_full_journalsubtitle: International Journal for the Study of Modern Islam _full_abbrevjournaltitle: WDI _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 0043-2539 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1570-0607 (online version) _full_issue: 1 _full_issuetitle: 0 _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien J2 voor dit article en vul alleen 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (rechter kopregel - mag alles zijn): Is China a House of Islam? _full_is_advance_article: 0 _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0
Is China a House of Islam?Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 33
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Is China a House of Islam? Chinese Questions, Arabic Answers, and the Translation of Salafism from Cairo to Canton, 1930-1932
Leor Halevi Vanderbilt University [email protected]
Abstract
Rashīd Riḍā’s six fatwas to China, disregarded by historians of China and by historians of Salafism, greatly expand our historical understanding of transnational intellectual exchanges between Muslim reformers in the interwar period. The questions that prompted the fatwas shed new light on the specific issues that divided Sino-Muslim nationalists in the republican era, when a Chinese awakening coincided with an Islamic awakening. They also reveal why a Sino-Muslim scholar, seeking external arbitration, decided to write to a Muslim authority in Cairo. The fatwas that ensued show, in turn, the care that Riḍā took to transmit his legal methods and religious values to a foreign country, where Muslims mainly followed the Ḥanafī school of law. On the basis of the fatwas, which were translated into Chinese, the article offers not an arbitrary, abstract, or ahistorical understanding of the origins of Salafism in China, but a concrete grasp of Salafism in translation.
Keywords
Chinese-Egyptian intellectual exchanges – globalization of Islamic reform – Salafism – Rashīd Riḍā – Ma Ruitu – fatwas – al-Manār – Dār al-Islām, Dār al-Ḥarb – Sino- Muslim identity in Republican China – ritual – gender – Westernization – Ḥanafī madhhab
Introduction
In 1930, the famous Syrian scholar Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (1865-1935), found- er and editor of the reformist Islamic journal al-Manār (The Lighthouse), re-
© KoninklijkeDie Welt des Islams Brill NV, 59 Leiden, (2019) 33-692019 | doi:10.1163/15700607-00591P03Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 34 Halevi ceived – at his publishing house in Cairo – an intriguing letter from the mysterious city of Qabūdān, China. The author, ʿUthmān b. Ḥusayn al-Ṣīnī, identified himself, all too humbly, as the most contemptible of persons, and expressed great joy at his recent acquisition: a copy of the first volume of Riḍā’s journal, originally published in 1898. He then asked Riḍā for answers to six questions that China’s Muslim scholars were debating. The most politically sig- nificant of these questions concerned the status of China in Islamic law: whether the nation, as a republic that allowed its Muslims citizens freedom of religion, should count as a House of Islam. Riḍā responded with a set of six fatwas, or legal rulings, which he published in October 1930.1 I myself discovered these rulings – unknown to specialists on Islam in China – while researching systematically al-Manār’s fatwas in or- der to write a book about Islam’s material reformation.2 In the course of his career, Riḍā published more than one thousand fatwas in response to religious questions from more than four hundred fatwa-seekers. Through al-Manār, which championed an “enlightened” return to Islam’s ancestral origins, he ac- quired a broad readership of dispersed Muslims worldwide. Fatwa-seekers wrote to him – in Arabic – not just from the Middle East and North Africa, but also from Europe and the Americas, as well as from Central, South, and South- east Asia. Hearing from places as far apart as Brazil, Switzerland, Russia, British Raj India, and the Dutch East Indies, he deserves the title “the First Global Muf- ti.” Although he resided in Egypt, nearly two thirds of his fatwa-seekers lived in other countries.3 Still, it was not an everyday event for Riḍā to receive a letter from China seeking his legal expertise – and in good Arabic, too. In fact, this was an extra ordinary occurrence; and Riḍā must have been tremendously pleased because he was a tireless advocate for the global spread of Arabic as the inimitable lan-
1 Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, Fatāwā al-Imām, ed. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid and Yūsuf Q. Khūrī (Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd: Beirut, 1970-1971), vol. 6, nos. 841-46, pp. 2300-10. Originally the fatwas appeared in al-Manār 31 (1930) 241, 271-78. For clarity and simplicity, I will refer to this set of questions and fatwas in one of two forms: either Ma Ruitu, “Questions from China,” or Riḍā, “Fatwas to China,” followed by the number in the two editions. 2 Leor Halevi, Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935, forthcoming in 2019 from Columbia University Press. In this book, I analyze Riḍā’s global enterprise as well as his fatwas concerning novel commodities and technological innovations. 3 Data derived from a statistical analysis of the index to Riḍā’s Fatāwā al-Imām that appears on pages 2745-59 of the sixth volume.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 35 guage of the Qurʾan.4 He must have been excited, too, because his journal had long served as a medium for the transmission of knowledge about Islam in China. In 1901 and 1906, for instance, al-Manār published brief reports on this subject. In addition, shortly after the revolutionary overthrow of the Qing dy- nasty, al-Manār translated into Arabic a series of articles (originally published by a Tatar newspaper from Orenburg, Russia) about the conditions of Muslims in the Republic of China.5 This article presents and analyzes Riḍā’s fatwas for China. Turning to ʿUthmān b. Ḥusayn’s six questions, it will shed light, in the first place, on “Sino- Muslim” or “Islamic-Chinese” identity at a critical juncture in China’s modern history: at the dawn of a new era, following the defeat of various warlords at the end of 1928, when nationalists began to hold fervently that all of the country’s Muslims fully belonged, as equal citizens, in the unified republic.6
4 In 1912, for example, Riḍā preached the importance of Arabic to Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ in Lucknow, India. On this lecture, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “The Role of Arabic and the Arab Middle East in the Definition of Muslim Identity in Twentieth Century India,” MW 87:3-4 (1997), 272-98, at 282. Quite opposed to nationalistic ventures to translate the Qurʾan, Riḍā insisted on the indispensability of the original Arabic text. On this matter, see Mohamed Ali Mohamed Abou Sheishaa, “A Study of the Fatwa by Rashid Rida on the Translation of the Qurʾān,” purportedly published by the Journal of the Society for Qur’anic Studies 1:1 (2001), and archived on May 3, 2016, at
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Specifically, it will show how a Sino-Muslim debate over integration into China was expressed in a dichotomous geopolitical framework that derived from Is- lamic law. In addition to the question about China’s legal status, one other question dealt with a political issue: the pan-Islamist charge that adherence to a school of law, a madhhab, was the cause of Muslim disunity. The remaining four questions concerned ritual and social matters: the recitation of the Qurʾan for the dead; the use of gold teeth and gold crowns; the timing of the fast of Ramadan; and the problem of Muslim women imitating “Western” manners. Significant historically as well, these were burning and divisive questions for Chinese Muslims around 1930. In the second place, the article aims at expanding our knowledge of Chi- nese-Egyptian ideological exchanges in the period between the world wars. In recent years, there has been a surge of scholarly interest in transregional com- munications within networks of Muslim scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during what James Gelvin and Nile Green evoca tively titled “the age of steam and print.” Historians of China have made out standing contributions to this field by analyzing some of the cultural and intellectual ramifications of intriguing contacts between Chinese and Egyp- tian Muslims in the 1920s and 1930s.7 Especially relevant for the present study is the attention that they have paid to the publications that Sino-Muslim trav- elers engendered in two journals, al-Fatḥ (The Conquest) and Yuehua (Moon- light), printed in Cairo and Beijing respectively. A young scholar from Yunnan who formed part of the first official delegation of Chinese students to al-Azhar, Muḥammad Makīn, otherwise known as Ma Jian (1906-78), has emerged as the most compelling example of the literary impact of this time of cross-cultural exchange. In 1934, with the imprimatur of Cairo’s Salafiyya Press, he published a book about the history of Islam in China – in Arabic.8 One year later, Shang-
7 For two groundbreaking studies of Chinese-Egyptian intellectual exchanges in the 1930s, see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “Taking ʿAbduh to China: Chinese-Egyptian Intellectual Contact in the Early Twentieth Century,” in James L. Gelvin and Nile Green, eds., Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 249-67; and Matsumoto Masumi, “Rationalizing Patriotism Among Muslim Chinese: The Impact of the Middle East on the Yuehua Journal,” in Dudoignon et al., eds., Intellectuals, 117-42. On the ripe fruits of this transnational exchange, see John T. Chen, “Re-Orientation: The Chinese Azharites be- tween Umma and Third World, 1938-55,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34 (2014), 24-51. 8 Muḥammad Makīn al-Ṣīnī, Naẓra jāmiʿa ilā tārikh al-Islām fī l-Ṣīn wa-aḥwāl al-Muslimīn fīhā (Cairo: Al-Maṭbaʿa al-Salafiyya, 1934). In this book on Islam in China, Makīn discussed several of the issues that Ma Ruitu raised earlier, in 1930. He mentioned the legal controversy over recitations of the Qurʾan at funerary repasts (p. 55), the issue of Chinese wearing European or American clothes (p. 63), and the debate on whether to place China in the Abode of Islam or the Abode of War (p. 63).
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 37 hai’s Commercial Press printed his translation into Chinese of a key book in the reformist Muslim canon, Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Theology of Unity, which historians have begun interpreting to illuminate Islam’s “modern globalization.”9 Despite these historiographical advances, additional historical research is needed to reach a more concrete understanding of the specific interests and preoccupations that drove Chinese-Egyptian exchanges in this period. Why, specifically, did Sino-Muslim scholars turn to their counterparts in Egypt for religious and legal guidance? A crucial piece of evidence needed to answer this historical question is ʿUthmān b. Ḥusayn’s request for Riḍā’s fatwas. Their legal exchange is historically significant, too, because it reveals a great deal about the early transmission of Salafism – in a fragmented form – from Cairo to Can- ton. This article contributes, in the third place, to scholarship on Rashīd Riḍā’s political and legal thought.10 Much is known about his political orientation after World War I: his critique of British and French imperialism, his response to the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate, his nationalistic activism for Syrian independence, and his alliance with Ibn Saʿūd, the king of the dual realms of Najd and the Ḥijāz. It has often been argued that he became radicalized in this period. One article goes so far as to claim that, with his “deviation” from the progressive, modernist philosophy of his mentor Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Riḍā embarked on a political and religious trajectory that “transformed Salafism into a backward-looking ideology ill-prepared to confront the challenges of the modern world.”11 There are good reasons to give him credit for providing le- gitimacy to “Ḥanbalī-Wahhabism” as an authentic expression of Salafism.12 But the simplistic and, in my view, unjustified thesis about Riḍā’s radicaliza- tion, which has been endlessly repeated without adequate evidentiary support since the 1960s, has failed to take into account continuities in his approach to
9 On ʿAbduh’s popular book Risālat al-tawḥīd as a marker of the globalization of concepts of religion, see Johann Buessow, “Re-Imagining Islam in the Period of the First Modern Globalization: Muhammad ʿAbduh and his Theology of Unity,” in Liat Kozma et al., eds., A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality, and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880-1940 (Lon- don: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 273-320. Buessow’s study does not concern the reception and trans- lation of ʿAbduh’s book, yet it encourages historians to pursue the topic. 10 Scholarship in this subfield is extensive. For an overview, see Mahmoud O. Haddad, “Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935),” in David Powers, Oussama Arabi, and Susan Spec- torsky, eds., Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists (Leiden: Brill, 2013), chap. 21. My forthcoming book, Modern Things on Trial, will include an extensive bibliog- raphy. 11 Ana Belén Soage, “Rashīd Ridā’s Legacy,” MW 98:1 (2008), 1-23, at 3. 12 Nabil Mouline, Les clercs de l’islam: Autorité religieuse et pouvoir politique en Arabie Saoudite (XVIIIe-XXIe siècle) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), 145-46.
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Islamic law.13 Late into his career, as his fatwas for China will show, he contin- ued to espouse an economically liberal Salafism that he justified through Ḥanafī, rather than Ḥanbalī, legal precedents.
Ma Ruitu of Yunnan: the Sino-Muslim Turn from the Han Kitāb to al-Manār
The 1930 request for a series of fatwas originated from a place that al-Manār named Qabūdān. After some detective work, I determined that this was an original, indeed unique, transliteration of Guangdong. Now, Riḍā’s journal identified the correspondent by his Arabo-Islamic name, ʿUthmān b. Ḥusayn “the Chinese.” 14 His Chinese name was Ma Ruitu 马瑞图, born Ma Yulong (1896-1945), the grandson of the famous Yunnanese educator and translator Ma Lianyuan (1841-1903). Although they traced their ancestry to Jiangnan, an eastern region that lies south of the Yangtze River, Ma Ruitu’s forefathers had migrated to southwest China and, several generations before his birth, they had settled in a village that was eventually incorporated into Yuxi, Yunnan.15 We know details of Ma Ruitu’s education and career because his sons pub- lished a brief account of his life and studies.16 During his childhood, when his father was absent, he learned to recite the Qurʾan. His education, however, was not exclusively religious: he took lessons in world geography from a late Qing textbook, Xixue Sanzijing 西學三字經 (The three-character classic about
13 For early and influential versions of this thesis, see Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Politi- cal Community: An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804-1952 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 84; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789-1939 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 163, 231. 14 The U.S. Board on Geographic Names’ Gazetteer of the People’s Republic of China (July, 1979) lists a few locations with similar-sounding names, including Kebudayaan, Gaoba- dian, and Gaobeidian. However, earlier correspondence between ʿUthmān b. al-Ḥājj Nūr al-Ḥaqq al-Ṣīnī al-Ḥanafī [Ma Ruitu] of al-Qwāndun (clearly Canton) and Riḍā, as well as the publication of Riḍā’s fatwas by Tianfang Xueli, makes the identity of the Sino-Muslim writer clear. 15 I base this genealogy on the biography cited below. For a longer genealogy of the Ma fam- ily, whose origins historians have traced to a tenth-century courtier from Anatolia, see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2005), 67. 16 Ma Yuncong and Ma Yunliang, “A Brief Biography of Our Late Father” [Wang Fu Zhuan Lue 亡父传略], in Ma Yunliang and Weishan County Islamic Association, eds., Ma Li- anyuan jingxue shijia 马联元经学世家 [Ma Lianyuan’s Noble Scholarly Lineage] (Yun- nan Nationalities Publishing House, 2011), 73-77. Originally published in Qingzhen duobao, New No. 36, dated 1947.
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Western learning). At the age of eleven, he accompanied his father, Ma Ank- ang, to Shadian, a Muslim town in Gejiu city. Under his father’s supervision, he applied himself to learning Arabic and mastering books in the Han Kitāb cor- pus, the indigenous Chinese-Muslim literary tradition. He continued doing this during his free time, after his marriage at age seventeen, in the early years of the Republic. Among other texts, surely he studied at one point his grandfa- ther’s translation into Arabic of Liu Zhi’s Benjing 本經 (Root scripture), a book that did much to define Islam’s dao.17 In his early twenties, he served for a year as an Arabic instructor in Jijie, a neighboring town, but otherwise stayed in Shadian until 1920. In the ninth year of the Republic, “bandits (tu fei) invaded Shadian.” Ban- ditry was a serious challenge to social and political stability in Republican China, and the mountainous city of Gejiu, where Shadian lay, was an attractive target – due to its tin mines – in the unstable frontier zone that separated Chi- na from French Indochina. Supplied by French merchants from the colonial protectorate of Tonkin, warlords and their enemies imported thousands of ri- fles into Yunnan at this time. These firearms doubtless played a role in the vio- lence unleashed by the bandits.18 Terrified, Ma Ruitu and his father fled the town in a panic, never to return. Ma Ruitu spent the next seven years in Kun- ming and Yuxi, teaching Arabic, serving as a cleric in different mosques, and learning some English from the missionary teachers of the Young Men’s Chris- tian Association, the YMCA. Three years before he sent his letter to Cairo, Ma Ruitu left Yunnan for Guangdong’s capital, Guangzhou (Canton), in order to teach Arabic and Islam at the Hao Pan Street Mosque. While occupying this position, he founded the “Arabic Theology Monthly” (Tianfang xueli yuekan 天方學理月刊), which ran from 1928 to 1935.19 The journal enjoyed a readership beyond the confines of Canton. A 1930 article in a Sino-Muslim magazine published by an Islamic col- lege in Beijing referred to it as “one of China’s most famous publications,
17 Kristian Petersen, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 193. 18 For an account of banditry in Yunnan in 1920, see Phil Billingsley, Bandits in Republican China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 88-89. On the French arms trade in this frontier region and on France’s interest in the Gejiu mines, see Anthony Bernard Chan, Arming the Chinese: The Western Armaments Trade in Warlord China, 1920-1928 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010) 54-55, 102-03. 19 Tianfang literally designates a “heavenly square.” It is a standard way of referring to the Kaʿba and, metaphorically, to Mecca, Arabia, Arabic, and Islam. An article “On the Nam- ing of the Journal,” published on the first anniversary, emphasized the Qurʾan’s unique heavenly origin. See Yulong 玉龙, “Ben Kan Mingming Shuo” [本刊命名说], Tianfang Xueli Yuekan 1:13 (1929).
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 40 Halevi especially in the South.”20 Although in 1931 he went back to Yunnan for a year or so, Ma Ruitu returned to Guangzhou at the urging of the Muslim commu- nity there. He continued to teach Arabic but in a new school established to serve better the city’s five mosques. He stayed in the city until the 1937 bom- bardments by Japan. In the aftermath of the Japanese invasion, he returned to Yuxi to establish an academy for learning Arabic. He began to serve as well as the principal reli- gious authority for a cluster of nine Muslim villages. In this capacity, he spared no effort to “invigorate religion in his hometown.” He targeted what his sons called “evil practices and undesirable customs.” But allegedly “corrupt” imams, adhering to the old system, rose up in a revolt against him. Bedeviled by con- flicts that stemmed from his disruptive reforms, the wandering scholar re- signed from his position resentfully and devoted himself for a while to the quiet work of translation. In 1940, however, he was appointed as a member of China’s Islamic Association for National Salvation (Zhongguo Huijiao Jiuguo Xiehui 中国回教救国协会).21 At the time, this organization dedicated itself to promoting “love of the fatherland” as an “article of faith” and to preaching Muslim unity in the face of the Japanese enemy.22 Not long after this, he de- cided to leave his hometown once more to teach Arabic at the renowned Xiao Weigeng Mosque in Menghua (Weishan), a “thriving place for Islam” in western Yunnan. In lectures that he gave to more than twenty Muslim villages in the surrounding area, he explained “profound theories in simple terms, compre- hensible even to women and children.”23 He spent the last months of his life reminding mosque leaders always to strike a flat cloud-shaped metal gong (yun ban) half an hour before the right time for the morning prayer. Of special interest to us is the zeal with which Ma Ruitu applied himself to reforming the practices and customs of Muslims in and around his hometown in the late 1930s. His exertions met strong local resistance, which indicates that he brought to Yuxi new and controversial doctrines about the correct way to practice Islam. Did he learn these socially divisive doctrines in Guangzhou? Actually, Guangzhou’s Muslim community was roiled by ideological conflicts
20 [Zhao] Zhenwu 振武, “The Disputes in Tianfang Xueli Yuekan,” [Tianfang Xueli Yuekan fasheng jiufen de ganxiang 天方学历月刊发生纠纷的感想], Yuehua 月华, vol. 2:3-4 (Dec., 1930). 21 The biography uses a subsequent name for this organization, Zhongguo Huijiao Xiehui 中国回教协会. 22 Masumi, “Rationalizing Patriotism,” 135-36. 23 Ma Lianyuan’s descendants published the three principal Arabic textbooks used to give women a traditional Muslim education in Yunnan. See Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), 97-98 and 331.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 41 in the late twenties and early thirties; and Ma Ruitu made a critical interven- tion in these conflicts, as an editor and translator, by importing into China a contemporary Salafist perspective. Inspired by modern, pan-Islamic currents of reform (iṣlāḥ), he embarked in Guangzhou on a journalistic mission for orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Tianfang Xueli featured an “Arabic” theological and legal perspective on topics such as monotheism, the taboo on pork, insurance contracts, commemoration of the dead, the characteristics of “undesirable” women, and similarities between Buddhism and Christianity.24 It always insisted on “correcting” Chinese-Mus- lim beliefs and rituals that failed to conform to the standards for right and wrong established by Cairo’s contemporary Islamic journals.25 By 1930, this mission gave rise to an editorial dispute over the pace at which Tianfang Xueli should press to reform the “bad habits” of Chinese Muslims. The dispute broke out into the open, and it led to the foundation of a rival Islamic journal, Muʾmin 穆民 (“Muslim” or “Believer”), also published in Guangzhou, that presumably adopted a more forgiving approach to differences in religious beliefs and prac- tices.26 In this tumultuous time in Guangzhou, Ma Ruitu’s admiration for Riḍā and his journal grew to an excessive degree. In an obsequious and hyperbolic letter that he penned in Arabic, in which he freely complained about the pathetic state of Islam in China, he named Riḍā the leader of the Sunni community (raʾīs ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa) and compared al-Manār to the sun.27 In re- sponse, Riḍā invited Ma Ruitu to become a reformer in his mold. Together with his fatwas, he sent to him a copy of his Muḥwarat al-muslih wa-l-muqallid (Dialogues between the reformer and the imitator). Serialized by al-Manār be- tween 1900 and 1902, this fictional booklet had made the case that, to attain the goal of Islamic unity, Muslims needed to abandon their traditionalist adher- ence to the medieval schools of jurisprudence and to return – with modern eyes – to the original sources of Islamic law.28
24 For a comprehensive index of articles published by Tianfang Xueli Yuekan, see Lei Xiao- jing 雷晓静, ed., Huizu jin xiandai baokan mulu tiyao 回族近现代报刊目录提要 (Yin- chuan Shi: Ningxia ren min chu ban she, 2006), vol. 1, 145-82. 25 In addition to translating articles from al-Manār, Tianfang Xueli Yuekan also translated articles from the new Azhari journal Nūr al-Islām. 26 Zhenwu, “Tianfang Xueli Yuekan,” cited above. On this topic, see Zeyneb Hale Eroglu Sager, “Islam in Translation: Muslim Reform and Transnational Networks in Modern Chi- na, 1908-1957” (PhD Thesis: Harvard University, 2016), 255. 27 ʿUthmān [b. Ḥusayn] b. al-Ḥājj Nūr al-Ḥaqq al-Ṣīnī al-Ḥanafī, “Risāla muhimma min al- Ṣīn fī ḥāl man fīhā min al-Muslimīn,” al-Manār 31 (1930), 75-76. 28 Al-Manār 31 (1930), 277; Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 6, p. 2309. The reference is to Rashīd Riḍā, Muḥwarat al-muslih wa-l-muqallid wa-l-wahda al-Islamiyya (Cairo: Al-Manār, 1906). On
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Selectively translating articles by Riḍā that had a bearing on Sino-Muslim debates and preoccupations, Tianfang Xueli came to serve as a critical medium for the transmission of al-Manār’s ideals into Chinese.29 During a nationalistic awakening, some Chinese intellectuals fiercely criticized the expansion of Protestant and Catholic educational missions in their nation, while others pre- sented Protestant Christianity as a revolutionary religion that was perfectly designed for modernity.30 Ma Ruitu contributed to this discourse by offering his readers a taste of Middle Eastern anti-Christian polemics: the first install- ment of Riḍā’s 1913 treatise The Doctrine of Crucifixion and Redemption.31 Dur- ing the civil war between Republicans and Communists, he translated an article from al-Manār on the difficulties for Muslims under Soviet rule. Ad- dressed to the Islamic world, this was a lament dispatched by the Idel-Ural In- dependence Committee. It recounted the woes endured by Muslims since the Russian Revolution of 1917: the dire consequences of the Bolshevik “war on religions,” which among other things meant the closure of thousands of Tatar mosques.32 This tirade must have had special significance for Guangzhou’s Muslims, for suspicion of the Soviets ran high in this republican city in the years of Chiang Kai-shek’s ascent to power. The 1926 purges of Chinese com- missars and Soviet advisors from the Revolutionary Army, as well as the 1927 arrests and executions of Communist labor organizers, left no doubt that pub- lishing anti-Soviet propaganda lent support to the Nationalist cause.33
the significance of this book, see Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Young Man: Rashīd Riḍā’s Muḥāwarāt al-muṣliḥ wa-l-muqallid (1906),” Islam and Chris- tian-Muslim Relations 12:1 (2001), 93-104. 29 In Chinese, al-Manār was called Guang Ta 光塔, “The Lighthouse.” 30 On the status of Christianity in Nationalist Chinese discourses about religion and moder- nity, see Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Mo- dernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 13, 35, and elsewhere. On resentment toward Christian missionaries in the 1920s and 1930s, see R.G. Tiedemann, ed., Handbook of Christianity in China, vol. 2: 1800-present (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 655-56, 673- 74. 31 Ma Ruitu, “The Cross and Redemption” [Shizijia Yu Shuzui 十字架与赎罪], Tianfang Xueli Yuekan 2:15 (December 1929). This article, the first of a series, was a translation of Riḍā’s ʿAqīdat al-ṣalb wa-l-fidāʾ. On the centrality of Christianity for Riḍā and his network, see Umar Ryad, Islamic Reformism and Christianity: A Critical Reading of the Works of Mu- hammad Rashīd Riḍā and his Associates (1898-1935) (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 32 Riḍā, “Aḥwāl muslimī Rūsiyya,” al-Manār 31 (May 1930), 70-75. Translated but a few months later under the title “Muslim Difficulties in Russia” [Eguo Huijiao Zhi Ku Kuang 俄国 回教之苦况], Tianfang Xueli Yuekan 3:3 (Dec. 1930). I thank Roy Bar Sadeh of Columbia University for helping me to identify the article in al-Manār. 33 Michael Tsang-Woon Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity: Canton, 1900-1927 (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 163-70.
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In 1931, Ma Ruitu translated a Sunni condemnation of sectarianism by a me- dieval theologian named Buyi Taimingyue (Ibn Taymiyya), whose writings he discovered by reading al-Manār. Riḍā had published the same condemnation a year earlier – in the very same issue in which he published the fatwas to China. The article can be described as a divisive call to Muslim unity. It ex- plained what doctrines and practices bound Muslims together, while denounc- ing Khārijīs and Shīʿīs for their heretical innovations and sectarian violence. It is not difficult to guess why Buyi Taimingyue’s rhetoric appealed to Ma Ruitu. The Sino-Muslim scholar was engaged at the time in fierce polemics against the Aḥmadiyya, whose missionaries had reached Hong Kong. He considered their teachings dangerous, and turned his journal into the chief organ for anti- Aḥmadiyya propaganda in China. Indeed, the term that he used to identify al- legiance to the “orthodox community” (Zhengzong pai 正宗派) in an article that criticized Ghulām Aḥmad’s doctrines is the exact same term that he used to translate Ibn Taymiyya’s reference to the Sunni community (ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa).34 In addition, in the early 1930s Ma Ruitu serialized a translation of Riḍā’s “The Muḥammadan Revelation,” published posthumously as a stand-alone book. 35 He also published a translation of ʿAbduh’s Risālat al-Tawḥīd under the title Huijiao ren yi lun, which basically means “An Islamic Essay on Recog- nizing the One.”36 He thus made significant contributions to the translation of the Arabic literature of Islamic reform. Ma Ruitu of Yunnan is therefore an exciting transitional figure in the intel- lectual history of Islam in China. Reared on Han Kitāb classics, which had
34 Buyi Taimingyue (布宜太明月), trans. Ma Ruitu, “Mushilin de zongzhi yizhi jingshen fangmian ying tuanjie lun 穆士林的宗旨一致精神方面应团结论,” Tianfang Xueli Yue kan 4:3 (1931), p. 10. This article was a partial translation of Ibn Taymiyya, “Jamʿ kalimat al-muslimīn: Qāʿidat ahl al-Sunna wa-l-jamāʿa,” al-Manār 31:4 (Oct. 1930), 281-89. For an analysis of Tianfang Xueli Yuekan’s polemics against the Aḥmadiyya, see Eroglu Sager, “Is- lam in Translation,” 234-36. 35 Tianfang xueli published portions of Al-Waḥy al-Muḥammadī in 1934 and 1935. The post- humous edition: Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā [Muhanmode Lai Shi Dezhe 穆罕默德赖施 德著], Muhanmode de mo shi [穆罕默德的默示], trans. Ma Ruitu (Shanghai: Zhonghua shu ju, 1946). 36 Muḥammad ʿAbduh [Muhanmode Abu Duzhe 穆罕默德 阿布笃着], Huijiao ren yi lun [回教 认一论], trans. Ma Ruitu (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1937). Surely Ma Ruitu used Riḍā’s edition of ʿAbduh’s Risālat al-tawḥīd, published by al-Manār Press in 1908. This edi- tion apparently “toned down” the “more unusual passages” of the original edition of 1897, on which see Mark Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh (Oxford: Oneworld, 2010), 64. Ma Rui- tu’s 1937 translation of the book should not be confused with Ma Jian’s 1934 translation, titled Huijiao zhexue (Islamic philosophy). On the significance of the different titles, see Benite, “Taking ʿAbduh to China,” 260-61.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 44 Halevi made an original synthesis of Islamic doctrines and neo-Confucian philoso- phy, he became a key translator of modern Salafist literature into Chinese: the scholar from Yunnan who would introduce Chinese readers to Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s and Rashīd Riḍā’s pan-Islamic project of reform. In a striking way, he embodies a profound shift in the Sino-Muslim culture of translation: a shift from the cultivation of a domestically oriented, harmonious disposition, which had yielded that unique mixture of Confucian and Islamic thought, to a uni- versalistic quest to reform Chinese Islam – with heightened concern over its particularities – in accordance with an external, revivalist Arab-Islamic model. This shift entailed a profoundly different approach to the Sharīʿa. Han Kitāb authors had paid relatively little attention to Islamic law.37 Mainly they had focused on reconciling Islamic rites and norms with dynastic rites and norms, adopting a regionalist approach to Islamic law that respected the dominant culture of the Qing empire. Allegiance to the Ḥanafī school of law, which made special allowances for Muslim minorities to submit to the sovereignty of a non- Muslim state, arguably facilitated this approach.38 By contrast, the republican reformers’ turn to al-Manār signaled a willingness to follow an external legal authority. This shift definitely meant a concerted effort on the part of Arabic translators such as Ma Ruitu to make Islam in China less Chinese. It did not, however, mean political alienation. The republic’s Sino-Muslim reformers ad- vocated, as we shall see, unity on multiple levels: unity among Muslim com- munities within and beyond China’s borders, as well as the unity of China’s diverse peoples. The religious aim to forge the firmest bond between Muslims worldwide seemed to them perfectly compatible with the nationalistic aim of unifying China.
The First Question: is Republican China a House of Islam?
Arguably, China ought to count as a House of Islam, wrote Ma Ruitu to Rashīd Riḍā, “for Muslims are born in China, and grow up here. They are able to [demonstrate] their piety and perform the canonical acts.” If this categoriza- tion is accepted, then all the rules that apply to Muslims living in Islamic na- tions would apply to Muslims living in China, too. Chinese Muslims would be
37 For a description of Liu Zhi’s Tianfang dianli as “the sole” Han Kitāb work to focus specifi- cally on Islamic law, see James D. Frankel, “Sharia in China: Compromising Perceptions,” in Timothy P. Daniels, ed., Sharia Dynamics: Islamic Law and Sociopolitical Processes (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) 126-27. 38 Roberta Tontini, “Tianfang Sanzijing: Exchanges and Changes in China’s Reception of Is- lamic Law,” in Lipman, ed., Islamic Thought, 56, 70.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 45 required to pay the ʿushr, a variable and adjustable “tithe” levied by Islamic re- gimes on agricultural produce from qualified lands, the earnings of merchants and artisans, and imported merchandise.39 They would also need to observe the prohibition on selling wine. Yet what if, alternatively, the country remained, as in the past, a House of War? Contending that China’s Muslims continued to submit to infidel laws and infidel judges, and that they lacked an independent ruler, some Chinese Muslim scholars argued that the Islamic label for an ene- my state still applied to the modern republic. This debate was meaningful in China at the time. The novel suggestion that modern China might count as a House of Islam marked a significant and pro- found departure from imperial times, when Muslim rebels had challenged the dynastic ideal of unity under the Mandate of Heaven.40 It shows the extent to which Sino-Muslims came to embrace – in the ebullient period known as the Nanjing decade – the Nationalistic ideology of the republic. Giving rise to an internal Muslim debate in China, they expressed their Chinese nationalism in their own terms, on the basis of an Islamic geopolitical conception of the world. If episodic violence and an uneasy coexistence had historically punctuated the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim in Imperial China, the re- publican era dawned with hopes of peace and integration. Sun Yat-sen, the republic’s founder, promoted national unity, which required easing ethnic and religious divisions, as a foundational philosophical principle. Beginning with the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and 1912, Guomindang and Republi- can officials, guided by this principle, made gestures to win over China’s mi- norities. Their efforts, sporadic and inconsistent, were not entirely successful. Despite the quest for ethnic harmony, violence between Muslims and non- Muslims continued to reign in certain provinces in the 1920s.41 Even so, the revolution accelerated and deepened the cultural and political awakening of China’s Muslims that began at the end of the Qing period. This is evident from
39 On taxation under an Islamic state in a Chinese historical context, see Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 (Stanford: California University Press, 2004) 131-35. 40 See Raphael Israeli, Islam in China: Religion, Ethnicity, Culture, and Politics (Lanham, MD, 2002), chap. 1, although it overemphasizes the “threat” of Muslim separatism. 41 See Andrew D.W. Forbes, Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: A Political History of Republican Sinkiang 1911-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chaps. 1-2. For general reflections and case studies on religious violence, see Jonathan N. Lipman, “Ethnic Violence in Modern China: Hans and Huis in Gansu, 1781-1929,” in Jonathan N. Lipman and Stevan Harrell, eds., Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture (New York: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), 65-86.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 46 Halevi the host of Muslim advocacy groups and journals, including Ma Ruitu’s month- ly, that emerged in the first few decades of the century.42 Now, Guangzhou, where Ma Ruitu lived and worked in 1930, was a natural setting for this Sino-Muslim debate on China’s geopolitical status. The city’s total Muslim population was relatively small; a 1928 article estimated that there were 5,000 adherents of Islam in Guangzhou. Many of them lived in a district known as the Foreign Quarters (Fanfang), where the main mosques were located.43 But Guangzhou, which boasted the historic Huaisheng (Light- house) mosque as well as a shrine to one of the Prophet’s companions, had long attracted Muslim scholars and travelers from diverse provinces within China and abroad. As a treaty port close to Hong Kong, it was deeply affected by foreign trade. The province’s commercial links to Southeast Asia were sig- nificant, and they facilitated the circulation of new political and religious ide- als across the South China Sea.44 Indeed, Ma Ruitu’s appeal to al-Manār for a fatwa, though exceptional from a Chinese historical perspective, is far from exceptional if it is interpreted historically as a representative example of Is- lamic communications between Cairo and the ports of the South China Sea or the wider region of Southeast Asia.45 In addition, in the 1920s Canton experi- enced a profound political upheaval. Guomindang revolutionaries established
42 Michael Dillon, China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlement and Sects (Rich- mond: Curzon, 1999) 82-85; Françoise Aubin, “Islam on the Wings of Nationalism: The Case of Muslim Intellectuals in Republican China,” in Dudoignon et al., eds., Intellectuals, 241-72. 43 Bo Shoubao 博守保, “Brief Record of the Customs of Muslims in Guangzhou,” (Guang- zhou Huijiao Fengsu Lue Zhi 广州回教风俗略志), Minsu 民俗 38 (12 Dec. 1928), 30. Re- printed in Ma Qiang 马强, ed., Minguo shiqi Guangzhou Musilin baokan ziliao jilu (1928-1949) 民国时期广州穆斯林报刊资料辑录 (1928-1949) (Yinchuan Shi: Ningxia ren min chu ban she, 2004), p. 126. Also see Ma Jianzhao, “The Role of Islam in the Forma- tion of the Culture and Economy of the Hui Community in Guangzhou,” Journal of Mus- lim Minority Affairs 16:1 (1996), 31-39. This article cites figures from 1932, holding that there were 1,069 Hui out of 2,145 Fanfang residents. 44 On links between Huis in China and Indonesia, see Rosey Wang Ma, “Hui Diaspora,” in Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember and Ian Skoggard, eds., Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immi- grant and Refugee Cultures Around the World (New York: Springer, 2005), 113-24. 45 Mona Abaza, “Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Al-Manar and Islamic Modernity,” in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, ed. Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard and Roderich Ptak (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 93-111; Jajat Burhanudin, “Aspiring for Islamic Reform: Southeast Asian Requests for Fatwās in al-Manār,” ILS 12 (2005), 9-26; Azyumardi Azra, “The Transmission of al-Manar’s Reformism to the Malay- Indonesian World: The Case of al-Imam and al-Munir,” in Dudoignon et al., eds., Intellec- tuals, 143-58; Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk, “Al-Manār and the Ḥadhramī Elite in the Malay-Indonesian World: Challenge and Response,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 17:3 (2007), 301-22; Nico J.G. Kaptein, “Southeast Asian Debates and Middle East- ern Inspiration: European Dress in Minangkabau at the Beginning of the 20th Century,” in
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 47 their headquarters there in 1923; and it was from there, a few years later, that they launched the Northern Expedition to seize powerful warlords’ strong- holds. Their anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist ideology greatly appealed to locals who resented foreign wealth and influence.46 In the midst of this nationalistic awakening, the city’s Muslim minority found especially attractive the republi- can promise of political equality. Ma Ruitu’s appeal to Rashīd Riḍā emerged against this rich historical back- drop. He presented each side of the internal Muslim debate fairly. Perhaps he saw himself as an impartial mediator in a local conflict. Or perhaps he felt genuinely conflicted. For one reason or another, he did not make his own posi- tion clear. The separatist language that he conveyed, which divided the world into a House of Islam and a House of War, indicates some degree of alienation from the official Nationalist rhetoric of unity. But did it reflect his own religious and political view? His initiative to reform Chinese Islam according to a Mid- dle Eastern model suggests a close identification with Islam’s Arab heartlands. Furthermore, the concerns that he shared with al-Manār’s readers about Sino- Islamic practices new and old – to which we shall turn shortly – demonstrate a censorious distance from local ways. Yet there is no reason to see Ma Ruitu as a Muslim reformer in opposition to a Chinese citizen. Presenting himself to Riḍā as al-Ṣīnī, “the Chinese,” he wrote on behalf of Chinese Muslims. Moreover, there is indirect evidence that he found republican ideals inspiring: his participation in the production of anti- Christian and anti-Communist propaganda, as well as his eventual appoint- ment to China’s Islamic Association for National Salvation, indicate an alignment with republican ideology. To understand his position, it is important to consider as well his fear of political and social disorder, evident in his flights from Shadian in 1920 and Guangzhou in 1937. Like countless Yunnanese Mus- lims of his generation, whose parents had survived the violent uprisings and the imperial massacres of the late nineteenth century, he was averse to conflict and eager for peace. Far from being a Muslim separatist, he probably found unpalatable the designation of China as a House of War. (At the very least he found it politically incendiary, for he omitted it – as we shall see – from the Chinese translation of the fatwa.) It is more likely that the novel and histori- cally significant proposition that Republican China should count as a House of Islam appealed to him, especially if he was swept up – as were so many other
Eric Tagliacozzo, ed., Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Islam, Movement, and the Longue Durée (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 176-95. 46 Jingoism in Canton should not be exaggerated, however. For a temperate assessment, see Virgil K.Y. Ho, Understanding Canton: Rethinking Popular Culture in the Republican Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 78-80.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 48 Halevi
Chinese Muslims at the time – by Sun Yat-sen’s principle of equality between the five “nationalities” (Han, Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and Hui) that formed the union. It is not entirely clear whether, as a Sinophone Muslim, Ma Ruitu would have identified as Hui or Han in this scheme. The ethnonym Hui, originally used to refer to Uyghurs, had no single or fixed meaning in this period: con- tested and redefined, it eventually became a standard way to designate Mus- lims like Ma Ruitu whose mother tongue was the language of the Han.47 Sun Yat-sen had apparently used the term Hui either to refer to “all Muslims in China” or to “Turks who profess Islam.” Regardless of how he would have cate- gorized Muslims who perceived themselves as Han in ethnicity but Hui in reli- gion, he placed Han and Hui on an equal footing and ultimately argued for a “natural fusion” of the five nations into a single nation.48 By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Sino-Muslim nationalists began to appropriate Sun Yat-sen’s scheme in order to argue – as both pan-Islamists and Chinese nationalists – that the term huizu should be used in a politically effective manner to repre- sent all Muslims in China, regardless of their ethnicity, as constituting a single “nation” bound by a common faith.49 Along these lines, in his 1934 history of Islam in China, al-Azhar’s Chinese student Muḥammad Makīn explained – in Arabic – that five colors (alwān) represented the five peoples or nations (shuʿūb) that constituted the republic. Eschewing the term Hui, he specified that these people were the Han, the Manchus, the Mongols, the Muslims, and the Tibetans. He admitted that Chi- na’s original Muslims and the Han belonged to one and the same race; what made them distinct were different doctrines and rites. Despite the kinship be- tween them, he placed allegiance to Islam on a higher pedestal than allegiance to an ethnic group. For this reason, when he contemplated the symbolic sig- nificance of the republic’s colors (strikingly represented by the five-colored flag of 1912-28), he saw the white band as the emblem of the Muslim people
47 Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1996), 15-26. 48 Compare Gladney, Muslim Chinese, p. 83, to David Brophy, Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 144. On this topic, also see Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 68-69, 171. 49 On this fascinating development, see Mao, “Sino-Muslims in Chinese Nation-building,” 90-102; and Cieciura, “Ethnicity or Religion?” Needless to say, the People’s Republic of China did not follow this integrative Sino-Muslim approach to religious identity. Favoring ethnicity as a criterion for classification, it divided the Muslims of China into ten minzu: Hui, Uyghur, Kazakh, etc. It placed the majority of Sinic Muslims, as well as a few others, in the Hui minzu. On this turn, see Lipman, Familiar Strangers, xxii-xxiii.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 49 and the red band as the emblem of the Han people. He found justification for his view in an early republican speech by Sun Yat-sen that had called for the unity and political awakening of the Hui people (Huizu 回族) as a key step to- ward the realization of a Chinese national movement. However, the transla- tion of the speech into Arabic allowed him to remove effectively whatever ambiguity existed about the meaning of the term Huizu, whether it referred only to “Turkic” Muslims or also to “Sinic” Muslims, in contemporary China. To translate it into Arabic, he simply employed the word “Muslims.”50 Ma Ruitu might have seen the question of ethnic and religious belonging in a similar way. Like Makīn, he can be described as a patriotic Chinese pan-Is- lamist. But the terms that he tended to use in Chinese to refer to Muslims in the early 1930s (Mushilin 穆士林 and Huijiao ren 回教人) do not demonstrate that he favored a Hui over a Han designation under the “five-peoples” republi- can order.51 It is not evident, therefore, how he stood on the question of adopt- ing a Hui as opposed to a Han identity. His own position in this debate has little historical significance, however. What does matter greatly is what his fatwa- request reveals: that in this period of national unity and Islamic unity, some intellectuals in his milieu felt inspired to declare China a House of Islam.
Ritual Disputes, Women’s Westernization, and the Indian Heterodoxy
Besides the debate over China’s status as an Islamic country, Ma Ruitu brought to Riḍā’s attention five other issues of contention. He devoted the most space to strife over the Chinese custom (ʿādah) of inviting the imām, the muezzin, and ten reciters to a house of mourning for readings of the Qurʾan “for the sake of their dead.”52 On these occasions, the host would typically offer each reciter an assortment of food and a few coins. In descriptions of these Sino-Muslim ceremonies, Christian missionaries specified that they would take place on seven occasions over an extended period of mourning that lasted for three
50 Makīn al-Ṣīnī, Naẓra jāmiʿa, 51-53. The Republic of China adopted a new flag in 1928, but the color scheme used by Makīn corresponds perfectly to the five-colored flag. 51 These were the terms that Ma Ruitu used in 1931 and 1932 translations of the Arabic word for “Muslims.” 52 Ma Ruitu’s interest in correct funeral form preceded his correspondence with Riḍā. It is evident in the title to his article “My Opinion about Funeral Corrections” [Sangli gaizheng zhi wo jian 丧礼改正之我见] Tianfang Xueli Yuekan 4 (Jan. 1929).
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 50 Halevi years. 53 Forbidding this custom, some members of the ʿulamāʾ had claimed that it diverged from the rules established by the books of jurisprudence. They had ordered reciters either to refrain from eating and refuse offers of money when exercising their vocation, or to partake of the funerary repast yet decline invitations to recite the Qurʾan. Other scholars, allied with reciters whose live- lihood depended on traditional offerings, argued against the legalistic effort to alter “the custom of the ancestors” (ʿādat al-salaf). Ma Ruitu wanted Rashīd Riḍā to help resolve the dispute with a sound answer based on “our, the Ḥanafi school of law.”54 In China, as in many other countries, funerals would become a flashpoint for sectarian conflicts, accentuating the differences between traditionalist and revivalist visions for religion and society.55 In a doctrinaire manner, the Wah- habi-inspired Yihewani, or Ikhwani (伊赫瓦尼), faction specifically opposed the customary exchange of scripture for food: the ahong’s acceptance of remu- neration, including payment in kind, for reciting the Qurʾan.56 Even more than the Yihewani, the Salafist (赛莱菲耶) faction – founded in the late 1930s by Ma Debao (d. 1977) and his associates – would distinguish itself by sharply oppos- ing various burial and commemorative rituals associated with the old Gedimu (格迪目) tradition and various Sufi brotherhoods.57 In fact, Ma Ruitu’s fatwa request is a key piece of evidence that shows how several years earlier, in 1930 Guangzhou, Muslim scholars were already evoking “the Salaf” in sectarian conflicts over compensation for Qurʾanic recitations at funerary and com- memorative ceremonies. Curiously, however, those who used the keyword ap- parently did so to argue for continuing a local custom that they associated with China’s Muslim ancestors, whereas Salafists in the Middle East would have
53 See Marshall Broomhall, Islam in China: A Neglected Problem (London: China Inland Mis- sion, 1910), 233; Rev. J. Edkins, “Notes on Mahommedanism in Peking,” The Chinese Re- corder and Missionary Journal (Jan. 1869), 176. 54 Ma Ruitu, “Questions from China,” no. 2/842. 55 For several examples of such conflicts, see Leor Halevi, “Funerary Practices,” The Encyco- paedia of Islam, Three, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), no. 2, 120-21. 56 Jonathan H. Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 205-06. 57 Alexander Blair Stewart, Chinese Muslims and the Global Ummah: Islamic Revival and Eth- nic Identity Among the Hui of Qinghai Province (Routledge: London, 2017), 44, 46-47. Em- phasizing that funerals allow different Muslim groups to emphasize their identity, an anthropological study of a Hui community in Henan shows that the Yihewani movement has continued to oppose the offer of presents to the ahong who are engaged to recite the Qurʾan by the tomb by families adhering to the “old doctrine” (lao jiao). On this topic, see Élisabeth Allès, Musulmans de Chine: une anthropologie des Hui du Henan (Paris: Éditions de l’Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences sociales, 2000), 203.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 51 used the same term to argue for a break with such customs in the name of “re- turning” to the bygone norms of the first Muslims. Debates over ritual practices gave rise to two other questions. In China, as elsewhere, Muslims often disagreed about the timing of Ramadan. Ma Ruitu wanted to know whether or not to accept “news from the horizons” confirming sightings of the crescent moon by the naked eye, which would serve to mark the beginning and end of the fasting month.58 A preoccupation with ritual figured, too, in a peculiar question that stemmed from the use of gold in dentistry:
Some people whose molar aches or whose tooth has become worm-eaten and decayed are given in replacement a molar of gold or of something else.59 And whenever [only] part of the molar has decayed, it is adorned with gold, which fills and repairs it. Is this permissible or not? Is it an obstacle for the soundness of ritual washing? Is the existence of [medi- cal] necessity a condition for the permissibility of the procedure? And is it necessary to extract the molar [with the gold crown] after death?
Why did gold implants, fillings, and crowns bother some Muslims in China? It is not altogether clear. The gilding of teeth for aesthetic or functional purposes is a practice with an ancient as well as a modern history.60 Marco Polo claimed that in a province named Zardandan, apparently located in western Yunnan, idolatrous tribes- men who were the Great Khan’s subjects covered their upper and lower teeth with plates of gold.61 Medieval antecedents aside, the use of gold in dentistry greatly expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries due to the development of new techniques for covering cavities with a cohesive foil and due to the invention of a casting machine for filling molds.62 These inno- vations spread to China. Introduced into cosmopolitan cities such as Guang- zhou, gold teeth at first appeared as a foreign artifact, the sort of embellishment favored by young city men who had also taken to wearing spectacles and trou-
58 Ma Ruitu, “Questions from China,” 6/846. 59 Ma Ruitu’s expression dāda sinnu-hu may reflect a folkloric belief in tooth-eating worms. 60 Charles I. Stoloft, “The Fashionable Tooth,” Natural History 81:1 (1972), 12-21. 61 Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Henry Yule, rev. Henri Cordier, ed. Morris Rossabi (New York: Sterling, 2012), 201. 62 On the innovations ascribed to Robert Arthur, William H. Taggart, and others, see M.D.K. Bremner, The Story of Dentistry from the Dawn of Civilization to the Present (New York: Dental Items of Interest Publishing, 1939), 125, 161, and passim.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 52 Halevi sers.63 Yet Ma Ruitu does not suggest that Chinese Muslims’ qualms about gold teeth had anything to do with opposition to foreign innovations or urban fash- ions. So why were they controversial? Islamic law prohibited drinking from gold or silver vessels and eating from gold or silver plates, associating these luxurious things with worldly manners. In addition, it forbade men from wearing gold jewelry. This prohibition was based on oral traditions ascribed to the prophet Muḥammad that had stigma- tized the use of gold rings by men, essentially representing them as an ostenta- tious ornament favored by people risking the fires of Hell.64 In Ma Ruitu’s circle, the problem was understood partly in terms of ritual purity: Was it pos- sible to clean the mouth ritually, in preparation for prayer, if it contained a forbidden metal? Would an exception be granted for medical reasons? And should the gold be removed from the mouth when there would no longer be a medical necessity for it, as a result of death? The extraction of the artificial tooth would restore the dead body to its natural state (fiṭra); and, rather than squandered wealth, the precious metal would become an inheritance. This seems to have been the rationale behind the odd set of questions.65 They arose, in other words, not because Chinese Muslims suspected “modern” medicine or “Western” dentistry, but because of technical Islamic legal issues revolving around the incorporation of gold into the human body. One modern practice associated with “modernity” and “the West” did stir some controversy, however: “Some Muslim women have cut their locks,” wrote Ma Ruitu, “in imitation of Western and non-monotheistic women [al- mushrikāt], and they go to the markets without a face veil [qināʿ]. Is this mildly or grossly ḥarām, and what is the ruling according to our, the Ḥanafī school of law?” Ma Ruitu misled Riḍā if he meant to imply that China’s Muslim women had traditionally used face veils, until the rise of this new trend. In the Chinese
63 See the marvelous anecdote in Pearl S. Buck, A House Divided (New York: P.F. Collier, 1935), 98. 64 Multiple canonical traditions narrated this prohibition. For two examples, see Ṣaḥīḥ Mus- lim (vol. 2, no. 5510, p. 903) and Sunan Abī Dāʾūd (vol. 2, no. 4238, p. 704) in Jamʿ jawāmiʿ al-aḥadīth wa-l-asanīd wa-maknaz al-ṣiḥaḥ wa-l-sunan wa-l-masanīd (Vaduz, Liechten- stein: Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, 2000). 65 Ma Ruitu, “Questions from China,” 3/843. I am not aware of fatwas on the use of gold teeth that preceded Riḍā’s, but legal authorities subsequently dealt with different aspects of the problem. A muftī from Silvan, Turkey, apparently issued a fatwa on this issue in 1945; see
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 53 translation of the question, he similarly referred to the use of the face mask (mian zhao 面罩) as if it had been the norm in China.66 In places like Kashgar, Xinjiang, Uyghur women did typically wear a thick, rectangular piece of cloth, usually known as a chumbal, over their faces.67 By contrast, Chinese-speaking Muslim women rarely masked their faces. In an early twentieth-century survey of Chinese Muslims, the French explorer Henri d’Ollone remarked that only in Hezhou, Gansu, did he observe Muslim ladies hiding their face below the eyes with a veil made of black silk, “as in the West, a custom that we have seen no- where else in China.”68 In any case, what concerned Ma Ruitu was the adoption of the flapper style – the daring short, bobbed look that became an international rage in the Roar- ing Twenties.69 Western fashions were wildly popular at this time in cosmo- politan cities such as Guangzhou. They signified modernity – a stylish break from traditional mores for liberated women and men.70 Yet bobbed hair, a symbol of women’s emancipation, was politically as well as socially controver- sial in China. In 1927, during the Horse Square Incident in Changsha, the Guomindang Revolutionary Army allegedly executed “Communist radicals for the sole provocation of having bobbed hair.”71 When Ma Ruitu refers to mushrikāt, which technically means “polytheistic women,” appearing in public without locks and veils, it is not entirely clear if he means Buddhists or Daoists or followers of unclassified religions whose “popular” or “superstitious” prac-
66 “Religious Rules for Women’s Haircuts” [Funü jian fa de duan fa 妇女剪发的断法], Tianfang Xueli Yuekan 5:3-4 (Dec. 1932, Jan. 1933). 67 Lady Macartney, An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan, with an intro. by Peter Hopkirk (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1985), 70-71. On qināʿ and chumbal face veils, see Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood and W.J. Vogelsang, Covering the Moon: An Introduction to Middle Eastern Face Veils (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 30, 37, 213-16. 68 [Henri] d’Ollone, Recherches sur les musulmans chinois: mission d’Ollone, 1906-1909. Études by A. Vissière; Notes by E. Blochet (Paris: Leroux, 1911), 247. Note, however, that a Protes- tant missionary, Sarah Ridley, remarked that Gansu’s countrywomen “wear no veil.” In the cities, “better-class women” between the ages of fifteen and thirty did wear a black veil whenever they ventured outdoors, as did “the Chinese.” See her unattributed essay “In Far-Off Cathay,” in Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It, ed. Annie Van Sommer and Samuel Marinus Zwemer (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1907), 276. 69 Victoria Sherrow, Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 83, 131-32. 70 On popular attraction to modern Western culture, including outfits and hairstyles, see Ho, Understanding Canton, 59-78. 71 Christina Kelley Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Commu- nist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 212. Also see Lung-kee Sun, “The Politics of Hair and the Issue of the Bob in Modern China,” Fashion Theory 1:4 (1997), 353-66.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 54 Halevi tices (divination, magic, ghost-appeasement, etc.) were under assault in re- publican Guangzhou.72 It is possible that he described Communist women as mushrikāt, too, given their embrace of short, bobbed hair, if he employed the term loosely to designate radical, irreligious women.73 Tellingly, in the Chinese version of the question, he used the term wai jiao (外教), which could refer ei- ther to “foreign religions” or “foreign instructors,” in place of mushrikāt.74 Ma Ruitu’s insistence on receiving a Ḥanafī solution to the problems divid- ing China’s Muslims is striking in one instance in particular: a question that reveals volumes about Guangzhou’s rapidly expanding cultural horizons, and that gives a sense of the shock that the city’s Muslims experienced by the sud- den discovery of ideas that had been circulating in the Middle East and South Asia for decades. With evident concern, Ma Ruitu asked:
Some Muslims from India refuse to follow any one of the four schools of law, and they claim that the people who adhere to the schools of law [ahl al-madhāhib] clash with one another, and that the judgment [raʾy] of some of the Imams [who founded the schools of law] can even be at variance with the sublime Ḥadīth. [They also claim] that this leads to quarrels and schisms, whereas “we are the Muḥammadans [al-Muḥam madiyyūn] guided by the Qurʾan and by Muḥammad, the Chosen one; and we act according to the Qurʾan and the Ḥadīth, instead of following this or that.” Is their opinion right? The hope is that you will generously give us a fatwa according to our, the Ḥanafī, school of law, as quickly as possible.75
Ma Ruitu had heard that some Indian Muslims had revolted against the medi- eval regime of law, the system of loyal adherence to one or another of the four major Sunni schools of law. Dispensing with centuries of tradition, they had decided instead to follow only the Qurʾan and the Ḥadith. Arguing that subjec- tive legalistic opinions had led to social and religious divisions, they main- tained that Muslim unity could be achieved by a direct return to scripture. Evidently, Ma Ruitu found this Indo-Muḥammadan doctrine scandalous, if not heretical, since he asked Riḍā for a Ḥanafī defense against it. His descrip-
72 See Shuk-Wah Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900-1937 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011), 5, 9-10, 68, 108, and elsewhere. On the Nationalist discourse against superstition, see also Nedostrup’s Super- stitious Regimes. 73 Ma Ruitu, “Questions from China,” 4/844. 74 “Funü jian fa de duan fa,” Tianfang Xueli Yuekan, cited above. 75 Ma Ruitu, “Questions from China,” 5/845.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 55 tion of it will sound familiar to all students of modern Islam, because it corre- sponds perfectly to the central tenet of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth, the Partisans of Prophetic Tradition, a revivalist Indian movement that is often compared to Wahhabism and described as an offshoot of Ṭarīqah-i Muḥammadiyyah. Fol- lowers of this movement represented themselves as “Muḥammadi” reformers, and they engaged in polemics against Deobandis, who preached continued ad- herence to Ḥanafism.76 Because the Ḥanafī school predominated in China, as it did in India, it is in no way surprising that Ma Ruitu wanted a Ḥanafī re- sponse to the Indo-Muslim heterodoxy. What is remarkable historically is that Sino-Muslim scholars greeted the Indo-Muslim doctrine as a strange, new, and pressing challenge in 1930. An Indian Muslim journalist in Guangzhou who had ties to Tianfang Xueli until he broke away to establish a rival journal in 1931 might well have been Ma Ruitu’s informant. It is possible, too, that the new Lahore Aḥmadiyya mission in Hong Kong disseminated the “news” of old Indian developments into China.77 But it is worth remembering that the most notable Indian defender of the controver- sial Ahl-i Ḥadīth doctrine, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān (1832-90), the princely consort of Bhopal, had died forty years earlier. Furthermore, already in 1831 Wilāyat ʿAlī of Patna (1791-1853), one of Ṭarīqah-i Muḥammadiyya’s leaders, had argued that Muslims ought to follow the Ḥadīth, rather than any juridical tradition, in cas- es where disagreement existed among the schools of law.78 Moreover, the
76 Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 264-96; Daniel Brown, Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 27-32; Harlan Otto Pearson, Is- lamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth-Century India: The Tarīqah-i Muhammadīyah (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008), 196-197; Martin Riexinger, Sanāʾullāh Amritsarī (1868-1948) und die Ahl-i-Ḥadīs im Punjab unter britischer Herrschaft (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004), 154-67, 232-38, and elsewhere. On pp. 537-41, Riexinger discusses Riḍā’s affinity for this Indian movement, focusing in particular on its legal theory and its critique of Sufi rituals. 77 In “Islam in Translation,” 19 and 255-57, Eroglu Sager argues that Ma Ruitu’s question was “obviously an attempt to determine the legitimacy of religious communities like Ahmadi- yya.” I believe that this is incorrect. Ma Ruitu claimed that the Indian group that preached this doctrine called itself Muḥammadiyyūn, and the doctrine that he described is a char- acteristic tenet of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth, who indeed adopted the eponym “Muḥammadī.” Fur- thermore, despite Ḥanafī polemics against it, members of the Lahore Aḥmadiyya unequivocally gave precedence to the Ḥanafī school of law when they were unable to re- solve cases on the basis of the Qurʾan and the Sunna. Eventually, they even turned this commitment into an article of their creed. 78 Pearson, Islamic Reform, 52-53. Incidentally, there is little historical justification for the common representation of Sayyid Aḥmad Barelwī as Ṭarīqah-i Muḥammadiyya’s founder. For a corrective treatment, see Marc Gaborieau, Le mahdi incompris: Sayyid Ahmad Ba relwī (1786-1831) et le millénarisme en Inde (Paris: CNRS editions, 2010), 76-81.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 56 Halevi teachings that Ma Ruitu identified as controversial had long circulated outside of India; they were principally associated with Wahhabism or Salafism. Our sense of a disconnect between Islam in China and Islam elsewhere only intensifies when we consider the medium of communication. Outside of Chi- na, al-Manār was famous for its espousal of the very same doctrine that per- turbed Ma Ruitu. Born into a Shāfiʿī family, Riḍā became a passionate advocate for the idea that Muslims should liberate themselves from slavish adherence to their traditional schools of law.79 In the 1920s, he emerged as the most promi- nent apologist for the Wahhābīs of Najd and the Ḥijaz, who belonged to the Ḥanbalī school of law.80 Nobody in the Middle East would have considered asking him for a Ḥanafī fatwa. It is indeed quite an irony that Ma Ruitu turned to Riḍā, of all the muftīs in the world, for a Ḥanafī solution to the Chinese co- nundrum.
Riḍā’s Fatwas to China: Salafism and Ḥanafism
In his answer, Riḍā stated plainly that the Ahl-i Ḥadīth in India and others who agreed with them were right. The authorities in whose name jurists formed the four major Sunni schools of law and other early Islamic leaders (the imāms of the Salaf) had declared that the uncritical adoption (taqlīd) of their own rul- ings was strictly forbidden. They had insisted as well on the need to follow the Qurʾan and the Sunna, the prophetic custom, without contrariety. Modern Muslims ought to follow their example. This was a succinct statement of the Salafist creed. Instead of explaining its validity, Riḍā sent to Ma Ruitu a copy of his book, Muḥwarat al-muslih wa-l-muqallid , where he had first made the di- visive case for Islamic unity. He also sent him an essay by an unidentified Ḥanafī author, most likely Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm b. Mullā Farrūkh, who had argued centuries earlier, in 1641, against juridical inflexibility.81 Through this literature, he tried to persuade his Chinese correspondent not to abandon Ḥanafism altogether, but to approach its rulings flexibly while embracing Salafist principles.82 In his questions, Ma Ruitu had used the term ʿādat al-salaf once to refer, as we have seen, to Sino-Muslim customs that traditionalists wanted to con- tinue. His use of the term “the Salaf” did not correspond in any apparent way
79 Haddad, “Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935),” 458. 80 Mouline, Clercs de l’islam, 19, 145. 81 Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm al-Makkī al-Ḥanafī, “Al-Qawl al-sadīd fī baʿḍ masāʾil al- ijtihād wa-l-taqlīd,” al-Manār 17 (1914), 368ff. 82 Riḍā, “Fatwas to China,” 5/845.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 57 to conventional Salafist usage. Salafists rather strove to break away from local religious traditions when they argued for a return to the ideals and norms of “the Salaf,” by which they meant not their grandparents or great-grandparents, but the paragons of the early Islamic era. Adopting the same orientation, Riḍā described the Sino-Muslim tradition of reciting the Qurʾan for the dead as an impermissible innovation (bidʿa). He treated separately the issue of paying for Qurʾanic readings. In a fascinating cross-cultural comparison, he revealed that on Ramadan nights in Egypt prosperous families, who rarely listened to the Qurʾan, engaged professional reciters, too. This practice was justifiable, he sug- gested, if they rewarded their services with voluntary donations as opposed to contractual wages. On this basis, he advised his “bickering brothers” in China to meet and consider a compromise. Perhaps they could gather in houses once a month, at a stipulated time rather than for a funeral ceremony, to enjoy reci- tations of the Qurʾan patronized by the community’s wealthy members.83 In his fatwas to China, Riḍā repeatedly referred to the Salaf, and he did this in a deliberate attempt to distill his religious and legal philosophy to its es- sence. This was clearly the goal behind his response to Ma Ruitu’s question about the use of gold in dentistry: “Ibn Taymiyya, the Shaykh of Islam and a great preserver of the Oral Tradition and of vestigial narratives, clarified that the Salaf never tabooed anything unless [they had] a definitive [legal] proof [dalīl qaṭʿī].”84 This principle yielded a relatively accommodating ruling. A general prohibition on the use of gold did not exist; the prophet Muḥammad had only forbidden wearing gold rings and eating or drinking from gold or silver dishes. Dentists’ use of gold was particularly problematic for Ḥanafīs because their school of law insisted on rinsing the entire mouth with water for a ritual of purity (ghusl al-janāba). Riḍā therefore advised them to remove their prosthet- ic teeth, if it was easy to do so, before performing a major ablution. As for gold crowns, he suggested leaving them in place, even after death, because taking them off was extremely difficult. Despite this dispensation, he recommended for Muslims in general to extract all artificial things from the body during buri- al preparations whenever the procedure would not result in physical deforma- tion. In line with his scripturalist legal method, Riḍā evoked a key ḥadīth that justified the use of a gold implant. According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet ordered Arfaja b. Asʿad, who had lost his nose at the Battle of al-Kulāb, to re- place a prosthetic made of silver – once his face began to smell badly – with
83 Riḍā, “Fatwas to China,” 2/842. 84 Riḍā, “Fatwas to China,” 3/843.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 58 Halevi one made of gold.85 Decades later, in the mid 1970s, a Saudi committee of Salaf- ist muftīs, led by the Egyptian ʿAbd al-Razzāq ʿAfīfī (d. 1994), would cite the same tradition in a ruling that favored replacing foul-smelling molars made of ivory with molars made of gold.86 After referring to the legal perspective inherited from the Salaf, he proceed- ed to argue that the sacred law makes allowances for medically necessary in- terventions: on the basis of a ḥadīth that allowed men afflicted by lice to wear the silk garments that were normally forbidden, he argued that scriptural pro- hibitions may be lifted to prevent harm. With this ruling, his fatwa demon- strated to Chinese Muslims why his jurisprudence, though rooted in foundational texts and ancestral models, was in one way progressive: it served to justify advancements that would relieve human suffering or improve the human condition. Riḍā’s interpretation of oral traditions and his invocation of the Salaf meant to accomplish more than simply to justify a dental procedure: the loftier aim was to suggest to Chinese readers that Islam’s sacred law had originally estab- lished a reasonable path that could easily accommodate modernity’s benefi- cial innovations. Not long before writing his fatwas to China, he had published a short book, Yusr al-Islām (The facility of Islam), that made this contention as it advanced his juridical hermeneutics. The idea in a nutshell was that Muslim scriptures were designed to encourage believers to prosper and thrive, because they imposed on them few demands besides easy-to-follow rules of worship.87 His journal had always supported – he claimed in a 1927 defense of his ideo- logical commitments – the “school of the ancestors” (madhhab al-salaf) and the “techniques of the age” (funūn al-ʿaṣr).88 These commitments were difficult to reconcile, for one pointed toward modernity, whereas the other one pointed toward the early Islamic past. But in his fatwas to China, as in general in his oeuvre, he made every effort to make them appear compatible. He expanded upon the argument that Islam was an easy religion in the fat- wa about the timing of Ramadan. Instead of following the Qurʾan and the
85 Several ḥadīth collectors narrated this anecdote. For one version, see Sunan Abī Dāʾūd, vol. 2, 703-04 (no. 4235). 86 Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Duwaysh, ed., Fatāwā al-lajna al-dāʾima lil-buḥūth al-ʿilmiyya wa-l-iftāʾ, 5th ed. (Riyadh: Dār al-ʿĀṣima, 2006), vol. 24, 53-54 (no. 823). For a slightly stricter version, see ibid., 71-72 (no. 6668:2). 87 Rashīd Riḍ, Yusr al-Islam wa-uṣl al-tashhrīʿ al-ʿamm fī nahy Allah wa-rasulihi ʿan kathrat al-suʾal (Cairo: Matbaʿat al-Manar, 1928). See the discussion of this book in Wael B. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunnī Uṣūl al-Fiqh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 215-19. 88 Rashīd Riḍā, “Bayān ʿalāqatinā bil-Imām ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Malik al-Ḥijāz wa-Sulṭān Najd,” al- Manār 28 (1927), 1-8.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 59
Sunna, which had made things simple and clear, Muslims had turned Islam into a difficult and complicated religion. Like the Israelites and the Christians before them, they had made religion hard on themselves – through their dis- agreements. To establish the beginning of Ramadan was the easiest of matters if Muslims just followed the prophet Muḥammad’s dictum: the month of fast- ing should begin with the sighting of the new moon or, in cases of low visibility, by simply extending the preceding month, Shaʿbān, to thirty days. All the schools of law (al-madhāhib) agreed with this instruction; there was no reason for disputation. All the same, Riḍā realized that his fatwa was too vague to re- solve any dispute in China. He closed by urging the enquirer to clarify the spe- cific issues behind his country’s conflict. Even so, the fatwa served to convey the Salafist claim that the solution to Muslim disunity could be found in the scriptures of Islam.89 Yet another evocation of “the Salaf” occurred in Riḍā’s fatwa against the Westernization of Chinese-Muslim women. After a relativistic admission, where he acknowledged that scandalous deeds vary with a country’s condi- tions and that the degree of immorality depends on the deed, he concentrated on making his argument: women’s peccadilloes will lead to the gravest sins. Fornication, neglect of prayer, resistance to marriage, distrust of a wife’s ability to take care of children – many such social ills will result from women cutting their hair after the Western fashion. Indeed, as one of the early Muslim ances- tors had said, “Infractions are the harbingers of infidelity.”90 Thirty years earlier, during the debate that followed the publication of a feminist manifesto, Qāsim Amīn’s Taḥrīr al-marʾa (The liberation of women), Riḍā had argued apologetically – as a socially conservative scholar who was desperate to appear progressive – for the advancement of women through ed- ucation. Amīn had made the case against the use of two specific articles of dress, the burquʿ and the niqāb, that formed part of the contemporary Egyptian ḥijāb and served to conceal women’s faces to an unjustifiable extent.91 Riḍā defended the use of such a veil in public while boasting that Islam’s sacred law enabled women to pray at the mosque and perform pilgrimage rites with their visages and hands uncovered. Advocates of unveiling exaggerated the prob- lem, he suggested, since only 10 percent of urban women in Egypt wore a veil, and the vast majority of them enjoyed the freedom to buy whatever they
89 Riḍā, “Fatwas to China,” 6/846. 90 Riḍā, “Fatwas to China,” 4/844. 91 Qāsim Amīn, Taḥrīr al-marʾa (Cairo: Hindāwī, 2012), 38, 43; Valerie J. Hoffman-Ladd, “Po- lemics on the Modesty and Segregation of Women in Contemporary Egypt,” IJMES 19 (1987), 23-50, at 26-27; Beth Baron, “Unveiling in Early Twentieth Century Egypt: Practical and Symbolic Considerations,” MES 25 (1989), 370-86.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 60 Halevi needed from the market’s male merchants. As for female peasants and domes- tic workers in the country, they rarely, if ever, concealed their faces.92 Perhaps his broader point was that there was no need to focus on veiling as a problem; he certainly thought that other issues, such as a lack of educational oppor tunities for girls and women, should take priority. But over time, he grew in- creasingly frustrated at feminist causes. In 1920, as a leading figure in a Syrian parliamentary debate, he argued influentially against women’s suffrage.93 And, in a famous lecture that he delivered in 1930, he railed against “the libertines” who wanted to abolish sacred laws pertaining to divorce and inheritance in order to grant women equal legal rights.94 Still, it is worth noting that his fatwa to China made no reference to Islamic laws concerning veiling or women’s coiffure. Nor did it make any distinction between the types and styles of headdress, which ranged from translucent veils that exposed the eyes to opaque masks. Since Ma Ruitu asked specifically about the qināʿ, a face veil, Riḍā might have informed him that, during the de- bate on the topic in fin-de-siècle Cairo, he had, on the one hand, supported continued use of the contemporary ḥijāb (face-coverings included) by a mi- nority of Egyptian women and, on the other hand, had condoned as lawful the appearance in public of women without face veils. Evidently, by 1930 he had come to see the adoption of “Western” styles by Muslim women as a first, dan- gerous step on the slippery slope toward the breakdown of traditional social mores. Despite his insistent praises of the Salaf in his fatwas to China, Riḍā made no effort to persuade Ma Ruitu to inaugurate a Salafist society or institution. He transmitted Salafist doctrines and methods, not a sectarian agenda or a political program. Tellingly, when he mentioned that the Ahl-i Ḥadīth of India were right to stress the value of following scripture rather than juridical au- thorities, he alluded to other movements in other countries that held the same teaching but without naming Wahhabism or Salafism. Instead of pressing his readers in China to adopt a Salafist identity that would set them apart, he
92 Riḍā, “Kalimat fī l-ḥijāb,” al-Manār 2 (1899), 369-373; Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, Ḥuqūq al- nisāʾ fī l-Islām: wa-ḥaẓẓihinna min al-iṣlāḥ al-muḥammadī al-ʿāmm: Nidāʾ lil-jins al-laṭịf, ed. Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī (Beirut and Damascus: Al-Maktab al-Islāmī, 1984), 182-84. Also see Juan Ricardo Cole, “Feminism, Class, and Islam in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” IJMES 13, no. 4 (1981), 387-407; and Werner Ende, “Sollen Frauen schreiben lernen? Eine innerislamische Debatte und ihre Widerspiegelung in Al-Manār,” in Dieter Bell- mann, ed., Gedenkschrift Wolfgang Reuschel: Akten des III. Arabistischen Kolloquiums, Leipzig, 21.-22. November 1991 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 49-57. 93 Akram Fouad Khater, Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 211-19. 94 Riḍā, “Al-Tajdīd wa-l-tajaddud wa-l-mujaddidūn,” al-Manār 31 (1931), 773-74.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 61 merely tried to convince them to give priority to the authority of scripture and embrace a set of values, customs, and rules that he associated with the first Muslims. This is significant because it shows what strategy he pursued, as the world’s leading Salafist at the time, to spread Salafism to China.95
The Abode of War’s Silver Lining
Finally, we come to the fatwa on China’s status according to Islamic law. Ques- tions about redrawing the boundary between the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War had been published before, on the pages of al-Manār, in dif ferent contexts. In the Caucasus during the Russian Revolution of 1905, for example, Muslim subjects of the Tsarist regime debated their country’s classi- fication.96 Similarly, in the Levant in the era of European dominance, it was never altogether clear how to apply medieval Islamic notions of a religiously divided world to radically new political arrangements. Thus, for instance, upon the creation of the French Mandate for Syria in 1920, questions emerged about what sorts of commercial transactions had become permissible, under this new configuration, if the country’s legal status had technically changed from an Abode of Islam to an Abode of War.97 With his request for a fatwa, Ma Ruitu therefore joined a broader, transregional debate about the relevance and ap- plicability of a medieval geopolitical construct. As an “enlightened” Salafist, Riḍā could have argued – as some experts on Islamic law would eventually argue – that the binary division of the world was to a large extent the product of medieval juridical interpretations.98 If it did not stem from a clear scriptural ruling, then there was no need to subscribe to
95 Bernard Haykel has argued that it is a mistake to focus mainly on the political agendas of diverse Salafī groups in different nations. In his view, to understand the movement’s glob- al appeal, it is critical to grasp its scriptural orientation and legal method. He argues that “attraction to Salafism lies in the form of authority that it promotes, and reproduces, as well as the particular hermeneutics it advocates.” My analysis of Riḍā’s fatwas to China lends support to this view, yet I want to clarify that I do not think there is such a thing as a universal and unchanging Salafī “creed and path.” This is what Haykel implies, but every version of a Salafī creed and path should be studied historically as a product of its time and place. Cf. Bernard Haykel, “On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action,” in Roel Mei- jer, ed., Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), esp. 36. 96 Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 1, 372-73 (no. 158); al-Manār 8 (1905), 291. 97 Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 5, 1917-21 (no. 700); al-Manār 28 (1927), 181-85. 98 Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 63; Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 226-27.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 62 Halevi it as if were an article of faith. On this basis, he might have ruled that Republi- can China could indeed count as a House of Islam. Muslims and non-Muslims had equal rights there, and everyone could worship freely. But the time for such a ruling had not yet come. Although he wrote his fatwa a few years after the Ottoman abolition of the caliphate, he insisted that, since China had never been under a caliph’s rule, it remained – without a doubt – a non-Islamic state. Every Friday, Muslims gath- er for the congregational prayer in Paris and London mosques, but does it oc- cur to anybody to suggest that these cities “now belong to the House of Islam?” He was sure that it did not. The very idea to reclassify China struck him as ri- diculous. The country had never had a Muslim sovereign to execute the rules of the sacred law and sign a pact of protection (ʿaqd al-dhimma) with non-Mus- lim subjects. “So I have no idea why the doubt arose” in China.99 Republican China’s legal status as an Abode of War did not entail, in Riḍā’s view, a call to arms. He restricted the Just Imam’s right to restore Islamic rule, by violent combat if necessary, to lands that had been previously ruled by an Islamic power until their seizure by the armies of European states, which abol- ished the rules of Islam. However, as China had been “a house of infidelity and war since its origin,” there was no justification for an offensive jihād. Paradoxically, the ruling that China’s status had not changed with the dawn of republicanism offered an advantage to the country’s Muslim citizens, if they were willing to espouse an exceptional Ḥanafī doctrine. Over the centuries, many Ḥanafī jurists had defended Muslim merchants’ prerogative to follow, while trading in a non-Muslim state, the commercial laws of that state. In par- ticular, they allowed them to profit from transactions involving alcohol or usu- ry, which they considered forbidden under Muslim rule. In a modern context, this non-universalistic approach to Islamic law could easily serve an economi- cally liberal agenda, and this is precisely why Riḍā liked it. He argued that the Ḥanafī school of law justified “devouring the goods of non-Muslims” (akl al- amwāl ghayr al-Muslimīn) through conventional or beneficial contracts, even when these involved interest or usury (ribā). Outlawing only exchanges based on perfidy or deception, this school permitted every kind of trade under non- Muslim rule. “It is not necessary,” he added, “for a Muslim to sell alcohol there to the one who drinks it by [going so far as to] open a bar.” Doing so would promote an expansion in the venues that profited from this vile, abominable, evil practice. But it is a Muslim’s right in China to accept “the value of alcohol
99 Riḍā, “Fatwas to China,” 1/841. The following paragraphs are based on this fatwa as well, except where noted.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 63 owed to him in a debt, and the same applies to [trading in] alcohol directly, though its sale [must be] to them, not to the Muslims.” Intriguingly, Riḍā resorted to missionary logic to support his economically liberal ruling. For years and years, he had related to China in missionary terms: the very first issue of al-Manār, published in 1898, analyzed the political after- math of the murder of two German Catholic missionaries in Juye, Shandong, which precipitated an imperialistic competition for Chinese concessions and the Boxer Rebellion.100 In 1912, he made some apparently unsuccessful efforts to recruit Chinese Muslim students to attend his “school of propaganda and guidance.” One of his goals at the time was to teach Muslim missionaries to compete with Christian missionaries.101 Along these lines he reasoned, in his 1930 fatwa, that the fortunes of China’s Muslims would grow if they followed “the modern paths that were made permissible by their own school of law.” Eventually, with the spread of “Islamic and economic knowledge,” China’s Muslims would begin to preach Islam in China assiduously, as Christian mis- sionaries had been doing for some time. In this way, “Islam should achieve su- premacy over all of China’s religions, and China should become a powerful Islamic state.”
Conclusions
Ma Ruitu’s correspondence with Riḍā reveals a great deal about transnational Islamic communications in the era of print. The journals that they edited, al- Manār and Tianfang Xueli, facilitated the transmission and translation of reli- gious and legal doctrines across national and linguistic boundaries, bridging to some extent the distance between Islam in China and Islam in Egypt. It is be- yond the scope of this article to probe all the repercussions of their uncommon journalist correspondence, but what interests and goals drove them to engage in it in the first place? And to what extent did they remain, despite their desire to come together, in different worlds? The questions raised by Ma Ruitu suggest that Sino-Muslim literati had been minimally exposed to Salafist thought before 1930. Ma Ruitu presumably knew more than most other ahong, or clergymen, about these things, but he used the expression “the custom of the Salaf” in a confused or confusing man- ner to refer to funerary practices that did not derive from the early Islamic canon. Furthermore, he found the turn to interpreting the Qurʾan and the
100 Riḍā, al-Manār 1, 2nd ed. (1898), 24-25. 101 Eroglu Sager, “Islam in Translation,” 245-46.
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Ḥadith directly, without adhering to any school of law, bewildering and strange. In the Middle East, the ʿulamāʾ readily associated this originalist turn to scrip- ture with Salafism or Wahhabism. Unaware of this, Ma Ruitu attributed the doctrine to an Indian group called the Muḥammadiyyūn; and he asked Riḍā for a Ḥanafī ruling in response. This is amusing in light of his professed admira- tion for the Syro-Egyptian muftī: although he sang his praises, he had no more than an inkling of his basic approach to the sacred law. His request for a Ḥanafī reply to an Indo-Muslim doctrine certainly made him appear ignorant of the fact that Riḍā had preached the same doctrine for thirty years, which is exactly why Riḍā sent to him a primer: a copy of his youthful Muḥwarat al-muslih wa- l-muqallid. Despite increasing contacts with the Middle East in the 1920s, Chi- na still lay, in 1930, a world apart. At the same time, his correspondence with Riḍā is a valuable piece of his- torical evidence that greatly adds to our understanding of the globalization of the Salafist project of reform. It certainly gives us a glimpse into a Chinese- Muslim reformer’s efforts to diminish the sense of distance and isolation from the Arab heartlands. Like the Chinese pilgrims and Chinese students who trav- eled to Mecca and Cairo in the 1920s and 1930s, Ma Ruitu took steps – as an Arabic translator – to reduce the divide. The fact that he knew to send a re- quest for fatwas to al-Manār is in and of itself evidence of increasing commu- nications between Cairo and Canton. Moreover, he dedicated much of his career, beginning with the launch of his journal in 1928, to the work of transla- tion. His articles and books would introduce Chinese-Muslim readers to ʿAbduh’s and Riḍā’s theological and juridical thought. It is easy to distinguish two motivations behind Ma Ruitu’s decision to write to Cairo for fatwas. In May 1930, a few months before al-Manār published his fatwa requests, he sent a letter to Riḍā in which he lamented his compatriots’ ignorance of the Qurʾan and the Ḥadīth. He criticized their neglect of prayer rites and other religious duties. Arguing that they knew nothing about the true reality of faith, he described them as “imitators” (muqallidūn). Those who bothered to read the Qurʾan in China did so without scrutinizing religious books and without attaining an understanding of the sacred law. Troubled by what he called, in a nice turn of phrase, “the religion’s estrangement in China” (ghurbat al-dīn fī l-Ṣīn), Ma Ruitu had decided to establish a Sino-Islamic journal dedicated to the work of translation – a journal that would alleviate the poignant feeling of exile from an imagined Islamic heartland by translating articles from al-Manār into Chinese.102 This shows that Ma Ruitu felt com
102 [Ma Ruitu], “Risāla muhimma min al-Ṣīn fī ḥāl man fīhā min al-Muslimīn,” al-Manār 31 (1930), 75-76; Eroglu Sager, “Islam in Translation,” 256.
Die WeltDownloaded des Islams from Brill.com09/29/202159 (2019) 33-69 03:06:09PM via free access Is China a House of Islam? 65 mitted to renew and reform Islam in China in accordance with Riḍā’s direc- tives. Although he framed his requests for fatwas in a balanced manner, without making his own view of things clear, he did so with the expectation that Riḍā’s rulings would support this enterprise. What also spurred Ma Ruitu to seek Riḍā’s fatwas was consternation over conflicts among China’s religious scholars. These scholars seemed to him more divided than ever. It is not that they were neatly separated into two factions, with each faction adhering to an antagonistic agenda. But they were unable to agree on a number of issues, and their disagreements had exposed the fault lines that separated the Sino-Muslim community into several groups espous- ing conflicting, if not irreconcilable, political, social, and religious ideals stem- ming from the rise of nationalism, scripturalism, and feminism. Unable to persuade fellow scholars to adopt his own point of view, Ma Ruitu turned to Riḍā as an external legal authority, hoping that he would act as both ally and arbiter in these disputes, and that he would ultimately help to restore his com- munity’s sense of unity. Over the course of his career, Riḍā wrote and published many fatwas for petitioners overseas who approached him, as did Ma Ruitu, for support and arbitration in the face of local communal struggles. In an obvious effort to con- vey to readers his international reputation and reach, he deliberately empha- sized their foreign addresses. Early in his career as a muftī, he went so far as to give a group of fatwa requests the title “Parisian Questions,” on the excuse that the petitioner who sent them, an Egyptian friend, happened to be traveling in Paris.103 Similarly, in the case under analysis, he chose a title to highlight the questions’ origin in China – after publishing the Chinese scholar’s hyperbolic praises of his journal. Due to China’s remoteness, the exchange served him to suggest that his fame had spread far and wide. But something else motivated Riḍā to craft his fatwas to China with a missionary’s sense of purpose: the rare opportunity to communicate his vision for Islam – through Ma Ruitu’s prom- ised translations – to a whole new set of readers, in Chinese. In his responses, he therefore proceeded with deliberation – with a keen sense of the distance that he needed to navigate to communicate effectively across the seas. Instead of giving Ma Ruitu bare answers that presumed common knowledge or a shared understanding, he decided to use the set of fatwas as an opportunity to introduce Muslims in China to his essential values and commitments. One of the remarkable things about his fatwas to China is that they show the care that he put into tailoring his message to a particular audience in a re- mote country. Knowing that Chinese Muslims wanted Ḥanafī answers, he gave
103 Al-Manār 7 (1904), 371.
Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 66 Halevi them Ḥanafī answers. This calls into question attempts by scholars to identify a supposed trend in his thought – above all, the argument that he turned, in the second half of his career, into a hardliner favoring Ḥanbalism. This com- mon argument is simplistic and superficial, if not altogether wrong. In his fat- wa on gold teeth, Riḍā did refer to Ibn Taymiyya, often described as a Ḥanbalī hardliner, but he did so in order to support a lenient ruling. Moreover, in his fatwas to China, he repeatedly emphasized Ḥanafī rather than Ḥanbalī rulings, going so far as to defend the distinct and controversial Ḥanafī legalization of forbidden commerce in non-Muslim territory. Clearly, Riḍā communicated his values strategically, with some sense of the desires of his audience. This flexi- bility in his ability to interpret Islamic law to suit different climes has been neglected by the historiography, but it must have been an essential reason for his success as a global muftī. Still, while giving Ḥanafī petitioners Ḥanafī fatwas, he made every effort to communicate his own religious and legal philosophy; and he definitely suc- ceeded in doing this in some measure. Notably, the Chinese version of his fat- was celebrated the medieval theologian Buyi Taimingye 布宜太命爷 (Ibn Taymiyya) for his legal hermeneutics. They advanced the methodological prin- ciple, ascribed to the Qian Xian 前贤 (otherwise known as “the Pious Ances- tors,” al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ) that a definite scriptural proof is needed to prohibit something strictly.104 Through Ma Ruitu’s translations, such doctrines – critical to the current of reform that is nowadays often described as “enlightened” or “modernist” Salafism – entered into China. This conclusion should lead to a new understanding of the transmission of Salafism to China. On the basis of oral traditions, anthropologists and histori- ans have traced the origins of Salafism in China to 1937, when a pilgrim to Mec- ca, Ma Debao, returned to Hezhou, Gansu’s “Little Mecca,” to preach a new ideology that inspired his followers to break with the Yihewani and establish a rival reactionary society.105 They may be right, if the goal is to explain what role a charismatic authority or religious personage played in founding a Sino-Mus- lim sectarian society that at some point in its history (perhaps as late as the
104 “Religious Rules for Dental Crowns,” [Xiangya zhi duan fa 镶牙之断法], Tianfang Xueli Yuekan 5:1-2 (October-November, 1932). In the 1931 translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s Sunni polemic against disunity that was discussed above, Ma Ruitu translated the word al-Salaf by the term Xianbei 先辈, which simply refers to “Ancestors.” 105 Stewart, Chinese Muslims, 39; Dillon, China’s Muslim Hui Community, 103-04; Dru C. Glad- ney, “The Salafiyya Movement in Northwest China: Islamic Fundamentalism among the Muslim Chinese?,” in Leif Manger, ed., Muslim Diversity: Local Islam in Global Contexts (Richmond: Curzon, 1999), 131-32. For an alternative story about the origins of Salafism in China, see Matthew S. Erie, China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 107-08.
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1970s) named itself “Salafist” (Sailaifeiye 赛莱菲耶).106 But this sociological perspective is far too narrow. Doctrines and stances that lay at the heart of Salafism in 1930 Cairo made their debut in China before Ma Debao’s return from Mecca. Reverence for early Muslim ancestors, a hermeneutic predilec- tion for the Ḥadīth, admiration for Ibn Taymiyya, an obsession with orthopraxy coupled with a zealous readiness to wield the authority of scripture to chal- lenge local religious traditions, a dismissive approach to legalistic scholasti- cism, a politically quietist but nevertheless polarizing view of the world, a missionary approach to exchanges with non-Muslims, an economically liberal attitude to interest-based transactions, a socially conservative attitude to women – all of these doctrines and stances, integral to the Salafism of al- Manār, appear in Riḍā’s 1930 fatwas to China. Ma Ruitu translated and pub- lished most of these fatwas within two years. He did not belong to any “Salafist” society or institution, and he probably never identified as a “Salafist.”107 Even so, he worked to convey Riḍā’s methodology and ideology into China well be- fore Ma Debao founded the society that justified its existence on the basis of the same methodology and ideology.108 For this reason, it is essential to revise the standard history of Salafism’s origins in China. But it would be a mistake to regard Ma Ruitu as a transparent transmitter of Salafist values and doctrines, for he was a selective translator. In 1932, he pub- lished four of Riḍā’s fatwas in translation: the fatwas dealing with China’s legal status, payment for Qurʾanic recitations at funerals, women’s haircuts, and gold teeth.109 His translations were loyal but politically sensitive. He chose the ge- neric and colorless title “Question and Answer” for the first of these fatwas – a fatwa that Riḍā had titled “The House of Islam and the House of War.” Although he accurately conveyed Riḍā’s ruling, he strategically omitted the provocative description of China as “an abode of infidelity and war since its origin.”110
106 One study claims that the Bai sect founded by Ma Debao adopted the name Sailaifeiye only in the 1970s. See Ma Tong, “Basic Characteristics of Islam in Northwest China,” in Is- lam, ed. Jin Yijiu, trans. Chan Ching-shing Alex (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 327. 107 For a historical argument against the anachronistic retrojection of the identification “Salafist” (Salafiyya), see Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 108 On the indirect influence of ʿAbduh’s and Riḍā’s teachings on Ma Debao’s sect, see Glad- ney, “The Salafiyya Movement,” 132, 134. 109 In addition to the three translations of the fatwas cited in other footnotes, see “Reciting the Qu’ran in Someone’s House” (Zai renjia zhong song gu lan 在人家中诵古兰), Tian- fang Xueli Yuekan 4:10-11 (July-Aug. 1932). 110 “Question and Answer” (Wen da 问答), Tianfang Xueli Yuekan 4, no. 7 (Jan. 1932). The original responsum is attributed to Muhanmode Li 穆罕默德利, an abbreviated name for Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā.
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He seems not to have published the remaining two fatwas, for reasons un- known. The question that he had formulated about the timing of Ramadan was vague; and Riḍā’s answer maybe seemed irrelevant or unhelpful. The fatwa in which Riḍā had sided with the Indo-Muslim group that had rejected the re- gime of the schools of law was also apparently never translated. If this is in- deed the case, then Ma Ruitu probably had a good reason for the omission. Despite his protestations against blind imitators, he remained loyal to the Ḥanafī school of law, as he made clear by requesting Ḥanafī solutions to Sino- Muslim problems. Although Riḍā’s fatwa concerning the Muḥammadiyya doctrine did not urge him and his compatriots to abandon Ḥanafism, it did encourage them to loosen their bond to the nation’s predominant legal tradi- tion. Ma Ruitu might not have liked this answer very much; or he might have worried that encouraging his readers to embrace an “Indo-Muslim” doctrine – at a time when there was already considerable antagonism toward a group of Indo-Muslim missionaries in China, the Aḥmadiyya of Lahore – would have been explosive or divisive. One way or another, he did not translate Riḍā’s writ- ings word for word. He chose morsels from al-Manār that suited his own inter- ests and the presumed interests of his readership; and he deliberately set aside what he considered unpalatable. He imported Salafism into China but in frag- ments. In a politically circumspect edition, Ma Ruitu did publish the fatwa that ruled on the Sino-Muslim effort to identify fully with China and fully with the Muslim world. What historical circumstances gave rise to this Chinese ques- tion, and what were the historical implications of the Arabic answer? This ar- ticle has shown that around 1930 the surge of Chinese nationalism coincided with a powerful drive toward Muslim unity – a drive to create a stronger “na- tionalistic” bond between the diverse ethnic groups that professed Islam within and beyond China. These impulses were not irreconcilable, yet Chi- nese-Muslim nationalists clearly felt in conflict with themselves over the des- ignation of China as a House of War. They came up with a remarkable solution – to elevate Republican China to the status of a House of Islam – that would have resolved for them the tension that existed, at this juncture, between being Muslim and being Chinese. Unfortunately for them, their solution, rather than uniting Hui, Han, and Arab, became yet another cause of Sino-Muslim divi- sion. Had Riḍā taken their side, he might have given their solution wings and made a significant contribution to a historic geopolitical shift. Instead, his rul- ing helped to bury their Islamic dream for China in the dust heap of history.
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Acknowledgements
The imperative to seek knowledge, even unto China, forced me to beg experts on Sino-Muslim history as well as a couple of bright Chinese students at my university for help. I am glad to acknowledge, in the first place, the assistance of Jonathan Lipman. In addition to encouraging me to pursue this research project by persuading me to present my preliminary research on Riḍā’s Chi- nese fatwas to the 2013 Association for Asian Studies conference, he responded to multiple questions over the years and offered me comments on a draft of this article. Masumi Matsumoto responded generously and knowledgeably to my questions, and she provided me with copies of several key Chinese texts. A librarian at my university, Yuh-Fen Benda, searched deeply and successfully to locate digital copies of the Chinese translations of Riḍā’s fatwas. Two re- search assistants, Chin-Ting Huang and Lu Sun, translated and transliterated for me the Chinese texts cited in this article. Without their assistance, this ar- ticle would have featured only the Arabic side of a trans-linguistic exchange. At Tony Stewart’s invitation, I synthesized the results of my research to one of the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer seminars, and I am grateful to participants for their responses. Finally, I would like to thank my colleague Ruth Rogaski and three anonymous readers for Die Welt des Islams for many helpful suggestions and corrections.
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