The labyrinth of alleys and lanes within the previous metropolis of Suzhou hides a secret: historic fragments of the lengthy historical past of Islam in China. Common tales within the worldwide press highlighting the therapy of Muslims within the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Area are likely to obscure the truth that Islam was as soon as extremely regarded by Chinese language emperors.
From written data and imperial edicts engraved on steles (standing stone slabs monuments) it’s clear that these Islamic communities loved the favour of the emperors – particularly through the Tang (618-907 AD), Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties. Islam was seemed on favourably by the imperial court docket due to its ethics, which – so far as the emperors had been involved – promoted harmonious and peaceable relations between the various peoples within the imperial territories.
Earlier than the Panthay and Tungan rebellions within the second half of the nineteenth century in western China, when hundreds of thousands of Muslims had been killed or relocated, Islam was thought-about by Christian missionaries within the nation – and notably by Russian students – as a rising menace. Islam was thought-about by many within the west to have the potential to turn into the nationwide faith in China – which might have made China the most important Islamic nation on this planet.
Islam and China: a particular connection
Immediately, Suzhou is a vibrant, rich metropolis of 12 million individuals solely 20 minutes by excessive velocity practice from Shanghai. What stays of “Islamic Suzhou” lies simply exterior town wall to the north-west. There is just one energetic mosque: Taipingfang, within the northern business and leisure district of Shilu.
Taipingfang was restored in 2018 and is the place native and visiting Muslims go to hope. It is in a busy a part of the neighbourhood, squeezed in a tiny alley, surrounded by small eating places and resorts, canteens, meals stalls and butchers catering to Uighur and Hui Muslims. The butchers of Taipingfang – like these in Beijing’s Niujie space the place nearly all of town’s Muslim minority lives – are popularly thought to promote the most effective meat.
Earlier than 1949, Suzhou had at the least ten mosques of varied sizes and social significance. A lot of them had been huge buildings with valuable furnishings and complex decorations, whereas others had been smaller intimate prayer rooms. Certainly one of them was a ladies’s mosque presided over by a feminine imam.
The ladies’s mosque, Baolinqian, was one in all a cluster of 4 mosques was constructed through the Qing Dynasty, all related to the rich Yang household inside town partitions within the north-western a part of town. In-built 1923, it was established by initiative of three married ladies from the Yang household who donated the constructing and raised funding from different Muslim households to show it right into a ladies’s mosque. Through the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976), the mosque’s library, containing holy scriptures, was broken and the constructing was changed into personal homes. Nothing stays at present to indicate it was a mosque.
One other Yang household mosque, Tiejunong, was constructed over three years through the reign of the Qing emperor Guagxu, from 1879 to 1881. It was the most important in Suzhou with an space of greater than 3,000 sq. metres, that includes seven courtyards. The principle corridor for Friday prayers had ten rooms and will maintain greater than 300 individuals. The courtyard included a minaret and a pavilion during which was housed an imperial stele.
Now a center faculty, Tiejunong is recognisable from the exterior structure and an historic wood engraved aspect door. Past a monumental entrance, there’s nonetheless the thought of the primary courtyard surrounded by bushes. Now there’s a enormous soccer subject, and the bushes on the perimeters of the walkway are nonetheless seen from their chopped trunks. The ablution space coated by blue tiles clearly reveals the previous presence of a mosque.
Tiankuqian Mosque was in-built 1906 and is now inhabited by poor metropolis residents – most certainly on account of the follow through the Cultural Revolution of reallocating giant, aristocratic or non secular buildings as residing lodging for indigent households. The mosque used to cowl an space of just about 2,000 sq. metres, with a foremost corridor, a visitor corridor and ablution room.
The construction of the primary corridor was like a big lecture place, containing – because the native historic data report – a ginkgo wooden horizontal plaque written in calligraphy by grasp Yu Yue. As a result of many Muslim jade staff had companies in the identical district, donations made the mosque essentially the most affluent in the entire of China. And, within the Twenties, a faculty educating Islamic and Confucian texts was opened there.
Most of the mosques had affiliated colleges educating the Arabic language and Islamic writings to the youngsters of the Muslim communities. Suzhou is likely one of the first cultural centres the place Islamic scriptures had been revealed within the Chinese language language. Translations from Persian into Chinese language had been made by the Sixteenth-century Suzhou students, Zhang Zhong and Zhou Shiqi, making town an early hub of Islamic mental tradition.
Learn extra: The historical past of China’s Muslims and what’s behind their persecution
But it surely was an Islamic hub hybridised in its Chinese language context, a course of described in Jonathan Lipman’s e book, Acquainted Strangers: A Historical past of Muslims in Northwest China. Islamic texts had been taught alongside Confucian ones, giving delivery to an eclectic corpus of Islamic writings.
The oldest Suzhou mosque, Xiguan, takes its title from the adjoining Xiguan bridge within the centre of the previous metropolis. It was constructed within the thirteenth century through the Yuan dynasty, most likely financed by the distinguished Muslim Sayyid household, and its influential Yunnan’s provincial governor, Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din Omar al-Bukhari (1211-1279).
The mosque was later included right into a authorities constructing through the Ming dynasty, so solely written accounts stay of its existence in native Chinese language data. This implies – and it’s already a widely known historic evaluation – that the Yuan dynasty favoured Muslims from Central Asia in its administration and authorities service. This important inhabitants group was a lot later, within the Fifties, labeled inside China because the Hui minority and represent about half of China’s Muslims at present.
Traces of the previous
The Cultural Revolution successfully banned Islam in China, as religions of any type had been thought-about instruments to oppress and silence the peoples’ wants.
In consequence, little stays of those non secular buildings at present. However the traces that do nonetheless exist – a door, a stone, the construction of the facade, or just a recognized deal with, written in an archive – are symbolic representations of a previous life. These are clues to the various social context and religious geography that these locations impressed and had been a part of.
Because the American sinologist, Frederick Mote – a professor of historical past at Princeton College – argued, Suzhou’s previous is embodied in phrases, not stones, and the fragments of Suzhou Islamic communities might be pieced along with the assistance of historic written data. These data of a various previous are equally necessary to the longer term in a rustic the place non secular variety is beneath assault. The newer stories of China’s oppression of its Muslim minorities, tragically, makes that every one the extra clear.
Creator: Alessandra Cappelletti – Affiliate Professor, Division of Worldwide Relations, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool College