The Handy Islam Answer Book. John Renard
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The Turkic connection has naturally made these republics a subject of intense interest to the Republic of Turkey, which regards them as natural economic and cultural allies.
Did Turkic peoples remain significant in the Turkic ancestral homelands of Central Asia?
Turkic peoples have remained a major population in Central Asia over the centuries and are a significant presence in at least four of the five “-stans” of the region. The former Soviet-controlled regions are now the independent states of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Taken as a whole, the predominantly Muslim region is sometimes referred to as “Western Turkistan,” to distinguish it from the largely Muslim Chinese western provinces often called “Eastern Turkistan.” As a result, Muslim areas of China fall within the Turkic Sphere.
Geographically the republics collectively represent a vast expanse; Kazakhstan, the largest, covers an area one-third as large as the “lower forty-eight” states; Uzbekistan is nearly the size of Spain; and Turkmenistan is as large as Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma combined. Together their total Muslim population numbers nearly fifty million, with another ten million or so still living under the Russian Federation—the people of Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus, for example. Soviet domination was very hard on the Muslims of these republics, imposing massive control and closing down hundreds of mosques and schools. During the Brezhnev years, Soviet agricultural policy nearly destroyed the Aral Sea, shrinking it from the world’s fourth largest freshwater lake to less than half its original size. Central Asia’s Muslims especially have had good reason to resent their former overlords and were a major force in compassing the end of the Soviet empire. From the time Stalin first cracked down on them to the end of Soviet rule, these Muslims managed to keep Islam alive through clandestine and risky illegal activities. Russia’s concerted efforts to wipe out Soviet Islam may even have given some renewed energy to pass on the heritage to their children.
How did the Muslim Turkic minority in China originate?
According to ancient tradition, Islam came to China in the seventh century with Arab silk merchants. In the mid-eighth century an Abbasid caliph dispatched a regiment of Turkic soldiers to help the Chinese emperor put down the revolt of a mutinous officer. Remaining after the war, those soldiers formed the nucleus of inland Muslim communities. Over the next four centuries, the Muslim population grew very slowly in coastal and central regions. But in 1215 Genghis Khan’s Mongols captured Beijing and eventually overthrew the Sung dynasty. Under the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty the Muslims enjoyed privileged status. Meanwhile, various segments of the population in the northwestern province of Xinjiang converted to Islam. After the Yuan dynasty fell to the Mingd (1368–1644), Muslim fortunes took a turn for the worse, and under the Manchu dynasty (1644–1911) Muslims endured several centuries of persecution. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Muslims suffered terribly again but have regained many important rights in the twenty-first century.
What are the basic facts about Islam in China? Are there any distinctively Chinese features of Islam there?
Approximately forty million citizens, perhaps more, of the People’s Republic of China consider themselves Muslims. Fully ten different “nationalities” make up the total Muslim population, but about half the total belong to the Hui people. The Hui resemble the majority Han population in physical appearance and they speak Chinese (unlike the other Muslim minorities, several of whom speak Turkic languages). But the Hui think of themselves as a distinct people in that they disavow ancestor veneration, gambling, drinking, and eating pork. The term “Hui” is related to Chinese Muslims’ traditional identification of themselves as ethnic “Uighurs.” They consider themselves ethnically related to other Muslims who live to the west in Central Asia—all part of a great region known as Turkistan. Hui people speak a dialect of Turkic origin, and the Chinese province of Xinjiang is also known as “Eastern Turkistan.” Many Chinese mosques are built in distinctively Chinese architectural styles. Their minarets are square rather than cylindrical and have the gracefully curved roofing associated with the pagoda.
THE SUB-SAHARAN AFRICAN SPHERE
What are the main characteristics of the Sub-Saharan (or Black) African Sphere?
Well over a dozen important nation-states, from the far west of Africa to the shores of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, comprise the Sub-Saharan Black African sphere. Perhaps the most diverse of all the spheres, ethnically and linguistically as well as religiously, the sphere’s west-east expanse is also impressive. In the northwest of the continent is the small but richly Islamic nation of Senegal, now most widely known for the cultural centrality of the Muridiyya Sufi order, a branch of the Qadiriyya unique to Senegal; and the Tijaniyya, a major African order. Further south, Mali is most famous for its major center of traditional Arabic scholarship in Timbuktu. Along with the Songhay and Kanem-Bornu empires, Mali was one of several “religious” polities begun from the eleventh century on.
Later developments included the Islamization of tribal communities identified by their dominant languages: the Fulani in Kano (Nigeria), the Hausa (from the fourteenth century), the Yoruba (from the sixteenth century), and the Bambara in upper Nigeria (from the seventeenth century). At the eastern limits of the sphere, where the African sphere overlaps significantly with the Arabicate, a major nation is Sudan, one of three geographically largest African states. Arabs conquered the Nubian and Funj in the fourteenth century, and Sufi missionaries converted much of the populace, making this a rare example of simultaneous Arabization and Islamization. Arabic remains the dominant main language here. In coastal states such as Somalia, Zanzibar, and Eritrea, by contrast, large numbers of people speak Swahili, a blend of Arabic and Persian on a foundation of Bantu origin. Though the vast majority of Muslims in the sphere are Sunni, more recent immigrants from the Indian subcontinent imported Shi’ism (especially Ismaili) to East Africa. Muslims make up a small minority of a score of other nations in central and south Africa, typically 4 percent or less of total populations.
How did Islam arrive and take root in Africa?
Muslims first arrived across North Africa during the early seventh century in connection with the earliest conquests of the Mediterranean coast of Africa. Beginning in about 638, the process of Islamization proceeded slowly, and the region’s population, from Egypt westward to Morocco, was predominantly Muslim by around 1000. During the next seven centuries or so, from 1050 to 1750, Islam spread down the west coast of Africa, brought largely by Maghribi (“Where the sun sets,” i.e., North Africa) merchants (who were mostly Berbers) and Sufis. Since these travelers were not chiefly interested in proselytizing as such, the brand of Islam they represented took root in ways that accommodated generously to the indigenous practices and beliefs of the so-called African Tribal/Traditional Religions (ATR). Both Muslim and Christian missionaries have often retroactively claimed credit for this form of Islamization and Christianization, but where either of those two faiths have gained ground, a major factor seems to have been ATR’s affinity with the large cosmological frameworks of the two Abrahamic faiths. Those same itinerant Muslims brought Islam across the Sahara and down the east coast of Africa. At the same time, Muslim traders and exiled Muslims from southeast Asia and India populated Indian Ocean coasts from south Africa northward through Swahili-speaking areas like Kenya and Tanzania. In many regions, kings and other tribal leaders played significant roles in encouraging their people to accept Islam (or Christianity).
How has African Islam taken shape in more recent times?
Between 1750 and 1900, several militant and intolerant Muslim religious leaders established theocratic or jihadi regimes and managed to gain allegiance by replacing tribal bonds with allegiance to states regulated by Islamic law. Sudan and Nigeria saw noteworthy examples of such developments. Some influential teachers and holy men, supported by merchants and herdsmen, nurtured visions of reestablishing Islamic empires of legend that they had read about in Arabic historical sources. But the age of jihadists claiming the status of an exalted ruler such as a re-vitalized caliph, or as the expected mahdi (guided one with apocalyptic overtones), gave way under various forms of colonialist rule in the early twentieth century. Colonial powers introduced economic, technological, and religious influences that ironically contributed to the dissemination