Muslims have been in China for well over a thousand years and yet they are still regarded as strange and inscrutable and backward, and politically suspect.

Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster

Mention the name Ma Jia Chun--"Ma Household Army"--and most people will bring to mind the incredibly successful running team built up by Ma Junren, the famous athletics coach. For many older Chinese--including the top leadership in Beijing's Zhong Nan Hai--the name has a more political significance, however. During the long period of internecine conflict known as the Warlord Era, much of China's vast north-west lay under the control of the Wu Ma ("Five Ma") warlord group; their collective armies were also widely known--and feared--as the Ma Jia Chun. It was this group which, in 1937, halted the Chinese Communist advance into Central Asia, when it handed the fledgling PLA 'the most cruel and punishing defeat they had suffered up to that time'.

The main distinguishing feature of the Wu Ma warlords, who controlled the provinces of Ningxia, Gansu and Qinghai for most of the period between 1911 and 1949, was that they--and most of their best fighting men--were Chinese-speaking Muslims of Hui nationality. All five bore the clan name Ma--a Sinicised form of the name Muhammad which is very common amongst the Hui. Little enough is known of China's Muslims, and there is a tendency in some quarters to consider them collectively, as a single group. In fact, such is far from the case. Beijing recognises ten separate Muslim nationalities, only one of which (the Hui, making up around 50% of China's more than 15,000,000 Muslims) is Chinese speaking. The remainder--Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and the like--are national minorities in a clearly defined way, like the Tibetans and the Mongols.

In fact the Hui, too, are officially recognised as a national minority. They enjoy a special status, being represented on the national flag. The red banner of the People's Republic bears a large yellow star for the Han majority, and four smaller yellow stars for the Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Hui respectively. Yet, despite this honour, as the perceptive Mr Theroux points out, most Han are at least puzzled by, and often suspicious of their Hui fellow countrymen. Chinese-looking and Chinese-speaking, they nevertheless eschew pork--the favourite food of most Han--read sacred texts in Arabic, pray towards Mecca five times a day, circumcise their sons and observe numerous other inexplicable practices which do not include ancestor worship! In short, from a Han perspective, the Hui are a rather inscrutable people.

What, then, is the position of the Hui in the Chinese body politic? Islam first came to

China more than a thousand years ago. Traders from the Middle East arrived both by land, along the ancient Silk Road, and by sea, especially to the south China coast. Today's Hui--overwhelmingly Sinicised--are the descendants of these traders, and of local Chinese converted by them. Unlike the Turkic Muslims of China's far west, they live scattered throughout the country, from Lhasa to Harbin. In three provinces--Gansu, Qinghai and Yunnan--they make up a fairly substantial part of the population, whilst in the arid northern province of Ningxia the Hui have their own autonomous region.

A product of long-distance commerce between China and the Middle East, the Hui still excel at trade--even if today their mule and camel caravans have increasingly been replaced by fleets of trucks. They are also renowned as hoteliers and restaurateurs--the Chinese sign qing zhen--pure and true, the equivalent of the Arabic term halal--hangs outside thousands of inns and eating places throughout the country. The food is good, the surroundings generally spotless by local standards--but don't always expect to get an alcoholic drink with your meal!

Yunnanese Muslim

Most Hui communities in China proper are surrounded by larger Han districts--like the famous Ox Street community in Beijing. Under such circumstances, Hui interaction with the predominant Han tends to emphasise the "non-Chinese" (Islamic) element amongst the Hui, both in their own attitudes and that of the Han. Conversely, the further from the Han-dominated heart of the country the Hui are found, the more conscious they are of their Chinese identity, and the more proud of their links with the Middle Kingdom. At the same time the "non-Chinese" aspect of the Hui, so disturbing to the Han in Beijing or Shanghai, seems to diminish in comparison with Tibetans, Mongols and Turks, whilst the Chinese element in their ethnic make-up and cultural behaviour begins to seem reassuringly familiar!

All of which means that, the farther Hui Muslims settle from the Chinese centre, the more they seem drawn to it. They have traditionally despised the Turkic Muslims of China's far west, whom they often denigrate as chan-tou or "turban heads". In the heyday of the warlord years the redoubtable Wu Ma clan may have given the PLA a bloody nose--but to the west, in far Xinjiang, their armies savagely put down Turkic separatists, and carried the Kuomintang banner to the Pamirs and the Tien Shan. It was a Hui Muslim general that outraged the Uighurs of Kashgar by hanging a picture of Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of Chinese nationalism, in that city's Id Ga Mosque. In short, the Hui are loyal to China, and strongly oppose any sort of Muslim separatist ideal.

Jim Goodman / CPA

Yunnanese Muslim children.

 Text copyright © Andrew Forbes / CPA 2001.

This article was originally published in the Asian Wall Street Journal.