As the Chinese Communist Party is a totalitarian entity, it views any other authority or object of loyalty as a competitor that must be destroyed. That’s why the Chinese government has cracked down so brutally upon the Uighur Muslims, and now a leading ChiCom official has announced the end goal of that persecution: the “Sinicization” of Islam. The U.S., and the West in general, can learn a great deal from what the Chinese are doing: it’s a grand lesson in what not to do.
Reuters reported Thursday that Ma Xingrui, the Communist Party top dog in Xinjiang, declared confidently that the inexorable march of history toward the dictatorship of the proletariat and pure Communism would take care of China’s little problem with Islamic jihadis. “Everyone knows,” he asserted, “that Islam in Xinjiang needs to be Sinicized, this is an inevitable trend.”
The Sinicization is already well underway. Reuters reminds us that “rights groups accuse Beijing of widespread abuses of Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority that numbers around 10 million in Xinjiang, including denying Uyghurs full religious freedoms. Beijing vigorously denies any abuses.” Also, ChiCom President Xi Jinping has on many occasions called for the “Sinicization” not only of Islam, but of Christianity and Buddhism as well, so that all religious expression becomes just another way of demonstrating one’s loyalty to the Communist state.
Sinicization, in the case of Christianity, has involved rewriting parts of the Bible to remove or alter passages that might inspire readers to think critically about Communism, forcing Christians to celebrate as heroes Communists who betrayed the Church, and requiring Christian teachers to attend Communist indoctrination sessions.
Will similar measures, applied to Islam, defang the Religion of Peace and end the possibility of jihad terror in China? That’s what Chinese Communist leaders are banking on. But they’re being short-sighted.
What is likely to happen in China, given the lessons of history, is that the “Sinicization” of Islam will proceed, and initially it will appear to be a comprehensive success. Muslims in China will appear to be practicing an Islam with Chinese characteristics, and to have assimilated completely into Communist Chinese society.
The Communist victory celebrations, however, will be premature. When the Communist Party begins to weaken, suddenly and unexpectedly, traditional Islam will begin to reemerge. Eventually, the Chinese Communists will discover that despite all their efforts, Islam has not become “Sinicized” at all, but is still pretty much what it has always been.
The reason why this is a sure bet regarding what will happen in China is because we have seen all this unfold in the West in the relatively recent past. One hundred years ago, Islamic societies were largely Westernized. After World War I, Turkey and Iran rejected the rule of Islamic law and actively patterned their new governments after Western secular models. The Westernizing trend continued: by mid-century, Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser was laughing at the prospect of asking Egyptian women to wear hijabs.
Even as late as the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Western “experts” were confidently predicting that Islamic societies would secularize and Westernize after the pattern of secular Turkey. Since then, however, everything has gone awry for the “experts,” although they still enjoy their tenured professorships and media adulation despite having been proven wrong about everything.
Turkey has re-Islamized, and Western influences have receded drastically in Islamic societies. Where Nasser joked about the impossibility of getting Egyptian women to wear hijab, now virtually all women wear the hijab.
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We are likely to see the same trajectory in China, but Ma Xingrui and his colleagues are almost certain to ignore all the indications of what’s to come. Ma Xingrui and his ilk are atheists who don’t understand the religious impulse. Under Communist pressure, it will recede, but it won’t disappear, and it will return when it can.
The lesson for the West is not to follow China in its repressive measures. Western countries should uphold the freedom of conscience while drawing a firm line at violence that finds a justification in religious texts and teachings.
The real lesson for the West is that the bland confidence that Islam will Westernize, discard its violent and supremacist doctrines, and become benign is just as baseless and potentially dangerous as the confidence that Islam will “Sinicize.” Islam will continue to be Islam. Western leaders will ultimately have to stop lying to themselves and their people and face that fact, or prepare to submit.
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