By Haiyun Ma | Assistant Professor - Frostburg State University
MEI | Nov 10, 2016
With the increased international media attention on the plight of the
Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, Western news magazines such as The Economist and Foreign Policy have started to also focus on the Hui, or Chinese-speaking Muslims. The Economist
article, “China’s Other Muslims” (October 8, 2016) depicts the Hui’s
success as owing to their assimilation into Han Chinese culture and
society. The article states that the Hui are counted as an ethnic
minority only “because it says so on their hukou (household
registration).” This imagined conception of the Hui leads to other
fantastical representations: Hui are “rarely to be victims of
Islamophobia,” can “negotiate around the grey areas of China’s political
system,” serve as “middlemen between China’s state enterprises and
firms in China Asia and the Gulf,” and are even able to “practice
Islamic law (sharia) to a limited extent.”
Unlike the Uyghurs’ recent incorporation into the Chinese state
around 1750s, the Hui have resided and intermarried in China since the
Tang dynasty (618-907). The historic Hui presence generates hybridity in
their race, language, religion, and literature; as a result, modern
Western scholars often deploy hyphenated terms such as “Sino-Muslim,”
“Confucian Muslims,” and more recently, “Muslim Chinese” to refer to
them. It is possibly because of this phenomenon that the Hui have been
portrayed as the best example of civilizational dialogue between (neo)
Confucianism and Islam, and thus promoted by contemporary Confucian
scholar Tu Weiming and his Islamic counterpart Seyyed Hossein Nasr.[1]
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