Wahhabism with Chinese Characteristics

This article seeks to provide an overview of Chinese Wahhabism, and its relationship to other forms of Islam in China. The first section of the article offers a brief review of the long history of Islam in China and, thus, the context in which Wahhabism would later take root. As such, numerous Islamic movements contributed to the emergence of a complex culture of Chinese Islam, long before the arrival of Wahhabism, itself an important ideology within China’s Islamic Revival during the twentieth century. This article then introduces the different Muslim communities within China. It illustrates briefly the structure of Chinese Islamic communities and the impact of the Chinese government’s open door policy on Muslim religious institutions and their professionals. Subsequently, this article focuses on Wahhabism and its arrival in South Asia generally, and China specifically, through the Salafiyya Movement. The spread of Wahhabism also had considerable implications for Muslim participation in the Chinese public sphere, as is revealed by examining the perspectives of transnational traders, international students with transnational networks and the concept of the global ummah. Finally, this article highlights the influence of individual conversions and networks of revivalists on conceptions of Wahhabism and perceptions of Chinese Islam as well as potential implications for the role of religion within the Chinese state…