China has more than twenty million Muslims, and a Muslim presence that goes back to the century after the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. It is one of the oldest and least known Muslim communities, older than most of the Muslim populations of Europe and the Americas.
Here are five facts about how Islam arrived in China, who China’s Muslims are, and how they have lived as a minority under imperial and modern rule. The picture that results includes both long periods of acceptance and episodes of violence, and the entries say which is which.
Chinese records mention an Arab embassy to the Tang court in 651, sent by the third caliph, Uthman. The Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou is traditionally credited to a Companion, Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, though the date and the founder are disputed by historians.[1] The tradition itself is old, and it reflects how early the Chinese Muslim community wished to connect its beginnings to the first generation of Islam.
Arab and Persian traders came by sea to Guangzhou and Quanzhou and by land along the Silk Road, and many settled and married locally. Under the Tang and Song dynasties foreign merchants lived in designated quarters under headmen of their own, and Quanzhou’s Qingjing Mosque was built in 1009 and 1010. According to Chinese chronicles, Arab troops also served the Tang emperor against the rebel An Lushan in the 750s, and some of them stayed.
A saying often repeated in this connection, “seek knowledge even as far as China”, is attributed to the Prophet. Hadith scholars judge the report weak or fabricated, so it is not evidence either way, and the history stands on the Chinese records alone.
The Hui, about ten million people, are Chinese in language and culture and Muslim in religion. They live in every province, most densely in Ningxia and Gansu. They descend from Arab and Persian traders and soldiers and from Chinese converts. The name Huí came to be applied to Chinese Muslims in general.[2]
Alongside them are Turkic groups, among them the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, who live mainly in the northwest. The state recognises ten Muslim peoples in all. Hui scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries, among them Wang Daiyu and Liu Zhi, wrote on Islamic theology in classical Chinese and drew on Confucian vocabulary to explain it, in a body of writing known as the Han Kitab.[3] Women have had a particular place among the Hui, since some communities in central China have run women’s mosques with female leaders of prayer for centuries.
Conditions for Muslims today differ greatly by region and group. In 2022 the United Nations human rights office reported credible indications of arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim groups in Xinjiang, which it said might amount to crimes against humanity. The Chinese government rejects that finding.[4]
The Great Mosque of Xi’an, founded according to tradition in 742, stands in the form of a Chinese temple, with courtyards, pavilions and a pagoda-style minaret. Arabic calligraphy hangs in Chinese-style frames. The buildings that survive date mostly from the Ming and Qing dynasties, and one Chinese feature gives way to an Islamic requirement: the complex is laid out along an east-west axis, so that the prayer hall lies at the western end, toward Mecca, where a Chinese temple would face south.
This fits the Islamic principle that the form of a mosque is not fixed. The Prophet is reported to have said that the whole earth had been made a place of prayer for him, and the first mosque at Medina was a courtyard with palm trunks for pillars.[5] The scholar Ismail al Faruqi argued that the Muslim artist’s task was to avoid portraying creation as divine and to use pattern and calligraphy to point beyond it, and that principle, rather than a particular style, is what makes a building Islamic.[6] Chinese mosques follow it in a Chinese idiom.
Some observers read the Chinese style as assimilation. The mosques have the features that matter for worship, namely the direction of prayer, a place for ablution and a space for the congregation, and the architecture around them follows local taste, as it does in Java or West Africa.
Zheng He (1371–1433), the Ming admiral who led seven great voyages to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and East Africa, was born Ma He into a Muslim family in Yunnan. His fleets reached Arabia and East Africa, and some of his envoys are recorded as having made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
His father and grandfather are said to have borne the title Hajji, meaning that both had made the pilgrimage, and Ma Huan, the Muslim interpreter who sailed with the fleet, wrote an account of the lands visited that includes a description of Mecca.[7]
His story is often cited as evidence that Muslims held high office in imperial China. The sources also show a man who served the Yongle emperor and honoured Buddhist and Daoist shrines, and some report that he took a Buddhist name. His personal piety is therefore a matter of debate, but his Muslim family and the Muslims in his service are not.
Du Wenxiu (1823–1872), a Hui of Yunnan, led a rebellion against Qing rule that began in 1856 and founded a state at Dali with himself as Sultan Sulayman. It lasted until the Qing crushed it in 1872. The rebellion followed massacres of Muslims and grew out of local conflict between Hui and Han.[8]
The Burmese called the rebels Panthay. Du Wenxiu is remembered in China, in different ways, as a rebel leader and as a defender of his people.
The strongest objection to the title of this entry is that the conflict was local and economic, over mines and officials, and that the “Islamic” label overstates it. Historians do stress the local causes. The rebels also took Islamic titles, sent a mission to Britain in 1872 asking for recognition, and governed Muslim and non-Muslim subjects at Dali, so the state had a religious identity as well as a political one. A larger Hui revolt in the northwest followed in the 1860s.
The bottom line
The evidence supports the opening claim. Muslims reached China within the first Islamic century, settled, intermarried and became a Chinese people, the Hui, who built mosques in local style, wrote theology in classical Chinese and produced an admiral and a sultan.
It also shows a history that was not a smooth one. Uprisings in the 19th century followed massacres, and Muslims in China have faced severe restrictions in more than one era, most recently in Xinjiang according to the United Nations. A community that kept its prayer, its calendar and its sense of belonging to the wider Muslim world through all of that has little to prove about its roots.
Notes
- Michael Dillon, China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlement and Sects (Richmond: Curzon, 1999), on the early Muslim presence and the Guangzhou tradition.
- Jonathan N. Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).
- Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), on Wang Daiyu and Liu Zhi.
- United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China, 31 August 2022.
- Sahih al-Bukhari, Book of Tayammum, on the earth being made a place of prayer, and Book of Prayer, on the building of the Prophet’s mosque at Medina. Bukhari 335 verified on sunnah.com (Jabir; the earth made a place of prayer); Ibn Hajar, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition, Shamela text), vol. 1, p. 435. Bukhari 428 verified on sunnah.com (Anas; the site of the Medina mosque and its palm trunks), vol. 1, pp. 524–525; the palm-trunk pillars are in Bukhari 446, vol. 1, p. 540.
- Ismail R. al Faruqi, Divine Transcendence and Its Expression (Kuala Lumpur: Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, 1983), III.C, on stylisation and the arabesque in Islamic art.
- Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405 to 1433 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007).
- David G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856 to 1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).