_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 brill.com/wdi 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 <http://www.webcitation.org/6hEQIAtBW>; Rainer Brunner, “Lātinīya la-dīnīya: Muḥammad Rašīd Riḍā über Arabisch und Türkisch im Zeitalter des Nationalismus,” in Johannes Zimmermann, Christoph Herzog, and Raoul Motika, eds., Osmanische Welten: Quellen und Fallstudien: Festschrift für Michael Ursinus (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2016), 73-114. On Riḍā’s political activities as a Muslim pan-Ara- bist, see Eliezer Tauber, “Rashīd Riḍa as Pan-Arabist before World War I,” MW 79:2 (1989), 102-12. 5 Rashīd Riḍā, “Al-Wafd al-Islāmī ilā al-Ṣīn,” al-Manār 4 (1901), 238; idem, “Muslimū al-Ṣīn wa-l- Islām fī l-Yābān,” al-Manār 8 (1906), p. 879. ʿInāyatullāh Aḥmadī, Waqt’s correspondent in Manchuria, originally published the articles on Muslims in China. For the Arabic translations, see al-Manār 15 (1912), 233-34, 550-52, 692-94, 790-97; and vol. 16 (1913), 63-64. On connections between Waqt and al-Manār, see Stéphane A. Dudoignon, “Echoes to Al-Manār among the Muslims of the Russian Empire: A Preliminary Research Note on Riza al-Din b. Fakhr al-Din and the Šūrā (1908-1918),” in Stéphane Dudoignon et al., eds., Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic World: Transmission, Transformation, Communication (London: Routledge, 2009), 100-01. 6 On the complexities of this identity, see Jonathan N. Lipman, “Hyphenated Chinese: Sino- Muslim Identity in Modern China,” in Gail Hershatter et al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1996), 97-112. On Sino-Muslim iden- tity under republican ideology, see Yufeng Mao, “Sino-Muslims in Chinese Nation-building, 1906-1956” (Ph.D. Thesis: George Washington University, 2007), 54-70, 90-102; and Wlodzimierz Cieciura, “Ethnicity or Religion? Republican-Era Chinese Debates on Islam and Muslims,” in Jonathan Lipman, ed., Islamic Thought in China: Sino-Muslim Intellectual Evolution from the 17th to the 21st Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), chap. 5. Die Welt des Islams 59 (2019) 33-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:06:09PM via free access 36 Halevi 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.