The Muslims of China

ProfileThe Muslims of China

The annals of the Tang dynasty record an embassy from the Arabs to the Chinese court in 651, in the time of the caliph Uthman. Chinese Muslims have long held that the Companion Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas brought Islam to China. Historians cannot confirm the story, but the old Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou is tied to his name.

Over the following centuries Muslims reached China by two roads. By sea, Arab and Persian merchants settled in Guangzhou and later in Quanzhou, where they lived in their own quarters with their own mosques and judges. By land, traders came along the Silk Road to Chang'an, today's Xi'an. Some of the soldiers the Abbasids sent to help the Tang emperor against a great rebellion in the 750s are said to have stayed and married there.

Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, from 1271, many Muslims from Central Asia and Iran came to serve as officials, engineers and astronomers. One of them, Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din, governed Yunnan and built mosques and schools there. Under the Ming, from 1368, the descendants of these settlers married into Chinese families, spoke Chinese and took Chinese names while keeping their faith. They became the Hui, and the admiral Zheng He was one of them. From the seventeenth century, scholars such as Wang Daiyu and Liu Zhi explained Islam in Chinese, in the language of Chinese thought.

In the north-west, the Turkic peoples of what is now Xinjiang, among them the Uyghurs, became Muslim over the same centuries. Today China has around twenty-five million Muslims, from ten recognised peoples. In recent years many of them, above all the Uyghurs, have faced severe limits on the practice of their faith.

Meet them inWhere they appear on the road

Further reading

• library.howtomuslim.orgLost Islamic History, chapter 9By Firas Alkhateeb. Our notes on each chapter, with a timeline and a map, are in the Rawdah library.

SourcesSources for this profile