Chinese Muslims in Transregional Spaces of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Beyond in the Twentieth Century

review of religion and chinese society 5 (2018) 135-155 brill.com/rrcs Chinese Muslims in Transregional Spaces of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Beyond in the Twentieth Century Wlodzimierz Cieciura University of Warsaw [email protected] Abstract This article examines the modern social history of Chinese Hui Muslims in the con- text of transregional connections within and beyond the borders of the two modern Chinese nation-states, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan. The article applies Engseng Ho’s concepts for the study of Inter-Asia to the biographical study of several prominent Hui religious professionals and intellectuals. The experiences and personal contributions to the development of modern Chinese Muslim culture of people like Imam Ma Songting are scrutinized, along with political and ideological conflicts over different visions of Chineseness and “Huiness” during the turbulent twentieth century. It is argued that when studying the social history of Chinese Muslims, researchers should not limit themselves to the religious activities of Hui elites that occurred within the confines of the two Chinese nation-states, but should also take into consideration the expansion of those elites’ religious activities abroad and the intensive circulation of knowledge across Inter-Asian spaces in which they participated. Keywords Chinese Muslims – ethnicity – connections – circulations – Inter-Asia – identity © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/22143955-00502002Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:10:20PM via free access <UN> 136 Cieciura 橫跨區域間的華人穆斯林:二十世紀在中國大陸、台灣和其他地區的華人回民穆斯林摘要本文著眼於華人穆斯林的近代社會史，研究背景為其在近代中國民族國家境內外的跨區域連結。除了以何英成 (Engseng Ho) 對亞際研究的觀念為研究框架，並將之應用於回顧幾位著名的回族宗教專家及知識分子的傳記研究中外，本文也詳細檢閱了如馬松亭阿訇等人的個人經歷與他們對近代中國穆斯林文化發展的貢獻，特別是當他們處在動盪的二十世紀，且對「中國性」與「回民性」因不同視角的觀察而造成政治上與意識形態上的衝突。本文認為，在研究華人穆斯林的社會史時，研究回族精英從事的宗教活動不應侷限於中國民族國家層面，而應進一步考量這些精英是如何擴展其所從事的宗教活動及他們在所參與的亞際區域中是如何密集性地散播知識。關鍵詞華人穆斯林，民族，人脈，流通，亞際，認同 Introduction Among Sino-Muslim elites, the first half of the twentieth century was domi- nated to a considerable extent by discussions of the question of ethnicity— whether the Hui were a separate minzu 民族 (ethnic group), or just Han who practiced Islam—and of the Hui relationship with Chinese nationalism (Aubin 2006; Cieciura 2016).1 The post-1949 mainland Chinese historiography of the Hui, strongly influenced by Marxist teleology, tended to picture Sino-Muslim 1 This paper is an outcome of the project “Chinese Muslims and Islam on Two Sides of the Strait. A Comparative History of Modern Religious, Cultural and Ethnic Identity of Sinophone Muslims in Mainland China and on Taiwan,” funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. In this text the terms “Hui,” “Chinese Muslims,” and “Sino-Muslims” are used interchange- ably to describe members of the Sinophone Muslim community (or communities) who share Chinese linguistic and material culture and Islamic religion. In this understanding I follow Jonathan Lipman’s (1997:xx–xxix) elucidations. Despite Lipman’s convincing critique of the ahistorical nature of the use of the term “Hui” 回for pre-prc Muslim communities in China, I retain this word for stylistic reasons. Most of the people described in this article are cur- rently identified in the prc as members of the Huizu 回族 ethnic minority. Even though some of them were not great enthusiasts of this term, they still understood the words “Hui” or review of religion and chineseDownloaded society from 5Brill.com09/28/2021 (2018) 135-155 09:10:20PM via free access <UN> Chinese Muslims in Transregional Spaces of Mainland China 137 history as confined by the national borders of China and culminating in the “new” socialist China, when Sino-Muslims were finally allowed to occupy their natural and deserved space as a “minority nationality” (shaoshu minzu 少數民族) (Yu 1996). One result of the 1949 “bifurcation” of the Chinese nation-state in the wake of the Communists’ victory on the mainland was the physical split of the Sino- Muslim communities along the lines of the political and geographic divide. Because many Hui, including three-quarters of the leadership of the Chi- nese Muslim Association (Zhongguo Huijiao Xiehui 中國回教協會, Huixie 回協 for short),2 managed to make their way to Taiwan, the island became an important place for the maintenance of the intellectual traditions and endeav- ors of Republican-era Hui elites (Jia 2005:7). Very few of these “exiled” Sino- Muslims seem to have ever addressed the issues of a separate Hui ethnicity in their writings, and even fewer of them applied the prc’s understanding of the ethnic difference between the Han and the Hui to their own community (Chang 2012:424–425). The activities of Sino-Muslim elites in two different post-1949 political con- texts offer an interesting illustration of how equivocal the Sino-Muslim self- understanding could become under different political conditions, and how the preoccupation with issues of ethnicity characteristic of the mainland narrative can obstruct the view when Hui history is considered within the rigid “minzu paradigm” normally used to describe Chinese Muslims in mainland Chinese scholarship.3 Yet beyond the two versions of the Chinese nation-state lies another set of spaces in which modern “Hui-ness” has been negotiated and shaped. That set of spaces is home to the Sino-Muslim diasporic communities that began to form as early as the nineteenth century, but received a boost after 1949 as many originally mainland Hui moved out of Taiwan (Ma 2005). It is in the spaces between the two Chinese nation-states and the wider Inter-Asian and global areas beyond that the true variety and richness of the Sino-Muslim historical and social experience is manifested in all its complexity. Throughout the modern era, mobile Hui pilgrims, scholars, and imams were returning home from the Islamic heartlands with the knowledge they acquired in the Muslim world, hoping to put that expertise into practice to ensure their native communities’ successful adaptation to the modern nation-state. In the religious sphere, the scripturalist inspirations brought from the madrassas “Huihui” 回回 as an umbrella designation for Islam, called Huijiao 回教 (or the Hui teach- ing/religion), and Muslims—the Huimin 回民. 2 “Chinese Muslim Association” is the English name preferred by the association itself, and thus I use it throughout the text. 3 For the “minzu paradigm,” see Lipman 1997:xx–xxv. review of religion and chinese society 5 (2018) 135-155Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:10:20PM via free access <UN> 138 Cieciura of the Arab heartlands resulted in the emergence of powerful socioreligious movements such as the Yihewani 伊赫瓦尼 Muslim Brotherhood founded by northwestern imams returned from Mecca (Lipman 1997:200–211). After issuing a call to purge Islamic practice of Chinese cultural influences, the movement eventually formed a practical alliance with northwestern Muslim military leaders. Ultimately Yihewani became one of the main ideological options for China’s Muslims during the Republic, merging scripturalist sensitivities with political loyalty to the nation-state; some of its sympathizers even extended their loyalty to the state’s later Communist incarnation (Chérif-Chebbi 2004). During the Qing–Republican transition period, with China embroiled in heat- ed political debates on the very nature of its nation and on the place of various ethnic and religious communities in it, these new understandings of religion and ethnicity brought back from abroad and propagated by mobile leaders informed the Hui discourses of membership in the nation-state and of the right- fulness of Muslim existence as part of the Chinese homeland. This paper considers some transregional aspects of modern Chinese Mus- lim history by examining the personal experiences of several core members of the twentieth-century Sino-Muslim intellectual elites. Informed by Engseng Ho’s recent methodological proposal “that the study of Asia, thought of as an Inter-Asian space, can provide concepts that shed light on the social shapes of societies that are mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive with one other” (2017:907), it discusses these individuals’ experiences by applying to them Ho’s concepts of mobility, connections, circulation, transregional axes, intermedi- ate scale, and partial societies. The Hui in places like Taiwan, especially in the early years of the post-1949 era, fulfill Ho’s notion of a partial society in that they are an incomplete version of the greater Hui community on the mainland and force us to seek ways in which they engage other parts of the Hui population at a distance (Ho 2017:922). Following Emma Teng’s application of Ho’s proposal to the example of Hong Kong’s Eurasian community, this paper proposes to see the Hui elites as forming a “web,” i.e., “an expansive stretching across space, with multiple nodes of connection that lead not only back to a center, but also to other points of intersection and contact” (Teng 2017:944). This notion of a web allows us to step away from using ethnicity, or minzu, as the “primary lens for understanding the lived experience” of the Sino-Muslims and instead to consider their identities as neatly fitting neither the National- ist Chinese nor Communist Chinese definitions of the Hui as either a special class of citizens or a “minority nationality” (Teng 2017). The Inter-Asian spaces between mainland China and Taiwan, or what Ho calls conventional units, and the numerous regions that Sino-Muslim

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