102 replies to this topic

[saladin1970]

The Hui are mostly descendants of Arab and Persian merchants who settled in China and married local women from the Tang to Yuan dynasties, or converts to Islam in China (including Mongols in Yunnan) during the same period. They are the only one of China's 56 official nationalities to be defined by their religion rather than by language or ancestry.

I will merge your thread with our older one on the Hui ethnic group.

This link is to a photographer called peter sanders. The photos are flash so i can't put them up directly only the link.

www.petersanders.co.uk

if you go to travel, there are some very good pictures of hui chinese

[DearCoolZ]

i'm a hui

[galvatron prime]

i want to ask ,are hui desendent from' semu 'during yuan dynastly era ,i see some sources say that zheng he was a' semu' ,are this true ,are the jews in china sometimes refer as hui too ,anyways how the hui treat the jews in china.

[saladin1970]

i'm a hui

I also read that traditionally the Hui where China's main warriers , the 5 ma (or something). Together they gave Chairman Mao's army a bloody nose, and where highly renowned for their martial arts.

[Yun]

i want to ask ,are hui desendent from' semu 'during yuan dynastly era

'Semu' was actually a very broad and generic classification used by the Yuan dynasty for people in China who were not Mongol, Jurchen, Khitan, or 'Han'. This included Arabs, Persians, Turks, Jews, Europeans, and possibly even Tanguts. Semu literally means 'coloured eyes', but is probably a transliteration of a Mongol word that means something else.

[ChiangAP]

How the hui treat the jews in china.

I doubt they are the least bothered. IMO, 回教人have enough on their plate without having to import hatred of Jews who are only in small number.

For what I can read, China's policy with regards to Israel and the Middle east countries seems pretty balanced

Here is a quotation from a Mr Elazar (Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs):

The State of the Kaifeng Community
There are four groups of Jews, or people of Jewish descent in China. The first are the so-called Chinese Jews of Kaifeng, now estimated at some 100 families totalling approximately 500 people. The city of Kaifeng, located approximately 300 miles from Beijing, contains the remnants of a Jewish community which flourished in the city from about the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, and which continued to be identifiably Jewish until the 1840s. The origins of the community are unclear, although they appear to be derived from an invitation extended by a Sung Dynasty emperor to a group of Jews to settle and manufacture cotton fabrics in Kaifeng, which at that time was the imperial capital. Approximately 1000 Jews responded as a group and formed a community, which reached its peak in the Middle Ages, when Jews from Western and Southern Asia (principally Iran, Afghanistan and India of today) were actively involved in the China trade. They settled in at least six other cities throughout China, including Beijing in the seventeenth century.

Of those communities, only Kaifeng Jewry flourished sufficiently to survive for a millennium, preserving some traces of their Jewishness until their synagogue was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1840s and the last of them assimilated. The only remnants of the community today are a knowledge of the site of the synagogue, upon which another building now stands; a stele from the Middle Ages with inscriptions of major events in the history of the community carved into it, but no longer legible; and a practice, still preserved by some, of avoiding the eating of pork. The surviving records and artifacts of the community have long since been transferred to Britain or the United States. I myself have seen one of the community's two surviving Torah scrolls in the Hebrew Union College library in Cincinnati. There are substantial records of the community's existence, compiled or written by Europeans, since the Kaifeng Jews were discovered by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century.

End of quote

Indeed, I read in a 1704 Jesuit report about a visit to a synagog used by a very small and very ancient Chinese Jewish community ("Tiao-kin-kiao"????).

[xuanzang]

Thanks ppl for sharing the knowledge, really learned a lot about Hui ppl.
I just hope Han''s and Hui''s can keep their good relationship in the future, and not make it a mess like in the western countries.

[Suren911]

^Huis generally have no problems living with the rest of Chinese. But if you go to the suburbs in Xi'an, you'll hear some Hui old ladies bad mouth Han people lol.

Not all people of the lastname "Ma" is a Hui and not all Hui are descended from Persian and Arabs. Hui is a very general term. Kind of like the term "Native American" with many different tribes within this category. The genetic composition of a Hui from Xi'an is obviousy different from a Hui from Hainan Island. But both will identify as Hui. Some Hui can look very Chinese and some look very middle eastern. It has a lot of Han converts as well as descendents of the original Persian and Arab settlers. My aunt is a Hui and she can easily pass off as half Caucasian whereas some of my Hui classmates looked no different from other Chinese.

[saladin1970]

I Need Guide Information Halal Food Restaurant In Shanghai & Beijing ...

Can List Hui & Muslim (Indian, Pakistani & Malay) Restaurant...???
Similiar Like My Grandfather...

Hang Li Po, i know it is a little late, but http://www.islamichi...s/halalfood.htm

all i ask in return is you add some information about islam in malaysia to the muslimwikipedia :-)

[Yun]

Hui is a very general term. Kind of like the term "Native American" with many different tribes within this category.

In fact, the Hui should not be considered an ethnic group at all. The only thing that defines them as a single group is their religion and the resulting halal diet they eat. They are really a religious community. To get a feel of how incongruous the classification is, imagine a PRC citizen of Han ethnicity who converts to Islam. He or she can immediately apply to be reclassified ethnically as a Hui. The same would be true if the citizen was originally of Mongol, Tibetan, Manchu, Yao, or any other ethnicity besides those that are already largely Muslim (i.e. the Uygurs, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kirgiz, and Bonan).

Or imagine if the PRC had a separate ethnic classification for Christians, or the USA had a separate ethnic classification for Buddhists. Such 'ethnic groups' would be just as diverse as the Hui.

[DearCoolZ]

In fact, the Hui should not be considered an ethnic group at all. The only thing that defines them as a single group is their religion and the resulting halal diet they eat. They are really a religious community. To get a feel of how incongruous the classification is, imagine a PRC citizen of Han ethnicity who converts to Islam. He or she can immediately apply to be reclassified ethnically as a Hui. The same would be true if the citizen was originally of Mongol, Tibetan, Manchu, Yao, or any other ethnicity besides those that are already largely Muslim (i.e. the Uygurs, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kirgiz, and Bonan).

Or imagine if the PRC had a separate ethnic classification for Christians, or the USA had a separate ethnic classification for Buddhists. Such 'ethnic groups' would be just as diverse as the Hui.

that is quite insulting to me,as you already knew i myself a hui.why shouldn't hui be considered a separeted ethnic group?its well recorded in history that there were many waves of people from persia,arabs,and central asian turks that eventurely setteled down in china and mixed witht he local han chinese womenand thurs created a new hybird ethnicity,huizu.
if you think all huis are converted hans,then you are wrong. go to the hui community in zhengzhou,henan and you would find many middle eastern looking huis .

Edited by DearCoolZ, 20 October 2006 - 11:21 PM.

[Yun]

its well recorded in history that there were many waves of people from persia,arabs,and central asian turks that eventurely setteled down in china and mixed witht he local han chinese womenand thurs created a new hybird ethnicity,huizu.

The same could be said of Xiongnu, Xianbei, Khitan, Jurchen etc. who intermarried with local 'Han' women. Their descendants are now all classified as Han, rather than as a "new hybrid ethnicity", because no elements of Xiongnu, Xianbei, etc. ancestry remain visible. The only thing that enables the Hui to assert that they haven't been 'assimilated' like other descendants of intermarriage is their religion. But having the same religion still doesn't necessarily translate to being a single ethnic group. The Persians, Arabs, and Central Asian Turks were all Muslims, but were they the same ethnic group? No: Persians, Arabs, and Turks are ethnically different. So why should their descendants in China be grouped under the same ethnicity? And why should 'Han' people who converted to Islam be grouped with them?

if you think all huis are converted hans,then you are wrong.

I don't think that they are all converted Hans. If I did, I wouldn't say they're such a diverse group that the only thing they have in common is religion.

that is quite insulting to me,as you already knew i myself a hui.

I kind of expected you'd be insulted. After all, a number of your first posts on CHF were pictures of yourself with the question "guess what ethnicity I am"? You're clearly quite proud of the fact that you 'look Han' but are actually Hui. Well, isn't the fact that many Hui 'look like Han' precisely because not all the Hui have Middle Eastern or Central Asian ancestors anyway?

I don't think you have to see being called a religious community rather than an ethnic group as an insult to the Hui. After all, shouldn't religion be more important than ethnicity for a Muslim? That's what makes the universal Umma possible, isn't it?

[xuanzang]

But isn't it up to the Hui's to decide what is an insult to them in this matter ? As much as you can argue that Hui's are a religious community, they ARE an official ethnicity in China, and one of the biggest, it is not without good reasons I guess ?

I don't think you have to see being called a religious community rather than an ethnic group as an insult to the Hui. After all, shouldn't religion be more important than ethnicity for a Muslim? That's what makes the universal Umma possible, isn't it?

[Yun]

As much as you can argue that Hui's are a religious community, they ARE an official ethnicity in China, and one of the biggest, it is not without good reasons I guess ?

The original 'Hui' classification included among the five official ethnic groups of the ROC was purely arbitrary. It included all Muslim citizens regardless of whether they were Uygur, Tajik, Uzbek, or virtually indistinguishable from the 'Han' other than in the aspect of religion. This was not a real ethnic category at all, instead it was a religious category awkwardly grouped with four ethnic categories.

The PRC tried to make the classification system truer to reality by allowing ethnic minority groups to apply for official recognition. Needless to say, the Uygurs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazaks, Kirgiz, and even the Bonan and Dongxiang applied for official minority status based on the fact that they had their own distinct languages. Those left in the Hui category were Muslims who did not speak a language distinct from Han and therefore could not be further differentiated into different groups, but who did not wish to be classified as Han. This status as a 'default' category caused the Hui to become the largest minority group in the PRC after the Manchus and Zhuang. But the Hui classification remains very imprecise - not all Hui actually speak only the Han language. There are two groups officially classified as Hui but which should really be official minorities in themselves: the Utsat of Hainan, who speak a Cham language and are descended from Cham immigrants, and the Keji of Tibet who speak Tibetan languages and are descended from Kashmiri immigrants.

The 'Hui' in the Qing dynasty consisted of diverse groups spread all over the empire, sharing only religion as a common factor. The Muslims in Yunnan, the Muslims in Gansu and Shaanxi, and the Muslims in Tibet did not have a common ethnic identity, nor did they necessarily see themselves as distinct from Uygur Muslims in Xinjiang. Yet because of the classification systems of the ROC and PRC, and because of their unwillingness to be included in the Han category, they are all regarded as being a single ethnic group today.

I would recommend books by the US anthropologist Dru Gladney, an expert on the Hui, for a detailed analysis of the problems inherent in classifying the Hui as an ethnic group rather than a religious community.