Development of Islam in China
Islam in China has a rich heritage. China has some of the oldest Muslim history, Throughout the history of Islam in China, Chinese Muslims have influenced the course of Chinese history.
Introduction of the Islam
Islam was first brought to China by an envoy sent by Uthman, the third Caliph, in 651, less than twenty years after the death of Prophet Muhammad. The Tang Emperor Gaozong received him and ordered the construction of the Memorial mosque in Canton, the first mosque in the country. It was during the Tang Dynasty that China had its golden day of cosmopolitan culture which helped the introduction of Islam. The first major Muslim settlements in China consisted of Arab and Persian merchants. The term “Hui” originated from the Mandarin word “Huihui,” a term first used in the Yuan Dynasty to describe Central Asian, Persian and Arab residents in China.
Partial settlement of Muslim in China
By the time of the Song Dynasty, Muslims had come to dominate the import and export industry. In 1070, the Song Emperor Shenzong invited 5,300 Muslim men from Bukhara, to settle in China in order to create a buffer zone between the Chinese and the Liao Empire in the northeast. Later on these men were settled between the Sung capital of Kaifeng and ancient Beijing. They were led by Prince Amir Sayyid "So-fei-er", the "father" of the Muslim community in China who renamed Islam to “Huihui Jiao”.
Large-scale settlement of Muslim in China
During the Mongol-founded Yuan Dynasty, the Muslim immigrants were given an elevated status over the native Han Chinese as part of the Mongolian’s governing strategy. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims immigrants were recruited and forcibly relocated from Western and Central Asia by the Mongols to help them administer their rapidly expanding empire. The Mongols used Persian, Arab and Uyghur administrators to act as officers of taxation and finance. Muslims headed many corporations in China in the early Yuan period. Muslim scholars were brought to work on calendar making and astronomy.
Zhenghe’s exploration to the west
During the following Ming Dynasty, Muslims continued to be influential around government circles. The Yongle Emperor hired Zheng He, perhaps the most famous Chinese Muslim and China's foremost explorer, to lead seven expeditions to the Indian Ocean from 1405 and 1433. However, during the Ming Dynasty, new immigration to China from Muslim countries was restricted in an increasingly isolationist nation. The Muslims in China began to assimilate by adopting Chinese culture. This era, sometimes considered the Golden Age of Islam in China. And Nanjing became an important center of Islamic study then.
"washing off the Muslims" policy
The rise of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) made relations between the Muslims and Chinese more difficult. The dynasty prohibited ritual slaughtering of animals, followed by forbidding the construction of new mosques and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Qing rulers belonged to the Manchu, a minority in China, and employed the tactics of divide and conquer to keep the Muslims, Hans, Tibetans and Mongolians in conflict with each other. These repressive policies resulted in five bloody Hui rebellions, most notably the Panthay Rebellion, which occurred in Yunnan province from 1855 to 1873, and the Dungan revolt, which occurred mostly in Xinjiang, Shensi and Gansu, from 1862 to 1877. The Manchu government then committed genocide to suppress these revolts, killing a million people in the Panthay rebellion, several million in the Dungan revolt and five million in the suppression of Miao people in Guizhou. A "washing off the Muslims" policy had been long advocated by officials in the Manchu government.
Being equal with Han people
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Sun Yat Sen, who established the Republic of China immediately proclaimed that the country belonged equally to the Han, Man (Manchu), Meng (Mongol), Hui (Muslim), and the Tsang (Tibetan) peoples. In 1911, the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Ningxia fell to Muslim warlords of the family known as the Ma clique. During the Cultural Revolution, mosques were often defaced, destroyed or closed and copies of the Quran were destroyed along with temples, churches, monasteries, and cemeteries by the Red Guards. The government began to relax its policies towards Muslims in 1978. Today, Islam is experiencing a modest revival and there are now many mosques in China. There has been an upsurge in Islamic expression and many nation-wide Islamic associations have been organized to co-ordinate inter-ethnic activities among Muslims.