Annemarie Schimmel was born in Erfurt, Germany, in 1922. She grew up in a home full of talk about mysticism and philosophy. She was one of the young Germans of the 19th and 20th centuries who fell asleep with the Stories of 1001 Nights. Her father, a postal worker, was deeply interested in mysticism. During the Nazi era, the young Annemarie discovered her passion for the Arabic language and Arab culture. Once a week, she received private lessons in Arabic and Islamic Studies by Hans Ellenberg, whom she called Efendi. Already, at the age of 19, she had completed her doctorate on the subject, “The Position of the Caliph and the Qadis in Late Medieval Egypt.” She published more than 120 books and studied and translated, among other things, Arabic and Persian poets such as Mawlana Rumi, Ibn Ataullah, Hallaj, Yunus Emre, and Muhammad Iqbal, who wrote about mysticism and the love of God. As an Islamic scholar, she is still highly esteemed in the East and the West. Here is just one example:

Love

In passion deep my heart fell –
Just look, what love has made of me!
I gave my head to strife and pain –
Just look, what love has made of me!
I silently weep to myself,
While love stains me in blood,
Can’t be sober, can’t be confused –
Just look, what love has made of me!
Yunus Emre

The languages she knew included Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Turkmen, French, Pashto, Hindi, Kurdish, Swedish, and also Arabic, which she was able to speak in more than 10 dialects. Besides her talent for learning languages, she was also a gifted speaker and gave lectures in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic that sometimes lasted hours.

She had a special passion for ornamentation, calligraphy, and architecture. Almost all of her published books are illustrated and many a chapter is introduced with calligraphic verses from the Qur’an. One of her books is titled, In the name of Allah the All-Merciful.

Annemarie Schimmel has received many awards and honors: honorary doctorates from the universities of Konya, Islamabad, and Sind; the Hilal-i Imtiyaz Medal (the highest award in Pakistan); the Gold Medal of the city of Istanbul; the Arts and Science Medal of the Republic of Turkey; the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade; and the Federal Cross of Merit. Thanks to her strong commitment for a better understanding between nations, her advice was taken seriously all over the world. Since her death, she has not been forgotten; in the Pakistani metropolis of Lahore, for instance, a main road was named after her – the Hiyaban-i Annemarie Schimmel Road. In Iran, she is much appreciated and often quoted. In Turkey, she became immortal as the unforgettable Cemile.

The bridge builder

“Nowadays broader circles of our society realize that a certain understanding of other cultures is needed to avoid the dangerous generalizations the media are replete with. It is a must to learn about the history of the ‘other.’ In my opinion, it is very important that we also address the intellectual history of Islam, recognize its outstanding cultural achievements, and strive to find common ground, even if it is sometimes difficult.”

During her life as a scholar, Annemarie Schimmel focused intensively on improving understanding between Islam and the West. With her in-depth analysis, she communicated the ideological and artistic content of Islamic culture, and especially its beauty and intellectual wealth – not only to German or European readers, but also to Americans and other cultures. She was always committed to dialogue, and made an effort – through media, literature, and face-to-face meetings – to get Christians interested in Islamic culture and Muslims interested in Christian culture. In the verses of famous Islamic poets and mystics she met the “true” Islam, which is embedded in believers’ hearts and waiting to be discovered.

For her, the first prerequisite for dialogue is knowledge of one’s own culture and the other culture, be a person Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist.

“Without mutual knowledge there is no mutual understanding, without understanding there is no mutual respect and no trust, and without trust, there is no peace, but the risk of a clash.”

Annemarie Schimmel would never have entered a dialogue without knowledge about the culture of her counterpart. In her view, people should keep and practice their religions. They should take it seriously, but at the same time, try to get to know other cultures and values and to accept them. In many conversations and interviews, she regretted that the Christian and the Islamic cultures knew so little about each other, because if they knew, they would surely appreciate each other – which she experienced over and over again during her long stays in Islamic countries. According to her, even brief conversations with taxi drivers can be very valuable in this regard.

She became friends with countless people from other cultures. Her image of Islam was not shaped primarily by her years of occupation with Islamic literature and art, but rather by the encounters with Muslim friends around the world and from all walks of life, who invited and received her lovingly in their houses and made her familiar with their culture.

Ms. Schimmel traveled with her mother from Edirne to Konya and Gaziantep, throughout Anatolia. They met with many people, from all layers of society, every one of whom taught them another personal piece of Turkish culture.

“We have to get to know other cultures better. You never finish with it; there is always something new to learn and to do: reading, giving lectures, and just keeping people informed. Everybody who knows Islam knows that Islam and terrorism have nothing in common,” she said in an interview. She relied on a quote of St. Augustine’s, “Res tantum cognoscitur quantum diligitur” (You only understand what you love), and on an Arabic proverb, which is mentioned in the prose works of Rumi: “Man is the enemy of what he does not know.”

Only a few Christians know that in Islam, Jesus is considered a forerunner to Muhammad and therefore enjoys the highest esteem in the eyes of Muslims, whereas Muhammad has a negative image in the West, peace be upon them both. Ms. Schimmel complained about this. In her book Jesus and Mary in Islamic Mysticism, she noted that Jesus is mentioned in the Qur’an in 15 chapters and a total of 93 verses, and that Mary is the only woman who is mentioned in the Qur’an by name – and thus is of great importance to all Muslim women.

Her greatest concern was a dialogue of equals. In Germany, she regretted and criticized that, for a long time, Catholic bishops had no other dialogue partners than Turkish engineers and distributors. She deemed this fact a main obstacle to understanding. Therefore she encouraged the German government to educate Imams and German-Islamic theologians. Eight years after her death, her wish came true. In April, 2011, the inauguration of the Centre for Islamic Theology at Tübingen took place – a milestone for interfaith dialogue in Germany.

Ms. Schimmel made the Turkish culture known in Germany and the German culture known in Islamic countries. During a five-year stay in Turkey, she wrote innumerable articles under her pseudonym, Cemile Kıratlı, for the magazines Hayat and Istanbul Dergisi. She did not forget her roots, but at the same time tried to absorb other cultures.

Annemarie Schimmel died in Bonn, in 2003, at the age of 81. Before her death, she said she was looking forward to finally seeing the hereafter with her own eyes, rather than only reading about it. Her last wish was that at her funeral, the opening chapter of the Qur’an be recited. Friends have engraved her life motto in both German and Persian on her grave stone: “People sleep, and when they die, they wake up.”

Conclusion

In her pursuit of understanding, Annemarie Schimmel was a role model for all people. It is important for our society to respect her efforts and follow her example. It is important that the Christian and the Islamic cultures get to know each other better in the future, because this is the only way prejudices and misunderstandings can be reduced. Annemarie Schimmel, Herder, Goethe, Klee, Rilke, Rumi, Yunus Emre, and Iqbal have proved the fact that there are no impenetrable barriers between cultures and religions.

“Then one day – Inshallah, God willing – we will find, as Goethe did, a way that will enrich both sides: the Orient through the encounter with the deep-rooted European culture and us through the knowledge of an infinitely rich past and a versatile oriental culture that comes to light in literature and grammar, in the heights of mysticism, but also in the most beautiful flowers of the arabesques. And then perhaps we may one day say (as Goethe put it once so well): Orient and Occident can no longer be separated.”

A few examples from Schimmel’s works: As Through A Veil : Mystical Poetry in Islam (1982); Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975); Islam: An Introduction (1992); My Soul Is A Woman: The Feminine in Islam (1997); A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (1992); Mohammad Iqbal, Poet and Philosopher (1960); Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (1990); A Dance of Sparks: Imagery of Fire in Ghalib’s Poetry (1983)

Though most outsiders view Chinese culture as being monolithic, both ethnically and religiously, there are over 20 million Muslims living within China. They’ve managed to peacefully co-exist with both their Muslim and Chinese identities.

Few people know that the Hui People, who are one of the fifty-five minorities of the People’s Republic of China, have been practicing Islam for 14 centuries, ever since Islam first emerged in Arabia. Even fewer people know that of those fifty-five officially recognized minorities of China, ten of them practice Islam. The Hui people particularly stand out from the rest of the Muslim minorities for a number of reasons. For example, as opposed to the other Muslim minorities for whom Chinese is a second language, the Hui People speak Chinese regional dialects. In addition to the language difference, contrary to the other Muslim minorities who are concentrated in the same region, the Hui people are spread out all over China. As a result of this regional diverse, the Hui People share many cultural similarities with the Han Chinese. These are only two distinctions that separate the Hui People from the other Muslim minorities in China, and while these two alone make the Hui People unique, there are even more differences that deserve recognition. The study of the Hui People is important because it will demonstrate how Islam has been practiced in harmony with Chinese culture for centuries. Furthermore, this study will also explain how one becomes loyal to his/her Chinese and Muslim identities simultaneously, because Chinese Muslims don’t find any problem in identifying themselves as Chinese and adopting Chinese customs that agree with Islam. Accordingly, the rest of the paper will give an overview about the origins and main characteristics of the Hui People before explaining the adaptation of Islam to the Chinese culture.

Who are the ten Muslim minorities of China?

The main focus of this paper will be an analysis of the particular characteristics of the Hui People. However, before undertaking the analysis, I will give a brief overview of the other nine Muslim minorities in China. The Chinese government has categorized its minorities based by nationality ever since 1949. Furthermore, the ten Muslim minorities of China were categorized by their ethnicity, including the Hui People. Six of the nine Muslim minorities, namely Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tatars and Tajiks, predominantly live in the XinJiang Autonomous Region, which is also known as Eastern Turkistan to many non-Chinese (Dillon, 1996, p.4). They all speak a form of Turkic language, except the Tajiks who speak Persian (Dillon, 1996, p.4). The remaining three Muslim minorities, who are the Salars, the Boa’an, and the Dongxiang, live in different regions. The Salars are another Turkic speaking Muslim minority in China that live in a region that borders the Gansu and Qinghai provinces (Dillon, 1996, p.4). The Salars trace their ancestry back to people who migrated from the Samarkand region during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The Boa’an live in the southwest of the Gansu province, while the Dongxiang live in the western-edge of Gansu province. Both trace their ancestors back to the Asian troops sent out during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). The Boa’an and Dongxiang languages also originate from the Mongolian language family, even though they are different from each other (Dillon, 1996, p.12)

The etymology of “Hui”

The Chinese word hui consists of two squares which literally means “return.” According to a Chinese Muslim scholar, “[t]he outer square means the universality of Islam, whereas the inner square refers to the Ka’bah” (Cahuh, 2004, p.156). In addition to this definition of hui), some Chinese Muslim scholars describe “the religion of the Hui as the religion that returns us to Allah,” the name of God in Islam (Cahuh, 2004, p.156).

The term ‘hui’ was used to describe all Muslims in China before the People’s Republic of China, in 1949, even though there were various nations practicing Islam during imperial China, including various Turkic people, Persians, and Arabs. The identification of Muslims as ‘hui’ gained a widespread usage starting with the Yuan Dynasty (1368-1644), ruled by the Mongols. After Imperial China, the Communist Government identified the Hui People with those who “do not have a language of their own but speak the dialects of the peoples among whom they live” (Gladney, 1996, p.20). Today the Hui People are famously known as Chinese Muslims.

The Development of Islam in China

Interestingly, the first appearance of Islam in China dates back to the 7th century in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), following the emergence of Islam in Arabia in 610 CE. Arab and Persian traders, soldiers and Sufi saints played a significant role in this transmission of Islam to Asia. Persian and Arab traders first settled in the southeastern coast of China, Canton (Guangzhou,) Xiamen, Quanzhou, Yangzhou, and some of them married local Chinese. However, this was a small amount of the Muslim community, and they were of little interest to local officials during Tang and Song Dynasties (618-1279 CE) (Gladney, 1996, p.17).

The Yuan Dynasty (1368-1644) was a landmark in terms of the spread of Islam in China because the Mongol rulers forced many Muslims living in Central Asia and Western Asia to migrate to China. “[T]he armies of Genghis Khan and his successors sacked major Islamic centers, including Bukhara and Samarkand, and transported sections of the population-skilled armourers, other craftsmen, and enslaved women and children among them-back to China, where they were settled as servants to Mongol aristocrats” (Dillon, 1996, p.17). In addition, the Mongol rulers of China made legal and hierarchical distinctions between the four kinds of people that led the Muslims to have higher status than the Chinese because the Muslims succeeded the Mongols who were at the top level (Gladney, 1996, p18).

Muslims in China believed that Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, the maternal uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, along with the three companions of the Prophet, were the first Muslims in China. In accordance with this claim, He Qiaoyuan, a seventeenth century Chinese scholar, also stated that “the prophet’s four apostles arrived in China to preach during the middle of the reign of Emperor Wude in the Tang Dynasty” (Sen, 2009, p.80). At the same time, many Chinese Muslims pay visit to a tomb which is associated with Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas in Canton (Guangzhou). Today there are even some Chinese Muslims who trace back their ancestry to Abi Waqqas. However, contemporary scholars regarded that this chronicle was a legend due to the lack of evidence. Instead, they argued the beginning of Islam in China started with the envoy sent by Caliph Usthman, in the Tang Dynasty, in 651 (Sen, 2009, p.81).

Han Kitab

The Han Kitab is a collection of treatises, translations and books constructed by different Chinese Muslim scholars between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Wang Daiyu, Ma Zhu, and Liu Zhi are the most well-known authors of the Han Kitab. The authors of the Han Kitab took an unprecedented position in the history of Islam in China by using predominantly Neo-Confucian terms in the introduction and description of fundamental Islamic concepts such as prophethood, God, and ritual. The Han Kitab is the very example of the adaptation of Muslims into Chinese culture. For example, the concept of prophethood in Islam, is explained with the Neo-Confucian concept “shengren” which means “a link in the long chain of sages sent by Heaven to communicate the Way through their worldly teaching” (Frankel, 2011, p.88). In short, the authors of the Han Kitab are mainly concerned about making abstract Islamic terms more understandable by using the existing religious terminology in China.

Practicing Religion in Muslim China

With the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the Chinese government’s shift in its attitude towards the practice of religions certainly enabled the revival of religious institutions and the free practice of religions in China. In fact, comparing the other Muslim minorities, the Hui People hold much more freedom in terms of practicing Islam. Political issues mainly lead other Muslim minorities to encounter some restrictions in practicing Islam. For example, the political, cultural and religious activities of Uyghurs are closely monitored and restricted by the government because they are considered as a threat to national unity.

With regard to the Hui’s religious traditions, they consider themselves Sunni Muslims who follow the Hanafi School of law. The mainstream Islam is called gedimu in Chinese, which is the transliteration of the Arabic word al qadim, “the ancient.” They call their Imams ahong, deriving from the Persian word akhong. As seen, it is possible to encounter the transliteration of both Arabic and Persian terms in the Hui People’s religious and daily life expressions. The Hui People also have names in the traditional Chinese forms, along with a religious name. Mahmud Ma Xiao and Sharif Wang Yongliang are examples of Hui names. There are also some common names among the Hui, “like Ma, probably derived from the first syllable of Muhammad” (Dillon, 1996, p.50-53).

In addition, the close interactions between the Hui people with Chinese culture were reflected in the mosques built in the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and early Qing dynasties because they have a similar architectural style with the Buddhist and Daoist pagodas constructed in the same period. However, the recently built mosques have been following the models of “Afghanistan, Iran, the republics of the former Soviet Central Asia, or the Arab world” architectural styles (Dillon, 1996, p.38).

That the Hui People are scattered around the country is a significant sign indicating the integration of the Hui People into all walks of life. It is unexpected that a minority group does not concentrate in a region, but spreads out all over the country. In the case of the Hui, they are all around the country even though most of them live in Ningxia, Gansu, Henan, Hebei, Qinghai, Shandong, Yunnan, Xinjiang, Liaoning and Anhui provinces. As for the population of the Hui, they are one of the most populous minorities in China, following the Zhuang and the Manchu. According to the report on Mapping on the Global Muslim Population conducted by Pew Research Center (2009), there are 22 million Muslims in China (p.7). To another report on International Religious Freedom conducted by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (2006), “there were 20 million Muslims, more than 40,000 Islamic places of worship (more than half of which are in Xinjiang), and more than 45,000 imams nationwide.” The same report also announced that the Hui People nearly consisted of the half of the Muslims in China.

Despite the fact that the Hui share many cultural affinities with the Han, it is obvious that their practice of Islam distinguishes them from the Han Chinese. For example, the Hui, like all Muslims, observe some dietary rules, such as not eating pork and any meat not slaughtered according to the Islamic way. Nevertheless, when one says meat in China, the Han first recall pork. Mao Zedong, who is the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, also said that pork is “a national treasure” of China (Gladney, 1996, p.13). As for dressing, Hui men wear a white skullcap and Hui women cover their head with a headscarf originating from their Muslim identity. At the same time, as opposed to the Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn which are the most common Chinese festivals, the Hui primarily celebrate annual Lesser Bairam (Eid ul-Fitr), and Corban (eid ul-adha) along with all Muslims around the world.

Conclusion

It is a little known fact that over 10 million Chinese speaking people – not including Turkic, Persian and Mongolian speaking Muslims – practice Islam today. This piece touched upon some of striking features of these Chinese Muslims, called the Hui. The earlier sources established that the first presence of Islam in China dated back to not long after the rise of Islam. The example of the Hui people also demonstrates how a Muslim society is well adapted to another culture while also maintaining its Islamic identity. Muslims have been inevitably influenced by Chinese culture and have adopted some parts of it – such as architecture, language, customs, and clothing – that do not disagree with the fundamentals of Islam. It is an undeniable fact that the Hui people’s practice of Islam has prevented them from being assimilated and absorbed into Chinese culture. The examples given in the last section, Practicing Religion in Muslim China, show that the Hui people maintain their Islamic identity while also owning their Chinese identity. This ideology was first documented by the Chinese Muslim literati who explicitly stated, three hundred years ago, in the Han Kitab, that Islam is compatible with Chinese culture