"This FT article on “How China is tearing down Islam” (ig.ft.com/china-mosques/) is one of the most dishonest pieces of “journalism” I’ve seen on China this year.
First of all, the timing of the article is absolutely fascinating. Just when the West is facilitating yet another large-scale massacre of Muslims civilians they want your attention drawn to China rearranging the architectural features of some mosques to make them look more Chinese… which they present as some sort of evil genocidal project.
Let’s go into the accusations here. They denounce “a widespread policy of stripping buildings of Arabic features, and in some cases replacing them with traditional Chinese designs” and present this as “Beijing’s suppression of Islamic culture” (and ultimately, as the title of the article says, a supposed Chinese project to “tear down Islam”).
Do pay attention to the false synonym they’re trying to create between “Arabic features” and “Islamic culture” or “Islam” wholesale. This is why the article is so profoundly dishonest: it seeks to mislead readers by equating Islam with Arabic culture and architecture, when both are just completely different things.
It is true and undeniable that China has renovated many mosques in the past few years to remove typically Arabic architectural features and make the mosques look more traditionally Chinese. But in no universe can one equate this with “tearing down Islam”.
As a matter of fact, Islam in China has roots dating back to the seventh century - less than twenty years after the death of Muhammad - making it one of the countries on earth with the oldest Islamic tradition. In fact Islam reached China at about the same time as it did North Africa. So China is as familiar with Islam as just about most Muslim countries: in fact Islam reached China some 600 years before it did Indonesia, which is today the largest Muslim country on earth. And some of China’s most celebrated historical figures - such as the famous explorer and diplomat Zheng He - were Muslims.
Arabic features on mosques in China is however an extremely recent phenomenon, which the article itself actually acknowledges: “In the 1980s, during Deng Xiaoping’s liberal era, a new mosque-building boom began, marked by a fashion for domed prayer halls and tall, slender minarets”. Before this, mosques in China looked very… Chinese, unsurprisingly! For proof please check this website of “Historical Photographs of China” made in partnership between the University of Bristol and the British Academy, these are the pictures tagged “mosques”: hpcbristol.net/tag/mosques You can’t find a single Arabic-style mosque here, from those photos taken in the 19th and early 20th century, all the mosques look positively Chinese.
So far from “tearing down Islam”, what this renovation initiative is actually doing is restoring China’s Islam, embracing the fact that Islam is a religion that’s been part of China for some 1,300 odd years and reflecting this in the architecture. What China is doing is ensuring that it isn’t “Islam in China” but “Islam of China”, in other words they’re trying to preserve a Muslim identity that is not deterritorialized nor deculturalized but very much local. It’s like Chinese Buddhism: by embracing Buddhism and making it part of Chinese culture, China didn’t “tear down Buddhism”.
Doing this is “tearing down Islam” only if you see Islam as a purely foreign political project, which it very much isn’t. Seeing it like that actually reflects a very biased and malign understanding of Islam, which sadly doesn’t surprise me coming from Western media… If you present Islam as an Arabic project, you present it as foreign, as some sort of invading force, instead of a religion which is universal and which all people can make their own, which is exactly what China is doing here. This article therefore achieves the feat of both slandering China and Islam, whilst trying to gaslight readers into believing it is China that’s “tearing down Islam”. The truth is that they misrepresent what Islam is and therefore metaphorically tear it down much more than what China does.
This is also, by the way, why no Muslim country ever expresses any issue with what China is doing with regards to Islam - on the contrary, they overwhelmingly support it. And why you only ever see criticism from Western countries who don’t understand the first thing about the religion, or about China.
We must never stop explaining.
It is frustrating that anti-communist, anti-China positions rely on comfortable ignorance and condescending “defense” of a superficial understanding of non-white cultures, it is very hard to fight against this sort of thing, it is so easy for someone to be manipulated, but education is vital, once a person truly understands a topic, they are insulated against all the anti-communist propaganda the capitalists could ever throw at them.
And it’s not just ignorance of Chinese history that they rely on. In this particular case the propaganda also wouldn’t work without islamophobia, since as the post says, the article is implicitly based on the assumption that Islam is something inherently foreign outside of the Arab world and not something that could be integrated into your own culture, which is how it is viewed in the West. The West is so islamophobic that it cannot comprehend how a specifically Chinese Islam can exist, so whenever it sees China (re-)integrating its Muslim communities into Chinese culture it immediately assumes that this must be coercive and malicious. Once again they are projecting. It’s a double dose of bigotry, simultaneously sinophobic and islamophobic.
Exactly, it makes me wonder if this shift away from Tibet to Xinjiang was calculated because they realised that the average westerner knows even less about Muslims than they do about China. (And maybe Tibetans looked too “Chinese” for them as well)