13 A Song of the Red Sea: Communities and Networks of Chinese Muslims in the Hijaz Shawwal, 1437/ July, 2016 Hyeju Jeong Duke University History Department A Song of the Red Sea: Communities and Networks of Chinese Muslims in the Hijaz Hyeju Jeong Duke University History Department © King Faisal Center for research and Islamic Studies, 2016 King Fahd National Library Cataloging-In-Publication Data Jeong, Hyeju A song of the red sea: communities and networks of chinese Muslims in Hijaz. / Hyeju Jeong. - Riyadh, 2016 32 p; 16.5x23cm ISBN: 978-603-8032-96-1 1- Islam - China 2- Hijaz (Saudi Arabia) 1- Title 210.9151 dc 1437/10311 L.D. no. 1437/10311 ISBN: 978-603-8032-96-1 Table of Contents Acknowledments 7 Introduction 9 An Overview of Chinese Muslim Presence in the Hijaz 10 Waqf and Communal Spaces: Ribat and Hajj Lodge Houses 13 A Song of the Red Sea 21 Conclusion 27 5 6 No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016 Acknowledments I am grateful to the King Faisal Center for Research in Islamic Studies, especially Dr. Yahya bin Junaid and Dr. Saud al-Sarhan, for sponsoring my stays in the Kingdom. In conducting this research, I became particularly indebted to individuals and families in Jeddah, Ta’if, Riyadh, and different parts of China and Taiwan who gladly devoted their time to a stranger who abruptly knocked on their doors. Please direct questions and comments to janice.jeong@duke. edu. 7 1- From History to Hurdles Introduction It was a hot yet pleasant midsummer day in 2014 when I first met Mr. ‘Abdul Majid Ma Jingwu in his apartment in Jeddah. Hanging on the walls of the reception room were several pieces of Chinese Islamic calligraphy, and on the bookshelf lay Ma Jian’s Chinese translation of the Quran. In 1949, at the age of sixteen, Mr. Ma Jingwu had undertaken pilgrimage to Mecca from Xining, the capital of northwestern Qinghai Province, along with his parents and around 200 kinsmen. His mother passed away that year, two days before performing the pilgrimage, and was buried in Mecca. Before settling in Jeddah in the early 1980s, Ma had sojourned in Mecca, Cairo, Ta’if, and Taipei; during the 1980s, he served as the representative of overseas Chinese in the Middle East to Taipei. Fifteen years prior he had visited his original hometown in Linxia, often referred to as China’s “little Mecca,” with his wife, Ms. Ma Yujing. After several hours of conversation, he handed me a couple of large dates from Gansu, which his relatives had sent him that summer. While the Chinese Muslim diaspora population in Saudi Arabia is smaller than the diaspora populations of South Asia, Central Asia or Southeast Asia, whose historical ties with the coasts of the Red Sea are known to have left enduring vestiges in and around Mecca, Chinese Muslim communities have forged their own enclaves in the Hijaz and beyond for the past century or so, making permanent homes in different parts of the Kingdom. Journeying from various parts of China, they arrived in Mecca, Ta’if and Jeddah as pilgrims, students, merchants, and exiles at different times and became residents and citizens of Saudi Arabia. The dispersed communities and networks that they have forged in past and present urge a redefinition of belonging that does not depend on ethnocentric nationalism. These communities also present a picture of Sino-Arabian exchanges that is deeper, less structured, and more enduring than the one represented by the official diplomatic relations between China and Saudi Arabia that came into force with the 1946 Treaty of Amity with the Republic of China and the 1990 treaty with the People’s Republic of China. 9 10 No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016 An Overview of Chinese Muslim Presence in the Hijaz Throughout history, the coasts of the Red Sea represented both a real and imagined destination for Muslim populations dispersed across China. 1 Recent research by Hatim al-Tahawi has illustrated the historical ties between Mecca and different parts of China between the ninth and fifteenth centuries: the routes by which sailors, traders and diplomats traveled and transferred goods and goodwill. 2 Zheng He’s voyages across the oceans, accounts of which were recorded by fellow sailor Ma Huan, are well known. 3 While direct physical ties between Arabia and China may have waned after Zheng He’s missions in the mid-fifteenth century, in northwest China, travel to Mecca and southern Arabia continued to serve as the basis for religious rectification movements throughout the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, culminating in late- nineteenth century Salafi-oriented socio-religious projects that gradually underwent ideational transformation. 4 For those farther in the east, Mecca and Medina were continuously inscribed and memorialized as 1- By “Chinese Muslims,” I mean the Muslim populations dispersed through China who trace their origins to settlers from Central Asia and the Middle East who intermarried with local populations, now narrowly classified as one of fifty-five ethnic minoritieshuizu ( ) under the PRC. مكة املكرمة يف السجﻻت) Haatim al-Tahawi, “Mecca in Chinese Records during the Medieval Age 2- Al-Tafaahim, vol. 45 (2014): 379-398. I am grateful to Dr. Engseng”,(الصينية يف العرص الوسيط Ho for referring me to this article. 3- Ma Huan, Ying Yai Shêng Lan Chiao Chu. CUP Archive, 1970, trans. J.V.G. Mills. 4- Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). Joseph Fletcher and Beatrice Forbes Manz, Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995). Dru Gladney, “The Salafiyya Movement in Northwest China: Islamic Fundamentalism among the Muslim Chinese?” in Muslim Diversity: Local Islam in Global Contexts, ed. Leif Manger. (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999). For an in-depth study of contemporary manifestations of Salafi movement in northwest China and the impact of overseas (Saudi) connections: Mohammed Turki A. Al-Sudairi, “Adhering to the Ways of Our Western Brothers.” Sociology of Islam 4, no. 1–2 (April 15, 2016): 27–58. points of origin and return, where Islam was born and spread to the lands of the east. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, as China experienced post- Opium War infrastructural developments, travel from China to Arabia increased. The first known Chinese-language pilgrimage account of this period was written by Ma Dexin of Dali, Yunnan Province after his travels from 1841 to 1848. 5 Pilgrimages and diplomatic missions to the Islamic world increased steadily throughout the interwar period and World War II, aided by trans-Islamic internationalism and Sino-Japanese competitions that sought to win the minds of Muslims within and outside China’s tenuous borderlines. 6 Yet the largest community of Chinese Muslims in the Hijaz is known to have formed in the mid-twentieth century, when a number of Chinese emigrants undertook the pilgrimage to escape from their country’s incessant warfare. The greatest number of migrants came with the final Communist victory, when the former militarist governor of Qinghai Province, Hussein Ma Bufang, fled to Canton, Hong Kong, and Mecca with between 200 and 300 of his close familial and political affiliates. A prominent general and politician working with the Nationalist Party, Hussein Ma Bufang and his extended family had maintained amiable relations with Saudi King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz even before their migration in 1949. Shortly after their arrival in Mecca, the group migrated to Cairo and sojourned there for a few 5- Ma, Dexin, Anli Ma, and Guochang Na. Chao jin tu ji (Yinchuan Shi: Ningxia ren min chu ban she, 1988). The pilgrimage account is discussed in some detail in Kristian Petersen, “The Great Transformation: Contours of the Sino-Islamic Intellectual Tradition.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 2012. 6- This particular episode is explored in Yufeng Mao, “A Muslim Vision for the Chinese Nation: Chinese Pilgrimage Missions to Mecca during World War II.” The Journal ofAsian Studies 70, no. 2 (2011): 373–95. 11 12 No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016 years, until the 1956 Egyptian socialist revolution and its recognition of the People’s Republic of China threatened their status. They undertook the pilgrimage again and permanently settled in Ta’if, where the mountainous climate is said to have offered more suitable living conditions. Besides the Ma clan, certain individuals from northeastern Shandong, southwestern Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet took isolated pilgrimages to permanently settle in places such as Ta’if and Jeddah. By then, Turkic-speaking migrants from Xinjiang had already become a part of Hijazi society and are said to have helped the Chinese Muslims settle down. 7 As new immigrants, with no direct access to mainland China or the relatives they left behind, the amalgamated Chinese Muslim community adapted to their new society while maintaining external religious, political and commercial ties throughout Hong Kong and Taipei. They memorialized now-distant homelands in mainland China, which they would not be able to return for the next three decades. While constructing their community in the western coasts of Arabia, many traveled to destinations far outside the Kingdom -- sometimes physically, and sometimes by crossing space and time in imagination. These are the stories that this paper seeks to tell, based on textual sources and interviews conducted in the summer of 2014 and winter of 2016 with a number of Saudi-Chinese residents. It focuses on places of communal gathering and the stories of individuals who both shaped and were