dogu-turkistan-sempozyumu

FREEEAST TURKISTAN SYMPOSIUMintermarried with Han women, people who lived in isolated communities for themost part, the only thing that some but not all had in common was a belief inIslam. Until the 1950s in China, Islam was simply known as the "Hui religion"(Hui jiao ) -believers in Islam were Huijiao believers. Until then, any personwho was a believer in Islam was a “Hui religion disciple” (Huijiao tu ).The term “Hui” ( ) narrowed in the late 19 th and early 20 th century froma generic term including all Muslims, no matter what their ethnolinguisticbackground, to denote mostly Chinese-speaking Muslims who were caught upin the nationalist movements of 20 th century China. Djamal al-Din Bai Shouyi,the famous Hui Marxist historian, was the first to argue persuasively that “Islam”should be glossed in Chinese as “Yisilan jiao” (Islam), not the Hui religion (Huijiao) (Bai 1951). In a chapter entitled “The Huihui People and the HuihuiReligion,” Bai (1951) ar gued that even though Hui are descendants of Muslimsand have inherited certain Muslim cultural traditions, such as abstention frompork, they do not all necessarily believe in Is lam. “Muslim” is different from“Hui person” (Hui min), and one should not use the term Huijiao (“Hui religion”)but “Islam” (yisilan jiao). He argued that the Hui believed not in their ownreligion, but in the world religion of Islam, and therefore are Muslims in faith. Inethnicity they are the Hui people, not Hui religious disciples. In Marxist terms,he identified a process of the indigenization of a world religion, in this case Islam,to a local context; for the communities now known as the Hui this had beengoing on for 1,200 years. Muslim groups identified by Chinese linguists withwhat was supposed to be their own language derived their ethnonym from theirlanguage family; in this way the Uyghur, Kazakh, Tajik, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tatarwere identified. In this, the Chinese were heavily influenced by the 1920s Sovietidentification of these peoples in Soviet Central Asia (Connor 1984: 53ff ). BaiShouyi went on to identify the Muslim peoples not distinguished by language orlocality as a catch-all residual group known as Hui min, not Huijiao. Thus, theofficial category of the Hui was legitimated, and one might even say, invented,so far as the legal definition of who is considered to be Hui is concerned. TheUyghur were directly affected by this policy for they, too, lost their identity asMuslims, but gained a nationality as an ethnic group (defined not by religion, butby a state policy of nationality recognition).454