Chinese Muslims and the Middle East: The Transformation of Islam in Modern China

Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

China is not only home to around 20 million Muslims, it is also home to a variety of different Islamic traditions, and of various ethnic groups who follow those different versions of Islam. In this episode we focus on the Chinese-speaking (or ‘Sinophone’) Muslims rather than the better-known Turkic-speaking (or Uyghur) Muslims. From the medieval period onwards, these Chinese-speaking followers of Islam developed their own religious traditions by drawing on classical Sufi mystical works and Hanafi legal texts written outside of China and applying them to local conditions, which often involved translating or writing religious texts in Chinese. Yet despite occasional contacts with the wider Muslim world, it wasn’t till the late nineteenth century that these Sinophone Muslims established regular ties with their coreligionists in the Middle East. Those new contacts set in motion a century of religious change that was also shaped by political events as China was transformed from an empire to a nationalist republic, then a communist People’s Republic. This episode traces the outcomes of these twentieth-century links between Muslims in China and Middle East. Nile Green talks to Mohammed Al-Sudairi, author of “Traditions of Maturidism and Anti-Wahhabism in China: An Account of the Yihewani Hard-liners of the Northwest,” Journal of Islamic Studies 32, 3 (2021).