ABSTRACT
China’s 20 million Muslims are both transnational (in that their identifications as “national minorities” is integral to China’s formation as a nation-state and most of them have significant populations outside of China) and transgressors of the nation-state (in that many of them, especially many Uighurs, are attempting to establish their own independent nation-state). This chapter will seek to understand both the transnational and transgressional aspects of Muslim identity in China in terms of the accommodation to or resistance against the dominant Chinese host culture and political milieu. Many of the challenges China’s Muslims confront remain the same as they have for the last 1,400 years of continuous interaction with Chinese society, but many are new as a result of China’s transformed and increasingly transnational, globalized society, and especially as a result of the watershed events of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent “war on terrorism.” Muslims in China live as minority communities amid a sea of people, in their view, who are largely pork-eating, polytheist, secularist, and kafir (“heathen”). Nevertheless, many of their small and isolated communities have survived in rather inhospitable circumstances for over a millennium. Though small in population percentage (about 2 percent in China), their numbers are nevertheless large in comparison with other Muslim states.
