Ugyhur and Hui muslims.
Not very good, to be honest.

It's like you guys consider Muslims as the Yellow Turbans of modern era.

Actually, Chinese muslims did commit something similar with what Yellow Turbans had done in ancient China more than one time. But most of Chinese people have little knowledge about the long history of China.
Only in some special areas like Shanxi and Gansu province where a large scale of rebellion occurred one and half century ago, there are horrible stories about the rebellion of Chinese muslim passed on from generation to next generation.

 

[Cybernetics]

Thanks for adding my quote I feel honoured. Just like to add that I personally have many close Pakistani friends and we openly talk about issues on life, culture, and politics all the time and would like to have similar conversations here.

I will try to explain it as concisely as i can.

Chinese whether they realise consciously or not look at arcs of history in the hundred year cycles and thousands of years arcs, we say long spans of time and reference history very casually in conversation. So we subconsciously understand history and what kept us alive and prosperous. Beyond the resilient family units, the core is a competent centralised government with its power base firmly inside China with its rulers deeply Chinese, although ethnically can be outsiders but must be 100% Chinese culturally. There were many instances in history, and that outside ethnicity was absorbed into China. Han ethnicity was not big because they just had a lot of kids, it was assimilation through culture and intermarriage. The difference between Chinese cultural assimilation and Islamic assimilation is geography. Islam and its followers seek to expand it boundlessly while Chinese culture will stop at its boundaries due to geography, will expand on that later.

Using the term "Middle Kingdom" is easier to explain than using "China" but they mean the same thing.

Formation of 3 key Middle Kingdom characteristics:
1. Centrality of civilisation (The view of exceptionalism)
2. Absorbing of Periphery and Invaders
3. Middle Kingdom governance

At the core of Chinese culture is family and lineage. From there we get the history of the Chinese civilization. Recent genetic testing showed 60% of Chinese people derive from 5 “super ancestors" 6000 years ago possibly proving the Shennong (God Farmer), Huang Di (Yellow Emperor), and Yan Di (Flame Emperor) mythology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shennong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Emperor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Emperor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Huang_Zisun

If i had a simple answer why China cannot be or difficult to be Islamic and or Non-Chinese religion and that is geography.

When the middle kingdom was fragmented during "Spring and Autumn Period" nearly all of the action took place in the central plains of China. It was basically a bloody multi-century long war for unification. Eventually unifying under the Qin Kingdom which previously was viewed as a non-civilized kingdom, even the Chu was viewed as non-civilized kingdom before, then accepted into the civilized club effectively being absorbed into the Middle Kingdom concept. The core of China (central plains) is enclosed by the ocean and mountains without any major civilizations anywhere nearby, at that time Korea and Japan didn't have many people and were tribal. This formed the idea of the outsider and Middle Kingdom exceptionalism, there were no other civilisation nearby thus forming the thinking that the Middle Kingdom center is civilisation and anything outside is barbarian. The Middle Kingdom views everyone outside as others and doesn't put them to the same standard as the Middle Kingdom, they wont expect them to have the same customs or require it.

The map can be misleading, in fact at some points there were hundreds of tiny kingdoms.

Europe also had the concept of the civilized world and barbarian world but they have a hard time unifying and its due to the mountain range in the center of Europe and river systems that divide the continent into shapes that look like modern national boundaries. Thus their natural state is division into seperate entities. Simply Europe is a Doughnut with a hole in the center and China is a ball.

China on the other hand has two major rivers that go through the central plains from West to East (Yellow river and Yangtze) which created the fertile plain but also flooded immense areas and killed many. Most of China's large natural disasters were floods from the rivers. The struggle throughout Chinese history was taming the rivers and making them useful for life but one small isolated tribe cannot do much thus a large and coordinated centralised bureaucracy is needed creating the Middle Kingdom governance. When that central power collapsed, the northern plains will almost instantly go into a state of war if fragmented and will quickly retake the rest of the country to reunify the Middle Kingdom.


Muslims pray facing the Kaaba in Mecca, this act of pray serves an as safe for information and is maintained through habit 5 times a day. It encode the message that the centre of your religion, your spirituality and eventually your loyalty is in mecca not the Middle Kingdom and mecca is ruled by Arabs who don't understand governance in China, for a smaller nation that is fine. But for China is destabilising and eventually if unified will become unislamic again. Refer to history, Moscow was the center of the Communist movement and thought that they could lead all socialist countries to communism, but soon they found out that China would not comply with their policies. Its because China has very different priorities, thus in 1962 relations soured. Noticed how as time progress the natural state of China begins to show, beyond the foreign ideologies China is transforming from communist ideals to "socialism with chinese characteristics", which is very far off from the original and was called capitalist traitors by USSR. Simply because China is so hard to govern that it requires it to take a very different path from the rest of the world, no other civilization went through similar journies and cant really help in governing China. The same can be said of Catholicism with the Vatican, probably worse considering they have a leading political figure who is also the legal king (or emperor). When the Mongols ruled China they were not loyal to the land, they always thought "if we don't succeed in holding China we can always go back to the stepps". Meanwhile the Manchus were much more successful because the few hundred years leading up to the Qing dynasty they were studying confusion philosophy and Chinese texts effectivly sino-fying themselves willingly. When they ruled Middle Kingdom they moved their entire forces into the central plains and eventually assimilating. Islamic texts doesn't offer the governance necessary for the Middle Kingdom's environment.

Because China is so hard to govern, all ideological governments eventually collapse or become practical. If pork was banned (pre globalization) in China many people would have starved to death as pork is one of the cheapest sources of protein and can be raised in confined spaces). China doesn't have the vast expances of Arabia to grow herds of lamb for everyone. Many of Islam's practices are cultural offshoots of Arabian culture, thus strict adherence to the Quran would be and unhealthy imposing of a culture that has not formed in the Middle Kingdom environment.

There is a concept in China called "入乡随俗" which translates to "When in Rome do as the Romans do". The concept comes from the understanding of cultural formation. Culture is a mere manifestation human expression within a defined environment. Understanding that in a controlled environment humans are very similar, if placed in a certain environment that person should best adopt its local customs as those customs developed and survived for very good reasons, surviving the test of time.

 

[Well.wisher]

There is a lot of ignorance about Islam.

But I think the Chinese are more tolerant and accepting than the west is.

West is an arrogant region , their asumptions are based on pure arrogance about islam but ironically , they r the one destroying muslim countries and interfering in the muslim matters.

 

[313ghazi]

Thanks for adding my quote I feel honoured. Just like to add that I personally have many close Pakistani friends and we openly talk about issues on life, culture, and politics all the time and would like to have similar conversations here.

I will try to explain it as concisely as i can.

Chinese whether they realise consciously or not look at arcs of history in the hundred year cycles and thousands of years arcs, we say long spans of time and reference history very casually in conversation. So we subconsciously understand history and what kept us alive and prosperous. Beyond the resilient family units, the core is a competent centralised government with its power base firmly inside China with its rulers deeply Chinese, although ethnically can be outsiders but must be 100% Chinese culturally. There were many instances in history, and that outside ethnicity was absorbed into China. Han ethnicity was not big because they just had a lot of kids, it was assimilation through culture. The difference between Chinese cultural assimilation and Islamic assimilation is geography. Islam and its followers seek to expand it boundlessly while Chinese culture will stop at its boundaries due to geography, will expand on that later.

Using the term "Middle Kingdom" is easier to explain than using "China" but they mean the same thing.

Formation of 3 key Middle Kingdom characteristics:
1. Centrality of civilisation (The view of exceptionalism)
2. Absorbing of Periphery and Invaders
3. Middle Kingdom governance

At the core of Chinese culture is family and lineage. From there we get the history of the Chinese civilization. Recent genetic testing showed 60% of Chinese people derive from 3 ancestors ranging 4000-6000 years ago possibly proving the Shennong (God Farmer), Huang Di (Yellow Emperor), and Yan Di (Flame Emperor) mythology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shennong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Emperor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Emperor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Huang_Zisun

If i had a simple answer why China cannot be or difficult to be Islamic and or Non-Chinese religion and that is geography.

When the middle kingdom was fragmented during "Spring and Autumn Period" nearly all of the action took place in the central plains of China. It was basically a bloody multi-century long war for unification. Eventually unifying under the Qin Kingdom which previously was viewed as a non-civilized kingdom, even the Chu was viewed as non-civilized kingdom before, then accepted into the civilized club effectively being absorbed into the Middle Kingdom concept. The core of China (central plains) is enclosed by the ocean and mountains without any major civilizations anywhere nearby, at that time Korea and Japan didn't have many people and were tribal. This formed the idea of the outsider and Middle Kingdom exceptionalism, there were no other civilisation nearby thus forming the thinking that the Middle Kingdom center is civilisation and anything outside is barbarian. The Middle Kingdom views everyone outside as others and doesn't put them to the same standard as the Middle Kingdom, they wont expect them to have the same customs or require it.

The map can be misleading, in fact at some points there were hundreds of tiny kingdoms.

Europe also had the concept of the civilized world and barbarian world but they have a hard time unifying and its due to the mountain range in the center of Europe and river systems that divide the continent into shapes that look like modern national boundaries. Thus their natural state is division into seperate entities. Simply Europe is a Doughnut with a hole in the center and China is a ball.

China on the other hand has two major rivers that go through the central plains from West to East (Yellow river and Yangtze) which created the fertile plain but also flooded immense areas and killed many. Most of China's large natural disasters were floods from the rivers. The struggle throughout Chinese history was taming the rivers and making them useful for life but one small isolated tribe cannot do much thus a large and coordinated centralised bureaucracy is needed creating the Middle Kingdom governance. When that central power collapsed, the northern plains will almost instantly go into a state of war if fragmented and will quickly retake the rest of the country to reunify the Middle Kingdom.


Muslims pray facing the Kaaba in Mecca, this act of pray serves an as safe for information and is maintained through habit 5 times a day. It encode the message that the centre of your religion, your spirituality and eventually your loyalty is in mecca not the Middle Kingdom, for a smaller nation that is fine. But for China is destabilising and eventually if unified will become unislamic again. Refer to history, Moscow was the center of the Communist movement and thought that they could lead all socialist countries to communism, but soon they found out that China would not comply with their policies. Its because China has very different priorities, thus in 1962 relations soured. Noticed how as time progress the natural state of China begins to show, beyond the foreign ideologies China is transforming from communist ideals to "socialism with chinese characteristics", which is very far off from the original and was called capitalist traitors by USSR. Simply because China is so hard to govern that it requires it to take a very different path from the rest of the world, no other civilization went through similar journies and cant really help in governing China. The same can be said of Catholicism with the Vatican, probably worse considering they have a leading political figure who is also the legal king (or emperor). When the Mongols ruled China they were not loyal to the land, they always thought "if we don't succeed in holding China we can always go back to the stepps". Meanwhile the Manchus were much more successful because the few hundred years leading up to the Qing dynasty they were studying confusion philosophy and Chinese texts effectivly sino-fying themselves willingly. When they ruled Middle Kingdom they moved their entire forces into the central plains and eventually assimilating. Islamic texts doesn't offer the governance necessary for the Middle Kingdom's environment.

Because China is so hard to govern, all ideological governments eventually collapse or become practical. If pork was banned (pre globalization) in China many people would have starved to death as pork is one of the cheapest sources of protein and can be raised in confined spaces). China doesn't have the vast expances of Arabia to grow herds of lamb for everyone. Many of Islam's practices are cultural offshoots of Arabian culture, thus strict adherence to the Quran would be and unhealthy imposing of a culture that has not formed in the Middle Kingdom environment.

There is a concept in China called "入乡随俗" which translates to "When in Rome do as the Romans do". The concept comes from the understanding of cultural formation. Culture is a mere manifestation human expression within a defined environment. Understanding that in a controlled environment humans are very similar, if placed in a certain environment that person should best adopt its local customs as those customs developed and survived for very good reasons, surviving the test of time.

Thanks for this response. It is fascinating. I'm going to re-read it and respond to a couple of parts later.

 

[Cybernetics]

Thanks for this response. It is fascinating. I'm going to re-read it and respond to a couple of parts later.

Please do, I wrote that in a rush so I would love to expand on any ideas and correct any mistakes i have made.