A video showing Hui Muslims of China clashing with Chinese security forces in riot gear who had come to assist the demolition of the domes and minarets of the 13th century Najiaying mosque in Tonghai county in the southwestern province of Yunnan brought back memories of our visits to some of the Muslim dominated areas in the country. The fragrance of spicy food, kebabs freshly grilled on small pushcarts, petty vendors selling dry fruits and chikkis (peanut brittle candy), love for Bollywood movies and film music, young street vendors and middle aged shopkeepers alike singing “noorie, noorie” from the famous Farooq Shaikh-Poonam Dhillon movie Noorie when my then-young wife and her friend passed by, the list is long. Maybe, I should try a piece on that sometime in the future.

China is home to 56 nationalities, i.e., ethnicities, including the overwhelmingly majority Han race which constitute about 92 percent of the population. Between 1.8 and 2 percentage of the population is Muslim. Hailing from different ethnic groups like Uyghurs and Huis, they live across China, but are concentrated in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Qinghai Province, Gansu Province, Yunnan Province, Mongolia Autonomous Region etc. The Chinese allege that efforts have been made by outside forces to introduce fundamentalist forms of Islam, or even radicalise ordinary Chinese Muslims, in recent decades. In the 1990’s and early 2000’s, one hardly saw a man with the a kufi or taqiyah skull cap or a woman wearing a hijab headscarf in public places in China, except, that too rarely, in some of the Muslim dominated areas. This changed slowly and one would come across hijab wearing ladies in shopping malls etc. even in big cosmopolitan cities by late 2000’s or early 2010’s when I visited China for a last time.

As fundamentalism evolved into radicalism, particularly in the restive western autonomous region of Xinjiang, Chinese authorities opted use of force mostly to supress the trend. In its efforts to ‘sinicise’ fundamentalist Muslims, they were banned from wearing symbols of religious identity, hijabs, caps, or even beards in some cases! Teaching Islamic scriptures etc. were banned. Over a million Muslims were quarantined and subjected to deradicalisation which the authorities called ‘re- education” and ‘vocational training’. Mosques with typical Islamic facades were remodelled to look like traditional Chinese pagodas, or just any other building in the local neighbourhoods. Najiaying mosque where the incident mentioned above took place was one of the last remaining mosques in the region that still boasted its typical Islamic facade of domes and minarets.

 

Security forces in front of Najiaying mosque. Image credit: The China Project

While Article 36 of the Chinese constitution allows freedom of religious belief, it is no official secret that the Communist Party of China (CPC) is “officially atheist” and more than half of the population is still atheist or agnostic. Mao Zedong believed religion was opium, and he is unfortunately being proven right day after day across the globe. In a vast country where people believed in several religions, dogmas, sects, cults, rituals, superstitions etc. for thousands of years, it is natural that a good percentage of the population, CPC cadres included, continue to be religious, and even more so, deeply superstitious. In fact, CPC had relaxed restrictions on practice of religion over the years. One of the interesting reasons for it, some senior cadres shared with me, is a lesson they purported to have learnt from India! “In India, people don’t come out onto the streets asking for jobs, houses, better standards of living etc. The Indians don’t blame their government, but their own karma, for their miseries,” they would say sombrely.

While the official ban on religious practice by CPC cadres continued, even some senior leaders are reported to be practising religion secretly. That includes Jiang Zemin, former CPC General Secretary and the country’s president. Several temples and monasteries destroyed by overzealous cadres during the Cultural Revolution were restored with government funding. The general public, particularly those engaged in businesses, could be seen donating money to temples where they openly engage in a variety of rituals. In fact, this author has witnessed large, ostentatious rituals of the past being revived by the local village, township or city governments, claiming that it was for promoting tourism. This author has even witnessed elaborate rituals paying obeisance to Mazu, the Goddess of the Sea and Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy and other local deities before the beginning of the fishing season. When queried subtly, the local Party leaders, who normally head the local governments, stuck to the stated position that the Party supports such activities for developing local tourism.

Even as the CPC relaxed restrictions on religious practices by the common people, control on religions and sects or cults like Falun Gong where the practitioner’s loyalty rests with an alien body, or a patriarch sitting in a foreign country, continues to be a strict taboo. That’s why the Chinese Protestants are subjected to relatively less strict monitoring, whereas the grip on Catholics who are loyal to the Pope enthroned in Rome and exercises control over appointments of senior positions in the ministry remains largely in place. That’s also why several churches associated with conservative Catholicism or the umpteen evangelical denominations are still operating underground while Protestantism is a growing creed in China, and is well on its way to overtake the Catholics in terms of numbers. To a question as to their opinion of the Dalai Lama I asked many ordinary Chinese whom I was friendly with, the typical answer everywhere was: as a political leader, we hate him; but as a religious leader, we love and respect him”. Isn’t religion something more intoxicating than opium, one wonders?

(Author is Director, AICIS. Views expressed in the article are personal to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AICIS.)