A Partial Translation from "Kaikyo kara Mita Chugoku" (written by Zhang Chengzhi) (3)

Preface: China's Islam

I sometimes feel that I have trouble in giving a general idea of the concepts of Islam in China which have some indispensable concepts to talk about. However, misinterpretation of the concepts might lead to a false-conclusion. Listeners also face risks of getting false-information even when they just want to increase their knowledge. All in all, Muslims or Islam in China are difficult for ordinary people to understand, and are easy to be misunderstood. This misunderstanding might be caused by the failure of defining the concepts.

It is vitally important to understand Islam, Muslims, and Hui people in China. It is one of the keys to understanding the national framework of China and religions there. I firmly believe that this understanding will give you important help in thinking about the future of Chinese people and their culture. Accordingly, I have long been looking forward to the publication of one textbook which enables people to understand the A to Z of Islam in China. As I write this book myself, I'd like to give brief descriptions of some concepts over Islam in China.

The name Hui Religion is an old phrase in China. Hui Religion is actually the same as Islamic Religion, or just Islam. In the old days, Chinese people didn't know the word “Islam”, but after the Qing Dynasty, if you had a neighbor called Hui-hui for example, you would have certain knowledge on the religion and customs the neighbor had. So, the religion Hui-hui people believed came to be called Hui-hui Religion or Hui Religion after the people's name. As the understanding of Islam spread, the old phrase Hui Religion became Islam. The Chinese Islamic people who speak Chinese and who live in the middle of Chinese culture have rather different aspects from those of Muslims like Uyghur, who speak a Turkish dialect and live in a different area within the national border. Besides, Muslims in China face different political-social circumstances than those in West Asia, where Islam is the state religion in many countries. Although the name Hui Religion is an old one, the name can be a proper one to describe Chinese Islam, with its complicated history and culture. So, I will sometimes use the name Hui Religion as well in this book.

Chinese Muslims, or Hui Religionists, have been referred to as Hui-hui in Chinese historic documents from the 13th Century. Some Mongolian documents in the 13th Century, Mongolian Dynasty Anecdotes for example, recorded Hui-hui as sartagul and Uyghur documents recorded Hui-hui as sartlar. In the Mongolian language, the suffix gul makes plural forms, and in the Uyghur language, lar does the same. The root sart means a merchant in the Persian language. The Chinese translation in the 13th Century for those words was Hui-hui. The meanings of the Chinese characters Hui-hui have had various folklore and academic explanations. We don't have an accepted theory yet, and the phrase is still unclear. However, Hui Religionists or Chinese Muslims, call themselves Hui-hui even today.

Hui-hui, which used to appear in old historical records, was called Hui for short. The word Hui was misused to refer to Uyghur people, who speak a Turkish dialect. Uyghur people and Hui-hui people do not share the same origins, language, history, or time when they first came to believe Islam. Old Chinese historical documents, however, recorded Uyghur as Hui because they didn’t have a particular name for the Uyghur. They often distinguished the 2 peoples by calling Uyghur as “Uy Hui” and Hui-hui as “Han Hui.” As Uyghur people regarded the name as discriminatory, they picked up the name Uyghur, which used to be the name of one of their ancestral tribes. Thus, we don’t confuse Hui with Uyghur today, and the name Hui is only used for Hui people who speak Chinese.

When we are not talking about religions, we sometimes call Hui Religionists Hui People. We similarly call Chinese People Han People or Han Man. However, the name Han Man is not appropriate. In China, we usually use Hui People instead of Hui-hui and refer to Chinese People as Han People. These names were used during the rule of the Republic of China. The government of the Republic of China didn’t classify Chinese speaking Hui People as an independent ethnic group, but emphasized that Hui People were also Chinese People, although they had different religious belief and customs. This was a deliberate act of the government at the time.

Today, the government of the People’s Republic of China regards Hui People as an ethnic group. The name Hui Ethnic, which indicates Hui People as an ethnic group, has been used most often from the 1950s. In today’s China, if you have either a father or a mother who is Hui, you are admitted as a Hui Ethnic, regardless of your religious belief. The usage of the term Hui Ethnic has been adopted by Hui People themselves after the turn of the century. Today, Hui Ethnic includes those who believe Islam and those who don't. According to the 1990 demographic statistics, the population of Hui Ethnic is 8,603,000.

I'm going to write within the conceptual framework above.

Let me repeat here that this book is about those who believe Islam in China and who speak Chinese. Those less than 10 million Hui People's history and present situation will tell us the fate of religions under the national order and culture of China. I'd also like to consider raison d'etre of those Chinese who have religious belief.