The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions by Randall L. Nadeau & Louis Komjathy

Author:Randall L. Nadeau & Louis Komjathy [Nadeau, Randall L. & Komjathy, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Religion, Fiction, Eastern
ISBN: 9781405190312
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Published: 2012-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Islam and the State

The various Muslim rebellions are often spoken of as though they were a single unified campaign against the central government, but they were anything but that. In fact, they reflected the very “problem” of Muslim diversity in China in the challenges they posed to Qing authority on a local level. After the Uyghur uprisings in the wake of the annexation of Xinjiang, Hui Muslims rebelled in Gansu province in the 1780s. But, rather than a unified movement against the Qing government, this rebellion was actually sparked by a conflict within the local Hui community. For generations, Hui Muslims from western China had been traveling westward into the central Islamic lands for trade, to perform the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, and also in search of Islamic teachings that they could not find in their native land. In the early part of the eighteenth century, a number of religious teachers from Gansu made their way to Arabia, traveling through most of the Muslim world. In their travels they were exposed to, among other things, teachings of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism.

In particular, several prominent Hui religious leaders were initiated into the Naqshbandi Sufi order, which was dominant throughout Central and South Asia at the time. Highlighting the diversity, and disunity, found throughout the Muslim world, the Naqshbandi order, one of numerous Sufi brotherhoods that had proliferated in Islamic countries, had itself divided into two rival sub-orders: the Khafiyya and the Jahriyya. These two groups were divided by a difference in the way they performed one of the central practices of Sufism: dhikr, or the ritual remembrance and invocation of the Quranic names of God. In many Sufi orders, the practice of dhikr takes the form of rhythmic chanting, accompanied by breathing techniques that often lead to ecstatic experiences of union with the divine, which are often compared to the feeling of drunkenness. Other Sufi orders have advocated a more “sober” practice; in fact, their practice of meditation and dhikr emphasizes the interiorization of religious experience, and so their dhikr is performed in silence, the repetition of the divine names being done internally by the devotee. Traditionally, the Naqshbandi have been considered one of the more sober Sufi orders. As the order expanded and developed, however, a group within the brotherhood that preferred the vocalized dhikr emerged and came to be known as the Jahriyya. To distinguish them from the others, the practitioners of the original silent dhikr were then called the Khafiyya.

These Naqshbandi sub-orders, with their divergent practices, were introduced into China by different Hui teachers. Ma Laichi (1673–1753) brought the Khafiyya teachings and practices to China. In Gansu, and the neighboring Qinghai and Shaanxi provinces, he attracted followers among the local Hui who found the Khafiyya practices consonant with the prevailing Sunni traditions that had already been in China for nearly a millennium. Thus, the Khafiyya menhuan (“brotherhood”) was established. The Jahriyya menhuan, on the other hand, was founded in China by a charismatic teacher by the

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