Origins of a European fantasy of a Muslim takeover of China

The narrative of Islamization can be traced back to the Russian Sinologist and scholar of Buddhism Vasily Pavlovich Vasilyev (1818–1900) who was the first among European Orientalists to raise the question of ‘whether China is ever going to be a Muslim state’.Footnote ¹⁶ Vasilyev spent almost a decade at the Peking Orthodox Mission (1840–1850), working closely with Archimandrite Palladius (Pyotr Ivanovich Kafarov, 1817–1878), who himself was an expert in Chinese linguistics and religion, including Chinese Islam.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1867, responding to news of the Muslim uprisings against the Qing, Vasilyev gave an address at St. Petersburg University wherein he noted:

Vasilyev’s lecture, which was soon republished in pamphlet form and came to exert tremendous influence on Orientalist scholarship, drew attention to Chinese Muslims who now appeared to be the ‘protagonists of the Chinese future’.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Vasilyev, their swift ongoing takeover of large swathes of territory could only be explained by their centuries-long cultural infiltration of the Chinese state and society. Whether through exogamy, the philosophical reconciliation of Islam with Confucianism, or entry into the ranks of the literati, Chinese Muslims ensured that ‘Muhammadanism … established its advance all over China’.Footnote ²⁰ The process of China’s Islamization was thus envisioned as something that had been unfolding for a long time.

While Vasilyev considered the acculturation of these Muslims as a critical factor accounting for their (coming) success, he also saw other dynamics, concerning the inherent powers of different world religions, coming into play. To him, China’s spiritual traditions—Buddhism and Confucianism—were inferior and stagnant compared to those of monotheistic West Asia: an encounter would thus inevitably lead to a redux of Islam’s triumph over Buddhism in India.Footnote ²¹ There was little fidelity moreover, per Vasilyev, to the cosmologies of China among its own people. For the non-Muslims there, ‘it is much easier to change their religion than their mode of dress’, and inducements, such as obligatory alms-giving, might attract the lower-classes to Islam in the future.Footnote ²² He surmised that the would-be Muslim conquerors of China, unlike the assimilated Mongols and Manchus of the past, will ‘force China to change, to discard its age-old tradition, in one word, to alter the spirit of the country’, giving rise to a fanatic Muslim imperium opposed, much like its co-religionists elsewhere in Asia, to European civilization and Christianity.Footnote ²³

Another near-contemporaneous eminent Orientalist who touched upon China’s possible Islamization was Claude-Philibert Dabry de Thiersant (1826–1898), a Sinologist and French diplomat best known for his important two-volume study Le Mahometisme en Chine et dans le Turkestan Oriental (1878).Footnote ²⁴ Situating himself in direct dialogue with Vasilyev, Dabry de Thiersant weighed the likelihood of China’s Islamization and the consequences of such an event for the imperial interests of the European powers.Footnote ²⁵ Though he viewed the fate of the Muslim uprisings as foreclosed and consigned to defeat by the time he was writing, Dabry de Thiersant did not dismiss a partial or even wholesale Muslim takeover of China in the future. He argued that a divided China, a possible scenario in his estimation, might lead to the formation of multiple independent Muslim statelets.Footnote ²⁶ Alternatively, a reformed Chinese empire might also come to willingly embrace Islam as its interactions with European civilization would:

While Dabry de Thiersant shared in Vasilyev’s appraisal of China’s religious tradition’s inability to compete with Islam, he did not consider this development to be an apocalyptic scenario detrimental to the progressive spread of European civilization and Christianity. He asserted that the ‘essentially peaceful character of the Chinese people’, hand in hand with the ever-spreading values of the Enlightenment, would rein in the fanaticism of Islam and guarantee that an Islamized China would be of a peaceful and affable disposition.Footnote ²⁸ He subsequently reassured his readers that ‘as morals become more purified and the truth, along with science, penetrates the masses’, Christianity might ultimately absorb this domesticated and Confucianized Islam.Footnote ²⁹ For Dabry de Thiersant, who subscribed to a teleological worldview infused with a belief in European and monotheistic supremacy, Islam’s potential victory in China could only be but a temporary and largely unthreatening phase. This interpretation was only viable within a framework of a hierarchically arranged set of world religions, with Christianity at the apex, ‘consuming’ one another in consecutive and descending order.

Vasilyev and Dabry de Thiersant’s assessments were by no means unique for their time, although they are the most elaborate and detailed. Reports from European travellers to the Qing frontiers during the late 1860s and early 1870s convey similar impressions of an ascendant Islam expanding across China. The separate Anglo-Indian expeditions to the court of Yaqub Beg, one led by Thomas Douglas Forsyth (1827–1886) and the other by Robert Barkley Shaw (1839–1879), claimed that the ‘Toonganee’ (Dungan or Chinese-speaking Muslims), a war-like,Footnote ³⁰ physically strong, religiously observant, and numerous people (by their count, thirty million in number), had conquered half the country of the ‘Khara-Khatai’ (Chinese).Footnote ³¹ Likewise, the Anglo-Indian expeditions that journeyed through the lands of the short-lived, Dali-centred sultanate in Yunnan espoused the view that the Chinese Muslims there were participating in an enterprise that was destined to result in either the establishment of a ‘great Mahommedan empire’ across China or, at the very least, an independent and well-governed polity in the southwest.Footnote ³² The perception of Muslim expansion clearly resonated within European circles.

Some Chinese Muslims certainly indulged and encouraged these early views. In 1872, the beleaguered Yunnanese sultan, Sulaymān Du Wenxiu (1823–1872), sent his adopted son, Crown Prince Hassan, to London with a letter addressed to Queen Victoria in the hope of procuring a British guarantee of independence as well as military assistance against the Qing. In his interactions with Anglo-Indian officials in Rangoon, Hassan emphasized that the sultanate was not only intent on pursuing a campaign into the interior of China, but indicated that Muslim communities there would support Sultan Sulaymān in the effort to ascend the imperial throne.Footnote ³³ He further ‘claimed that there was a prophecy that, with the assistance of the English, the Muslims were destined to rule over the whole of China’.Footnote ³⁴ These claims of Sultanic power and ambition appear to have left a mark: the prolific British Orientalist Demetrius Charles Bougler (1853–1928) sarcastically described Du Wenxiu in his exhaustive work A Short History of China (1893) as ‘the original of the mythical Sultan Suliman, the fame of whose power reached England, and who had been an object of the solicitude of the Indian government’.Footnote ³⁵ As such sources would indicate, an imminent victory of Islam in China was a narrative that a segment of Chinese Muslims was popularizing, whether for strategic reasons or out of genuine belief, in their interactions with foreign audiences.

European visions of Chinese Muslims in the aftermath of the rebellions

As the Qing empire defeated all Muslim (and non-Muslim) challenges to its rule by the late nineteenth century, the fantasy of an Islamized China that would be realized through outright conquest became far more difficult to uphold. Nevertheless, a thematic undercurrent tied to a Muslim takeover continued to feed European imaginaries, more specifically one wherein Chinese Muslims were rendered into a robust and militant minority that was harnessing its influence, both within the state and society at large, to clandestinely Islamize the country. They were thus reconceived as the vanguard of a lively world religion that was exerting transformative religious pressure while impeding European religious inroads in China.

This representation can be gleaned in many late nineteenth-century publications dealing with the so-called Muslim world. In his influential The Future of Islam (1882), the British anti-imperialist poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) wrote that Chinese Muslims were ‘making steady progress in the Empire’, predicting moreover that they were likely to ‘make their existence felt; for China is no dead nation, only asleep’.Footnote ³⁶ Much like the works of Vasilyev and Dabry de Thiersant’s, Blunt’s book attracted considerable interest, including from China-based Protestant missionaries who were increasingly shifting their attention to Chinese Muslims as a potential target for conversion.Footnote ³⁷ Another example can be found in the writings of the prominent British Orientalist, Thomas Walker Arnold (1864–1930), who dedicated a whole chapter of his work The Preaching of Islam (1896) to Chinese Muslims.Footnote ³⁸ Relying on an eclectic number of sources such as Vasilyev, Dabry de Thiersant, and even the interview of the Yunnanese Sayyid Sulaymān in Thamarāt al-Funūn (which we will discuss in more detail elsewhere in the article), Arnold concluded the chapter by stating that ‘the zealous spirit of proselytism with which the Chinese Musalmans are animated, secures for them a constant succession of new converts, and they confidently look forward to the day when Islam will be triumphant throughout the length and breadth of the Chinese Empire’.Footnote ³⁹

While Arnold and Blunt wrote with a relatively sympathetic tone towards Islam, for many other European observers, Chinese Muslims remained a menacing apparition who were part of a rival world religion. Not only were they perceived to be deeply embedded within Qing political and military structures, almost like a privileged warrior-caste, but also as jealously protective of Islam’s status within China.Footnote ⁴⁰ European responses to the Boxer uprising (1899–1901) capture this perception. Several Muslim battalions from the Northwest, led by the (non-Muslim) Gansu native Dong Fuxiang (1839–1908), participated in the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing and played a decisive role in the Qing victory at the Battle of Langfang (June 1900) against the armies of the Allied Eight Nations.Footnote ⁴¹ A slew of European (and American) commentaries stressed the barbarity and xenophobia of these (mostly) Muslim troops, claiming that their bloodlust exceeded that of the Boxers themselves, and attributed this squarely to their Muslimness and hatred of European civilization and Christianity.Footnote ⁴²

This menacing view of Chinese Muslims was compounded by the perception that they were under the sway of pan-Islamism. At the onset of the Boxer rebellion, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany suggested to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II that he include Ottoman soldiers in the international coalition against the Qing, or at least leverage his status as caliph to pacify his Chinese co-religionists and desist from resisting the expedition.Footnote ⁴³ The Sublime Porte responded by sending a small delegation to China which landed in Shanghai in May 1901 with leaflets addressing Chinese Muslims in the name of Abdülhamid II and the Seyhülislam, the highest religious-legal authority in the Ottoman realm. Although the mission met with little success, arriving well after the suppression of the rebellion, it immediately elicited European apprehensions about its intentions and potential to mobilize Chinese Muslims against the interests of the imperial powers.Footnote ⁴⁴ Later Ottoman exchanges with Chinese Muslim reformists like Wang Kuan (1848–1919), which culminated in the establishment of the Dār al-ʿUlūm al-Ḥamīdiyya school within the Niujie Mosque in Beijing in 1908, would only deepen these suspicions and nourish the European obsession with Ottoman and German ambitions not only in the Middle East, but in East Asia as well.Footnote ⁴⁵

The pan-Islamic propaganda carried out by various actors during the First World War (1914–1918) is illustrative of how the imaginary of a powerful Muslim population in China had taken hold. Through its consular offices in China, Germany allegedly distributed Chinese-translations of the Ottoman declaration of jihād against the Entente.Footnote ⁴⁶ Conversely, Great Britain responded by translating Sharīf Ḥusayn’s (1854–1931) proclamation justifying his rebellion against the Sublime Porte, issued in 1916, into several languages, including Chinese.Footnote ⁴⁷ British preoccupation with the sympathies of Chinese Muslims dovetails with these actions. Their agents agonized over this population’s presumed receptivity to enemy propaganda: one report from late 1918 claimed that many Muslims in Gansu believed ‘that the victory of the Allies would mean destruction of Mohammed’s tomb and also Constantinople’ and stated elsewhere that donations were being made in support of the Ottoman cause.Footnote ⁴⁸ As such language demonstrates, Chinese Muslims were considered a variable that had to be watched closely in the context of a global war, notwithstanding their own national government’s low-key support for the cause of the Entente.

Towards a more sober assessment of Chinese Islam in European sources

The narrative of Islamization—in both its rebellion/post-rebellion forms—was not one that was uncritically accepted by all. From the late 1880s onwards, a growing number of European scholars and observers began to express scepticism over the accuracy of the demographic estimates and descriptions provided by Vasilyev and Dabry de Thiersant, questioning whether China’s Muslim population was even capable of engineering a takeover.Footnote ⁴⁹ This sceptical trend continued into the twentieth century as the forced opening of the Chinese interior allowed for ever-growing numbers of Europeans to travel and conduct ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork in previously inaccessible parts of the empire. The new insights gleaned from such work did not lead to a complete break from previous fantasies but overturned them to produce an altogether new imaginary of Chinese Muslims as an entry point for the triumph of the strongest of world religions, Christianity.

The work of Henri d’Ollone (1868–1945), a French military officer and explorer, is emblematic of the new reassessments. His influential and detailed study Recherches sur les Musulmans Chinois (1911) was based on material he and his team had gathered during a French government-funded expedition to China’s borderland regions in 1906–1909.Footnote ⁵⁰ D’Ollone did not dismiss the possibility that future rebellions might enable Muslims to dominate and convert some of the borderland provinces or that even a ‘Muhammadan Emperor’ might claim the throne. Under such circumstances, d’Ollone speculated, the Chinese population would eventually come to embrace the faith.Footnote ⁵¹ However, he appraised the likelihood of such a development as low, for the imperial government practised, according to him, a ‘policy of cleverly concealed mistrust, which does not allow any believer to gain a great ascendancy’.Footnote ⁵² Per his interpretation, Islam would continue to grow in China, but its followers were in no position to take on the reins of power. What was unique to d’Ollone was that he challenged two prevalent understandings of Chinese Muslims. First, was that their numbers were substantially lower than what had been initially assumed, with his own estimate being that they were no more than four million.Footnote ⁵³ Secondly, he doubted the presence of a strong sentiment of pan-Islamic solidarity among them, stating that even ‘the existence of a Caliph is unknown’.Footnote ⁵⁴ It thus seemed unlikely, according to d’Ollone, that a sizeable Muslim fifth-column would be ready to follow the commands of a distant Ottoman ruler.

Marshall Broomhall (1866–1937), a British Christian missionary, went even further than d’Ollone in his seminal text Islam in China: A Neglected Problem (1910).Footnote ⁵⁵ Travelling extensively throughout the country and drawing on a vast number of interviews, Broomhall detected little evidence of the ‘menacing problem contemplated by Professor Vasil’ev some forty odd years ago’.Footnote ⁵⁶ What he discovered, rather, was a community that was demoralized from the defeat of their past rebellions, isolated from their co-religionists, and adherent to a worldview grounded in the ‘belief in God, abhorrence of idolatry, reverence for the patriarchs of the Old Testament … etc’ that placed them in closer proximity to the Christians of Europe compared to the broader mass of Chinese.Footnote ⁵⁷ This reinterpretation of Chinese Muslims re-envisioned them as a tantalizing target for Christian conversion. As Broomhall puts it:

For Broomhall, time was clearly of the essence, particularly before Chinese Muslims were revitalized, in a religious sense, by the establishment of new links with their co-religionists abroad.Footnote ⁵⁹ He warned his readers that there were already signs that the window of opportunity was closing, as indicated by the establishment of the Dār ul-ʿUlūm al-Ḥamīdiyya in Beijing.Footnote ⁶⁰

The revisionist contributions of D’Ollone and Broomhall were received with some relief (and arguably a degree of glee) by the different circles that cited them. Various European Christian missionaries, like those associated with the China Inland Mission, launched dedicated campaigns for converting Chinese Muslims in the wake of these findings.Footnote ⁶¹ Orientalists like the well-known German scholar Martin Hartmann (1851–1918), who penned several entries on China in the first Encyclopaedia of Islam and even had a posthumously published book on the topic Zur Geschichte des Islam in China (1921), enthusiastically regurgitated many of the two authors’ conclusions.Footnote ⁶² He was particularly dismissive of the narrative of Chinese Islamization, calling it (ironically, given its origins) a ‘mere dream’ espoused by deluded Muslim supremacists.Footnote ⁶³ The writings of the India-based Anglican missionary Edward Sell (1839–1932) are reflective of the impact exercised by these revisionist works. In an article entitled ‘Islam in China’ (1901), which cited Vasilyev, Sell speculated that Chinese Muslims might still emerge as a dominant political force in their country.Footnote ⁶⁴ In his later Muslims in China (1913), a revised version of this same article in book-form, and one that drew heavily from d’Ollone and Broomhall, he was far more dismissive, proclaiming that Islam in China was, much like elsewhere in the world, a spent force.Footnote ⁶⁵ He added that Chinese Muslims were unlikely to ‘have any very important share in the shaping of events in the near or distant future’, and voiced support for Broomhall’s call for converting ‘such a large body of Muslims in the far East’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Arab and Ottoman visions of an Islamized China

As the European debates on the validity of the narrative raged on, the fantasy of China on the verge of Islamization gained considerable traction in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish writings from the late 1880s.Footnote ⁶⁷ In consuming European sources on the topic, ranging from the clippings of The Crescent, a Liverpool-based newspaper managed by the British convert to Islam ʿAbdullah Quilliam (1856–1932), the texts of Vasilyev and Dabry de Thiersant, to the reports of unidentified British Protestant missionaries as well as the statements of high-ranking European ministers,Footnote ⁶⁸ Middle Eastern audiences became conscious of the Islamic presence in China, and consequently incorporated it within their budding imaginary of the Muslim world. One of the earliest and most definitive instances of this can be found in Umm al-Qurā (The Mother of the Cities, 1899), a fictional account of a pan-Islamic conference in Mecca penned by ʿAbdulraḥmān al-Kawākibī (1849?–1902?) which included a colourful assortment of characters from all over the world, including al-Qudsī (‘of Jerusalem’), al-Rūmī (‘of Rum/Anatolia’), al-Tabrīzī (‘of Tabriz’), and, most importantly for our purposes, al-Ṣīnī (‘the Chinese’).Footnote ⁶⁹

This heightened awareness of Chinese Muslims went hand in hand with a celebration of their demographic weight, proficiency in the martial arts (al-funūn al-ḥarbiyya), and enthusiasm for spreading Islam.Footnote ⁷⁰ The textual evidence for this is copious, at least from the 1890s onwards. Foreshadowing later European scepticism of the revised population estimates, the renowned Egyptian shaykh Muhammad Tawfiq al-Bakrī (1870–1932) relates in his al-Mustaqbal lil-Islām (The Future is for Islam, 1893) the story of a Baluchi merchant, a frequent visitor to China, who came to Cairo and proclaimed ‘that the Muslims of China are eighty million, and that their ʿulamāʾ mock the Europeans who say they are forty million’.Footnote ⁷¹ A stream of early articles from the reformist periodical al-Manār, run by the Syrian(-Egyptian) religious scholar and journalist Rashīd Riḍā (1865–1935), depicted Chinese Muslims as a patriotic and well-accultured group ‘more numerous than the largest of Islamic kingdoms’, who stood at the forefront of defending China against the dual threats of European imperialism and Christianity.Footnote ⁷²

For many Middle Eastern writers, this vision of Chinese Muslims offered a direct repudiation to many of the claims made by European detractors of Islam, in so far as it showcased, through the very existence of this community, their world religion’s vitality, relevance, and ability to compete in the modern age, especially in religious terms. The Ottoman intellectual Mehmet Halil Halid (1869–1930) referred to them in his book The Crescent versus the Cross (1907) as such: ‘we should like to ask those who maintain that the religion of Muhammad was diffused at the point of the sword, whether China has ever been overrun by any Mussulman Power which could carry forcible proselytism into that country?’.Footnote ⁷³ Citing Dabry de Thiersant as an authority, Halid asserted that the Muslims of China had vied with Christian missionaries over the soul of that country for many centuries, and emerged successful all the same.Footnote ⁷⁴ For commentators in the Middle East, then, the fantasy of China’s Islamization provided a precious opportunity to not only relate positively to East Asia, but to also confidently assert their global Muslim identity against the expansion of Christianity, a rival world religion.

The growing number of face-to-face encounters between Middle Easterners and Chinese Muslims, disseminated through print, also played a role in nourishing these narrational strands, in large part because those involved were perceived to have authoritative backgrounds.Footnote ⁷⁵ The interview of the Yunnanese Sayyid Sulaymān from 1894, which was published in parts over several issues in Thamarāt al-Funūn, an Ottoman Beirut-based newspaper, is demonstrative of this. The Sayyid’s account opens with an explanation as to why he was in the Ottoman realm to begin with; he claimed that upon hearing news of the Ertuğrul, an Ottoman warship that had sunk off the coast of Japan in 1890, ‘a longing to visit the Caliphal lands’ was ignited in his heart, and he thus determined to leave China for pilgrimage to Mecca, an arduous journey for many of his kinsmen.Footnote ⁷⁶ He then recounts how he first travelled to Beijing in order to obtain permission from his father who was then a minister at the imperial court, noting that his appointment by the imperial government was a ploy to keep him out of Yunnan given his previous role as one of the heads of the Muslim rebellion there.Footnote ⁷⁷ Following that, the Sayyid continues, he obtained an audience with the young Guangxu emperor (1871–1908) whom, he claims, loved Muslims and surrounded himself with many as his retainers, highlighting their influence at the highest echelons of the state.Footnote ⁷⁸ Elsewhere, and so as to emphasize this point, the Sayyid makes the observation that the grandfather of the emperor had a Muslim concubine from Kashgharia,Footnote ⁷⁹ and was so impressed by her morals that he wanted to convert to Islam, only to be deterred by his ministers—a recurrent myth about various Imperial figures that had long found currency among Muslim subjects of Chinese rule.Footnote ⁸⁰

As the Sayyid progressively expands on the conditions of Islam in China, the image that emerges is an avowedly confident one regarding its future: everywhere Chinese Muslims are physically robust in comparison to their non-Muslim countrymen (being unaffected as they are by the deleterious effects of opium smoking due to their religious prohibitions); zealous in their preaching and numbering more than seventy million (and not, ‘as the Frankish books ignorantly claim, only thirty to forty million’); and the pagans throughout China are gradually converting to Islam to the point where, he proclaims, ‘we are certain that not a century will elapse after which all the people of China are Muslims’.Footnote ⁸¹ This prophetic claim was tied in with an appeal to the readers of Thamarāt al-Funūn to raise funds for Arabic-script printing presses to help facilitate the production of Islamic literature, and was immediately followed by a quote from Vasilyev, as if to confirm, on the part of the editors, the veracity of many of Sayyid’s statements.Footnote ⁸²

The Boxers and the Muslims of China under a Middle Eastern spotlight

The Boxer rebellion, a large-scale, anti-Western mobilization in northern China, was most likely one of the first global media events in modern history.Footnote ⁸³ Its tumultuous developments were communicated widely by telegraph, and European (and American) newspapers and magazines provided constant coverage of it. This interest was reproduced elsewhere across the world, spurring newfound curiosity about China.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the Middle East, discussions about the Boxers became a backdrop to popularizing and entrenching specific imaginaries about Chinese Muslims that had been gestating over the past decade or so.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Jurjī Zaydān’s tarājim (biographies) of famous Qing figures such as the Empress Dowager Cixi and Li Hongzhang, key characters in the Boxer saga, we find allusions to the martial exploits of Chinese Muslims, especially Sulaymān and his short-lived sultanate in Yunnan.Footnote ⁸⁶ The remarkable booklet, Nabdha ʿan al-Ṣīn (On China, 1900), co-authored by the jurist Atrubi Abū l-ʿIzz (d. 1955) and published in Egypt at the height of the events, invoked many of the familiar tropes about Chinese Muslims found in (uncited) European writings: that the uprising in Yunnan nearly led to the enthronement of a Muslim emperor; that Muslims in the post-rebellion period channelled their energies towards political advancement within the imperial system; and that their communities numbered up to eighty million people.Footnote ⁸⁷

Ideas about the strength of Chinese Muslims also shaped the discussions on the religious-political implications of the 1901 Ottoman mission that had been dispatched at the request of the German kaiser due to the eruption of the Boxer rebellion. The Alexandria-based al-Jāmiʿa, for example, noted that if Chinese Muslims could be tied in loyalty to the Ottoman caliphate, Abdülhamid II would obtain ‘great status in China, and the ability to solve the Chinese problem today’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The same source, in an implicit complaint about the situation, declared that had Chinese Muslims succeeded in their bid to control the country some 20 years ago, ‘that ancient and large state [China] would have been revitalized, and would not be in its current state [of war] against Europe’.Footnote ⁸⁹ In contrast, the ever-critical Rashīd Riḍā in al-Manār expressed scepticism about the goals of the mission and its colonial complicity, or more precisely the role of Germany, in its dispatch:

As the abovementioned sources illustrate, the perception of a strong Islamic foothold in China, and one that had the capacity to decisively impact the course of events in geopolitical as well as world religious terms, had seeped into the thinking of many Middle Eastern observers by the turn of the century.

Not everyone necessarily subscribed to this vision, as can be seen in one of the most fascinating works dealing with the Boxer rebellion and its aftermath, a seven-part series that appeared in al-Muqtaṭaf over the course of a year (1900–1901) under the title ‘Mustaqbal al-Ṣīn’ (‘The Future of China’). Written by the pan-Islamist Ottoman thinker Shakīb Arslān (1869–1946), the entries weighed up the strengths and weaknesses of Qing political, societal, economic, and religious life, while also speculating on the trajectories China might follow in the face of European and Japanese imperial ambitions.Footnote ⁹¹ The instalments are a notable example of Arslān’s masterful knowledge of the Orientalist discourse of his time and his ability to make a culturally unfamiliar China relatable to his readership: he compared, for instance, the engagement of Chinese non-Muslims with the three teachings of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism to that of a Muslim’s concurrent initiation into the Shādhliyya, Qādiriyya, Rifāʿiyya, and Naqshbandiyya orders.Footnote ⁹² In his treatment of Chinese Muslims, Arslān drew upon a wide variety of sources that included medieval Arabic texts on China along with Vasilyev and Dabry de Thiersant, among others.Footnote ⁹³ As a result, Arslān too conveyed the familiar story of Chinese Muslims as wielders of great might and power (sawla wa shawka), and thus an unsurprising threat in the eyes of Russian and European onlookers who feared that ‘an Islamic China, will not be like a pagan China’.Footnote ⁹⁴

In the final entry of the series, Arslān weighed the likelihood of the different future scenarios against one another, including China’s pursuit of Meiji Japanese-style modernization, territorial dismemberment as had happened with India, or absorption by external actors like Russia or Japan.Footnote ⁹⁵ Interestingly for our purposes, he identified Islamization as one of these distinct possibilities, albeit with a degree of pessimism, asking:

As we see in Arslān’s comments, fantasizing about Islam’s expansion among Muslim thinkers was not necessarily couched in a sense of inevitable triumph over Christianity. Discussions on the narrative of Islamization could, on the contrary, serve as a means for highlighting and criticizing the present condition of Muslim states and societies. The (potential) power of Chinese Muslims, to which Arslān alluded, being unrealized (and unrealizable) accentuated the shortcomings of Muslim communities elsewhere and underscored the need for continued self-strengthening efforts if the global struggle between world religions was to go in Islam’s favour.

Japan, Chinese Muslims, and dreams of an Oriental Muslim imperium

For Arslān, China’s most viable path to self-strengthening lay in its embrace of science and territorial absorption (whether through voluntary submission or conquest) by Japan, with Chinese Muslims paving the way for such a development.Footnote ⁹⁷ This line of thinking echoes a recurrent theme in later Arabic and Ottoman Turkish writing, mostly from the mid-1900s onwards, that regularly discussed China’s fate in relation to Japan (and vice versa) and viewed Islam as an integral part of this connection. This understanding was galvanized primarily by the events of the Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905) and the consequent elevation of Japan’s status in non-Western spaces, on the one hand, and the perceived absence of a world religion within Japan, on the other. The latter’s conversion to Islam therefore became an aspiration for many onlookers in the Middle East who were searching for saviours (or challengers) against European hegemony. Chinese Muslims, as the most sizeable grouping of Islamdom in the east, were accordingly treated, by virtue of their proximity, as facilitators of such an outcome.Footnote ⁹⁸ Observers in the Middle East thus creatively fused together the fantasies of Chinese and Japanese Islamization, heralding a new geopolitical and spiritual future for East Asia shaped by Islam.

The specifics of how this endpoint would materialize produced a variety of answers, but most entailed the forging of a mutually beneficial and anti-imperialist relationship between Japan and the Muslims of China that would ultimately have positive reverberations for all the colonized nations of the world. In al-Shams al-Mushriqa (The Rising Sun, 1904), Muṣṭafā Kāmil, the Egyptian nationalist leader, proclaimed that Japan’s triumph over Russia would allow it to uplift the benighted nations of East Asia, and especially Chinese Muslims, through its diffusion of modern knowledge and technologies: ‘China has seventy million Muslims whose progress will nourish the affairs of the Muslim nations and greatly reinvigorate Islam in the Far East.’Footnote ⁹⁹ In his conception Japan thus emerges as a catalyst for a Chinese Muslim renaissance, though whether it would be religiously transformed by them is left unsaid. Others saw this relationship in more starkly imperial terms: the widely travelled Russian-Tatar pan-Islamist Abdürreşid İbrahim (1857–1944), who would later become a major proponent of Japan-centric pan-Asian and pan-Islamic solidarity, welcomed the possibility that Manchuria’s Muslim community (which he estimated to be half the total population) could act as a fifth column enabling Japan’s conquest of the area and beyond.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Implicit in Abdürreşid İbrahim’s thinking is the notion that Chinese Muslims would become a critical variable for advancing Japanese empire-building in East Asia, who would also bring Japan (and China along with it) into the Islamic fold—a proposition he himself enthusiastically supported, given his own personal advocacy of Japanese conversion to Islam.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This idea resurfaces elsewhere in the sources, albeit in other forms. Writing in al-Manār, Rashīd Riḍā cautiously warned that Muslims’ interest in Japan should not be driven by the aspirational search for an anti-colonial ally, but by the sincere desire to save the Japanese from perdition and hellfire.Footnote ¹⁰² At the same time, he contended that Muslims in the Middle East should focus on rectifying their own societies, leaving the task of converting Japan to the Chinese Muslims, a group that was also well-positioned to advance Japan’s expansion into China. As Riḍā notes:

Another variant to this scenario can be found in al-Riḥla al-Yābāniyya (The Journey to Japan, 1907), a travelogue by the Egyptian journalist and religious scholar ʿAlī Aḥmad al-Jirjāwī (d. 1961) which described the author’s supposed missionary exploits at a (wholly fictional) conference organized by the Japanese emperor to select a world religion as the national creed of his country. Of particular interest is the character of Sulaymān, a Chinese Muslim who joins the Egyptian protagonist on his trip to the east.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The introduction of Sulaymān, a name recurrently associated with Chinese Muslims in the Arabic sources by this juncture, functions as a narrational opportunity to supply readers with a general sketch of Muslims in China and their recent history.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Al-Jirjāwī claims that, per his newfound companion, Chinese Muslims were large in number and possessed a latent power that frightened the Europeans.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In a later section discussing the benefits that Japan might reap from its conversion to Islam, al-Jirjāwī stressed the possibility of establishing a great Muslim polity in East Asia through this Islamic presence in China, which would then join the Ottoman empire in reshaping the international order, as well as the world religious landscape, to the benefit of all Muslims:

This, too, was not merely a victorious rejoicing at the ascendance of Islam against its main world religions competitor, Christianity. With his comments on the friendly coexistence of the Ottoman and (Islamized) Japanese empires, the Ottoman-loyalist al-Jirjāwī probably wanted to pre-empt the debate on whether the emperor of Japan, after his conversion, should be awarded the title of caliph as the most powerful Muslim ruler. This line of reasoning was perhaps influenced by Young Turk critics of Abdülhamid II as they contested the latter’s legitimating claims for rule. By presenting the scenario of twin brotherly sovereigns ruling different parts of Asia, al-Jirjāwī overturned the idea of a Japanese caliph. As we see in this case, from a Middle Eastern point of view, numerous layers of implications were attached to the fantasies of Chinese and Japanese Islamization, offering fertile ground for reimagining alternative futures and balances of power.

Saving Chinese Muslims from the Christian missionary threat

Though it was far more common for Arabic and Ottoman Turkish source material to reject the European revisionist claims that had appeared about China’s Islamization, opting to emphasize earlier assertions of unobstructed growth and ascendance instead,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ a beleaguered image of Chinese Islam beset by Christian missionaries did begin to make its way within some circles from the mid-1900s onwards. A few Middle Eastern authors increasingly expressed their frustration over the perceived failure of Chinese Muslims to convert East Asia, attributing this squarely to their insufficient knowledge of Islam and Arabic. Riḍā, for instance, registering surprise at the news in the Ottoman press of a Chinese Muslim preacher going to Japan, argued that while such selfless acts were commendable, Chinese Muslim communities were themselves in need of spiritual guidance and instruction—a refrain he would voice ever more loudly with the passing of the years.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In a response to the Guangzhou-based scholar Ma Ruitu (who himself declared that Islam in China ‘was daily entering a state of weakness and stagnation’) published in al-Manār in 1930, Riḍā stated:

Riḍā was not alone in decrying the spiritual and material shortcomings of Chinese Muslims that supposedly led them to miss the opportunity to bring China into the Islamic fold. Al-Jirjāwī, himself an enthusiastic advocate of Japanese and Chinese Muslim cooperation, shared in these misgivings, asking Sulaymān, his companion from China: ‘why travel to Japan to spread Islam when your own homeland is in need?’Footnote ¹¹¹ So as to stress his point, he bemoaned the lack of ʿulamāʾ among China’s fifty million Muslims capable of teaching the correct creed. He additionally criticized venerable Islamic institutions, such as Egypt’s al-Azhar, for their failure to support the Muslims of China.Footnote ¹¹² While there was lingering hope that Chinese Muslims would be the vanguard of East Asia’s Islamization, as far as some of their Middle Eastern co-religionists were concerned, they clearly had to put their own house in order first.

This shift in views could be partially attributed to the growing availability in the Middle East of first-hand accounts about Chinese Islam accessible to reading publics back home. Al-Manār translated and republished many articles concerning the challenges and reform activities of Muslim communities in China, including those of ʿInāyatullāh Aḥmadī, imam of the Tatar mosque in Harbin. He had originally written them for the Tatar newspaper Vakıt in Orenburg.Footnote ¹¹³ Likewise Alī Rıza, an Ottoman scholar teaching at the Dār al-ʿUlūm al-Ḥamīdiyya in Beijing, repeatedly wrote to the Ottoman Turkish periodical Sırat-ı Müstakim decrying the limited religious knowledge of Chinese Muslims, on the one hand, and the dangers posed by European Christian missionaries to these Muslim communities, on the other.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In a lecture that he gave in Istanbul in 1911 following his return from East Asia, Abdürreşid İbrahim made a complete break with his past stances, arguing that there was much exaggeration surrounding Chinese Muslims in the international and Ottoman press. As opposed to the portrayal of a powerful and sizeable minority wielding great influence and numbering in excess of one hundred million believers, he informed his audience that he had witnessed a benighted and weak community in which ‘not a single person could read the Fātiḥa’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The arrival of Chinese Muslim students in Cairo in the 1920s and 1930s undoubtedly contributed to this discursive change.Footnote ¹¹⁶ At first glance, much of the rhetoric that came from this group emphasized the outsized power and clout of their community in the Chinese context. Prominent figures such as Wang Jingzhai (1879–1949) continued to extol, in Arabic-language articles in well-known outlets like al-Fatḥ and al-Ahrām, or in conference proceedings like that in Jerusalem in 1931, the strength and influence of China’s Muslims.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In an Arabic-language book titled Al-Ṣīn wa-l-Islām (China and Islam, 1945) that had been published through a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated printing press, Pang Shiqian (1902–1958) made the following assertion on the demographics of his community:

What is remarkable, and relevant to the transformation of the image of Chinese Muslims, is that almost all these interventions were intertwined with appeals for assistance.Footnote ¹¹⁹ When Ma Songting, head of the Chinese mission to al-Azhar, met with its reformist rector Muhammad al-Ẓawāhirī (1878–1943/44), their conversations largely revolved around the Christian missionary threat to China’s Muslims.Footnote ¹²⁰ In al-Ẓawāhirī’s posthumously published memoirs, this issue was explicitly identified as the main reason behind al-Azhar’s decision to dispatch two religious scholars to Beijing in the early 1930s.Footnote ¹²¹ Even before that, Ma Songting had famously procured the patronage of King Fuʾād I (1868–1936) of Egypt in support of the Chengda Teachers School in Beijing, one of the earliest and most important Muslim modern educational institutions to have been established in China at that point.Footnote ¹²²

This seeming contradiction between celebrations of power and the need for aid stemmed from the pressure Chinese Muslims faced to reconcile different imperatives. They were more acutely aware than others of the Christian missionary threat to their communities back home (as exemplified by the China Inland Mission); they had to contend with the implications of their minoritization (and potential marginalization) under Kuomintang rule; and they were engaged in countering mounting Japanese propagandistic outreach in the Middle East and beyond.Footnote ¹²³ Fahmī Huwaīdī (b. 1937), the famous Egyptian journalist who visited China in 1980 in his capacity as editor of the Kuwait-based al-’Arabi magazine, references a discussion on Chinese Muslim population estimates he had with Na Zhong (1909–2008), a prominent Arabist who was part of the group that had studied in Egypt in the 1930s.Footnote ¹²⁴ The latter remarked sarcastically on how ‘we [the Chinese Muslim students] used to declare in every occasion [at the time] that the Muslims of China were fifty million one time, and sixty million in another’, alluding to the naked instrumentalization behind such numerical invocations.Footnote ¹²⁵

Epilogue: The elusive green (and yellowish) peril of the East

Our basic premise in this article is that the co-constitution, and multi-scalar resonance, of China’s Islamization narrative between Europe, the Middle East, and East Asian (Muslim) interlocutors originated in great part from how religion as a classificatory category was conceived of in the late nineteenth century. Peoples and territories were increasingly re-envisioned and amalgamated, in accordance with an imperial gaze refracted through the European religious experience, into larger religious units like Islam and (later) Hinduism with their own global communities, respectively called the Muslim and Hindu worlds.Footnote ¹²⁶ This process of forging identifiable world religions was accompanied by the assumption that these communal entities were in constant competition with one another, paralleling the wider civilizational and racial struggles that were gaining traction at the time.Footnote ¹²⁷ As Peter van der Veer astutely reminds us, ‘the colonial era makes new imaginations of community possible, and it is especially in the religious domain that these new imaginations take shape’.Footnote ¹²⁸ The ebbs and flows of religious rivalries, furthermore, were understood to invariably affect the fortunes of more temporal balances of power: the Ottoman harnessing of pan-Islamism in the late nineteenth century and the European reactions to it are demonstrative of this logic as well as the power and sway of religious imaginaries during this period.

China, superficially at least, seems like an anomaly in this global religious worlding, but it is its very liminality, we would argue, that nourished the Islamization narrative. In the late nineteenth century, an assortment of actors, encompassing both European missionaries and Chinese reformists, categorically dismissed the rich religious landscape of China as mere folk superstition, not worthy of the status of a world religion.Footnote ¹²⁹ It is within the framework of world religions that China’s perceived spiritual void was reconceptualized, much as had happened with respect to Japan and as discussed in Samee Siddiqui’s work, into a tantalizing and transformable battleground for projecting different religious futures and allegiances.Footnote ¹³⁰ Given the near-Darwinian competition pitting different world religions against one another, the stakes to fill China’s empty spiritual space became incredibly high as it concerned one of the most densely populated territories on the planet. This consequently led to an imaginary scramble—as discussed throughout this article—that wedded the fears and hopes surrounding pan-Islamism (predicated largely on a newly discovered Chinese Muslim presence since the late 1860s), on the one hand, with the contemporaneous threats and promises of Chinese demographics, on the other, essentially birthing a yellow peril threat with a green Islamic hue.Footnote ¹³¹

China’s Islamization narrative had a surprisingly long shelf-life, enduring in one form or another for over a century after it was first articulated at the end of the late 1860s. This is attributable not only to the broader zeitgeist of world religions that nourished it, but also to the discordant and fragmentary nature of the conversation itself. While different world-spanning public print cultures (built upon new techno-communicative infrastructures) were engaged with each other, their cultural, linguistic, and religious divides meant that they were involved in the production of multiple ‘Muslim Chinas’ that inevitably reflected their different agendas and biases—a process of disjointed cross-cultural knowledge exchange akin to the one described by Nile Green in How Asia Found Herself.Footnote ¹³² These narrational divergences, and with them the idiosyncratic yet creative blurring of fact and fiction, can be best observed in the disputes over the exact size of China’s Muslim population. Starting from the 1890s, new ethnographic and statistical findings by European observers led to a dramatic downsizing in the number of Chinese Muslims to the low millions. Middle Eastern and Chinese Muslim sources routinely rejected such revisions, claiming that they were driven by Christian jealousy of Islam’s inroads in East Asia. Instead they opted to reaffirm the estimates of fifty to one hundred million-strong, effectively a fifth to a quarter of China’s total population at the time.Footnote ¹³³ These assertions continued to be voiced well into the early Cold War, with the fifty million figure being regularly invoked by everyone from Kuomintang-aligned Muslim elites in Taiwan to revolutionary pan-Arab leaders like Gamal ‘Abdulnāsir of Egypt.Footnote ¹³⁴ All this testifies to the versatility and adaptability of the narrative, not to mention its appeal even to groups wholly uninvested in the presumed struggle between world religions. The Japanese pan-Asianists of the 1930s and 1940s, while perhaps not especially keen on establishing an Islamic imperium in East Asia as imagined by some of the Middle Easterners we examined, continued to view Chinese Muslims as an exploitable resource that could benefit their expansionistic enterprise.Footnote ¹³⁵

Though this would require further investigation and research, we believe that China’s Islamization narrative, which tapered off from the mid-twentieth century onwards, lost its potency only as the onset of the Cold War reordered the global spiritual and ideological landscape and, with it, the parameters of communal identity and conflict. The clashes of yesteryears were gradually replaced with new geopolitical and religious fault lines—spiritual united fronts (or religious internationalisms) were created, bringing multiple world religions/traditions together against the forces of ‘God-less’ communism.Footnote ¹³⁶ The ‘reddening’ of China in 1949 brought an end to the Islamization and Christianization narratives, with both (and more so with the latter) only resurfacing in the post-Maoist and post-Cold War decades in wholly new forms disconnected from the past debates, fears, and hopes.Footnote ¹³⁷ The reorienting interregnum of the Cold War, and notwithstanding the return to religious and civilizational narratives since the 1990s, interrupted the narrative’s evolution and relevance to many contexts and is likely one of the causes for its ‘death’. This is not to say that the narrative was wholly expunged from intellectual memory: we can find traces of it in the writings of Fahmī Huwaīdī, one of the last to revisit it in the Arabic discourse, mostly in his much-celebrated book al-Islām fī al-sīn (Islam in China) which was based on a collection of articles he wrote in the early 1980s. Footnote ¹³⁸ He concludes one chapter, aptly named ‘the disturbing prophecy’ in reference to Vasilyev’s warnings, with what is essentially an acknowledgement of defeat: ‘what is important is that [Islamization] did not take place, and it is a matter that elicits surprise, bewilderment and questioning [in any Muslim]: why did Islam stumble in China, when its seeds were planted thirteen centuries ago?’