Muslims take over synagogue to pray

Haaretz: Virginia synagogue doubles as mosque for Ramadan

On Friday afternoons, the people coming to pray at this building take off their shoes, unfurl rugs to kneel on and pray in Arabic. The ones that come Friday evenings put on yarmulkes, light candles and pray in Hebrew.

The building is a synagogue on a tree-lined street in suburban Virginia, but for the past few weeks – during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan – it has also been doubling daily as a mosque. Synagogue members suggested their building after hearing the Muslim congregation was looking to rent a place for overflow crowds.

Comment: I confess…the title is a tad sensational…

Civilian deaths in Gaza under-reported

JPost: Civilian deaths in Gaza op were higher

More than half of the 1,382 Palestinians who were killed by the IDF in Operation Cast Lead did not take part in hostilities, the human rights organization B’Tselem said in a special report being published Wednesday morning regarding Palestinian fatality figures during the fighting. Palestinians search through…

Palestinians search through the rubble of their home in the northern Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead.

B’Tselem wrote that its figures were “the result of months of meticulous investigation and cross-checks with numerous sources.”

Comment: As always, B’Tselem is doing good work on exposing the atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in their recent invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Al-Qaradhawi opens ‘Center for Middle Path in Islam’

Memri: Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi Inaugurates ‘Center for Middle Path in Islam’

International Union of Muslim Scholars head Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi today inaugurated the Al-Qaradhawi Center for the Middle Path in Islam and for Innovation.

At the inauguration ceremony, Al-Qaradhawi explained that the center’s aim was to reinforce the idea of the middle path, which expresses religious moderation

Forget the Muslims in China

Riots in China are not uncommon. For decades, corrupt government officials have abused their power in seizing rural land for the ostensible reason of industrialization and economic progress. Farmers and their families, frustrated by the lack of accountability in the land acquisition process, have consistently banded together and rioted. Much of this go unreported.

But the recent riots in Xinjiang are another matter. Xinjiang was a predominantly Uighur and Muslim province. It still is, but that position is being eroded by the Communist Party’s deliberate policy of transplanting Han Chinese to the region. Like Israel, China seeks to change facts-on-the-ground, by proactively interfering with the demographic so that Uighurs lose all semblance of political power through a loss in its majority status.

To its credit, the Chinese government has established various economic and educational benefits for local Uighurs, but this comes at a price. Education, for example, is oriented toward promoting the Chinese language at the expense of local languages. Widening the Han Chinese base in Northwestern China and building state schools are part of a multifaceted strategy to supplant and eventually replace Uighur culture, language and religion with that of the Han Chinese. This is done in the name of assimilation.

The enormous province of Xinjiang was not always Muslim. Islam came to the region in the tenth century. Although people often make the mistake of lumping Xinjiang’s Muslims together with Hui Muslims, both are not the same. The Uighurs of Xinjiang belong to a Turkic ethnolinguistic group who have lived in Northwest China for thousands of years. They share the land with a host of other ethnicities like Kazaks, Uzbeks and Tartars. By the sixteenth century, the region became almost entirely Muslim.

The history of Hui Muslims, on the other hand, is completely different. The Hui Muslims are descendants of Arabs and Persians- most of them traders and merchants- who settled in many parts of China from very early on. Hui Muslims were subjected to a long and complicated acculturation process that managed to transform them into a new kind of Muslim more comfortably integrated into mainstream Chinese society.

The successful assimilation of Hui Muslims into Chinese society argues against the popular notion that what the Communist Party is doing today in Xinjiang is reactionary and irrational. There is a tendency, for example, to paint the conflict between the Chinese government and the rebels in Xinjiang as being part of the war on terror. I would argue instead that the policies of assimilation that the Chinese government is undertaking is a deliberate and systematic process that has little to do with fighting terrorists but everything to do with maintaining Chinese supremacy. Specific policies that are carried out today in Xinjiang, aimed at changing demographic, cultural and linguistic facts-on-the-ground, find their roots in the imperial past, more specifically, the turbulent period of the Mongol conquest of China.

The Mongols conquered the whole of China in 1271. Under their aegis, Muslims were generally given preferential treatment. Muslims were put into positions of great power and prestige because the Mongols distrusted the majority Han Chinese. In the social hierarchy, Muslims were placed before Han Chinese, and this unfair policy would shape the Han Chinese perception of the Muslim community.

Thus, after Zhu Yuanzhang’s spectacular success in overthrowing the repressive Yuan dynasty of the Mongols, the preferential treatment of Muslims came to an abrupt end. The distinctive ethnic costumes that Muslims wore were banned. In order to avoid arrest, Muslims complied by dressing like ordinary Chinese. In rural areas, Hui Muslims put on traditional black or grey gowns. When going to the mosque, Muslim males would wear haomao (hats) instead of Islamic-styled turbans.

Worse was to come, however. The Chinese have had thousands of years to hone statecraft. They realized from very early on that demographics was a very important card to play in building a civilization. Zhu Yuanzhang hence wasted no time in asserting Chinese superiority in every aspect of life. The Ming government imposed a complete ban on all foreign languages like Arabic and flooded Muslim-dominated regions with schools that promoted the Chinese language. By the end of the Ming dynasty, most Hui had replaced their native language with that of Chinese. The result was that only a handful of Hui, like Imams or religious teachers, understood Arabic.

In 1372, Emperor Hongwu further curtailed the rights of the Muslim minority by forbidding Muslims from marrying fellow Muslims. But they were free to marry Han Chinese. This was to curb the fast growth of non-Chinese minorities. There are very little reports on how the Muslim community had reacted to the harsh marriage law. There is little doubt, though, that the Mongols’ discriminatory practices against the Han Chinese made the latter extremely intolerant of minorities, especially Muslims.

The Mongol conquest of China might have lasted for only a short period in Chinese history, but its repercussions are still felt today in China. Perhaps in the eyes of the Chinese government, the Uighurs are the new Hui.

The unfathomable enigma of Sultan Malik

From the thirteenth century, intrepid Chinese voyagers had an almost complete map of Southeast Asia. Invariably, the names they gave to places were direct transliterations. Thus, Singapore, which was once known as Pulau Ujong, was called Puluozhong. The long, jungle-covered island of Sumatra, which was once known as Samudra, became Su-mu-ta.

Islam had arrived to the Malay Peninsula and archipelago from very early on, through trade routes and the tireless missionary activities of Sufi teachers, but did not gain a foothold until the latter part of the thirteenth century ¹. Even then, the Malay heartlands were still populated by Hindus, Buddhists and a formidable array of animists. Muslim communities coalesced at coastal areas, where trade- and more importantly the free exchange of ideas- were carried out with foreign and neighbouring countries. The first Muslim kingdom was therefore formed on the northern tip of the large island of Sumatra (where Aceh now is). It was called Samudra-Pasai, and its first king was Malik al-Salih.

From the Malay Annals we come to know that this king, named Merah Silau, was a man of humble origin- a fisherman who became rich and powerful and carved out a kingdom for himself at Samudra. Having ascended the throne he assumed the title of Malik al-Salih, and married the princess of the neighboring kingdom of Perlak, which had already adopted Islam ².

It was reported that Malik al-Salih had converted to Islam because the Prophet Muhammad had appeared to him in a dream. This might sound mystical today, but it is easy to forget that experiential aptitudes are shaped by the challenges we face in our environment. Our physical desires are sated to such excess that there seems little need to exercise our potential for spiritual insight. In any case, many early Muslim figures, like Imam al-Bukhari ³ (d. 870 AD) and Imam al-Ashari ⁴(d. 936 AD) had described similar dreams, from which they had drawn the strength and inspiration to accomplish their tremendous works for Islam.

Historians glean much information about Samudra-Pasai from a document Hikayat Raja-raja Pasai, but the existence of the first king of Sumatra is further established by the discovery of his gravestone in Aceh, which lies today on lands once ruled by Samudra-Pasai.

The gravestone marks the date of Malik al-Salih’s death as having occurred in the year 1296 AD. In the Muslim calendar, this was 696 AH, or 696 years after the “moving” of the Prophet Muhammad. Most Orientalists automatically assume that the “moving” refers to the Prophet’s Muhammad emigration from Mecca to Medina, known as the hijra. After all, most Muslim calendars mark their dates this way, and are called hijri calendars.

On Malik al-Salih’s gravestone, however, the usual word hijra is not used, but instead intiqal. Intiqal is an Arabic word that is derived from intaqala, which means to emigrate or to pass over. The mystery deepens when one sees that the same word intiqal is also used to refer to the death of Malik al-Salih.

Though the Malay world borrowed enthusiastically and extensively from Arabic traditions and language since its adoption of Islam, this never meant that specifically Malay customs and linguistic peculiarities were completely submerged. In fact, a large number of pre-Islamic words, like shurga (paradise) and agama (religion) were retained and incorporated into the new religion and script. The Malay language, oriented primarily toward trade, was inherently flexible.

Thus, it seems plausible that when the word intiqala is used on the gravestones of early princes, it referred to the Malay manner of referring to death. To move, or berpindah, was a refined way of saying that someone has died. It is, in fact, an abbreviation of the longer of phrase: “berpindah ke negeri yang baka”, or to move house to the abode of eternity ⁵.

Nonetheless, the main confusion is over the word intiqal, or the both instances it is used on Malik al-Salih’s gravestone. Had the stone craftsman intended for intiqal to be interpreted in two different ways in the same sentence? Could the intiqal of Prophet Muhammad have referred to the hijra, or more intriguingly, to his death?

To me, the last question is the most important mystery to solve. We already know that Sufism had an incalculable role to play in the spread of Islam in Southeast Asia. Amongst Sufis, the birth of Prophet Muhammad has a special meaning, as evidenced by the annual celebrations known as mawlid. Could the death of Prophet Muhammad also have held some special meaning for the early Muslims of Southeast Asia?