Muslims in Northwest China: A Response to Professer Adshead

PAGE 10 as large and relatively smaller cotton textile mill owners displayed vastly different viewpoints on policies basic to the industry. {19) Juan Yin-huai, "Wu-hsi shih-hsi tiao-ch'a jih-chi" (A field study of wu-hsi) (Paper presented to the Graduate School of Land Economics of Central Political Academy, Nanking, N.D.), in Hsiao Cheng, ed., ~in-kuo ~rh-shih hien tai Chung_:kuo ta-lu t'u-ti wen-t'i (Data on Chinese land problems in the 1930s) (Taipei, 1977), XCVIII, 51434-51435. Juan indicates that Wu-hsi gentry were split into many factions; they hardly constituted a cohesive social grouping for any purpose. (20) For a rundown on the situation in northern Kiangsu, see Geisert, "Power and Society," pp. 237--241; and see Elizabeth Perry, Rebels ~9. Revolutionaries in North Chin~ 1~5-19~ (Stanford, 1980) {21) See Bachrach and Baratz, pp. 949-952. {22) See Hsiao Cheng. This remarkable 200 volume collection includes many hundreds of pages of information on Land Administration Offices and virtually every other important question concerning land tenure and taxation. {23) One example of such pork barrel politics is found in Ch'en Kuo-fu's memoirs. Ch'en recounts that while he ·was Kiangsu's governor, he approved the request of a landlord (who had earlier been a minor warlord) for government aid in dredging a river that adjoined his property. Ch'en Kuo-fu, Su-chenq hui-;_ (Reflections on Kiangsu administration) (Taipei, 1951), pp. 118-119. Muslims in Northwest £h!.~ Jonathan N. Lipman. ~ B~nse to E_rofe~ Ad§.head Mount Holyoke College I was delighted to read Prof. Adshead's paper, "The Naqshbandiyya in Late Imperial and Early Republican China," in the October, 1980, Newsletter. I found his -argument fascinating, but his conclusions suffer from unfamiliarity with the context of the Naqshbandiyya's activities -- the northwestern periphery of China. In brief, Prof. Adshead concludes that the Naqshbandiyya remained a powerful force in northwest China well into the 20th century, that Republican era Muslim warlords comprised a modernist, secularist group and that the Muslim clergy, alienated by these modernist currents, combined with the Communists to oppose the warlord clique. I feel these conclusions must be amplified and modified in order to clarify some basic issues in the study of Muslims in China. Prof. Adshead has, at least in part, been be~ayed by his sources. He relies primarily on the Qing Shil£ and on Christian missionary reports. Neither approaches the Chinese Muslims· (Hui) with anything like objectivity. The s hilu is dominated by concern for national poli'C·y and social order, the most basic problems of Imperial officials. Officials did not need to know very much about Islam and Muslims, or so they thought, in order to control them. The §_hilu therefore contains numerous misperceptions, rendered particularly common in this case by unfamiliar terrain and ethnic heterogeneity . Whether created by self-serving officials or by honest officials who did not know what they were seeing in Gansu, these distortions have served to throw Prof. Adshead off the mark. The Christian missionaries, unlike the Chinese officials, believed themselves to have an intimate acquaintance with Islam, a "universal religion " like their own in sharp contrast to that of the Han Chinese. The mis- PAGE 11 sionaries vocabulary, their perception of religious contradiction, their attitude toward these far-flung "Sons of the Prophet" stemmed directly from their European experience -- that of confrontation with the Muslim Orient. For them, all Muslims were a challenge, a uniquely hostile enemy whose monotheism competed with their own. Their observations of Muslims in China often contained unwarranted, even silly leaps of uncritical faith. For example , any Muslim violence against the Han Chinese was immediately construed as "holy war" (jihad), and veneration of Sufi saints was castigated as polytheistic "tomb worship." Like many European observers of Islam, the missionaries knew little of their subject except classical, stereotyped dogma. They took pleasure in branding the Hui as "bad Muslims." Clearly, neither of these sources is adequate to understand Islam in northwest China. The Naqshbandis lived primarily in Gansu, which then included Qinghai and Ningxia, and in Xinjiang, so they must be understood in that particular...