Pilgrimage and Hui Muslim Identity in the Republican Era

Yuan-lin Tsai

Abstract

Pilgrimage (hajj) is the fifth pillar of Islam and the most important symbol of unity of the Muslim ‘Community’ (‘Ummah’). When pan-Islamism and Chinese nationalism met in the early twentieth century, it is interesting to see how the Chinese pilgrims, and the Chinese Muslims as a whole, understood and responded to the Islamic revivalist call to the unity of the Community and the Chinese nationalist voice to build a new nation-state. This chapter explores the relationships between these two forces by researching original official documents, news reports, memoirs, and other biographical materials regarding the Hui Muslims’

pilgrimage experience. It concludes that Hui Muslim pilgrims’ choice is not an either/or question, but a mixture of pan-Islamism and Hui patriotism.

Keywords: pilgrimage, Mecca, Hui, Uighur, pan-Islamism, Wahhabi

Introduction

Islam in China has not yet been a well-explored field despite some ground-breaking books and articles that have been published in Chinese, Japanese, and various Western languages during the last two decades. The scholars in this field have usually made their own efforts in an isolated fashion and have not integrated into the academic communities of either Islamic studies or Chinese studies. This is also true for the studies of the Chinese Muslims’

pilgrimage (hajj). In the two most comprehensive historical works on the pilgrimage – Peters’ The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places (1994) and Wolfe’s One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage (1997) – there is no mention of the Chinese Muslims’ pilgrimage journey. Recently, Tagliacozzo’s ambitious book, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (2013), tries to investigate the Southeast Asian Muslims’ pilgrimage in the context of global history and elevates the pilgrimage studies to a new level.

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But the title of his book is a little misleading. The Chinese Muslims’ journey to Mecca is even longer than the Southeast Asian Muslims’ ‘longest journey’.

Certainly, this omission is reasonable since China is usually not included in the Muslim world and Islam has never been part of the mainstream of Chinese religions despite Muslims having settled in China for more than a thousand years and the Muslim population of China being more than two million, as much as the whole population of Malaysia. However, it is worth exploring how the Chinese Muslims living in the far eastern margin of the Muslim world have overcome so many physical, economic, psychological, social, and cultural difficulties because of the pilgrimage before air travel became commonplace.

The pilgrimage is the fifth pillar of Islam and the most important symbol of the unity of the Muslim ‘Community’ (‘Ummah’). The pilgrims who return to Mecca and observe the mandated rituals at the holy sites would have a profound feeling of having gone through a life-transforming spiritual experience and belonging to a global community that shares the same religious beliefs. My research will focus on the relationship between the awakening of the Chinese Muslim identity and the pilgrimage in the Republican Era on the basis of a large amount of original official documents, news reports, memoirs, and other biographical materials, as regards to the Chinese pilgrims’ responses to Islamic revivalism and Chinese nationalism.

The Chinese Muslim communities in the Republican era (1911-1949)

After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the founding father of the Republic of China, Sun Yatsen, immediately proclaimed that the new country belonged equally to the five nationalities, including Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui (in-cluding Uighur Muslim), and Tibetan. But according to Sun’s first People’s Principle, Nationalism, all ethnic nationalities in China should eventually be assimilated into a new Chinese nationality. The nationalist government followed Sun’s nationalism and tried to implement the assimilation policy to the ethnic minorities. In the new historical context of pan-Islamism and Chinese nationalism, it is interesting to see how the Chinese pilgrims, and the Chinese Muslims as a whole, understood and responded to the Islamic revivalist call for the unity of the Community and the Chinese nationalist voice to build up a new nation-state.

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Hui

回

is the traditional name for all Muslim peoples in China. Although the PRC government has changed it as an ethnic term,¹ exclusively for the Muslims who have scattered in every province and are more acculturated to the Han Chinese societies. In Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities Hui still refers to all Muslim peoples in China and even other countries, and the ‘Hui religion’ (Huijiao

回教

) is another name for Islam. In the Republican era, most official documents and personal writings roughly made a differ-ence between the Uighur Muslims, mainly in Xinjiang, and the sinicized Muslims in almost every other province. The latter are the descendants of Muslim traders, envoys, and soldiers who migrated from the Middle East and Central Asia via the ‘Silk Road’ on land and sea, and eventually settled in China. They were more inclined to accept a new Chinese nationality based on the model of Sun’s nationalist ideal than the Uighur Muslims, for geographical, cultural, and historical reasons. Due to the late integration of Xinjiang into the Qing imperial political system and the Uighur Muslims’

exposure to their Turkish Muslim brothers in the neighboring Central Asian region, they kept their Persian-Turkish Islamic tradition intact up to the Republican era. Indeed, the majority of the Uighur Muslims could not speak Chinese, and far less adopted Han Chinese customs, read Confucian Classics or took up any position in the Han-dominant bureaucratic system. But the sinicized Muslim elites could master all of these matters, far better than the elites of other ethnic minorities. The nationalist government was aware of the problem of the Uighur Muslims but had never been able to build up a strong political mechanism to integrate them until the communists took over mainland China in 1949. The fate of the Uighur Muslims had been at the mercy of local warlords in Xinjiang during the Republican era. Therefore, their pilgrimage experience was very different from the rest of the Chinese Muslims. My research on the Chinese pilgrimage literature only focuses on the group of the sinicized (Hui) Muslim elites, although some of their works contain important information on Uighur Muslims’ pilgrimage.

Perhaps for most Hui Muslims, Sun’s claim to give equal rights to the five nationalities was an ideal, not a reality. Under the shadow of the massacre of the Hui communities in the northwestern and southwestern regions in the late Qing era, they doubted that the Han majority would treat them

1 The PRC government classifies all Muslim peoples in China in ten ethnic groups based upon the Stalinist ethnology. The Hui is one of them. The other nine Muslim ethnic groups are Uighurs, Tartar, Kirgiz, Kazak, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Dongxiang, Salar and Bonan, and all of them, besides Hui, are highly concentrated in the northwestern provinces where the Han majority has relatively less influence on the ethnic minorities than in the eastern provinces.

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as equals. But some of them might have thought that it would be worth a struggle to build up a liberal, democratic, and modern China. None of the Hui Muslims looked back at the monarchy system. They welcomed the new republican system in which they no longer had to perform ancestral rituals, ‘prostrate’(ketou

叩頭

) to the emperor and government officials, or follow various sophisticated customs against Islamic tenets. Therefore, some Hui Muslim intellectuals joined Sun’s revolutionary party and took part in the general effort to reform China. They held the view that Islamic modernization should be part of a national effort to modernize China.² A new wave of Islamic revivalist movements combining the ideology of Chi-nese nationalism were carried out by a new generation of foreign-educated Hui Muslim elites in the Republican era.

A group of such new Hui Muslim elites expressed their progressive ideas through the new media, such as newspapers, journals, and pamphlets, and organized themselves into local, provincial, and national voluntary organizations. The new instruments of communication transformed the general Chinese public sphere at that time, and also created a new Muslim public sphere. By the 1930s, more than a hundred Muslim newspapers and periodicals were coming out in almost every province of China.³ One of the most influential periodicals was Crescent China (Yue Hua

月華

), issued every ten days from 1929 until the Japanese invasion of North China in 1937.

Crescent China’s approach was global and frequently included news about worldwide subjects, particularly from the Muslim countries. It also regu-larly published translated essays on a variety of topics from the Al-Manar (The Beacon) journal and other Egyptian Islamic modernist periodicals.⁴ Through the introduction of Crescent China and other new presses, the Hui Muslim intellectuals were familiar with Muhammad Abduh’s (1849-1905) and Rashid Rida’s (1865-1935) ideas of Islamic reform. These new ideas motivated some young Muslims to go overseas to study in order to learn new knowledge to build up a new China. In the context of this new national-ism and internationalnational-ism, the Chinese Muslim communities cultivated their first generation of Azhari graduates and modernist ‘religious leaders’

(‘imams’), and brought forth a new wave of the pilgrimage movement in the 1920s and 1930s. The most well-known leaders with an Azhari diploma included Wang Jingzai

王靜齋

(1879-1949), Ma Songting

馬松亭

(1895-1992),

2 Gelvin and Green (2014, p. 251).

3 Ibid., p. 253.

4 For the brief history of Islamic modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Hourani (1995, pp. 130-244).

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Pang Shiqing

龐士謙

(1902-1958). During his nine-year stay at Al-Azhar University (1937-1946), Pang was requested by his Azhari colleagues to write an Arabic book to introduce the Chinese Islamic tradition, which came out in 1945, entitled China and Islam. The publication of this book was the first time that the Arabic-speaking Muslim world received first-hand knowledge of Chinese Islam from a Chinese Muslim scholar.⁵ The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), wrote the preface for the first Arabic edition of Pang’s China and Islam. In his memoir, Pang mentioned that the Muslim Brothers asked for his help to build up the Chinese branch of their organization. Pang told them that China already had similar Islamic reform organizations, but he was willing to cooperate more in Egyptian and Chinese Muslim reformist movements in the future.⁶ Pang’s polite objection to Hassan al-Banna’s suggestion was a sign of the limitation of the Hui Muslims’ to take part in the transnational Islamic revivalism in the Republican era.

The first generation of Azhari graduates initiated the earliest formal contacts between China and Egypt in sharing the strong sense of comrade-ship under the same yoke of Western colonialism. In this context, King Fu`ad (1868-1936) donated money to build up an Islamic library in Beijing and financed the travel and lodging of Chinese students in Cairo through the aforementioned leader Ma Songting’s request.⁷ From then onward, the nationalist government saw the political value of Hui Muslims as a bridge between China and the Muslim world and developed diplomatic relations with Muslim countries through the Hui Muslim elites. Although the Republic of China government in Taiwan lost all official diplomatic relations with the Middle Eastern countries after the 1990s, the Hui Muslims in Taiwan have still been the most important agents for the ROC in Taiwan by maintaining some unofficial relations with the Muslim world by way of the pilgrimage, studying at Muslim universities, and by doing halal business, and so on.

In the Republican era, the Hui Muslim intellectuals saw the connections with the Middle East as a renewal of traditional Chinese Islam’s ties with the Muslim world and a return to their Islamic origin. In this regard, the Hui Muslims were like their Arab Muslim brothers in the early twentieth century, believing that the modernization of Islam meant a return to its

5 http://www.islam.org.hk/e15/e/action/ShowInfo.php?classid=32&id=6710, accessed 15 April 2016.

6 Pang (2005, pp. 373-374).

7 Ibid., p. 370.

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original form, the true and pure Islam in the Prophet Muhammad’s time.

Therefore, the identity of Chinese nationalism was not contradictory to the global unity of the Islamic Community at all; these two identities complemented and reinforced each other. The convergence of religious and political identities was especially embodied in the Hui pilgrims’ experience.

Hui pilgrims’ road to Mecca

Before the mid-nineteenth century, few people in the far eastern part of the Muslim world were able to make their way to Mecca for the pilgrimage, especially the Chinese Muslims, who had lived far from the center of the Muslim world and had to dedicate a year or more to the pilgrimage journey via the difficult ‘Silk Road’ on land or by sea, which was a risky trip that did not guarantee a safe return.

The ‘Silk Road’ consisted of several routes. As it extended westwards from the ancient commercial centers of China, the ‘Silk Road’ on land was divided into the northern and southern routes.⁸ The ‘Silk Road’ oversea began from the port cities of South China, mainly Guangzhou and Quanzhou, through Champa, Java, Palembang or Malacca, Ceylon, Calicut, the Persian Gulf or the coast of Yemen.⁹ The first Hui pilgrim writing about his journey to Mecca was Ma Huan

馬歡

(1380-1460), who joined Zheng He’s great seven voyages (1405-1433) as scribe and translator, taking this route to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, and East Africa. On the last voyage (1431-1433), Zheng He’s fleets started their journey from Fujian, through Champa, Bengal, Laccadive and Maldives Islands, Aden, to the East African coast.

During his return journey to China, Zheng He died off the Malabar Coast near Calicut. He had apparently never found time for the pilgrimage but did send Ma Huan and a group of Muslim sailors to Mecca. Ma Huan’s work, the General Survey of the Ocean Shores (Yín Ya Sheng Lan

瀛涯勝覽

) composed in 1416, gave a brief account of his observations of people’s lives and customs in Mecca and most of the ports they visited. He called Mecca

‘the Country of the House of Heaven’ (Tianfang Guo

天方國

), an official name for Mecca and Arabia in imperial China. Ma admired the Muslims in Mecca who followed the Islamic law in a strict way, but did not provide much detail regarding their lifestyle and customs. His narrative focused on the splendid Masjid al-Ḥaram, the Grand Mosque of Mecca, but did not

8 Ladjal, et al. (2013).

9 Ibid.

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describe the rituals performed by the pilgrims. Ma’s writing style is similar to that of the local gazetteers written by imperial officials, and his feelings and personal comments about the holy city don’t show up in his narrative.¹⁰

After the Western colonial powers reopened the door to China after the Opium War (1840-1842) and used firearms and steamships to control the sea routes, it was easier for the Chinese Muslims to perform the pilgrim-age. Many researches have already related the first global wave of Islamic revival to the pilgrimage at the time of Western imperialism from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, but few of them are concerned with the impact of the renewed possibilities for the Chinese Muslim communities to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca. Indeed, the second earliest eyewitness narrative by a Hui pilgrim came out in the new context of Western colonial-ism, in which the pilgrims from all over the Muslim world no longer took the traditional route along the ‘Silk Road’ to Mecca.

The Yunnanese Hui leader Ma Dexin (1794-1874) wrote his Record of pilgrimage (Chao Jin Tu Ji

朝覲途記

) following his return to China in 1848.

Ma’s journey began in 1841, which signified the beginning of a new era in the Chinese Muslim pilgrimage history. Unable to sail from Guangzhou during the Opium War, Ma followed an overland path through Burma and boarded a ship in Rangoon, sailing directly to Arabia. Ma Dexin’s narrative on the holy city, like Ma Huan’s, merely focused on the Grand Mosque without any description of the pilgrimage rituals or the Meccans’ customs.¹¹

After performing the pilgrimage, Ma spent eight years studying at Al-Azhar University. He was the first Hui leader to study in the Muslim world and initiated a new learning model for the new Hui ‘scholars’ (ulama) in the Republican era by combining the pilgrimage with studying at Al-Azhar.

Regrettably, Ma mentioned nothing about what he had seen and learned at Al-Azhar, which Pang did a century later. By the end of the nineteenth century, regular steamships sailing from the East Asian ports to the Middle East and Europe completely reorganized the economy of the pilgrimage.¹²

In the 1920s, Shanghai became the main departure port for the Chinese pilgrims to go to Mecca via the sea route through the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean which was then under British control. This journey to Mecca had been standardized in the most efficient and fast way.¹³ The Uighur pilgrims took a different route due to the long distance between

10 Ma Huan (2005, pp. 99-104).

11 Ma Dexin (2008, pp. 207-211).

12 Mols and Buitelaar (2014, p. 121).

13 Ibid., pp. 121-122.

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Xinjiang and Shanghai. They kept taking the traditional ‘Silk Road’ on land for the first half of the pilgrimage, during which their Turkish Muslim brothers in Central Asia could help them to overcome their physical and psychological hardships, until they arrived in Bombay or Karachi to take a steamship for the rest of their journey to Mecca.

From 1930 onward, the Chinese Muslim pilgrims from almost every prov-ince besides Xinjiang did business with a British company, the Blue Chimney Co., to arrange the steamship to Mecca but only after time-consuming negotiations with a travel agency in Shanghai. The Blue Chimney Co.’s monopoly of the Chinese pilgrimage journey continued until 1940, cut short by the Second World War.¹⁴ The Chinese pilgrims departed from Shanghai, traveled through Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo, Bombay, disembarked in Jeddah, and then rode to Mecca on camels. It only took about four or five weeks to make the one-way trip from Shanghai to Mecca. Besides applying for a passport from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the ROC government, getting a visa from the British embassy, exchanging foreign currency at the bank, and buying the ticket through the travel agency, every pilgrim had to be vaccinated against epidemic diseases at the quarantine station of Shanghai. According to Tagliacozzo the ‘aggressive European powers sought to manage the pilgrimage on the grounds of global epidemiological survival’.¹⁵

Blue Chimney Co. provided halal food for the Chinese pilgrim during their voyage, but they were often offended by the other travelers’ customs

Blue Chimney Co. provided halal food for the Chinese pilgrim during their voyage, but they were often offended by the other travelers’ customs

Im Dokument Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies (Seite 180-198)