A Partial Translation from "Kaikyo kara Mita Chugoku" (written by Zhang Chengzhi) (4)

The Story of the Grievous Brothers

Let me cite a case. I'm going to talk about the 4 brothers I know. The eldest and the third were arrested in 1958. The fourth tried to commit the suicide, but failed and became handicapped. The second brother spent despairing days with the fourth for 15 years.

The eldest, who had been arrested, was put to death, but his body was not given to his family. The third, who had also been arrested, died in prison at the beginning of the 1970s. The news of his death was brought to their village. The second brother, who stayed in the village and in good shape, only hoped to bring the third brother's body back to their home town and bury it at the town's shrine.

The second brother reached the prison after a long journey, and found his younger brother's body which had not rotted yet in the winter cold. The police handed the body to him after checking that he was a bereaved brother. There started the famous story of contemporary Jahriyya history, “to carry a body for 500 kilometers.”

As he could not walk along highways with the body on his back, he chose mountains and fields to walk on. He hid during daytime, and moved quickly at night. He walked over some 500 kilometers within half a month, and brought the brother's body home. The brother's wife, who had been 20 years old when she married the brother and reached middle age by this time, fell unconscious upon seeing the body. After burying his younger brother in the sacred Jahriyya shrine, the second brother lost the will to live.

His family had offered martyrs one after another for generations from the ancient time to the third brother. He also dug a hole as his own grave in the shrine, put himself into the hole, and observed a fast.

I have wanted to write about this story for the dead and for the living since the time I met the only survivor, the fourth brother who had broken down mentally, at the peril of my life.

Understanding Hui people including Jahriyya is real humanitarianism, and I realized spreading the understanding to the wider people is my responsibility, as a person who was born as Hui Ethnic.

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.

A Partial Translation from "Kaikyo kara Mita Chugoku" (written by Zhang Chengzhi) (2)

In Lanzhou, the struggle for their belief has started. The aged people who are leaving their town for the fight have made up their mind not to return home but to die for martyrdom without victory. People are starting to Lanzhou not only from this village, but also from the vast Ocher Plateau, from Yunnan, and even from Xinjiang. A sacred grave was destroyed more than 2 decades ago, and, now, the government is going to construct a building over the grave yard. The Muslims decided that the place is more meaningful than our lives, so we should get the place back from the government. Villages do not live in peace anymore. Peasants, who rarely show their feelings, now have glorious expressions with the sacred light. This is almost unbelievable after having seen their incredibly poor everyday lives.

Having graduated from the history faculty, I started reading relevant documents from the habit acquired during my college days. I found a simple article about the martyr Ma Mingxin, who was killed by the Qing government 200 years ago. The deprived Muslims are heading to Lanzhou really because of their self-sacrificing faith in Jahriyya, which was founded by Ma.

Even China, which holds secularism as their national policy, really has those who take their history into heart. They actually stake their lives on their faith.

A Partial Translation from "Kaikyo kara Mita Chugoku" (written by Zhang Chengzhi) (1)

The oppression policy against the Jahriyya during the Qing Dynasty was severe. After the Qing destroyed the rebels completely, the bereaved of Jahriyya were exiled from the Salar area to other places with "men to the south, women to the west."

Ma Mingxin had two wives. When Ma Mingxin was caught, his Salar wife committed suicide, and his other wife, Mrs. Zhang, was exiled to Ili in today's Xinjiang with their daughters. It is not hard to imagine how tragic the fate of the women who were exiled to Xinjiang by the government army was, but today's Jahriyya people have come not to mention their pain. The two daughters (in 1 opinion, three) of Ma Mingxin couldn't put up with the insult on the long journey on the Silk Road, and killed themselves. One young female follower of Mrs. Zhang threw her body in a lake on the way as well.

Mrs. Zhang herself endured it, and reached Ili at last. There were many Jahriyya followers who had hoped to follow her, and they too came to live in Ili. However, Mrs. Zhang killed more than ten members of a government official family who made her cook pork on New Year's Eve. She then went to the public office to surrender herself. Even an official is said to have admired her as she confessed that she killed them for the revenge.

At the time of her execution, she cried to one Islamic religious leader who was watching her at her execution: "What are you waiting for?"

While in tears, the religious leader painted her blood on his face, and performed the last ceremony for her, shedding tears, which must be done at the funeral for a Muslim, that is, the ceremony of regret, and he offered a final prayer for her.