6 Pilgrimage and Hui Muslim Identity in the Republican Era Yuan-lin Tsai Abstract Pilgrimage (hajj) is the fifth pillar of Islam and the most important symbol of unity of the Muslim ‘Community’ (‘Ummah’). When pan- Islamism and Chinese nationalism met in the early twentieth century, it is interesting to see how the Chinese pilgrims, and the Chinese Muslims as a whole, understood and responded to the Islamic revivalist call to the unity of the Community and the Chinese nationalist voice to build a new nation-state. This chapter explores the relationships between these two forces by researching original official documents, news reports, memoirs, and other biographical materials regarding the Hui Muslims’ pilgrimage experience. It concludes that Hui Muslim pilgrims’ choice is not an either/or question, but a mixture of pan-Islamism and Hui patriotism. Keywords: pilgrimage, Mecca, Hui, Uighur, pan-Islamism, Wahhabi Introduction Islam in China has not yet been a well-explored field despite some ground- breaking books and articles that have been published in Chinese, Japanese, and various Western languages during the last two decades. The scholars in this field have usually made their own efforts in an isolated fashion and have not integrated into the academic communities of either Islamic studies or Chinese studies. This is also true for the studies of the Chinese Muslims’ pilgrimage (hajj). In the two most comprehensive historical works on the pilgrimage – Peters’ The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places (1994) and Wolfe’s One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage (1997) – there is no mention of the Chinese Muslims’ pilgrimage journey. Recently, Tagliacozzo’s ambitious book, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (2013), tries to investigate the Southeast Asian Muslims’ pilgrimage in the context of global history and elevates the pilgrimage studies to a new level. 180 YUAN-LIN TsAI But the title of his book is a little misleading. The Chinese Muslims’ journey to Mecca is even longer than the Southeast Asian Muslims’ ‘longest journey’. Certainly, this omission is reasonable since China is usually not included in the Muslim world and Islam has never been part of the mainstream of Chinese religions despite Muslims having settled in China for more than a thousand years and the Muslim population of China being more than two million, as much as the whole population of Malaysia. However, it is worth exploring how the Chinese Muslims living in the far eastern margin of the Muslim world have overcome so many physical, economic, psychological, social, and cultural difficulties because of the pilgrimage before air travel became commonplace. The pilgrimage is the fifth pillar of Islam and the most important symbol of the unity of the Muslim ‘Community’ (‘Ummah’). The pilgrims who return to Mecca and observe the mandated rituals at the holy sites would have a profound feeling of having gone through a life-transforming spiritual experience and belonging to a global community that shares the same religious beliefs. My research will focus on the relationship between the awakening of the Chinese Muslim identity and the pilgrimage in the Republican Era on the basis of a large amount of original official documents, news reports, memoirs, and other biographical materials, as regards to the Chinese pilgrims’ responses to Islamic revivalism and Chinese nationalism. The Chinese Muslim communities in the Republican era (1911- 1949) After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the founding father of the Republic of China, Sun Yatsen, immediately proclaimed that the new country belonged equally to the five nationalities, including Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui (in- cluding Uighur Muslim), and Tibetan. But according to Sun’s first People’s Principle, Nationalism, all ethnic nationalities in China should eventually be assimilated into a new Chinese nationality. The nationalist government followed Sun’s nationalism and tried to implement the assimilation policy to the ethnic minorities. In the new historical context of pan-Islamism and Chinese nationalism, it is interesting to see how the Chinese pilgrims, and the Chinese Muslims as a whole, understood and responded to the Islamic revivalist call for the unity of the Community and the Chinese nationalist voice to build up a new nation-state. PILG RIMAGE AND HUI MUSLIM IDENTITY IN THE REPUBLICAN ErA 181 Hui 回 is the traditional name for all Muslim peoples in China. Although the PRC government has changed it as an ethnic term,1 exclusively for the Muslims who have scattered in every province and are more acculturated to the Han Chinese societies. In Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities Hui still refers to all Muslim peoples in China and even other countries, and the ‘Hui religion’ (Huijiao 回教) is another name for Islam. In the Republican era, most official documents and personal writings roughly made a differ- ence between the Uighur Muslims, mainly in Xinjiang, and the sinicized Muslims in almost every other province. The latter are the descendants of Muslim traders, envoys, and soldiers who migrated from the Middle East and Central Asia via the ‘Silk Road’ on land and sea, and eventually settled in China. They were more inclined to accept a new Chinese nationality based on the model of Sun’s nationalist ideal than the Uighur Muslims, for geographical, cultural, and historical reasons. Due to the late integration of Xinjiang into the Qing imperial political system and the Uighur Muslims’ exposure to their Turkish Muslim brothers in the neighboring Central Asian region, they kept their Persian-Turkish Islamic tradition intact up to the Republican era. Indeed, the majority of the Uighur Muslims could not speak Chinese, and far less adopted Han Chinese customs, read Confucian Classics or took up any position in the Han-dominant bureaucratic system. But the sinicized Muslim elites could master all of these matters, far better than the elites of other ethnic minorities. The nationalist government was aware of the problem of the Uighur Muslims but had never been able to build up a strong political mechanism to integrate them until the communists took over mainland China in 1949. The fate of the Uighur Muslims had been at the mercy of local warlords in Xinjiang during the Republican era. Therefore, their pilgrimage experience was very different from the rest of the Chinese Muslims. My research on the Chinese pilgrimage literature only focuses on the group of the sinicized (Hui) Muslim elites, although some of their works contain important information on Uighur Muslims’ pilgrimage. Perhaps for most Hui Muslims, Sun’s claim to give equal rights to the five nationalities was an ideal, not a reality. Under the shadow of the massacre of the Hui communities in the northwestern and southwestern regions in the late Qing era, they doubted that the Han majority would treat them 1 The PRC government classifies all Muslim peoples in China in ten ethnic groups based upon the Stalinist ethnology. The Hui is one of them. The other nine Muslim ethnic groups are Uighurs, Tartar, Kirgiz, Kazak, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Dongxiang, Salar and Bonan, and all of them, besides Hui, are highly concentrated in the northwestern provinces where the Han majority has relatively less influence on the ethnic minorities than in the eastern provinces. 182 YUAN-LIN TsAI as equals. But some of them might have thought that it would be worth a struggle to build up a liberal, democratic, and modern China. None of the Hui Muslims looked back at the monarchy system. They welcomed the new republican system in which they no longer had to perform ancestral rituals, ‘prostrate’(ketou 叩頭) to the emperor and government officials, or follow various sophisticated customs against Islamic tenets. Therefore, some Hui Muslim intellectuals joined Sun’s revolutionary party and took part in the general effort to reform China. They held the view that Islamic modernization should be part of a national effort to modernize China.2 A new wave of Islamic revivalist movements combining the ideology of Chi- nese nationalism were carried out by a new generation of foreign-educated Hui Muslim elites in the Republican era. A group of such new Hui Muslim elites expressed their progressive ideas through the new media, such as newspapers, journals, and pamphlets, and organized themselves into local, provincial, and national voluntary organizations. The new instruments of communication transformed the general Chinese public sphere at that time, and also created a new Muslim public sphere. By the 1930s, more than a hundred Muslim newspapers and periodicals were coming out in almost every province of China.3 One of the most influential periodicals was Crescent China (Yue Hua 月華), issued every ten days from 1929 until the Japanese invasion of North China in 1937. Crescent China’s approach was global and frequently included news about worldwide subjects, particularly from the Muslim countries. It also regu- larly published translated essays on a variety of topics from the Al-Manar (The Beacon) journal and other Egyptian Islamic modernist periodicals.4 Through the introduction of Crescent China and other new presses, the Hui Muslim intellectuals were familiar with Muhammad Abduh’s (1849-1905) and Rashid Rida’s (1865-1935) ideas of Islamic reform. These new ideas motivated some young Muslims to go overseas to study in order to learn new knowledge to build up a new China. In the context of this new national- ism and internationalism, the Chinese Muslim communities cultivated their first generation of Azhari graduates and modernist ‘religious leaders’ (‘imams’), and brought forth a new wave of the pilgrimage movement in the 1920s and 1930s. The most well-known leaders with an Azhari diploma included Wang Jingzai 王靜齋 (1879-1949), Ma Songting 馬松亭 (1895-1992), 2 Gelvin and Green (2014, p.