Islam in China

Though diverse, the Muslim community in China is quite large. According to reasonably accurate estimates based on the 2000 national census of China, the Muslims of China total 20.3 million, or 2% of the population. Since the census registered people by nationality and ethnicity, not religious affiliation, the exact number of Muslims in China is still unknown. Ties to global Islam were truncated by half a century of self-imposed isolation under Mao, but this abruptly changed with Mao's death in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping's “open door” policy in the 1980s. Non-Uyghur Muslims travel fairly freely on the hajj to Mecca (Makkah) and engage in cross-border trade with coreligionists in Central Asia, the Middle East, and increasingly, Southeast Asia. There are few Han converts to Islam in China, yet the Muslim population has continued to increase, and there are more mosques in the 21st century than before the beginning of the Communist regime in 1949.

Many of the challenges that these Muslim communities confront remain the same as they have for the past 1,300 years of continuous interaction with Chinese society, but many are new as a result of China's transformed and increasingly globalized society and especially the watershed events of the September 11 terrorist attacks with the subsequent War on Terror. Islam in China has primarily been propagated over the past 1,300 years among the people now known as Hui. Hui jiao (“Hui teaching”) was the local Chinese term once used to refer to the religion of Islam in general and probably derives from an early Chinese rendering of the term for the modern Uyghur people (Hui he); yet since the early 1950s, Muslims in China have been divided into ethnic national groups, and all believe in yi si lan jiao (“the teaching of Islam”). Although the 2010 census should reveal some population increases overall, the official figures report the following mostly Muslim groups: Hui (9,816,805), Uyghur (8,399,393), Kazakh (1,250,458), Dongxiang (513,805), Kyrgyz (160,823), Salar (104,503), Tajik (41,028), Uzbek (14,502), Bonan (16,505), and Tatar (4,890). The Hui speak mainly Sino-Tibetan languages; the Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Salar and Tatar are Turkic speakers; those who speak a combination of Turkic and Mongolian languages include the Dongxiang and Bonan, concentrated in Gansu's mountainous Hexi corridor; the Tajik speak a variety of Indo-Persian dialects.

With the exception of the Tajik minority, who follow Ismaili Shi'ism, Muslims in China are Sunnīs, but they are divided by regional, linguistic, and ethnic differences. The Hui are generally the closest to the Han Chinese in terms of geography and culture, adapting many of their Islamic practices to Han ways of life. This accommodation to majority culture often invited criticism from Muslim reformers influenced by Islamic ideals originating in the Middle East. Islamic factional struggles have begun to reemerge among China's Hui Muslims, however, dividing them internally, especially as increased travel to the Middle East and the pervasiveness of global Islam prompts criticism of local Muslim practices at home and exposes China's Muslims to new, often politically radical, Islamic ideals.

The Muslim communities of northwestern China, notably the Uyghur, were incorporated into Chinese society more recently as a result of Chinese expansion [Page 584]westward since the early 19th century. The Uyghur are perhaps the least integrated into Chinese society. Diverse Uyghur political groups have organized to further nationalist, Pan-Turkic, or Pan-Islamic causes. The Chinese government has reported more than 160 incidents of Uyghur-related violence since 1980, related primarily to political activities mostly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In July 2009, the largest and bloodiest civil riots in modern Chinese history took place in Urumqi, pitting Uyghur Muslims against Han Chinese citizens. Supported by a global diaspora, Uyghur sovereignty organizations are now based in many international cities, including Istanbul, Ankara, Almaty, Munich, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Toronto, London, and Washington, D.C. The fact that the former Soviet Central Asian Republics became independent in 1991 as well as the increase in access to the Internet and other global media has done much to encourage the hopes of local Uyghur for an independent “East Turkestan,” though the new, mainly Muslim Central Asian governments signed protocols with China in the spring of 1996 that they would not harbor or support separatist groups.

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