yeahhh China! I’ve seen a little bit of Chinese Islam here: I have an ethnically-Hui friend, and for the National Holiday, our group of 8 that ultimately travelled Inner Mongolia together almost went to Xinjiang. On our last day in Hohhot, Chris, Mailyn, and I explored a Chinese Muslim part of the city and saw a mosque/community center type of thing.
Chinese Islam is - just fascinating. Especially for me, coming straight from Turkey/India, this is…just fascinating.
One thing that is especially interesting is how all the Chinese Islam here has been confuddled with the Ottoman Empire. Domes and Aladdin’s lamp are not Islamic, they are Ottoman/Arab/Middle Eastern. But here they are in China, despite the fact that Chinese Islam has enough of its own geographically-appropriate culture to solicit no need of borrowed architectural designs from the Arab world.
From the article:
Female imams and women’s mosques are important because their endurance in China offers a vision of an older form of Islam that has inclusiveness and tolerance, not marginalization and extremism, at its core, the scholars say.
Female imams and women’s mosques are not “a new thing here. It’s just a cultural tradition that was never interfered with,”
“I always see Islam in places in China as reminding Muslims of their authentic tradition before it was impacted by petrol dollars and this very gruff and dry form of Bedouin Islam that came out of Saudi Arabia,”
(Source: samratravels)
I LOVE THIS ARTICLE. As a TCK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid), I relate to this a 110%. Also, objectively speaking, I love the way she wrote this article - this is a great piece. It’s also a great read for anyone from the South Asian diaspora, or anyone who’s lived abroad but has ties to America.
On the flip side, I’m rather annoyed that that the celebration of thanksgiving, a controversial holiday in itself and a part of history we shouldn’t be proud of, is being parroted around all the international American school system, I mean, if you’re getting all the good things about American school systems it’s only fair that you get the bad too, like first-graders playing pilgrims and innocently misappropriating history, but I still don’t like it.
Usually I give an excerpt from the article to entice you guys to read it, but this time the entire article is so good there’s no point SO READ THIS ARTICLE :)
