I can't say that this Arabic architecture is a sacred, but the Sinified one is.. Islam has nothing to do with architecture.. It is the local characteristics as in Morocco, Persia, Central Asia's and Western Africa..
Yes, on the other hand, the systematic policies to Sinify the Muslim Chinese is also local business, unless interferes with religious practices, rituals and commandments..!
Last major Arabic-style mosque in China loses its domes
Exclusive: Experts say changes to
Grand Mosque of Shadian mark completion of five-year sinification campaign
Sat 25 May 2024 05.00 BST
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The last major mosque in China to
have retained Arabic-style features has lost its domes and had its minarets
radically modified, marking what experts say is the completion of a government
campaign to sinicise the country’s Muslim places of worship.
The Grand Mosque of Shadian, one of China’s biggest and grandest mosques,
towers over the small town from which it takes its name in south-western Yunnan
province.
Until at last year, the 21,000 square metre complex featured a large
building topped with a tiled green dome, adorned with a crescent moon, flanked
by four smaller domes and soaring minarets. Satellite imagery from 2022 shows
the entrance pavilion decorated with a large crescent moon and star made from
vivid black tiles.
Photographs, satellite imagery and witness accounts from this year show
that the dome has been removed and replaced with a Han Chinese-style pagoda
rooftop, and the minarets have been shortened and converted into pagoda towers.
Only a faint trace of the crescent moon and star tiles that once marked the
mosque’s front terrace is visible.
Yunnan’s other landmark mosque, Najiaying, less than 100 miles from Shadian, also recently had its Islamic features removed in a renovation.
In 2018 the Chinese government published a five-year plan on the “sinification of
Islam”. Part of the plan was to resist “foreign architectural styles” and to
promote “Islamic architecture … that is full of Chinese characteristics”. A
leaked Chinese Communist party memo shows that local authorities were instructed
to “adhere to the principle of demolishing more and building less”.
Ruslan Yusupov, an anthropologist at Cornell
University who spent two years in Shadian doing fieldwork, said: “Sinification
of these two landmark mosques marks the success of the campaign. Even if there
are small mosques left of Arab style in villages, it will be difficult for
local communities to contest their sinicisation”.
Hannah Theaker, a historian of Islam in China at the University
of Plymouth, said the mosque sinicisation campaign had progressed
“province by province”, with Yunnan, one of the furthest provinces from
Beijing, being tackled last. “By 2023, there was a sense among communities that
architectural sinicisation would reach the famous Yunnanese mosques, as the
last major unsinicised mosques in China.”
Ma Ju, a Chinese Hui activist based in New York, said
the renovations were “a clear message to destroy your religion and your
ethnicity”.
First built during the Ming dynasty, the Grand Mosque
of Shadian was destroyed during the cultural revolution in an uprising known as
the Shadian incident, in which the People’s Liberation Army suppressed an
uprising of Hui Muslims in the area. More than 1,000 people are estimated to
have been killed.
The Grand Mosque was later rebuilt and expanded with
government support. Its design was based on the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina,
Saudi Arabia, where Muhammad is believed to be buried. It has three prayer
halls and capacity for 10,000 worshippers.
The Hui are a Chinese Muslim ethnic minority, most of whom live
in western China. There are more than 11 million Hui people, according to the
2020 census, a similar population to Uyghurs.
Yusupov said the development of Shadian and Najiaying
mosques represented “the ability of Muslims to regain religious and Islamic
space after the cultural revolution. In the Xi Jinping era, the inclusion of
Chinese Muslims into the national space happens through their [mosques’]
impairment or disfigurement.”
A Hui Muslim who opposed the redevelopment of the
mosques said: “Shadian mosque is very important to all Muslims, not just in
Shadian. It’s a big loss.
“We just wanted to preserve our last bit of dignity,
because except for Shadian and Najiaying, every [mosque] in the country has
been remodelled,” said the man, who has since left China and who asked to
remain anonymous because of fears for his safety.
One of the Grand Mosque’s modifications is the
addition of Chinese characters underneath the gold-plated Arabic writing on the
front of the building. The Chinese text reads: “The imperial palace of supreme
truth”, a Taoist term that is also used in Chinese Islam. But it has not been
previously associated with Shadian’s mosque.
Ian Johnson, the author of The Souls of China, a book about
religion, said: “Given the tragic history of this mosque – especially that
within living memory Han chauvinism already led to its destruction once – the
reconstruction and renaming of it is another effort to erase local people’s
beliefs and their cultural heritage.”
In 2014, the Chinese government launched a “strike
hard” campaign against Uyghurs, who live mainly in the north-western region of
Xinjiang. The policies involved oppressive surveillance measures and harsh
punishments for a wide array of expressions of Islamic faith, such as
abstention from alcohol or the possession copies of the Qur’an or other Islamic
materials.
The campaign eventually led to around a million
Uyghurs and other minorities being imprisoned in extrajudicial detention
centres, which the UN said may constitute crimes against humanity. The Chinese
government has defended its policies as necessary for tackling extremism and
separatism.
In 2018, the campaign officially spread to the
sinification of Islamic architecture. An analysis published last year by
the Financial Times found that three-quarters of more than
2,300 mosques across China had been modified or destroyed since 2018.
Hui communities have typically been given more
latitude than Uyghurs to practise their faith because the government sees them
as being better integrated with the Han majority and does not have concerns
about Hui separatism. But clashes have occasionally broken out over plans to
modify or destroy mosques.
Last year hundreds of police clashed with protesters at the
Najiaying mosque over the planned renovations. The protests were eventually
suppressed and the renovations went ahead.
Muslims in Shadian did not stage similar protests when their mosque was closed for sinification last year. That was because they had paid close attention to events in Najiaying, say former residents.
“Since that time, Shadian people realised that the
government has a very strong power to control everything,” said a former
employee of the Shadian mosque who left China in 2021. “But people are not
happy with the government forcing them to change the mosque style … Most of my
friends have left Shadian. They said we cannot survive.”
The Grand Mosque of Shadian appears to have reopened
in April, in time for Eid. A video from inside the prayer hall shows that
several surveillance cameras have been installed. In 2020 the mosque management
committee refused a request from the authorities to install surveillance
cameras, said the former mosque employee.
Five sources with knowledge of the local environment
in Shadian said wireless speakers had been distributed to households to
broadcast the call to prayer, since public calls are generally banned, raising
concerns about surveillance.
A Chinese government spokesperson said: “Respecting
and protecting freedom of religious belief has been a basic policy of the
Chinese government. The Chinese government protects normal and lawful religious
activities in accordance with the Regulations on Religious Affairs and other
relevant laws and regulations, attaches great importance to the protection and
renovation of religious sites including mosques, and ensures the normal
religious needs and safety of believers.”
China’s mosque sinicisation plan is now considered to
be largely completed, but is only part of its plans to mould religion,
particularly Islam, to fit with the government’s ideology. In February Beijing tightened its regulations on religious expression
to ensure that faiths “adhere to the direction of sinicisation”. Several local
authorities already ban under-18s from attending mosques, and in Najiaying,
minors are banned from fasting.
“The sinicisation of Islam campaign was never just
about the appearance of mosques,” said Theaker, the historian.
Additional research by Chi Hui Lin
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