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 have known 4 chinese people in my life, 3 were colleagues and we only ever talked about work, 1 was a fellow university student and we only ever talked about assignments. I think for a lot of people the relationships will be similar, so i appreciate the perspective of someone who's already had this sort of conversation before.
I really appreciate the concise information you've given me about Chinese outlook and values and the middle kingdom way of thinking.
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.
If i had a simple answer why China cannot be or difficult to be Islamic and or Non-Chinese religion and that is geography.
The Geography of China is something i've thought about previously too. The Chinese people aren't as genetically diverse as people in Europe and the middle east. The himilayas and other mountain ranges have kept China within a certain area and it has kept others out too.
There seems to be a theme developing where Muslims/Islam is coming across as missionary. Some groups are, most of us aren't. There is an Islamic saying that you should want for your brother, what you want for yourself; it is a teaching of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). It is a noble sentiment and very universal. Anyone of us who has children will have felt that way before about our children. We all want what is best for them, but if you've ever tried feeding a young child something new or something they are suspicious of, you will know it's not easy.
Values work the same way (btw i am not equating other cultures the same as young children), ie if you try to impose them they will be rejected. Islam has a history of spreading it's message, geography was not considered prohibitive, but at the same time, it's largely been through example and through voluntary teaching, not through imposition. There have been forced conversions carried out but in Islamic doctrine these are strictly prohibited. Unfortunately people are not always bound by law, especially people of power.
Muslims are not interested in making everyone else Muslims (though everyone is welcome), our primary goal in life is to live a positive life within the definition and boundaries of islamic values. In the regions of India/Afghanistan/pakistan/central asia Islam was spread by teachers, not generals (though where communities were threatened, armies were also sent).
No Muslim army ever set foot in China yet there are 21 million Muslims there today (a tiny figure compared to the whole population) and they have been there for 1400 years, nearly as old as Islam itself.
Similarly the largest Muslim nation - Indonesia never had any armies visit it or conquerers, it was through trade that islamic communities were setup there. Australia is also on historical Muslim maps yet the aborigenes were non Muslim.
Another example is closer to the middle east. The regions of Syria and Palestine were conquered by Muslim armies very early in the history of Islam. The Dome of the Rock is a sacred site for Muslims and was the direction they prayed in initially. The majority of the population of Syria and Palestine remained Christian for 500 years after Muslim conquest. The displacement of Christians came after the first crusades.
Islam is intended as a gift, not an imposition - it has never been forced upon by people by the best of us and that is not our teaching nor should it be our practice.
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.
Muslims first prayed towards the Dome of the Rock in jerusalem. They then were ordered to pray facing the Kabah (through revelation sent to the Prophet Muhammad pbuh). Facing the kabah is a part of an act of worship, not a political act. Most Muslims do not have any allegiance to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or to Arabs in general. The Cities of Makkah and Madinah are sacred, no political entity is sacred.
The idea that Muslim faith is an afront to the soverignty of the nation state is not true. The focus of any state should be to it's citizen and the citizen should be to his or her own state, not any other state. The pan islamic identity is a religious one not a territorial one. The concept of caliphate does include aspects of governance, but it is not the same as empire building, the role is primarily about enabling the practice of the Islamic faith. Think of the EU as a modern example. The leader of the EU is not the leader of the European continent, rather then overall political/economic construct that the EU is.
Muslim loyalty is to God, much like any other religion. If the state doesn't present itself as God, then there is no confliction of loyalty. All Muslims are loyal to nation states as well as God. Chinese are loyal to their family and their state, or to a sports team and their state, to a lover and their state, different types of loyalty are applicable to different relationships. The relationship of Islamic belief and a nation state are not the same.
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.
This was really interesting to read. I think it's fair to say Muslims Islam is also flexible and is able to include different cultures. Take clothing for example, we don't all dress like arabs, we simple dress in a manner we deem modest. For Muslims a modest way of dressing is one in which the figure is not extenuated (ie attention is not drawn to it) and for the majority of Muslims, women cover their hair. In some cultures men do to.
Similarly we eat all sorts of foods, however we don't eat certain meats and we ensure the meat we do eat is killed in a certain way (cut the jugular vein). We don't all speak Arabic either.
Most Muslims can recite the Quran and Arabic prayers, but most don't speak the language - the learning of the prayers is rote.
Islam did not prohibit slavery (though freeing a slave was considered a noble act), yet when the world eventually abolished slavery Muslim countries did too.
It is true that certain parts of Islam (religious practices) are based on Arab traditions, but Islam is not arab-centric and certainly doesn't require a political alliagance to the middle east.
Regarding governance - all methods of governance evolve. Islam is no different. In the past certain laws were suspended due to economic conditions. There is no single Islamic method of governance and the last example we had was a weak Ottoman empire in 1924. There are certain stable principles but not 1 model. There has been kingdoms, emperors, republics, Islamic republics, sultunates, khanates, blah blah blah, all different models based sometimes around islamic principles, other times paying lip service to them and at other times nothing at all.
If all chinese were Muslim then any islamic governance model in China would have to adapt to unique Chinese circumstances, but 99% of you are not Muslim and have no intention to be, so you shouldn't worry about how an alien political system might work. After 1400 years of Islam only 1% of the population is Muslim, i think it is safe to say the boundless nature is not as imposing as some might think.
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.
I posted this somewhere else and I will repeat it here.
1. Being a Muslim is voluntary
2. How much you participate in the Muslim faith is voluntary
3. The rules of the Muslim faith only apply to Muslims
4. The Muslim state is not established in regions where the Muslims are not a majority (simply because any such state would be unstable).
5. Despite modern examples rebellion and instablity are to be avoided in Islam wherever possible. Every action should be considered by the societal cost.
We have to remember that the actions of the individual should not define the ideology, yet at the same time we live in the reality that the implementation of any ideology is only possible via the actions of individuals. People have a responsbility to think about the impact of what they do and say as it has repercussions wider than their own desires - especially in these times were we don't have a central Muslim body.
