ABSTRACT
Moving slowly down one of the main alleyways of the concentrated Bafang (‘eight districts’) Muslim quarter of Hezhou, known as the ‘Little Mecca’ among China’s Muslims for its large collection of influential mosques, tomb complexes, and madrasas, a young Hui Muslim stopped to peruse one of the many Islamic periodicals and commentaries laid out on a cloth on the ground by a traveling Muslim book salesman. Hezhou, now known as Linxia, is the most likely place in China proper where one might find Persian poetry and short stories for sale on the street. As China’s Hui Muslims speak the mainly Chinese dialects in the areas where they live across the length and breadth of this vast country, very few of them get beyond the memorization of the standard Qu͑rānic Sūra in Arabic, and even fewer begin to read Qu͑rānic Arabic or go on to the Persian commentaries. It is indicative of Hezhou’s place at the heart of Islam in China, therefore, to find Muslims fluent enough in Persian to make it profitable to reprint and sell short stories and poetry from Iran. Located at a traditional crossroads in southwestern Gansu, on the lower escarpments of the Tibetan-Qinghai plateau, it grew up as a redistributive centre linking the wool, tea and opium trades between the northwestern Silk Route and the southwestern Burma Road. From Hezhou many Muslims travelled to and from the Muslim Middle East on missions of trade and pilgrimage. Upon their return, they helped establish Hezhou as the ‘Chinese Mecca’, a pilgrimage centre that drew many local and foreign Muslim travellers, and which is still at the heart of Islam in China today. Like most other Islamic reform movements in China, Hezhou is where the Salafiyya gained their first foothold on the China mainland.
