tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post6351083758271389137..comments2024-03-27T15:36:44.737-07:00Comments on Haq's Musings: July Vacation in BeijingRiaz Haqhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-34463502689292161512016-08-03T20:04:16.565-07:002016-08-03T20:04:16.565-07:00#China's #Muslim explorer Admiral Zheng He may...#China's #Muslim explorer Admiral Zheng He may have reached #America before #Columbus, says new book https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/sideshow/chinese-explorer-may-have-discovered-america-before-columbus--according-to-new-book-201051307.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=tw … via @Yahoo<br /><br />Does a 600-year-old Chinese map prove that Christopher Columbus was not the first international explorer to navigate the New World?<br /><br />In his book “Who Discovered America?,” published Tuesday, author Gavin Menzies says the settling of North America by nonnative peoples is more complex than previously thought.<br /><br />‘The traditional story of Columbus discovering the New World is absolute fantasy, it’s fairy tales,” Menzies, 76, said in an interview with the Daily Mail.<br /><br />However, not everyone is sold on the theory. Menzies has been derided as a “pseudo-historian” by critics, who say his claims are grandiose and not based in historical fact. Menzies has primarily focused his studies on when and how North America was first explored but he has also argued that the mythological city of Atlantis was real.<br /><br />Menzies also has passionate supporters — his previous books have been best-sellers, and proponents of his theories have donated millions to his efforts, allowing him to hire a number of experts to join in his investigations.<br /><br />Menzies says that the Chinese map, found in a bookstore and created in the 18th century, is attributed to Chinese Admiral Zheng He and shows a detailed map of America dating back to 1418. That would place Zheng He’s efforts some 70 years ahead of Columbus. In fact, Menzies says Columbus used a copy of Zheng He's map to plot his own voyage.<br /><br />Zheng He — a Muslim eunuch — is arguably the most famous explorer in Chinese history. Deployed by the emperor, He led Chinese fleets on voyages of discovery that helped expand the empire’s knowledge of the world to include previously unknown areas in the Middle East and Africa. His influence over Asian culture was so strong that he is still considered a god in parts of Indonesia.<br /><br />An appraiser from Christie’s has authenticated the map itself, but there is currently no way of proving the map was based on images drafted in the 1400s. However, Menzies says that certain observations on the map, including descriptions of communities and other cultural landmarks in Peru, coincide with known data from that period.<br /><br />In addition, Menzies makes an even broader claim in his book, saying that Chinese sailors were the first to cross the Pacific Ocean 40,000 years ago. Menzies says there is DNA evidence to support his claim.<br /><br />So how does Menzies believe the Chinese pulled off such a giant historical accomplishment thousands of years before anyone else?<br /><br />“If you just go out in a plastic bathtub, the currents will just carry you there,” Menzies told the Mail. “They just came with the current, it’s as simple as that.”<br /><br />The current historical version of events says that individuals from what is now Asia crossed into North America via a land bridge extending from the Bering Strait.<br /><br />Critics of Menzies point out that he holds no degrees or professional training as a historian. But the Daily Mail says he “can no longer be called an amateur” after his most recent efforts.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-32011751924247682412016-02-02T21:09:07.676-08:002016-02-02T21:09:07.676-08:00Light Government Touch Lets #China’s Hui #Muslims ...Light Government Touch Lets #China’s Hui #Muslims Practice #Islam in the Open and Flourish http://nyti.ms/202HNho <br /><br />Asked about the Chinese government’s light touch here, Liu Jun, 37, the chief imam at the Banqiao Daotang Islamic School, offered a knowing smile.<br /><br />“Muslims from other parts of China who come here, especially from Xinjiang, can’t believe how free we are, and they don’t want to leave,” he said, referring to the far-west borderlands that are home to China’s beleaguered Uighur ethnic minority. “Life for the Hui is very good.”<br /><br />With an estimated Muslim population of 23 million, China has more followers of Islam than many Arab countries. Roughly half of them live in Xinjiang, an oil-rich expanse of Central Asia where a cycle of violence and government repression has alarmed human rights advocates and unnerved Beijing over worries about the spread of Islamic extremism.<br /><br />But here in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a relatively recent administrative construct that is the official heartland of China’s Hui Muslim community, that kind of strife is almost nonexistent, as are the limitations on religion that critics say are fueling Uighur discontent.<br /><br />Throughout Ningxia and the adjacent Gansu Province, new filigreed mosques soar over even the smallest villages, adolescent boys and girls spend their days studying the Quran at religious schools, and muezzin summon the faithful via loudspeakers — a marked contrast to mosques in Xinjiang, where the local authorities often forbid amplified calls to prayer.<br /><br />In Hui strongholds like Linxia, a city in Gansu known as China’s “Little Mecca,” there are mosques on every other block and women can sometimes be seen with veils, a sartorial choice that can lead to detention in Xinjiang.<br /><br />“It’s easy to live an intensely Muslim life here,” said Ma Habibu, 67, a retired truck driver, whose surname, Ma, with its phonetic resemblance to the name Mohammed, is common among the Hui. “Even government officials here are very devout and study the Quran every day.”<br /><br />Descendants of Persian and Arab traders who settled along the Silk Road and took Chinese wives, the nation’s 10 million Hui are a minority primarily defined by their faith and, in some cases, solely their culinary habits. Compared with the Uighurs, they have also demonstrated a remarkable ability to coexist with the Communist Party, an organization hard-wired to distrust those whose first loyalty belongs to a higher power.<br /><br />Unlike the Uighurs, who speak a Turkic dialect and whose Eurasian features set them apart from the country’s Han Chinese majority, the Hui speak Chinese and are often indistinguishable from their non-Muslim neighbors. In much of China, the white caps worn by men and the head scarves worn by women are all that give them away. In many places, the Hui have so thoroughly assimilated that their only connection to Islam is a vestigial aversion to pork.<br /><br />Most subscribe to a moderate brand of Islam, though tradition frowns upon intermarriage — Hui men who break convention by marrying outside the faith often demand that their wives convert to Islam.<br /><br />Their loyalty to the Communist Party has been well rewarded. In places like Linxia, people can easily obtain passports and about half of the senior officials are ethnic Hui, according to local residents. In Xinjiang, by contrast, most important government posts go to the Han, and young Uighurs find it hard to get passports to travel abroad. Government workers in Xinjiang who go to mosques or fast during the holy month of Ramadan often find themselves unemployed.<br /><br />But even in Ningxia and Gansu, official tolerance has its limits. During a recent five-day journey through Hui communities that fleck the arid foothills of the Tibetan plateau, several imams said proselytizing to non-Muslims was forbidden, as was contact with Islamic organizations outside China. Accepting overseas donations for the construction of a mosque was also sure to invite trouble from the authorities.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-37893911600549316972013-03-19T10:03:05.485-07:002013-03-19T10:03:05.485-07:00Here's a video report on women only mosques of...Here's a <a href="http://chinafile.com/last-call-prayer" rel="nofollow">video report</a> on women only mosques of Hui Muslims in China:<br /><br /><i>China’s Hui Muslims are unique in many respects. The country’s second-largest ethnic minority share linguistic and cultural ties with the majority in China that have allowed them to practice their religion with less interference and fewer restrictions than others, like Uighur Muslims and Tibetans. Outside of China, the Hui practice of installing women as the head of female-only mosques has been viewed with criticism and admiration. In this video, we look inside the lives of Hui women and what the practice, and the religion, means to them.</i><br /><br />http://chinafile.com/last-call-prayerRiaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-42334279044645138102012-12-23T10:31:35.848-08:002012-12-23T10:31:35.848-08:00It's a little known fact that Chinese Adm Zhen...It's a little known fact that Chinese Adm Zheng He was Muslim.<br /><br />Here's an excerpt from Henry Kissinger's book <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=4pFfYliTIMkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=kissinger+china+book&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0j7XUP3xF6aAiwKG94DQAg&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=Zheng%20He%20Muslim&f=false" rel="nofollow">"On China"</a> about Zheg He:<br /><br />"...in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, between 1405 and 1433, China launched one of history's most remarkable and mysterious enterprises: Admiral Zheng He set out in fleets of technologically unparalleled "treasure ships" to destinations as far as Java, India, the Horn of Africa, and the Strait of Hormuz. At the time of Zheng's voyages, the European age of exploration had not yet begun. China's fleet possessed what would have a unbridgeable technological advantage in the size, sophistication and of its vessels, it dwarfed the Spanish Armada (which was still 150 years away).<br /><br />Historians still debate the purpose of these missions. Zheng He was a singular figure in the age of exploration: a Chinese Muslim eunuch conscripted into the imperial service as a child, he fits no historical precedent."<br /><br />http://books.google.com/books?id=4pFfYliTIMkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=kissinger+china+book&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0j7XUP3xF6aAiwKG94DQAg&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=Zheng%20He%20Muslim&f=falseRiaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-48796402839234783592012-10-10T10:34:12.026-07:002012-10-10T10:34:12.026-07:00Here's NY Times on female Muslim Imams in Chin...Here's <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/world/asia/10iht-letter10.html" rel="nofollow">NY Times</a> on female Muslim Imams in China:<br /><br /><i>BEIJING — Could an old religious tradition from China help solve one of the world’s most pressing problems — violence committed in the name of Islam? <br /><br /> The irony of an officially atheist country possibly offering a way out of an international religious problem is intense. Yet that is what some Islamic scholars in China and elsewhere hope may happen as they point to a quietly liberal tradition among China’s 10 million Hui Muslims, where female imams and mosques for women are flourishing in a globally unique phenomenon.<br /><br />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. <br />------------<br /> Female imams and women’s mosques are not “a new thing here. It’s just a cultural tradition that was never interfered with,” Ms. Shui, an author and researcher at the Henan Academy of Social Sciences in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, said in an interview.<br /><br />That is what makes it so important, said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a prominent Islamic legal scholar.<br /><br />“The Chinese tradition of women’s mosques is rooted in Islamic history. It is not novel, a corruption or innovation or some type of heretical practice,” Mr. Abou El Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a recorded interview.<br /><br />China’s liberal Hui tradition therefore challenges the power of Wahhabism, a puritanical, patriarchal sect dominant in Saudi Arabia today that is behind much Islamic extremism, he said.<br /><br />“The Chinese example preserves and reminds Muslims of an important jurisprudential and historical phenomenon that Wahhabism tried to wipe out,” he said.<br /><br />“Contemporary fundamentalist movements use the space provided by the mosque to affirm all types of patriarchy and male power over women,” he said. “When you have something like the Chinese example, which ultimately empowers women to work within their own space and lead prayer and manage that space on their own, it’s a significant form of women asserting themselves in the Islamic tradition, helping in constructing it and perpetuating it.”<br /><br />“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,” said Mr. Abou El Fadl. “So the point is there’s an old, historically rooted tradition, and the Chinese, if they tap into this tradition, they can effectively provide resistance or examples of resistance to puritanical Islam.”<br /><br />Muslims arrived in China during the Tang dynasty, more than 1,000 years ago, and their numbers swelled during the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century. Mostly from Persia and Central Asia, though some were Arabs, they brought with them traditions that had always emphasized women’s education, said Ms. Shui. But women’s status really took off in the early Qing dynasty, more than 300 years ago, when the numbers of Hui declined as they were absorbed into the majority Han Chinese culture, she said.<br /><br />By then, she said, “most Muslims couldn’t read or speak Arabic. So they relied on women to spread the word, to educate. It wasn’t possible to rely just on the men. There weren’t enough of them.”<br /><br />Far away, in the Arab world, Wahhabism began spreading....</i><br /><br />http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/world/asia/10iht-letter10.htmlRiaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-65103467808268116092011-12-10T20:35:38.201-08:002011-12-10T20:35:38.201-08:00In his book "On China", Henry Kissinger ...In his book "On China", Henry Kissinger mentions the name of Zeng He, a 15th century Muslim admiral, who commanded the first Chinese Navy and made seven major expeditions under Emperor Yongle during Ming dynasty.<br /><br />He was the great great great grandson of Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, a Persian who served in the administration of the Mongolian Empire and was appointed governor of Yunnan during the early Yuan Dynasty.<br /><br />Kissinger says that the world history would have been very different if the Chinese emperors who succeeded Yongle had not decided to end the expeditions.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-77536745814006405272009-11-14T19:39:11.013-08:002009-11-14T19:39:11.013-08:00very useful! thx so much :)very useful! thx so much :)Melody Violinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18366350924374015864noreply@blogger.com