Despite living in autonomous regions, thousands of Chinese Muslims are suffering under harsh educational systems imposed by the communist government to erode Qur’an and religious studies from schools and colleges.
“We are only allowed Qur’an study once we are in college,” one Hui student at the Yinchuan college in autonomous Ningxia area told The Hindu.
The Yinchuan college is not an exception.
In Ningxia, one of China’s five autonomous regions, most primary and middle schools do not allow studies of the Noble Qur’an or Arabic to its Muslim students.
The Chinese government claims to allow autonomous regions, home to 55 minority groups, to set up their own education systems under the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law.
In practice, policies are set by Beijing and directed by local Communist Party secretaries, who hold more power than their government counterparts.
For example, lessons given to the 420 students at the Ningxia Islamic College are usually confusing.
In the morning, students, from China’s 10 million-strong Hui Muslim minority group, recite verses from the Qur’an and study Arabic.
When afternoon lessons resume, students shift to Chinese textbooks on Socialist theory, learning about capital, labor and Communist Party philosophy.
“Socialism and Islam are, usually, not the most compatible of subjects,” says Ma Ming Xian, the vice dean of the college, with a smile.
The communist message was apparent in other Muslim colleges, such as the Islamic college in Yinchuan.
At such college, teachers said their priority was to ensure that students placed “patriotism over religion”.
“The country comes first, and then your religion. That is our message,” said Ma.
Eroding Identity
Many Chinese Muslims fume at the government’s education plan for aiming to eroding religion from younger generations.
“By the time students start reading the Qur’an, they are already too old and have left school,” said Ilham (not his real name), a primary school teacher in Kashgar in Xinjiang’s far west.
“And by the time they start studying,” he added, “they have already lost interest.”
This is not only in schools.
Local governments in both Xinjiang and Ningxia have waged a campaign against informal Qur’an study sessions, arresting any local resident involved in organizing them.
Along with its campaigns on Qur’an and Arabic studies, the government has also applied a new plan in Xinjiang to promote the study of Mandarin Chinese.
The plan was seen by many as aiming at eroding the Uighur Turkic language.
In the past two years alone, Xinjiang has set up close to 1,500 bilingual schools, now making up 85 percent of all kindergartens.
In these schools, many Uighurs say religious studies and Uighur culture are given less attention.
“There has been criticism of the Chinese government popularizing Mandarin,” Pan Zhiping, a scholar at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, said.
Islam, the second largest religion in China, has a very long history in the western Asian country.
Historians believe that the faith was spread to China by Muslim diplomats and merchants between 630AD and 751AD during the Tang Dynasty.
According to official data, China has 20 million Muslims, most of them are concentrated in Xinjiang, Ningxia, Gansu, and Qinghai regions and provinces.
Smaller Muslim communities can also be found throughout interior China.
Unofficially, Muslim groups say the number is even higher, stating that there are from 65-100 million Muslims in China — up to 7.5 percent of the population.
Atheist China recognizes five religions — Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Taoism and Buddhism — and tightly regulates their administration and practice.
Source: OnIslam & Newspapers