The Comrades and Mullahs by Ananth Krishnan and Stanly Johny

Author:Ananth Krishnan and Stanly Johny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Good Terrorists, Bad Terrorists

AS THE SUN SETS ON A FRIDAY EVENING, IT IS ALMOST prayer time. The faithful, silently and patiently, gather outside the Xiguan mosque, located at the heart of Yinchuan’s old district in Ningxia, a province in China’s far west. Among them is Hai Ming Tang, who hasn’t missed a prayer at Xiguan in three decades. The last time, he says for the record, was during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when Mao Zedong’s Red Guards were running amok, decrying the ‘four olds’: customs, culture, habits and ideas. The mosque then had to close its doors to save itself from the rampaging mobs.

Hai Ming is one of China’s 10 million Hui Muslims, the country’s second biggest minority Muslim group. Huis have lived in China for more than ten centuries: they are the descendants of the first Arab traders the Silk Road brought to China. Over a millennium, they assimilated into Chinese culture, marrying with the local Han, China’s majority ethnic group, and setting up their own communities.

Hai Ming looks ‘Chinese’; he even dresses in the dull blue workman’s uniform that is still a common sight in small-town China, a legacy from the days of Mao. The only clues to his faith are his square grey hat and a small white beard that protrudes from his wrinkled chin. As the light dims, the call to prayer finally sounds, diffusing through the stillness of the hot desert evening. Hai Ming briskly jogs up the steps of the grand mosque and disappears into the darkness of the prayer hall.

It is also prayer time some 2500 km to the west, on another hot Friday evening. Mahsum, in his early thirties, relaxes with his friends at the sprawling square that is the centre of life in Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road city in China’s western frontier Xinjiang region. Young women in brightly coloured headscarves stroll around the square, children in tow. Old men sit side by side on a rickety wooden bench, silently watching the proceedings, their weathered faces shaded by the intricately designed hats that are unique to the Uighurs, the ethnic Turkic-speaking people for whom Xinjiang is home. The grand 550-year-old Id Kah mosque, freshly painted in a jarring yellow, glistens in the fading evening light, casting a shadow over the square.

Mahsum waits for the call to prayer, but in Kashgar, it will not come. A ban on the use of loudspeakers means his wristwatch is his only guide. The only sound comes from a nearby police van: a recorded message urging all ethnic groups ‘to maintain harmony, support the Communist Party and serve the motherland’. A battalion of armed police, with guns at the ready, watch over the square. Mahsum heads towards the Id Kah’s bronze gates in silence.1

Islam in China

Prayer time at the two mosques presents two snapshots of Islam’s complicated, and continuing, encounter with China. There are more than 22 million Muslims in China, including the Hui, Uighur and Kazakh minorities, all of whom are among the 55 minority ethnic groups recognized officially by the Chinese government.

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