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China's Islamic
Awakening
Ahmad Lutfi explores Beijing's latest attempts to
contain the blowback effect of China's constant
reversal of policies toward Islam and Muslims
By Ahmad Lutfi
In March 2003, the Chinese State Council produced a
white paper cataloguing the country's "progress" in
promoting personal liberties and religious freedoms.
This followed an amendment to China's Constitution,
endorsed by the National People's Congress earlier in
the same month, to incorporate the protection of
individual freedoms into the country's legislation.
Such moves are but the latest in Beijing's attempts to
contain the blowback effect of its constant reversal
of policies toward Islam and Muslims.
Islam in Central Asia
Since the introduction of Islam to Central Asia during
the 8th century, its role in the lives of its
adherents has been grossly misunderstood. Non-Muslim
rulers have enacted a variety of policies at different
times to deal with the issue of Islam in territories
under their control, including integration,
assimilation, pacification, and oppression. While
imperial China considered all but the Han Chinese to
be barbarians, its need for expansion required
accepting groups of such 'barbarians' and policies
were thus developed to insure their loyalty through a
process of integration. However, as the empire
expanded, there was a need for assimilation to
incorporate the new groups into the Chinese state. The
Qing (1644-1911) administered policies of 'divide-and-rule'
and military force to maintain control and punish
Muslims for supporting their predecessors, the Ming.
Tsarist Russia controlled the hajj, waqf (endowment)
revenues, and construction of mosques and madrasas,
with the aim to oust Muslim education through
Russianization, and modified the application of
Shari`ah laws.
Muslims' reaction took the shape of pan-Islamist,
pan-Turkist nationalist movements, giving birth to
organized Muslim political movements and resistance
that reached their peak during WWI. Subsequent
massacres forced many Kyrgyz and Kazakhs to move to
China, where they gradually became part of the growing
non-Chinese Muslim population in Xinjiang at a time
when China's policies were proving most unsuccessful
in areas inhabited by religious or ethnic minorities
such as Mongolia and Tibet. The inconsistency of such
policies has contributed to the radicalization over
time of a tolerant faith. Oppression of the legitimate
public practice of the faith forced Muslims' religious
life underground where adherents resorted to secretive
practices under the auspices of tariqas (Sufi orders),
many of which were misinterpreted by fanatic religious
leaders. Meanwhile, ethnic tensions and
ultra-nationalist sentiments grew as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz,
Tajiks, Turkmen and Uzbeks strived to preserve their
respective religious traditions.
Both China and the Soviet Union took little notice of
Muslims' strong sense of political identity, be it
based on minority nationality or religious heritage, a
fact to which their policy of forced introduction of
atheism attests. Note the similarity with which
anti-Islamic attacks were launched in both countries:
communist party branches in Muslim areas were purged
of Muslim nationalist leaders who, along with ulema,
sheikhs and mullahs were exterminated in forced labor
camps. During the Russian Civil War (1918-20), all
official spheres of Muslim life were crushed: Latin (then
Cyrillic or Pinyin) alphabets replaced Arabic, mosques
and madrasas were destroyed, tariqas were declared
illegal and lands belonging to Muslim individuals and
institutions were nationalized. As the Red Army fought
Nazi Germany, the persecution of religious beliefs
superficially decreased and official Islam was
legalized to avoid the destabilizing impact of
internal Muslim discontent on a country at war.
Beijing followed many aspects of Moscow's model in its
own unsuccessful policies. For their part, Chinese
republicans rewarded Chinese Muslims for their support
of the revolution but antagonized the non-Chinese
Muslims in Xinjiang for their strong sense of
nationalism. Mao Zedong's early support for equality
between minorities and the Han Chinese attracted many
Turkic Muslims to join his communist forces. The quid
pro quo on offer was a promise of protection for
religious freedom upon communist take-over in return
for their known fighting skills. The promise was
short-lived.
A History of Inconsistency
Like the Russians, time and again, Chinese policies
toward Islam and Muslims have proven to be
demonstrably inconsistent. Beijing considered
religious beliefs to be dying and continues to reap
the harvest of this miscalculation to this day.
China's Islam policy has always been linked to its
internal and external power relations: while strong
dynasties such as the Tang and the Yuan allowed
Muslims to prosper, unstable governments such as Qing
oppressed Muslims for fear of reprisal. During the
late 19th century, the Qing struggled to quell
uprisings by the Hui Chinese Muslims in Yunnan, Gansu
and Shanxi, and Turkic-speaking Uyghur and Kazakh
Muslims in Xinjiang. For their part, the republicans
expected Muslims to be assimilated and incorporated
into Chinese society. Such hope was met with the
Xinjiang Muslims' rebellion of 1944, which the
Russians helped put down in 1946, leading to the
establishment of the East Turkistan Republic.
In keeping with their short-lived promise, the
communists showed some respect for Islam at the outset:
religious freedom was preserved, Muslim customs at
workplaces were observed, religious and social
ceremonial practices were permitted, the Islamic
Association was founded in 1953, the Institute of
Islamic Theology was established in 1955 and
autonomous regions were set up in Muslim areas such as
Xinjiang. Muslim leaders were encouraged to criticize
communist policies during the Hundred Flowers Campaign
for thought-reform in 1956. This swiftly changed by
1957, when policies were reversed in an attempt to
contain Muslim 'separatist tendencies,' leading to a
gradual narrowing of Muslim autonomy and the launch of
an anti-Islam campaign similar to the Soviet model.
Within a year, large-scale relocation programs shifted
non-Muslim Chinese to Muslim areas to dilute the
ethnic composition of "troublesome" regions. This was
part of a policy aimed at integrating the non-Han
minority nationalities into the 'big family' of China,
but later moved towards assimilation, in particular
during the ill-fated Great Leap Forward (1958-9).
When Beijing later realized that such policies
jeopardized the diplomatic support it needed from
Muslim states that disapproved of this oppression, it
re-reversed its course of action, again. Beijing sent
Muslim Chinese delegations to Mecca for pilgrimage and
encouraged Sino-Muslim interaction with foreign
countries. Before such policy could gain Muslims'
trust, years of Mao's untested economic ventures took
its toll: the great famine of 1959 struck, causing
further economic devastation that was made the more
harsh in underdeveloped areas, such as Xinjiang, where
large numbers of Han settlers were moved following the
completion of the Hami Railway that year. At the same
time, numerous Muslims who were sent to Sunni Islam's
most prominent university, al-Azhar, in Egypt were
introduced to the widespread ideas of Islamic scholars,
whose thought shaped Islamist movements in the Middle
East as the region moved from its colonial past.
Mistrustful of how long the honeymoon could last,
Central Asian Muslims brought back the same literature
that provided the Muslim Brotherhood, and its
subsequent radical offshoots (such as Islamic Jihad
and al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya) with the foundation for
their ideology. From that point on the roots of
self-preserving Islamic revivalism slowly penetrated
the fiber of Muslim life under communist rule.
Moscow's painful lessons were not well learnt in
Beijing whose Soviet-inspired nationalist policy ruled
China's Muslim regions. For instance, during the
Cultural Revolution (1966-76), oppression of Muslims
reached unprecedented levels. Mao's Red Guards
effectively ended special privileges granted to
minority nationalities and set about burning mosques,
killing imams, persecuting leaders, dispersing
families, prohibiting Qur'an study and forbidding
Islamic social practices. Following Mao's death and
the overthrow of the "Gang of Four" in 1976, Muslims
were partially rehabilitated, although the integration
of Han Chinese in Muslim areas continued. While the
rights to observe Islamic practices were recognized,
there were no assurances that religious freedoms would
be protected, another indication of policy
inconsistencies a la Moscow. In 1978, Deng Xiaopeng
launched China's Opening and Reform program to
liberalize the economy and reactivate contact with the
world following his country's isolation during the
Cultural Revolution. But his policy, which opposed
national and local chauvinism and promoted regional
autonomy, failed a serious test when students'
democracy demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square
were ruthlessly suppressed (April-June 1989).
The root cause of 'terror'
Decades of communist oppression have inevitably
contributed to the radicalization of the Islamic
identity of ethnic groups who survived such oppression,
as became evident in the aftermath of the Soviet
Union's disintegration. Once Muslims in Central Asia
were permitted to contact the wider Muslim world, the
seeds of global Jihad were already planted and the
Central Asian Republics, Moscow, Chechnya and Beijing
are indeed harvesting some of the bitter crops. For
its part, Beijing is yet to acknowledge that closing
legitimate channels for expressing grievances forces
ordinary folks into practicing violence and terrorism
to express their discontent. Instead, it claims that
terrorism is a cancer but refuses to consider what has
caused it, as its current policies in Xinjiang
demonstrate.
Islam's role in China and Central Asia is different
from that of the unfolding al-Qaedaism in the Middle
East. Beijing's inconsistent religious policy has
inflicted pains similar to the Soviet oppression in
Central Asia. Both led to Islamic insurgency and
aspirations for political independence that enabled
the Muslim Central Asian states to exist, and that
continues to feed Xinjiang's Uyghurs' aspirations for
their own cause. Yet, despite the exaggerated fears
about fundamentalism, Islam is not inherently
destabilizing. The lack of religious freedom and the
absence of democracy are, and no white paper can
change that.
Ahmad Lutfi is a London based Middle East and
terrorism analyst, and a specialist in state-civil
society relations.
This essay originally appeared in the Jamestown
Foundation's China Brief and is reproduced here by
permission of the Foundation. The views expressed are
those of the author and are not necessarily shared by
the UCLA Asia Institute.
May 17, 2004
http://www.jamestown.org
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