ISLAM on the WINGS of NATIONALISM the Case of Muslim Intellectuals in Republican China

12 ISLAM ON THE WINGS OF NATIONALISM The case of Muslim intellectuals in Republican China Françoise Aubin Unceasing convulsions, chaos and troubles have shaken China, as it is well known, during the first half of the twentieth century: the Boxer rebellion in 1900, the overthrow of the Qing dynasty at the turn of 1912, the xenophobic anti-Christian (more precisely anti-Protestant) outburst in 1925, the breaking of a tactical alliance between Guomindang1 and Communists in 1927, the rapid mili- tarization of the politics and so on.2 While intellectuals were contending without end about the significance of the past, the throwing out of their so-called ossified spiritual legacy, the invention of a new way of life and thought, their political commitment, there were other groups of intellectuals who unostentatiously and unnoticed were conducting their own revolution, on the fringe of the main currents, especially in the coastal big cities. These intellectuals were Chinese believers in Islam.3 How Muslim intellectuals reacted to the surrounding turmoil With cultural associations The basis of their social activity was the creation of numerous cultural associations, whose program focused on the modernization and the expansion of popu- lar religious education, on the improvement of higher religious formation, on the promotion of Islamic culture, and whose leaders were often the imams in charge of the cult (zhangjiao ), usually called in China the ahongs.4 Associations had too the merit of being a remedy for the dispersion of local communities, each of them congregated round a mosque, without links between one another. And, doing so, the activists were convinced that they put into practice their love of the Chinese motherland and their wish to help it, although without taking political 241 FRANÇOISE AUBIN stand, they say. But, from the names chosen for these associations and for the schools they supported, it is obvious that a very important point then was at stake: the identity of the Chinese Muslims, that is Muslims whose everyday and literary language is Chinese. Did they constitute a religious or an ethnic minority? That is a problem which was new at the turn of the twentieth century and during the following decades, linked with the diffusion of Western ideas (often thanks to a Japanese intermediary) about religion, ethnicity, nationality and citizenship. Actually there are several Chinese expressions for rendering the concept of Islam and Muslim according to the point of view of the speaker, and each of them appears somehow in one or another designation of these associations. The tradi- tional wording of self-designation was to be a follower of “the Religion of the Pure and the True” or of “the Pure and True Religion”, Qingzhenjiao , a statement still very appreciated at the turn of the twenty-first century for it stresses the believers’ purity as a special marker of their superiority. They could also be called Mumin , “the Mu[slim] people,” an abbreviation of the word now currently in use, Mu-si-lin .5 During the first half of the twentieth century they were more and more often named—and they called themselves more and more often—members of the Huijiao “the religion of the Hui,” or Huimin , “the Hui people,” it being understood that Hui had then the meaning of the world-wide Islam,6 an equivalent of the word now common, Yi-si-lan , Chinese transliteration of “Islam.” They also frequently called themselves the Hui Hanzi , “the Muslim Han.” Later on, history has decided: under the People’s Republic, the Chinese Muslims have been registered as a specific “nationality” or minzu , as the Huizu .7 In the following list I shall draw from the main cultural associations created during the first decades of the twentieth century; I shall translate their names as closely as possible to their original meaning, unfortunately at the expense of elegance, because such names were not chosen at random, and each of the words forming them bore in itself the weight of an emotionally heavy tradition. Since the very beginning, the appearance of associations of their own is unmistakably a reply the Muslim modernists gave to the pervasive atmosphere surrounding them. Indeed the earliest association just followed, at the end of the Qing dynasty, the official reform of the educational system, culminating in September 1905 in the abolition of the thousand year old civil service examina- tions and of the Confucian schooling. It was founded in 1906 (Guangxu 32)8 at Zhenjiang (Jiangsu),9 under the appellation of the “General Association for the Religious Education of the Muslim People (Mumin) of Eastern Asia” (Dongya Mumin jiaoyu zonghui ). Its initiator, Tong Cong ,10 was a local Muslim in his forties, having recently graduated in the Confucianist system, so a man well integrated in the surrounding society. The interesting point is that he was then in touch with a group of thirty-six young Muslim Chinese sent for studying in Tokyo, because Japan was, after its victory over Russia in 1905, the favorite place where one could be introduced into modernity.11 These young men in their turn founded in 1907, on the model drawn by Tong Cong, an “Association 242 ISLAM ON THE WINGS OF NATIONALISM for the Pure and True [i.e. Muslim] Education of the Students in To[kyo]/or in the East”—with a play on the word dong, “East,” and the first syllable of Tokyo, ‘the Eastern Capital’ (Liudong Qingzhen jiaoyu hui ). And then, so important was, in the Chinese tradition, the correct naming of any enterprise, that Tong Cong, at these students’ instigation, changed the name of his society to “General Association for the Pure and True Education of East Asia” (Dongya Qingzhen jiaoyu zonghui ), a formulation which stressed at the same time the religious and the Chinese characters of his program. The aim of Tong Cong’s association was the promotion of a good Muslim education, so many Muslim notables backed him. He had actually opened in 1905 one of the first “modernized” Islamic schools in China—if not the first one—, a “School of Muslim sources” (Muyuan xuetang ), fit out with a printing house for presenting his pedagogical ideas in a journal “To develop us” (the Yiwobao ). As early as in 1908, he called in the school a meeting of his supporters and encouraged the creation of branches of his association everywhere. But this still remained a provincial venture. Merchants of Shanghai, during the troubles accompanying the fall of the impe- rial dynasty in the last weeks of 1911, constituted for protecting citizens a militia directed by a future journalist, Sha Shanyu , 12 and they were proclaiming to be adepts of the “Pure and True” using the name itself chosen for their group, Qingzhen shangtuan [Militia of Merchants of the Pure and True].13 The need for a common local organization of the believers was then strongly felt. For example, shortly before the overthrow of the dynasty, in 1910, a group of Muslim merchants and students of Shanghai elected (through a genuine vote, toupiao , with ballot papers) a marine officer as a general administrator with two assistants, to make up for the lack of a central authority heading their community; and they came to the office of the representative of the throne, the head of the xian , begging for an official registration: this has been immortalized by an inscrip- tion on stone.14 Shortly after the beginning of the new era in 1912, Muslim intellectuals of the major centers of coastal China felt more and more the acute need for associations promoting Islamic (Hui) culture and education. Pekingese launched in this very year 1912 a progressive movement with the long-lasting “Society for the Advance of the Hui Religion of China” (Zhongguo Huijiao jujin hui or al-Ëam2iyyat al-taqaddum al-islamiyya al-siniyya),15 which has been the first nationwide association of the believers, endowed with subsidiary associations ( fenhui ) in each province, and, since 1934, subsidiary groups in the mosques too. Very fine scholars were among its members, such as the ahong Ma Songting 16 and its first director, the ahong Wang Haoran .17 The principle for naming this association, which was to be followed by several others, was to use the word Huijiao, meaning Islam as a whole, and to add the specification of Zhongguo, “China.” The movement extended to Shanghai later. In the full burst of xenophobic man- ifestations and of large strikes in 1925, appeared, in the foreground of Muslim revival, Ha Decheng .18 He was both a religious personality—an ahong at 243 FRANÇOISE AUBIN a Shanghai mosque—, and since 1913 one of the managers of an international commercial society, whose benefits were earmarked to finance the schooling of future ahong and to buy Islamic books overseas. In 1925, back to Shanghai after several years spent abroad, he was struck by the still low level of religious teach- ing. In order to remedy to this situation, he gathered ten or so co-religionists of Shanghai, among others Sha Shanyu, a teacher and journalist,19 and Wu Tegong , a journalist;20 and on the 25th of June he created with them a specifically nonpolitical “Learned Society of the Hui Religion of China” (Zhongguo Huijiao xuehui , or al-Ëam2iyyat al-2ilmiyya al-islamiyya al-siniyya).21 Its aim was the promotion of religious education, of the collective good, of friend- ship with foreign co-religionists; the practical actions were the creation of an Islamic school, of an Arabic school and of elementary schools, of a library, the diffusion of foreign Muslim scholarship, the translation of the Qur1an, the publi- cation of handbooks, of a journal, and so on.

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