Islamic Modernism in China: Chinese Muslim Elites, Guomindang Nation-Building, and the Limits of the Global Umma, 1900-1960

Islamic Modernism in China: Chinese Muslim Elites, Guomindang Nation-Building, and the Limits of the Global Umma, 1900-1960 John Tseh-han Chen Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 John Tseh-han Chen All rights reserved ABSTRACT Islamic Modernism in China: Chinese Muslim Elites, Guomindang Nation-Building, and the Limits of the Global Umma, 1900-1960 John Tseh-han Chen Modern Chinese Muslims’ increasing connections with the Islamic world conditioned and were conditioned by their elites’ integrationist politics in China. Chinese Muslims (the “Hui”) faced a predicament during the Qing and Ottoman empire-to-nation transitions, seeking both increased contact with Muslims outside China and greater physical and sociopolitical security within the new Chinese nation-state. On the one hand, new communication and transport technologies allowed them unprecedented opportunities for transnational dialogue after centuries of real and perceived isolation. On the other, the Qing’s violent suppression of Muslim uprisings in the late nineteenth century loomed over them, as did the inescapable Han-centrism of Chinese nationalism, the ongoing intercommunal tensions between Muslims and Han, and the general territorial instability of China’s Republican era (1911-49). As a result, Islamic modernism—a set of positions emphasizing both reason and orthodoxy, and arguing that true or original Islam is compatible with science, education, democracy, women’s rights, and other “modern” norms— took on new meanings in the context of Chinese nation-making. In an emerging dynamic, ethos, and discourse of “transnationalist integrationism,” leading Chinese Muslims transformed Islamic modernism, a supposedly foreign body of thought meant to promote unity and renewal, into a reservoir of concepts and arguments to explain and justify the place of Islam and Muslims in China, and in so doing made it an integral component of Chinese state- and nation-building. “Islamic Modernism in China” argues that Chinese Muslims’ transregional engagement with Islamic modernism did not subvert but enabled the Chinese government’s domestic and foreign policies toward Muslims, and ultimately facilitated the nationalization of Muslim identity in modern China. From Qing collapse through the Second World War, urban coastal Chinese Muslim religious and political elites imported, read, debated, disseminated, and translated classic Islamic texts and modern Muslim print media, while establishing their own modernist schools and publications. Yet those same figures, through those same practices and institutions, increasingly wielded an image of Islamic authority and authenticity in support of the nationalist Guomindang government’s efforts to develop, integrate, and Sinicize China’s frontiers, including the predominantly Sufi Muslim communities of the Northwest. In the 1930s and early 1940s, integrationist Chinese Muslim elites further mobilized modernist narratives of Islam’s rationality, peacefulness, and past and present “contributions” to China. For example, they responded to Islamophobic misperceptions about halal by arguing that Islamic medicine was an important part of Chinese medicine. They also dispatched nationalistic goodwill delegations to the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China’s own frontiers during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), to pursue cultural cooperation and spread anti- Japanese propaganda. At the same time, in contrast to this instrumentalized Islam, certain Chinese Muslim scholars studying in Cairo instead articulated an expansive, democratized version of the Islamic concept of independent human reason (ijtihad) as the basis for a more inclusive vision of both Chinese nationalism and the global Islamic community (umma). The opportunity to pursue this or any other alternative to mere integrationism soon evaporated, however, as the renewed Chinese Civil War (1945-49) split the Chinese Muslim elites across the Mainland, Taiwan, and a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Thereafter, the Chinese Muslim elites largely became marginalized from high politics in the era of Cold-War and decolonization. Many of their once-contingent narratives of history and identity, however, have nevertheless been normalized as the canonical truth of Chinese Islam to this day, quietly informing China’s minority policies, foreign relations, and rhetoric of the “New Silk Road.” “Islamic Modernism in China” is a history of the subsumption of modern forms of mobility by modern structures of power. It narrates an assertion of difference in the context of multiple, partially overlapping integrations: the integration of a Han-centric idea of the Chinese nation-state, of an Arabo-centric idea of the Islamic world, and of a Eurocentric system of global infrastructures, institutions, networks, and knowledge. It de-parochializes the modern history of Chinese Muslims, showing how they epitomized aspirations and challenges common to Muslim minorities across many large non-Muslim societies and, to an extent, to modern Muslims everywhere. Using a wide range of new or under-studied archival and published sources in Chinese and Arabic, it connects questions of the meaning and scope of Islam, Islamic community, and Islamic modernism (scholarship on which tends to prioritize the Arab Middle East and relations with the West) to questions of religion and state in modern China (scholarship on which tends to prioritize popular spirituality and the official Confucian system, as well as relations with the West). As such, it presents Sino-Islamic transregional interactions beyond the lens of Western influence, yet also uncovers new trajectories by which Western concepts (“religion,” the “nation-state,” the “Islamic world”) became universalized. Overall, it moves beyond a circulation-based understanding of global encounters, and instead maps the contingent ways in which forms of mobility became pressed into the service of hegemonic processes of state- and nation-building: how flows of people and ideas created borders rather than simply crossing them. CONTENTS List of Charts, Graphs, and Illustrations iv Acknowledgements v Dedication xi Introduction Islam and Chinese Nation-Making 1 By Land and Sea: A Survey of Islam in China and Islam in Republican China 12 Authority without Power: The “Eliteness” of the Republican-Era Chinese Muslim Elites 17 Islam in China as Chinese, Islamic, and Global History 21 Distinctions: Land versus Sea, Public versus Private Islam, Ethnos versus Ethos 37 Structure of the Dissertation: Expanding Geographies and Converging Concepts 39 PART I: TRANSNATIONALIST INTEGRATIONISM Chapter One: Islamic Modernism in China Introduction: Chinese Muslims’ Changing Relationship with the Arabic Language 44 Textual Transnationalism I: Chinese Muslim Modernist Institutions and Print Media 55 Textual Transnationalism II: Multiregionalism and Arabization by Accident 74 Curricular Reform: Continuity and Change in Chinese Madrasas 88 Conceptual Convergences: “Islamic Civilization” and its “Arab Essence” 110 Conclusion: The Contingency of “Arabization” 115 Chapter Two: Making Islam Chinese Introduction: Chinese Muslim Support for Guomindang Nation-Building 117 Northwest Frontier Development and China’s Manifest Destiny Crisis 124 From Warlords to Muslim National Institutions 134 i Intellectual Legitimation: The Fu’ad Library Project and Frontier Cultural Progress Association 150 Frontier Education Reform: State- and Muslim-Led Initiatives amidst War and Communist Competition 160 Tawhid with Chinese Characteristics: Arabic Propaganda and Islamic Pedagogy under the Guomindang’s “Religion” Policies 178 Conclusion: Islamic Modernism as an Infrastructure of Chinese Nation-Building 191 PART II: NARRATIVES IN ACTION Chapter Three: The Discursive Sinicization of Islamic Medicine Introduction: The Politics and History of Islamic Medicine in China 195 Chinese Muslim Responses to “Insulting the Religion”: Halal as Biomedicine 202 Egyptian Reinforcements: The Transmission of Arabic “Scientific Exegesis” to China 210 Toward Narrativization: Bai Shouyi’s Materia Medica as a Muslim “Contribution” to China 215 Medical Donations and Chinese Muslim Wartime Diplomacy 224 Conclusion: From Han Islamophobia to Muslim Sinophilia 226 Chapter Four: Universalism Co-Opted Introduction: Beyond China? 228 Modern Chinese Muslims and the Hajj: From Cosmography to Geography 233 The Wartime Delegations: Propaganda, Espionage, Fraternity, Performance 247 The Chinese Islamic Near East Delegation in the World 263 Dueling Delegations? The Japanese- and GMD-Sponsored Hajj Delegations 282 The Chinese Islamic South Seas Delegation: Islamic Modernist History as Chinese Diplomacy 294 Conclusion: Culture and Power 297 ii PART III: TURNING POINTS Chapter Five: A Meeting of Minds: The Chinese Muslims in Cairo Introduction: The Chinese Muslims in Cairo 301 “The Beating Heart of the Islamic World”: Al-Azhar and its Modern Reforms 305 Journeys in Search of Knowledge: Careers and Thought of the Chinese Azharites 309 “China” in Arabic-Islamic Thought, and “Egypt” in Chinese Muslim Thought 327 What is to be Done? Al-Azhar’s Significance for Modern Chinese Islam 347 The Ambiguities of Tawhid 353 Reason Triumphant: Ijtihad as an Alternative Vision for Islam in China 363 Conclusion: Islamic Modernism’s Lost Generation 370 Chapter Six: Return or Exile Introduction: End and Beginning 375 Keeping Islam Anti-Communist:

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