T H U R S D A Y, 1 5 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6
09:15 – 09:30 REGISTRATION
09:30 – 09:45 WELCOME AND INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Jonathan Rigg, National University of Singapore Engseng Ho, National University of Singapore
09:45 – 11:15 PANEL 1 | TRAVELLERS TRADING TALES
CHAIRPERSON Nisha Mathew, National University of Singapore
09:45 Supplying Hajjis: Northern Afghanistan’s Trading Communities in Saudi Arabia (and beyond) Magnus Marsden, University of Sussex, UK
10:05 ‘Miraculous Circulations’: Fabric Trade from China to Dubai through the Indian Traders
Ka-Kin Cheuk, Leiden University, Netherlands
10:25 Chinatopia: China as a Worldly Utopia in a 9th Century Account of an Arabian Traveller to the “Orient”
Nizar F. Hermes, University of Virginia, USA
10:45 Questions and Answers
11:15 – 11:45 MORNING TEA
11:45 – 12:45 PANEL 2 | EARLY GEOSTRATEGY
CHAIRPERSON Ernesto H. Braam, Dutch Embassy in Singapore
11:45 New Evidence on the History of Sino-Arabic Relations in the 8th Century: An Early Pan-Asiatic Power Alliance?
Angela Schottenhammer, University of Salzburg, Austria, and McGill University, Canada
12:05 West Asia between South Asia and China: The Complexities and Geopolitics of Intra-Asian Interactions
Tansen Sen, City University of New York, USA
12:25 Questions and Answers
12:45 – 14:00 LUNCH
14:00 – 15:30 PANEL 3 | DIPLOMACY
CHAIRPERSON Rosey Wang Ma, Independent Scholar
14:00 Battlefield without Smoke: Chinese Muslim Delegations to the Middle East and
Their Anti-Japanese War Propaganda
Jilian Ma, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
14:20 Cairo Declarations: Remapping Chinese Diplomatic Encounters with West Asia, 1941-1946
Ira N. Hubert, McGill University, Canada
14:40 China-Japan Rivalry over the Middle East
Ghadda Hayat, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan
15:00 Questions and Answers
15:30 – 16:00 AFTERNOON TEA
16:00 – 17:30 PANEL 4 | MECCAN EXPERIENCES
CHAIRPERSON Cemil Aydin, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
16:00
via Skype
Converting the Heathen in Mecca and Battling the Shi’ii Menace in the Far East:
A Look at the China-Oriented Missionary Phenomenon in Saudi Arabia
Mohammed Al-Sudairi, University of Hong Kong, and King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, Saudi Arabia
16:20 Belonging to the Same Religion, We have Forgotten our Differences of Nationality: Assessing the Hajj and Travels of Ma Songting and Zhao Zhenwu, 1932-33
John Chen, Columbia University, USA
16:40 Exiled to the Center of the World: The Turkestanis of Mecca
Rian Thum, Loyola University New Orleans, USA
17:00 Questions and Answers
17:30 END OF DAY ONE
17:45 BUS TRANSFER TO DINNER VENUE (For Speakers, Chairpersons, and Invited Guests Only)
18:15 CONFERENCE DINNER (For Speakers, Chairpersons, and Invited Guests Only)
20:15 BUS TRANSFER TO HOTEL (For Overseas Speakers Only)
F R I D A Y, 1 6 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6
10:00 – 12:00 PANEL 5 | MUSLIMS AND CHINESE
CHAIRPERSON Shuang Wen, National University of Singapore
10:00 An Indispensable Patriot: A Chinese Muslim Traveler at the Royal Egyptian Court of King Farouk
Selim Hai Peng, Reuters News Agency
10:20 Producing Multiple Imaginaries of Iran in the Hui Muslim Communities through China’s
Government Sponsored Exchange Programs
Yang Yang, University of Colorado – Boulder, USA
10:40 Cross-Cultural Encounters along the New Silk Road: The “Back to Jerusalem” Movement
Yi Liu, Shanghai University, China
11:00 Questions and Answers
11:30 – 12:00 MORNING TEA
12:00 – 13:30 PANEL 6 | INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGES
CHAIRPERSON Yueyang Chen, Shanghai International Studies University, China
12:00 Spiritual Practice in the Arabic Hagiography of the Chinese Jeherenye Sufi Order
Florian Sobieroj, Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany
12:20 Unraveling the Principles of Nature: Arabic Philology in China, 16th-18th Centuries
Dror Weil, Princeton University, USA
12:40 The Scientific Muslim: Ma Jian and his Translation of Husayn al-Jisr’s Treatise
Zeyneb Hale Eroglu Sager, Harvard University, USA
13:00 Questions and Answers
13:30 – 14:30 LUNCH
14:30 – 16:30 PANEL 7 | ECONOMIC POTENTIALS ANALYSED
CHAIRPERSON Jianhua Yu, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, China
14:30 The History of Bilateral Relation between China and Kuwait 1971-2009
Riyan Hidayat, Universitas Indonesia
14:50 Can China-Arabia Regional Multilateralism Become the New Model of International Regimes? Game Theory Analysis of China-UAE Civil Aviation Relations within the Context of One Belt One Road Strategy
Jiangtian Xu, University of East Anglia, UK
15:10 China-Arab Economic Relations: Current Status and Future Challenges
Liangxiang Jin, Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, China
15:30 The US Dollar, Global Shifts: The Political Economy of Chinese Investments in Saudi Arabia
Alvin A. Camba, Johns Hopkins University, USA
15:50 Questions and Answers
16:30 – 17:00 AFTERNOON TEA
17:00 – 18:00 OPEN DISCUSSION
18:00 END OF CONFERENCE
18:00 BUS TRANSFER TO DINNER VENUE (For Speakers, Chairpersons, and Invited Guests Only)
18:30 CONFERENCE DINNER (For Speakers, Chairpersons, and Invited Guests Only)
20:00 BUS TRANSFER TO HOTEL (For Overseas Speakers Only)
ABSTRACTS
Supplying Hajjis: Northern Afghanistan’s Trading Communities
in Saudi Arabia (and beyond)
Magnus Marsden
Sussex Asia Centre, Department of Anthropology,
and School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK
m.marsden@sussex.ac.uk
This article explores the role played by ethnically Turkmen traders from northern Afghanistan – especially those belonging to families who migrated to Afghanistan in the years following Soviet expansion into Central Asia – in connecting China to the Arab world through trade and commerce. It documents the historical emergence of this group as networked international traders, locates some of the nodes and routes that are important for their commercial activities and collective self-understandings, and also discusses the nature of their relationships with the various nation-states within and across which they live.
Magnus Marsden is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex. His work is centrally concerned with the study of Asia’s Muslim societies. Magnus has conducted extensive fieldwork in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, as well as with diasporic communities from this region in the Gulf, Eastern Europe, and China. He is the author of Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Northern Pakistan (Cambridge, 2005), and Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers (Oxford,
2015). He also jointly authored with B.D Hopkins Fragments of the Afghan Frontier (Oxford, 2015) and has co- edited Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds (Springer 2013, and Beyond Swat (Oxford 2013). He sits on the International Advisory Board of Central Asian Survey and the Editorial Board of Modern Asian Studies.
‘Miraculous Circulations’:
Fabric Trade from China to Dubai through the Indian Traders
Ka-Kin Cheuk
Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands
k.k.cheuk@hum.leidenuniv.nl
This paper examines how Indian traders, despite continuously indebted to Chinese suppliers, can still sustain transnational trade from China to Dubai. The examination is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Keqiao (2010-2012, 2016-2017), a municipal district of eastern Zhejiang Province, China. Accounting for its one- third annual turnover in China, Keqiao is the trading frontier for fabrics, the semi-finished textiles that are industrially weaved, knitted, dyed, and printed in bulk before being exported. Drawn by the trade opportunities, around 5,000 Indians have flocked to Keqiao to run global intermediary business. Focusing on their everyday activities in Keqiao, the paper shows that in addition to simply banking global capitals from Dubai, Indian traders can also turn such capital flows into what I call ‘miraculous circulations’: Chinese suppliers continue to take orders through Indian traders, notwithstanding the much-delayed payment and, in some cases, payment discounted or even defaulted. Specifically, the paper describes the ways whereby Indian traders use the capitals from Dubai to break into a lucrative local economy of export rebates, which would be otherwise reserved for Chinese suppliers only. As such, it illustrates that Indian traders not only circulate capitals transnationally, but also honing its usage in a specific China-Arabia context.
Ka-Kin Cheuk is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), where he is part of an interdisciplinary Europe-China research consortium, ‘Immigration and the Transformation of Chinese Society’ (2015-2018). He completed his DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University, where he was also affiliated to the ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS). He also has BSSc and MPhil in Anthropology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Having worked on Indian diaspora in East Asia for the last decade, Ka-Kin’s most recent publications include ‘Everyday Diplomacy among Indian Traders in a Chinese Fabric Market’ (2016) in Cambridge Anthropology 34(2): 42-58 and ‘Sikhs in China, including Hong Kong’ (forthcoming in 2017) in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Sikhism.
Chinatopia: China as a Worldly Utopia
in a 9th Century Account of an Arabian Traveller to the ‘Orient’
Nizar F. Hermes
Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures,
University of Virginia, USA
nfh5x@virginia.edu
In my talk, I will explore the representation of China in arguably the first eyewitness Arabic account of China by a ninth-century Muslim merchant/traveler (which was later incorporated by Aby Zayd al-Sirafi in Akhbar al-Sin wa-l-Hind). Al-Tajir’s account is a mine of sociocultural, religious, political, and economic information about India and China in the ninth century. Among other things, I will discuss Sulayman al-Tajir’s fascination with ninth-century China’s “Universal literacy,” political justice, social equality, agricultural and economic abundance, and the Chinese unequalled artistic skills in craftsmanship and painting. For obvious reasons, al- Tajir notes with fascination what he saw of widespread literacy among Chinese men and women. Whether poor or rich, young or old, he tells us, the Chinese learn calligraphy and the art of writing. This was the outcome of an effective political policy of decentralized promulgation of education on the part of the Chinese politicians. “In every town,” al-Tajir writes, “there are scribes and teachers who impart education to the poor and their children; they receive their maintenance from the treasury” (52).1 Since everybody knows how to read and to write, all the disputes and complaints must reach the king not only in documents written by a katib (scribe) licensed by the hikam (laws) but—to our surprise and amazement—in perfect spelling (51). “[And] before the plaintiff [sahib-al-qiss] is presented in the audience of the king,” al-Tajir says, “a person who is stationed at the gate of the house looks into the written [complaint] of the person. If he finds that there are some mistakes in it he rejects it” (51). Universal literacy does not seem to be the invention of our modern times, and “the Literall advantage,” to the detriment of the seventeenth-century English traveler Samuel Purchas (d. 1626), is God’s gift to all.
In the same connection, despite its brevity, al-Tajir’s account of Chinese justice is particularly remarkable. Not only does the Muslim traveler notice with admiration the absence of bureaucracy, but he also speaks with awe of the Chinese al-dara: “Every town has a thing called al-dara. This is a bell placed near [lit. ‘at the head of’] the ruler of the town and is tied to a cord stretching as far as the road for the [benefit] of the common people” (49). If a person is wronged by another person, he/she shakes the cord that is linked to al-dara. When doing so, al- Tajir observes, “the bell near the ruler starts ringing. So he So he [the wronged] is allowed to enter [the palace] to relate personally what the matter is and to explain the wrong done to him” (49). The result of this medieval Chinese “wonder” was the amazing accessibility of the public to the political and judicial hierarchy. In medieval China, it seems, injustice was panoptically controlled and justice was impressively disseminated. This conjures up the modern theory of panopticism. Whereas modern states, as understood by Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, function through this panoptical controlling of their citizens, the medieval Chinese state, to the surprise of all, used panopticism to repress injustice. Not found even in the most democratic of modern societies, the Chinese al-dara, it appears, is a more utopian wor(l)d.
Nizar F. Hermes received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature, in association with the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. Before joining the University of Virginia, he had taught at the University of Toronto, Princeton University, and the University of Oklahoma. While Nizar’s research interests are interdisciplinary and comparative in scope, he is particularly interested in medieval and early modern Islamic-European contacts, medieval and early modern Arabic-Islamic travel and diplomacy, North African and Andalusian studies, and classical Arabic-Islamic prose and poetry. He is author of The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture, Ninth-Twelfth Century AD (The New Middle Ages), New York: Palgrave-Macmillan: 2012, and was nominated for the 2015 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Arabic Culture in Other Languages.
New Evidence on the History of Sino-Arabic Relations in the 8th Century: An Early Pan-Asiatic Power Alliance?
Angela Schottenhammer
History Department, University of Salzburg,
and the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Canada angela.schottenhammer@sbg.ac.at
According to information provided in a tomb stele (shendao zhi bei 神道之碑) of a Chinese eunuch, a certain Yang Liangyao 楊良瑤 (736-806), the latter was sent as an envoy to the Abbasids (Heiyi dashi 黑衣大食; lit. “Black-dressed Tajik”, i.e. the Arabs) by Emperor Dezong 德宗 (r. 780-805) in 785. It seems that the mission was intended to ask the Arabs for military support against the Tibetans. This paper will expound the geopolitical situation in Asia in the second half of the 8th century and comparatively analyse the tomb stele against the background of the political landscape
under the Chinese Emperor Dezong and more specifically against the backdrop of the court’s politics in the face of
Tibetan aggression. I will argue that although a clear indication that the mission of this eunuch even took place at all is absent in both Chinese and Middle Eastern historiography, there is no plausible reason to automatically rule out the possibility that the mission was carried out, or to assume that somebody might have faked such a story on an epigraphic document like this tomb stele. Historical circumstances and a comparison with information provided in other sources rather suggest that the mission was sent, perhaps even successfully, and there are also quite a few political reasons as to why the mission and information pertaining to Yang Liangyao himself were not included in the official accounts. My paper, consequently, especially wants to address the question of why such an important diplomatic mission is neither mentioned in any other sources, and the question of why it has never been brought up in academic discourse.
The paper will argue that particular historical circumstances suggest that his mission was very plausible; and that the decision to send him to the Abbasid caliphate to ask the Arabs for assistance in pushing back the Tibetans was very much in line with Emperor Dezong’s foreign policy strategy. In this context, the paper seeks to show how two of the most powerful countries in Eurasia at that time, the Abbasid Caliphate in the West and China in the East, were considering forging a military alliance to contain a common “unpleasant” enemy. It will also show that despite of the Battle of Talas between the Arabs and China in 751, both countries subsequently maintained close commercial and political-diplomatic and military relations.
Angela Schottenhammer is Professor of Non-European and World History at the University of Salzburg, Austria, and research director and adjunct professor (Chinese History) at the Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC), History Department, McGill University, Canada. She has been Professor of Chinese Studies at Ghent University, Belgium (2010-2013), Professor of Pre-modern Chinese History at the Centro de Estudios de Asia y África (CEAA), El Colegio de México (2009-2010), Professor of Chinese Studies at Marburg University (2006-7 and 2008-9) and Research Director at the Department for Asian Studies, Munich University (2002-2009). She obtained her PhD in
1993 from Würzburg University, Germany, with a thesis on “Song Period Tomb inscriptions” (MA 1989 on Liao Mosha and the Cultural Revolution) and her Habilitation degree (post-doctoral university professor teaching qualification) 2000 from Munich University with a thesis on “Song Time Quanzhou in a Conflict Situation Between Central Government and Maritime Trade: Unexpected Consequences of the Central Government’s Grasp for the Wealth of a Coastal Region”. She is the editor of the Online journal Crossroads – Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East Asian World and of the book series East Asian Maritime History and has widely published on traditional Chinese history and culture as well as China’s manifold historical exchange relations and her integration into the Eurasian and global context. Websites: www.schottenhammer.net, http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/Team_3
West Asia between South Asia and China:
The Complexities and Geopolitics of Intra-Asian Interactions
Tansen Sen
Baruch College, City University of New York, USA
tansen.sen@baruch.cuny.edu
This paper focuses on the role and contributions of West Asian traders, migrants, and officials in the interactions between South Asia and Song and Yuan China. It demonstrates that traders from West Asia were frequent participants in the commercial and tributary exchanges between the coastal polities in South Asia and the Song court in China. Similarly, the networks of West Asian migrants and Islamic preachers played an important role in connecting various regions of South Asia to coastal China during the Yuan period. Also during the Yuan period, the political alliance between Qubilai Khan and the Ilkhanate in Iran fostered unprecedented interactions across the Asian continent. By highlighting the place of West Asians in the commercial, diplomatic, religious, and migratory networks between South Asia and China, the paper questions the partition of Asia into sub-regions, often placing West Asia in the periphery, and argues that the pre-colonial connections across the continent were multifaceted, multidirectional, and extended from the markets in Baghdad to Khanbaliq (present-day Beijing) in China.
Tansen Sen is Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York, USA. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2003; 2016) and co-author (with Victor H. Mair) of Traditional China in Asian and World History (Association for Asian Studies, 2012). He has also edited Buddhism across Asia: Networks of Material, Cultural and Intellectual Exchange (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014). Recently he completed a monograph entitled India, China, and the World: A Connected History and is now working on a book about Zheng He’s maritime expeditions. He was the founding head of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Center (ISEAS) and the founding director of the Center for Global Asia (NYU Shanghai). He serves on the Governing Board of the Nalanda University, India.
Battlefield without Smoke: Chinese Muslim Delegations
to the Middle East and Their Anti-Japanese War Propaganda
Jilian Ma
Middle East Technical University, Turkey
jilianma@gmail.com
During the period of Anti- Japanese War, several Chinese Muslim delegations with different backgrounds went to the Middle East for various purposes. In 1938, The Chinese Muslim Salvation Association sent Chinese Islam Near East visiting delegation to expand propaganda against Japan and seek supports from the Islamic world. One year later, Japan Army sponsored North China Hui Muslim pilgrimage delegation to go to the Middle East. To monitor and forestall their activities in Mecca, Chinese Muslim students in Al-Azhar University organized Islam pilgrimage delegation of Republic of China and went to Mecca.
Analyzing the travel accounts wrote by members of these delegations and related news, this paper explores national identity of Chinese Muslims who lived under both Chinese and Islamic culture traditions, and the discordance of this sense in different groups during the Anti-Japanese War.
It argues that the tradition of Islam and the horizons expanded by faith provided a source and choice for Chinese Muslims to coordinate their belief and the discourse of nation-state; and their religious identity and national identity were interactive and blended in each other. It also addresses that the Muslim elite intellectuals took a significant role in the propaganda of patriotic conceptions.
Jilian Ma got her MA (by research) from Department of Chinese studies, National University of Singapore in 2013 and her BA in Chinese Language and Literature from Beijing Language and Culture University in 2010. She went to Turkey and studied Turkish and Ottoman Turkish in language center of Ankara University after her graduation. Addition to learning Turkish, she had also been attending a series of seminars and workshops about Turkish culture and history organized by SETA (Foundation for social and Political Research, Turkey) and ADAM (Ankara Center for Thought and Research). After working in Hong Kong for one year, she came back to Turkey to resume her research. She will start her master study in Middle East studies in Middle East Technical University from this September. Now she is doing a research on scholars sent to China during the period of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Her research interests include Sino-Ottoman/Turkish relations, Ottoman diplomatic history, Chinese travelling to the Middle East and Islamic publishing network in the early 20th century, Chinese Muslim society.
Cairo Declarations: Remapping Chinese Diplomatic Encounters
with West Asia, 1941-1946
Ira N. Hubert
Doctoral Program, McGill University, Canada
ira.hubert@mail.mcgill.ca
The question of border dispute resolution in early Maoist China has been widely debated by historians and policy practitioners, with scholars such as Fravel (2008) and Shen & Lovell (2013) noting the PRC’s strategic use of territorial negotiations with neighbors in furtherance of broader foreign policy objectives.1 While demonstrating the flexible and often conciliatory approach of Communist Party leaders (CCP) to border issues into the 1950s and early 1960s, these studies aiming to theorize and even exceptionalize PRC handling of sovereignty claims (i.e. as a post-imperial polity) note leaders’ linkage and sensitivity to an ever-shifting “international environment”, but fail to account for the work of diplomacy that any case for territorial ownership then, like now, actually entails. My paper rejects the tendency to see territorial disputes as essentially bilateral, by focusing on spaces abroad. Specifically, I recover episodes from the years 1941 to 1956 whereby Arab publics and government officials, empowered in international relations as non-aligned and anti- colonialist, found themselves introduced and asked to directly adjudicate sovereignty contests involving China and its neighbors. Through analysis of Chinese-language diplomatic correspondence, print media, thirdcountry intelligence reports, and officials’ published memoirs (回憶錄), I ‘take off the Cold War lens’ in order to appreciate a Republic of China ministerial apparatus geared during the Sino-Japanese War towards wartime goals in the Middle East being, by late 1946, re-tasked to outmaneuver anti-Kuomintang sojourners and programs in the region. Also, I observe rhetorical and tactical continuities among KMT and CCP policymakers towards the rapidly decolonizing Arab Middle East — some of which bear a striking resemblance to trans- continental approaches today. I argue that pending colonial questions compelled Iraqi, Syrian, and Egyptian nationalists (among others) to register influential opinions about East Asian affairs; this pattern of intersection surged with the opening of debates at the United Nations, nearly a decade before presumed first encounters at the famed Asian-African Conference at Bandung (1955). A new historiography of the Chinese Civil War and ensuing cross-Straits dispute must challenge the narrow spatial coordinates by which they are conventionally understood, so as to apprehend the global manner by which these and other Chinese sovereignty struggles have been waged.
Ira N. Hubert’s fields of interest in McGill’s doctoral program, begun in 2012 under the supervision of Dr Lorenz Lüthi, are 20th century international relations (with an emphasis on the post-1945 period), modern Chinese history, and modern Middle East history. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Ira has earned his honours BA in political science and MA in Islamic & Near Eastern studies from Washington University in St. Louis. He then spent three years in Washington, D.C. writing on international security issues for the U.S. Department of Justice, followed by a year of independent study based in Guilin and Beijing, China. His dissertation research will focus on variation and change in China’s diplomatic engagement with the countries of the Arab Middle East during the Cold War years. Seeking to contribute to new narratives concerning Sino-Arab state relations, some of his related mid-20th century interests include international cooperation against perceived ideological threats (from both Western and ‘nonaligned’ perspectives); anti- and post-colonial nationalisms; and cultural diplomacy. Tangentially, Ira is also interested in historiographical efforts to situate events of political and social upheaval in post-1945 America in international context.
China-Japan Rivalry over the Middle East
Ghadda Hayat
International Relations Division, Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan
ghadha15@apu.ac.jp
Sino-Japanese relationship with the Middle East goes back in history. Due to their economic interests, both countries started their relations with the Middle East at an early age. China and Japan share identical interests in exporting their products into the region’s rich market and importing the region’s large oil volume. However, those identical interests have led the two to engage in a regional rivalry over energy resources. Toichi (2006) explains the two’s rivalry as a clear intensified competition that aims to secure oil and gas shares in the Middle East market. China’s influence has been comparatively growing in the energy area. According to Graham (2016), China has replaced Japan as the second largest importer of Middle East crude oil – second after the United States- and is now the region’s seventh biggest trading partner. This rising influence has been met with worry from Japan’s side. Japan has intensified its engagement in the Middle East region. Pollock (2016) referred to the era of Abe’s administration as the most active era in Sino-Japanese confrontation. He explicated how Abe’s administration has been trying to establish a defined economic stand in order to ensure that Japan’s position in the Middle East is known and that its desires are met even with China’s presence in the region. The two countries’ rivalry has extended beyond the share of oil and has spread to diplomatic tactics in the region. China has spread its ties in the Middle East in terms of politics, infrastructure, culture, education and even religion, and so has Japan. Both leaders, Japan’s Shinzo Abe and China’s Xi Jinping, are trying to present themselves as trustable good-faith friends who provide reliable responses on political, economic, and other issues. Nishihara (2014) defined the Abe administration’s issuance of good-faith policies and promotion of rules of law and democracy as an attempt to build a solid ground in the area and spread Japan’s good image in the region, an image that contrasts to China’s image of flexing muscles in the Asia Pacific region and rising tensions with its neighbors, such as China’s aggressive behavior in the South China Sea. Lamont and Pannwitz (2015) mention how Abe’s administration has been relying on policies of respect and commitment to present itself as a close partner. Shinzo Abe has formed his Middle East policy on the basis of three Arabic terms of “al-tasaamuh (harmony and tolerance) al-ta’aaish (coexistence and co-prosperity) and al-ta’aun (collaboration)”.
This paper aims to investigate the political, economic, and people-to-people dimensions of the Sino-Japanese rivalry in the Middle East. By tracking their engagement in the region, analyzing the past and present and examining the progress that led and shaped their rivalry development, this paper attempts to answer why China and Japan engage in a rivalry in the Middle East?
Ghadda Hayat is a second year International Relations’ graduate student at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan. Her research interests include Japan-Middle East relations, the “rise of China’s” impact on the Middle East, soft power, peace studies, refugees and international communities’ response to Middle East crises. Her thesis analyzes how the domestic policies and interests in Japan influence her Middle East foreign policy.
Converting the Heathen in Mecca and Battling the Shi’ii Menace
in the Far East: A Look at the China-Oriented
Missionary Phenomenon in Saudi Arabia
Mohammed Al-Sudairi
University of Hong Kong, and
King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, Saudi Arabia msudairi@gmail.com
The past few years have seen a noticeable shift in how da’wah (missionary) organizations and groups in the Gulf states perceive China. Off-limits during the Maoist era and largely invisibilized in the Asia-focused literature of major da’wah organizations, China has been increasingly reconceptualized over the last decade as a promising frontier for da’wah work. This can be observed in the massive quantitative growth in Chinese-language resources on Islam and, more importantly, in the proliferation of Gulf-based or Gulf-funded dedicated missionary organizations targeting Chinese-speakers for conversion such as the Da’wat Al-Siniyeen center (in Chinese, the zhongsha wenhua jiaoliu zhongxin) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, among others. This new-found religious re-orientation towards China within Saudi Arabia and the broader Gulf region is driven by many factors, although two stand out as being the most important in catalyzing it and which will be the focus of this talk. The first is related to China’s own enhanced visibility on the global stage and its growing footprint in the region. This is especially felt in the growing presence of Chinese overseas communities in place like Dubai (est.
300 thousand) and the noticeable influx of state-owned enterprise (SOE) associated laborers to work on infrastructural projects across the Gulf. The Haramain speed-rail development in Mecca initiated in 2009 is a representative example of this. The completion of the project necessitated bringing in several thousand Chinese workers into the environs of the holy city. The subsequent discovery that many of these laboerers were non- Muslims led to considerable public outcry within Saudi society. This in turn spurred a government response for damage control marked by the empowerment of local da’wah offices and according disproportionate media attention to stories of Chinese mass-conversions as a result of their efforts. The relative ease by which this was accomplished encouraged many da’wah activists about the Chinese cultural space’s susceptibility to conversion and dispelled traditional inhibitions about China.
The second factor is closely intertwined with the emergence of what can be called a “Shi’ification” conspiracy narrative regarding China and its Muslim communities among official and informal Saudi “China watchers.” The basic outlines of this narrative, which reflects a geo-sectarian projection of the Saudi-Iranian conflict, can be identified as the notion that Iran is actively seeking to Shi’iify both Muslim and non-Muslim Chinese, and has already done so with some success. There is a palpable sense of urgency that underlies this narrative, calling as it does for a swift da’wah-oriented response to counter the spread of Shi’ism and save China before it is too late. This widespread narrative, which can be encountered in many Saudi-based Islamic websites, Arabic scholarly works, and Saudi government documents, is in many ways informed by China’s growing visibility, albeit one that is visual and cyber in nature: the proliferation on the internet of videos and images of presumably “Chinese-looking” bodies in what are identified as Shia environments. The examples for this are many: videos of Chinese laborers chanting “Ya Ali” as they go about their work in an unknown campsite in Iraq; the televised interview of a Chinese businessman who had funded a pilgrimage caravan to the holy city of Karbala…etc. That these images are co-opted by different actors, including East Turkestan independence activists and Shi’ii sectarian ones to propose their own narratives (a Chinese-Iranian conspiracy to destroy the Sunni communities of Xinjiang or evidence of winning China over to the “civilization of Hussein”) has only worked to intensify the sectarian anxieties of Saudi watchers and feed into the da’wah dynamic.
This talk is interested in examining the da’wah phenomenon holistically while focusing specifically on the two factors recounted above. It will then connect these two factors to the story of the Da’wat Al-Siniyeen center as a case study representative of this new impulse. Its background, literature, and activities will be introduced. The talk will end with a few thoughts on the implications of this da’wah work on Sino-Gulf relations in light of the Chinese party-state’s growing concerns with religious transnational links.
Mohammed Al-Sudairi is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Politics from the University of Hong Kong. He holds a double master’s degree in International Affairs from Peking University and the London School of Economics, and a Bachelor of Science in International Politics from Georgetown University (Qatar.) He is currently affiliated to the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. Al-Sudairi has worked on a range of topics dealing with Sino-Middle Eastern issues, including Israeli advocacy in China, Sino-Gulf relations, and Sino-Muslim transnational links with the Gulf. He is a native of Saudi Arabia.
Belonging to the Same Religion,
We have Forgotten our Differences of Nationality: Assessing the Hajj and Travelsof Ma Songting and Zhao Zhenwu, 1932-33
John Chen
Department of History, Columbia University, USA
jtc2148@columbia.edu
Studies of the Chinese Hajj to date focus almost exclusively on the pilgrimage’s significance for Chinese Islam within China (Lipman 1997; Ben-Dor Benite 2014; Petersen 2016). This paper argues that much could be gained by viewing the Chinese Hajj as also a self-sufficient question of circulation, lest it be seen only as a subset of the grand narrative of Chinese Islamic and thus, perhaps, of Chinese history. The Sino-centric perspective is particularly limiting as regards the early twentieth century, for one, because it does not fully account for the transformations of the Hajj itself at that time. These included the increasing normalcy of nineteenth-century imperial regulations such as passports and quarantine (Low, 2008; Roff, 1982), as well as the normative influence exerted after 1932 by the newly established Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In addition, the Sino-centric perspective does not adequately address how the domestic “Chinese” and transnational “Islamic” activities of Republican-era Chinese Muslim elites, rather than requiring reconciliation, in fact automatically reinforced and relied on one another, simultaneously legitimizing Chinese Muslims’ status in both the Chinese nation-state and the global umma.
This paper develops an alternative circulationist perspective on the Chinese Hajj. It does so by focusing on the Hajj and other Middle Eastern travels of two prominent Chinese Muslims in 1932-33: Imam Abdul Rahim Ma Songting (1895-1992), head of Beijing’s Chengda Academy, and Abdullah Siddiq Zhao Zhenwu (1895-1938), editor of China’s leading Muslim journal, Yuehua. Their journey coincided with a dramatic expansion of the Chinese Hajj: sixty Chinese Muslims made the journey in 1933 (versus only a few in the whole nineteenth century), and over one hundred made it in 1936. As the quotation in this paper’s title suggests, that journey was replete with contingencies that led them to experience the umma in a manner all but unavailable in China—and, with rare exceptions such as this, untraceable in Chinese sources.
Ma and Zhao’s journey through the Indian Ocean to the Middle East was highly consequential. In Singapore, they met Ḥaḍramī patriarch Syed Ibrahim Alsagoff, laying the groundwork for the Chinese Islamic South Seas Delegation’s wartime diplomacy in 1939-41. In Egypt, they met King Fu’ad I, who invited them to the last Ramadan jumʿa at the Mosque of ʾAmr Ibn al-ʿAṣ, agreed to send Egyptian imams to work at Chengda, and made a gift of books that became Chengda’s “Fu’ad Library.” They also delivered the second set of Chinese Muslim students to al-Azhar, and encouraged important further work and decisions by the Chinese Azharites, including Ma Jian’s translation of the Quran into Chinese, Pang Shiqian’s Arabic-language magnum opus China and Islam, and Hai Weiliang’s relocation to Cairo from Delhi. They cemented relations with Grand Imam Sheikh Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri and other Azhar sheikhs, and purchased a set of Arabic type to bring back to China. In Jerusalem, they met Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who referred them to contacts in Hijaz. Finally, in Saudi Arabia, they not only completed the pilgrimage and enjoyed an audience with King Abdulaziz, but had fruitful impromptu exchanges with several Arabs, Indians, and Southeast Asians, who recognized Ma and Zhao from their involvement with Yuehua or their photos in Arab papers.
This paper uses Zhao’s travelogue, Xixing riji (1933), as well as other accounts from the 1920s and 1930s, to rethink several transnational aspects of modern Chinese Islam—including print exchanges, knowledge transformation, and concepts of Islamic community—in the context of both Chinese Muslim elite politics and the overall evolution of the modern Hajj. In pursuit of a truly multi-perspectival, circulationist account, it will also use Arabic periodicals to assess the relevance of Ma and Zhao’s journey, and Chinese Islam generally, to interwar Arabic speakers.
John Chen is a doctoral candidate in History at Columbia University. He is interested thematically in global histories of Islam, science, and knowledge transformation, and regionally in modern China and the modern Middle East. His dissertation, “Making Islam Chinese: Chinese Muslim Elites, Nation-Building, and the Limits of Islamic Universalism, 1900-1960”, has been supported by Fulbright-Hays, Columbia GSAS, and Columbia Weatherhead fellowships. His work has been published by Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME, Spring 2014), the Middle East Institute’s Middle East-Asia Project (MAP, March 2015), and the Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia (SOJOURN, forthcoming). Prior to entering Columbia, John worked as a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York. Before that, he lived for over a year in Cairo, where he completed a full-year fellowship at the American University in Cairo’s Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) with the support of a Fulbright student grant, and received additional training in written and simultaneous translation with the support of a Critical Language Enhancement Award (CLEA). A native of Massachusetts, John earned his BA from Harvard University (2008), specializing in history and Arabic.
Exiled to the Center of the World:
The Turkestanis of Mecca
Rian Thum
Department of History, Loyola University New Orleans, USA
thum@loyno.edu
In 1948, a fourteen-year-old Uyghur girl, Aynur,1 left her home in Chinese Turkestan and headed for Mecca. She had no idea that she would never return. Today she remembers most vividly the sheer mountain defiles and shaggy yaks of the Karakoram, as well as a stormy sea passage to Arabia, but another turn of events had a more powerful effect on her life. When the Chinese Communist Party took control of her hometown, Aynur’s parents decided to remain in the environs of Mecca, where she lives to this day, and where she is known not as a Uyghur, nor as Chinese, but as a Turkestani. This paper examines the historical development of the Turkestani community of Mecca Province in Saudi Arabia, a community formed by successive waves of exile and pilgrimage between the 1870s and the present. In doing so, it argues for a reexamination of our notions of centers and peripheries and shows the close relationship that can sometimes exist between pilgrimage and exile, as in the case of Aynur.
Often we think of exile as a movement to a periphery, but the Turkestanis of Mecca have been exiled from a place usually considered marginal to a place that they and much of humanity see as a center, even the center of the world. Of course, more voluntary migrations are often center-seeking, but exile rarely lands one in a place that is more central to one’s cosmology than the home left behind. Yet, for all the romanticized desire that Mecca can conjure, many first-generation Turkestani Meccans have felt themselves to be marooned on the periphery.
Their Mecca-born children have faced fewer obstacles to social integration, but have embraced an additional challenge of identity construction. Banding together with the Meccan descendants of Samarqandis, Bukharis, and Khoqandis (people whom today we might be tempted to call Uzbeks), they have embraced a local Arabian category, Turkestani, filling it in with a hybrid identity of their own. It is an identity continually renegotiated across inter-generational contours of successive diasporic waves. Some left Chinese Turkestan before the creation of the Uyghur identity, others after. Some speak an Uyghur dialect shaped by the Chinese Communist Party’s Sinicizing policies, others speak an older dialect. All have been forced to re-imagine themselves through the eyes of the center that is now their home.
The aims of this paper are threefold: to provide a basic historical outline for a community that has never been described in English-language scholarship; to uncover the mechanisms that have encouraged pilgrimage and exile to bleed together, including legal, financial, and geographic systems; and to tease out lessons from the Turkestani experience for our understanding of centers and peripheries.
1 Aynur is a pseudonym.
Rian Thum is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Asian Studies at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. His book, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard University Press, 2014) argues that the Uyghurs – and their place in China today – can only be understood in the light of longstanding traditions of local pilgrimage and manuscript culture. The study uses manuscripts in Chaghatay and Persian, contemporary Uyghur novels, graffiti, and ethnographic fieldwork to uncover a complex of historical practices that offer new perspectives on what history is and how it works. The book was awarded the 2015 Fairbank prize for East Asian history (American Historical Association), the 2015 Hsu prize for East Asian Anthropology (Society for East Asian Anthropology, American Anthropological Association), and the 2015 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award. Thum’s current book project, Islamic China, is a re-examination of Chinese Islam that takes full account of the numerous Persian and Arabic sources that Chinese Muslims have used and written. It re-evaluates Chinese-language Islamic traditions in light of their multilingual contexts and uncovers the role of Persianate Islamic networks in binding China and India together over the last 400 years. More generally, his research interests include historical anthropology, mobility, orality and writing, historiography, the history of money, and the place of non-Han peoples in China.
An Indispensable Patriot: A Chinese Muslim Traveler
at the Royal Egyptian Court of King Farouk
Selim Hai Peng Reuters News Agency
heipern1988@163.com
The historical and present ties between Chinese Muslims and the larger Muslim world have generated much interest in Chinese as well as western academia recently. Under
various rubrics such as the revival of the ancient “Silk Road”, Islam’s peripheries, Eurasia interconnectivity, Chinese ethnic minority studies and intellectual movements of the republican era in China, scholars have been excavating historical evidence of the connection between Chinese Muslims and their brethrens overseas with much enthusiasm. This essay presents a new slice of evidence by looking into a piece of travel literature to authenticate as well as contextualize this connection in the first half of the 20th century. By analyzing this piece of evidence, the author also contends that the connection went beyond a one-way religious pedagogy and in fact even had implications on the configuration of modern Chinese nationhood, a key feature of which is the recognition of multi-ethnic diversity.
Selim Hai Peng was formerly a radio journalist with China Radio International for five years. He has a master’s
degree in East Asian Studies from University of California-Los Angeles, USA.
Producing Multiple Imaginaries of Iran
in the Hui Muslim Communities through
China’s Government Sponsored Exchange Programs
Yang Yang
Department of Geography, University of Colorado – Boulder, USA
yang.yang@colorado.edu
This paper examines China-Arabia connections by exploring how individuals, especially the Hui Muslims in China, respond to and appropriate national initiatives on building the New Silk Road. This paper thus looks at how undergraduate Hui Muslim students that major in Farsi and Persian Cultural Studies in Xi’an contribute to local Muslim communities’ knowledge about Iran. Students are indispensible to cultural exchanges, especially knowledge transfers between different regions on the Silk Road. This paper specifically asks how the undergraduate Hui Muslims students understand, react to, and appropriate government sponsored exchange programs that are premised upon the strategic concerns over strengthening China-Iran connections through cultural exchanges. Moreover, how do their experiences contribute to the Muslim communities’ knowledge of Iran in Xi’an through information sharing on social media?
The Chinese government sponsors exchange programs for Chinese students in foreign language studies to strengthen their language skills. This state sponsorship is manifest in providing governmental scholarships and organizing group itineraries for students, and aims at using students as cultural ambassadors to promote the presence of China in countries along the New Silk Road. However, exchange students—especially the Hui Muslim students—are immersed in the everyday life of Iranians and interact frequently with locals, thus gaining different perceptions about Iran. Through sharing individual experiences of the community members in Iran and learning from Iranians on various things including fashion and media, Muslims in Xi’an become connected to the broader Muslim world.
Xi’an, as the historic east terminus of the Silk Road and the new starting point of the One Belt One Road initiative, is a case in point that shows multiple forms of encounters and engagements in forging China-Arabia connections through the new Silk Road. Xi’an has a significant Hui Muslim population, most of which reside in the Muslim Quarter, an ethnic enclave and well-known tourist attraction that contributes to the local economy significantly. The Hui, one of the ten officially recognized Muslim ethnic minorities, often regards the Persian Empire as one of their ancestries and traces usages of Persian in their dialects and similar features in physical appearance. The Hui Muslim students leverage the historic narratives of Persian lineages among the Hui Muslims in claiming a better understanding of Iran as compared to Han Chinese. This lineage overlaps with government projects aimed at strengthening China and Iran’s strategic relations through cultural exchanges.
This paper approaches the complex process of producing knowledges about global Muslim communities in Xi’an through individual travelling by understanding as a process of producing imaginaries of the Arabia in social space. This approach thus brings scholarship of Henri Lefebvre and Benedict Anderson in conversations. Henri Lefebvre’s concept on spatial production as interlinked social relations allows it to see the impacts of transferring experiences from elsewhere and thus having impacts on social relations locally (Lefebvre 1991). Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” shows how imaginaries of Iran from the Chinese side are assembled by different actors and diverse narratives (Anderson 1983). These imaginaries have various possibilities of being assembled together, and thus show impacts of competing actors and their ideas on envisioning Iran. This paper thus addresses diverse experiences of individuals with the new Silk Road initiative and how the new Silk Road takes form in different local contexts both inside and outside China.
Yang Yang is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the University of Colorado – Boulder, USA. Her research interests include urban and ethnic geographies, particularly the visualization of ethnicity and religion in the urban built environment. She obtained her Master of Sciences in Human Geography and Urban Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her current research concerns visualization of Islam and the Hui nationality as a process of ethno-religious subject making in inland, second tier cities in northwestern China. She participated in editing a volume on cultural cities in Asia, “Making Cultural Cities in Asia”, which is included in the Routledge series on regions and cities.
Cross-Cultural Encounters along the New Silk Road:
The “Back to Jerusalem” Movement
Yi Liu
Center for Study of Religion and Society, Shanghai University, China
translation.liu@163.com
The historical Silk Road is an idealized type of cross-cultural conversations, including the main religious traditions of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, in parallel with risky trades and military conquers. The “New Silk Roads” proposed by the main powers after the cold war have more geo-political meaning, which is facilitated by the “One-Belt-One-Road” initiative of the Chinese government.
Between these two contrary pictures is the cultural and religious encounters in the new context. On one side, the Chinese government sponsored numbers of Confucius Institutes in countries along the Silk Road, which focus on teaching Chinese language and promoting Chinese culture abroad, but with little religious meaning. On the other side, Islamic missionary groups rose as a counterpart to the Christians and got supports from countries such as Saudi Arabia. They not only operate within China, through publications and training centers, but also target the Chinese migrant workers and students living in the Arabic world.
A third group is smaller in scale than the former two and without government support, but has larger and more complex cultural implications in the global context. That is the “Back to Jerusalem Movement” – the missionary work of Chinese Christians along the Silk Road with Muslims as the main target.
It can be traced back to the Edinburgh International Missionary Conference in 1900 and is considered as a part of the global ecumenical movement. When the China Inland Mission sent Christians to the Muslim area of Northwest China, they met their Islamic counterparts appointed by the Pan-Islamic Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire. Later, it developed as a Chinese indigenous movement in the 1940s, which was applauded and propagated by the Western missionaries. It revived in the 1980s among the Chinese “house churches,” which is called the “Great Commission” left for the Chinese Christians. The “One-Belt-One-Road” initiative of the Chinese government provided a new context for its development. And it also won supports from the American and Korean churches, as well as the large group of Chinese diasporas.
It is an illegal, secret movement within China. But the Westerns attribute it a geo-political meaning, i.e. to cultivate a Pro-American and Pro-Israeli group in China, as a counter-back to the cooperation between Confucianism and Islam, a topic proposed by the master of “Clash of Civilizations”. While China is historically well-known for the Confucian synthesis together with Christianity and Islam, this new movement will arise cross-cultural conflicts, due to its Pentecostal-fundamentalist theology, poor education and preparation, and aggressive missionary aspiration.
Yi Liu, PhD from The Chinese University of Hong Kong is now Associate Professor of History at Shanghai University. In the 2010-11 academic year, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs of Georgetown University. From 2013 to 2016, he acted as the Chinese Director of Confucius Institute at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. His expertise is on history of religion and comparative religions, particularly the mutual encounters between Confucianism, Christianity and Islam. He is the author of two monographs, Religion and Politics in a Global Context (Shanghai, 2011) and Globalization, Public Religions, and Secularism: A Comparative Study of Christianity and Islam (Shanghai, 2013). He also co-edited the Blue Book of Turkey, with three volumes published annually from 2014 to 2016. He was awarded an “Excellent Young Scholar” of Shanghai University in 2011 and a “Shuguang Scholar” of Shanghai Education Committee in 2015.
Spiritual Practice in the Arabic Hagiography
of the Chinese Jeherenye Sufi Order
Florian Sobieroj
Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany
x8sofl@uni-jena.de; florian.sobieroj@uni-jena.de
The hagiography of the Chinese branch of the Naqshbandiyya order of Islamic mysticism called Jeherenye (Jehelinye, of Arabic Jahriyya), mainly rooted in the provinces of Gansu, Ningxia and Yunnan, has been recorded in a small number of texts composed in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Arabic language. The most important are the Rashaḥāt (Reshihaer 熱什哈爾) of Guan Li Ye, Kitāb al-Jahrī (Daotong shi zhuan 道統史傳) of
Muḥammad Manṣūr Ma Xuezhi and Manāqib (Mannageibu 曼納給佈) of Zhan Ye. As the hybrid Arabic-Persian text of the Rashaḥāt, the oldest of these literary works, is not accessible to researchers (however, a Chinese translation thereof has been published), in this paper I will concentrate on the hagiography recorded in the other two texts (extant as facsimile editions and partially in Chinese translation). The hagiography in the three above-mentioned works is made up mainly of stories about the founder of the Sufi order, Ma Mingxin, and his successors in the first few generations. Many of the stories deal with the contemplative discipline (xiuxing 修行; Arabic: ʿamal) declared obligatory for the followers of the brotherhood (Ma Xuezhi gives a description, in the introduction to K. al-Jahrī, of the works he calls qurubāt [Chin.: gongke], i.e. works which make the disciple draw closer to God), and they include mainly the following practices:
– Dhikr 宰可熱, i.e. “remembrance” of God; carried out mainly through the application of the kalimat al- tawḥīd (“word of the oneness of God” [Chinese: qingzhen yan de ci]); dhikr can be performed individually and collectively (the latter has been performed in the circle called dāʾira, in the master´s home or in the Sufi convent, gongbei); descriptions of the physical execution of dhikr are given in the stories; there has been developed, within the Chinese Jahriyya, a whole mysticism of remembrance which has also been the core discipline of Sufism in the Arab lands;
– Prayer formulas, which were taught the disciples by the shaykhs, e.g. subḥāna llāh for their individual use, and Litanies, apparently learnt by Mingxin in Yemen (Awrād al-sharīfa [Chinese: zunguide zanci]);
– Recitation of the “canonical” texts (jing), in the Sufi assemblies, namely: the Suwar Khwājagān (selections of Qoranic verses); the Mukhammas and the Madāʾiḥ (the first in verse, the second in prose) in praise of the Prophet Muhammad, allegedly brought from the Yemen by Mingxin;
– Connecting with the master (shaykh), through the heart (cf. rābiṭa in the wider Naqshbandiyya order); copying the Nisbat (nisibaiti = genealogy of the masters of the Sufi order), thereby connecting with the Sufi ancestors.
Questions to be examined include the following: To what extent are the contemplative principles and practices of the wider Naqshbandiyya Sufi order reflected in the Jahrī hagiography? Are deviations from the classical Arabic Sufi models discernible which may be due to the influences of the Chinese environment and its religions, Buddhism and Taoism (cf. the physiology of the performance of dhikr involving the “raising of the qi”)? Is the hostility of Mingxin, pathfounder of the Jahriyya order, against Buddhist iconography characteristic of the Jahrī masters´ attitude towards the Chinese religions?
Florian Sobieroj, is active (since the start of his employment in 1995) as a cataloguer of Arabic manuscripts in the project KOHD under the auspices of the Akademie der Wissenschaften Göttingen. He has published three catalogues in the VOHD series, including descriptions of Arabic as well as some Persian and Turkish Mss. of the BSB München and of some major collections of Thuringia. Sobieroj has studied oriental languages and history of religion at Freiburg university (he attained his PhD in 1991) and he worked as a lecturer of Arabic and Islamic studies at Victoria university of Manchester (1993-95) and as a replacement professor at the universities of Tübingen, Erlangen and Jena (he obtained his venia legendi, “Habilitation”, in 2004). Besides cataloguing Islamic Mss. he takes an interest in Sufism, focusing on its manifestations in Arabic and Persian language literature. He has written a number of articles and books on manuscript studies and Sufism, including an editio princeps of one of the works of al-Qushayrī (he is preparing a translation of the Arabic mystical text with a special focus on the poetry). Sobieroj also studies Sufism in China (his article “The construction of the sanctity of Ma Mingxin” has been published in Asia 2016. 70 (1), p. 133-169) and he is preparing a publication on the Arabic literature of the Naqshbandiyya-Jahriyya of northwest China. His book publication Variance in Arabic Manuscripts (De Gruyter, 2016, SMC 5) also includes some excursuses on Chinese Islam.
Unraveling the Principles of Nature:
Arabic Philology in China, 16th-18th Centuries
Dror Weil
Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University, USA
dweil@princeton.edu
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of a new interest in Arabic and Persian texts in China, and the emergence of a new genre of Chinese Islamic literature. Chinese scholars undertook extensive searches for Arabo-Persian manuscripts that had been forgotten in libraries or were brought to China by foreign visitors, and integrated them into a new localized literary genre.
Late imperial China’s Islamic literature juxtaposed and integrated Islamic and Chinese views of the natural world, and presented them to Chinese readers. In that process, China’s scholars of Islam developed methods of translation of Arabic and Persian texts into Chinese, and forms of textual presentation, as they negotiated the conceptual and lexical bearings of the discourse on nature.
By highlighting representative segments of Islamic works in Chinese and comparing them to their Islamic sources, the talk will address the issues of movement of medical knowledge across Asia and the eastward expansion of Islamic medicine. It will discuss the main conceptual frameworks that were employed to introduce Islamic natural philosophy to Chinese readers, and the ways China’s Islamic scholars reconciled Islamic and Chinese physiological paradigms. It will shed light on the historical actors and institutions in both the Islamic and Chinese societies that facilitated the movement of such knowledge.
The talk will refer to the Arabic and Persian works on the natural world that circulated in China during the 17th and 18th centuries, which reveal the scope of late imperial China’s scholarly engagement with the Islamic world. In addition, it will discuss methods of cross-cultural translation, aspects of book culture, and their effect on the transmission of medical and scientific knowledge.
Dror Weil is PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Department of East Asian Studies. Currently in the final stages of completing the dissertation, entitled: “The Vicissitudes of Late Imperial China’s Accommodation of Arabo-Persian Knowledge of the Natural World, 16th-18th Centuries”.
The Scientific Muslim:
Ma Jian and his Translation of Husayn al-Jisr’s Treatise
Zeyneb Hale Eroglu Sager
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, USA
hale.sager@gmail.com
Ma Jian, one of the most influential Chinese Muslim scholars in the twentieth century, translated Husayn al-Jisr’s (1845–1909) A Hamidian Treatise on the Truth of Islam and the Shari‘a of Muhammad into Chinese in 1938 when he was a student at al-Azhar University. Al-Jisr’s treatise was an early version of the new discourse becoming prevalent among Muslim reformists concerning the compatibility of science and Islam. Nonetheless, Husayn al-Jisr held conservative views concerning social matters like slavery, polygamy, and jihad, which contradicted Ma Jian’s already-established ideas. It therefore remains a curious question as to why Ma Jian chose to translate the treatise a few years after he translated Muhammad Abduh’s Theology of Unity although Abduh’s treatise surpassed that of al-Jisr in its espousal of rational thinking and presented an Islamic worldview closer to that of Ma Jian. In this paper, I analyze the original and the translated texts in comparison. This approach enables us to observe how Ma Jian navigated the highly controversial and heterogeneous reformist discourse in Egypt. His “peculiar” translation of al-Jisr’s treatise, in which he not only selectively translated chapters but also totally changed the content of some others in order to make them conform to his own views, demonstrate that the religious, cultural, educational, and intellectual baggage Ma Jian brought from China to Egypt determined how he selected, adopted, and appropriated ideas from the Arabic reformist literature. His selection of al-Jisr’s treatise for translation should be seen in light of the challenge posed by the theory of evolution prevalent among New Culture intellectuals in China. Husayn al-Jisr was among the first Sunni scholars who provided Muslims with a road map showing the direction Muslims should take in facing the positivistic challenge, specifically Darwin’s theory. Al-Jisr’s theological manuscript, with its distinctive coverage of evidence from all kinds of scientific disciplines, helped Ma Jian not only confront the anti-religion discourse in China but also go beyond the apologetic and rejectionist discourse prevalent among Chinese Muslim reformist literature in 1930s, mainly concerning the question of the compatibility of Islam and the theory of evolution.
Hale Eroglu received her PhD from the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard University in May 2016. Her dissertation title is “Islam in Translation: Muslim Reform and Transnational Networks in Modern China, 1908-1957.” She also has an MA from the History Department at Bogazici University. She published an article comparing constitutional reformist movements in Turkey and China. She is interested in global intellectual networks and comparative history. Currently she is a Visiting Scholar at Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.
The History of Bilateral Relation
between China and Kuwait 1971-2009
Riyan Hidayat
Middle East and Islamic Studies, School of Strategic and Global Studies,
Universitas Indonesia riyan.hidayat51@ui.ac.id
China and Kuwait have bilateral relations long enough. At March 22, 2016, the Government of Kuwait did anniversary of China-Kuwait bilateral relations 45th year. Both of countries have accounted for the contribution and support of this bilateral relationship. The relations established in various fields such as politics, economy, culture and other minor fields such as sport and developing human resources. Diplomatic visits between the two countries in a time series that alternates between 1989-2009 a regular agenda that is intended to strengthen the relationship and cooperation between the two countries. starting from the visit of President Yang Sang Khun from China to Kuwait in 1989 and the last visit was done representatives of Kuwait, Emir al- Sabah in 2009. In addition, Kuwait is the first country in the Middle East area, which establish formal diplomatic relations with China. Both do perception and views on discourse and international dynamics that occur. For example, in the fields of investment, Kuwait continues to perform a variety of strategies to contribute to the development of investment in China. In other fields, China highlighted the events of the Gulf War in 1990 and against it. Gulf war itself could potentially lead to the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq’s invasion activity. China also voiced diligent in offering solutions to the problems that occurred in the Arabian Gulf region.
China and Kuwait in the constellation of political influence and trade in their respective area. China with great economic power often cultivate influence in developing countries and in the region itself. In the perspective of the future, China can influence not only in the regional area, but also has the potential to control the world economy. Position Kuwait as an Arab country “special” who have cooperated for a long time with China has a rich base is very large in China petrified in investing its resources for the benefit of Asia and the Middle East region. This requirement makes China continue cooperating with Kuwait to continue to work and vice versa, Kuwait did the same thing.
Results from this study is the explanation of the development of relations between China and Kuwait in the fields of politics, economy and trade in the period 1971-2009. Good communication in the political corridors between the two countries becomes very significant in maintaining political relations. Common vision to build mutual between the two countries is an important factor in the development of good bilateral relations. Siding with one another be a reinforcement of the relationship. In the field of economics and trading, Kuwait put myself as a variable guard the stability of the Chinese state through investments in infrastructure and monetary policies. China function as bilateral contacts that contribute economic development of trade in Kuwait with the contribution of export of goods that are not widely circulated in Kuwait. Based on the historical information, this relationship is forecast to continue to run and will increase in the years ahead. These developments will affect in regional economic developments such as in the Gulf, Arab or East Asia.
The significance of this paper is to provide enough information about the origin of the bilateral relations between China and Kuwait, provide sufficient information about the history of relations between China and Kuwait in the field of politics in the period 1971-2009, providing information on the history of relations between China and Kuwait in the fields of economy and trade in the period 1971-2009, and provide related analysis of the relationship between China and Kuwait in the future.
Riyan Hidayat is a MSc Candidate (with full scholarship) in Middle East and Islamic Studies at the School of Strategic and Global Studies, Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia. He is interested in History and Civilization of Middle East, Islamology, Islamic Civilization in Indonesia and Malayan Studies. He has been involved in several research such as “Evaluation of Government Policy, Particular Coordination between the Ministry Regarding The Protection of Migrant Workers in Abroad in Order to Change UU No. 39 of 2004” (2015), “Why they were against the State? Transformation of Darul Islam in Indonesia 1949-2010” (2015-2016), “Democratization in Middle East” (2016), and “The Role of Kyai as Agents of Change in the New Order and Reform” (2016).
Can China-Arabia Regional Multilateralism Become
the New Model of International Regimes?
Game Theory Analysis of China-UAE Civil Aviation Relations within the Context of One Belt One Road Strategy
Jiangtian Xu
School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies,
University of East Anglia, UK
xujiangtian@icloud.com
The ultimate ambition of the paper is to explore whether China-Arabia Cooperation, within the context China’s One Belt One Road Strategy, can make new international regimes through their efforts to negotiate, contract as well as sustainably promote the political norms of regional multilateralism internationally.
The paper uses UAE-China Civil Aviation Relations as the case to measure China’s civil aviation power in the Middle East region with the application of Regime Theory. Game theory analysis will facilitate to explore whether a more liberal civil aviation agreement between China and UAE can be formed in the future to enhance the ideology of regional multilateralism which is the core value of One Belt One Road Strategy. Through game theory analysis, it has been found that singing liberal civil aviation agreement with China will be the best choice for UAE as well as other One Belt One Road Region nations, because they will get the highest and stable payoffs from the game. Therefore it is very likely that China-Arabia regional multilateralism can be the new model of international civil aviation regimes in the near future.
Jiangtian Xu is PhD Candidate at University of East Anglia in the UK. He has been chosen as one of the four
2017 UACES Scholars. He was awarded United Nations University Scholarship and two DAAD Fellowships.
China-Arab Economic Relations:
Current Status and Future Challenges
Liangxiang Jin
Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, China
jinliangxiang@siis.org.cn
The new century witnessed rapid development of economic relations between China and Arab countries. And despite the security challenges, economic relations between the two have been stable in general. China’s economic relations with major Gulf oil producers have contributed greatly to maintaining the feature of stability. China’s economic relations with the countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia, which had experienced turmoil, resumed very quickly and even increased greatly shortly after the turmoil.
The reasons are numerous. The most important should be the mutual complementarity of the two by nature. Gulf countries are major oil producers while China is major consumer; Gulf Arab countries are short of laborers while China is abundant with; Arab countries are short of infrastructure construction capabilities while China has. Besides, since the beginning of the new century, China had encouraged its enterprises to go out, and the Arab Middle East is one of the major destinations. And China has also been a major partner for the reconstruction of turmoil-devastated countries.
China-Arab cooperation will see new areas in the coming decade in addition to these old areas, and economic cooperation between the two is going into a new stage. China is currently talking about the establishment of the “1+2+3” cooperative pattern. That is with energy cooperation as the principal axis, infrastructure construction and trade and investment facilitation as the two wings, and the three major high-tech fields including nuclear power, space satellite and new energy as the breakthrough.
China-Arab economic relations will see numerous opportunities. The first should be the current political and economic transformations in the Arab world. Within this context, Arab countries, in order to reconstruct their political legitimacy, will need both investment and export market, which will greatly strengthen economic cooperation between the two. Secondly, China has already launched its Belt and Road Initiative, which will greatly facilitate economic connections between the two; thirdly, the post 2030 development agenda of the United Nations will also create fields of cooperation.
China-Arab cooperation will also have to face challenges. The first one should be security challenges. Business people will have to include security risks in their calculation. China will have to find out ways to protect the security of its economic interests in the region, but its military resources are still very poor. Secondly, China and Arab countries will have to always prepare for the worst scenario where a third player might defame and disrupt the cooperation between the two.
Liangxiang Jin is a Research Fellow with Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS). He mainly focuses on the Middle East international relations and China-Middle East relations. He in particular works on Iran nuclear issues in the last two years. He used to stay as visiting fellow in the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace (2002-2003), the Baker Institute (2011) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2013) as well.
The US Dollar, Global Shifts:
The Political Economy of Chinese Investments in Saudi Arabia
Alvin A. Camba
Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, USA
acamba1@jhu.edu
According to the logic that high levels of corruption and weak institutions attract more Chinese outward (FDI), the Arabian Peninsula, inclusive of states with weak democratic institutions, should have pulled in higher yields of Chinese investments. The paper examines Chinese outward FDI investments in Saudi Arabia. Specifically Chinese FDI in Saudi Arabia, currently sitting at $25.6 billion in the second quarter of 2016, has been consistently high in recent years. If the political window for closer ties has been there since the end of the Cold War, what accounts for China’s recent investments across a wide range of economic sectors in Saudi Arabia? Furthermore, why have investments been so high in Saudi Arabia vis-à-vis most of the other states in the Arabian Peninsula? I argue that the contradictions of U.S. dollar, seen in the global financial crisis of 2009 and the growing ruptures of the American global order, led to the positive intensification of Sino-Saudi relationship. As the crisis of Western capitalism continues, China and Saudi Arabia protect themselves against the volatility the U.S. dollar by forging stronger economic ties. China has been the largest buyer of U.S. treasury bonds before 2011. But as a result of the financial crisis, China now tries to balance its need to purchase US treasury bonds by using the renminbi to stimulate productive activities in the global economy. While many Chinese companies have pushed Latin American, African, and Southeast Asian States further into resource specialization, Chinese companies in Saudi Arabia engage in diversifying the Kingdom’s economy by investing across a wide range of economic sectors. Saudi Arabia hedges against U.S. Petrodollar recycling by drawing in huge sums of Chinese outward FDI to diversify their economy. Chinese outward FDI in Saudi Arabia, fulfilling the need to export the renminbi and diversify the Kingdom’s economy, sustains the reemergence of Sino-Saudi ties.
Alvin A. Camba is a PhD Student in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He combines detailed ethnographic fieldwork, quantitative methods, and comparative-historical analysis to analyze historical mechanisms that embed states and places in and toward particular pathways within the global circuits of capital. Within this broad research agenda, he aims to trace the particularities, unravel the dynamics, and examine the implications of Chinese overseas foreign direct investment (FDI) in Southeast Asia. Some of his works have been appeared in the following: Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia (edited volume, Cambridge University Press), The Extractive Industries and Society, The Austrian Journal for Southeast Asian Studies, and the Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture. His work on Chinese investments will appear in the following edited volumes: China’s Resource Engagements in Southeast Asia and New Directions in the Study of Africa and China. He has recently been awarded the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) PEWS 2016 Terence K. Hopkins best graduate student paper award (honorable mention). Furthermore, his research has been recognized and funded by The Southeast Asia Research Group, The East Asian and Islamic Studies Center at Johns Hopkins, and the Arrighi Center for Global Studies.
ABOUT THE ORGANISERS AND CHAIRPERSONS
Cemil Aydin (PhD, Harvard University, 2002) is currently teaching courses on Middle Eastern and Asian History at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, U.S. His recent publications include The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007), “Regionen und Reiche in der Politischen Geschichte des Langen 19
Jahrhunderts, 1750-1924 (Region and Empire in the Political History of the Long 19th Century) in Geschichte Der
Welt, 1750-1870: Wege Zur Modernen Welt (A History of the World, 1750-1870) (Beck Publishers, July 2016) pp:
35-253, and The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, Forthcoming
Spring 2017).
Engseng Ho is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History at Duke University, USA. He is currently the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor in Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, and the Director of Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at Harvard and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He is a specialist on Arab/Muslim diasporas across the Indian Ocean, and their relations with western empires, past and present. His writings include The Graves of Tarim, Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, and Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2), 2004.
Ernesto H. Braam is a diplomat and scholar who has lived and worked in Europe, the Middle East, East and Southeast Asia. Ernesto has studied international law and achieved his Masters degree with a thesis on the Geneva conventions and the Palestinian territories. He began his career with the Dutch Foreign Service just before the first Gulf War, being the Iraq and Kuwait desk officer during Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. After 11 years of diplomatic postings in the Far East (Singapore, Japan, Thailand), plus some intermittent postings at HQ in The Hague, Ernesto returned to the Middle East in 2009 as Chargé d’Affaires of the Dutch embassy in Baghdad. In March 2010, he observed the general elections from the holy Shi’ite city of Najaf, and subsequently returned to The Hague to take up a position as Strategic Policy Advisor at the North Africa and Middle East Department. From July 2015, Ernesto has started with a new assignment at the Dutch embassy in Singapore as a Regional Strategic Advisor for Southeast Asia. His portfolio includes analyzing and reporting on political and security trends in Southeast Asia, and building a network with think tanks and universities throughout the region, that will not only serve Dutch embassies and the Foreign Ministry, but also knowledge institutes in the Netherlands. In addition to, and sometimes interwoven with, his diplomatic work, Ernesto has conducted academic research on Islamic movements, particularly Salafism (in Southeast Asia and Middle East) and Shi’ism. He has published on both topics in peer-reviewed publications (a.o. ISEAS publication) and is currently pursuing a related PhD. Ernesto has given lectures at academic institutions and conferences in the Netherlands, US, UK (Chatham House), Singapore (NUS and LKYSPP), the Middle East, and elsewhere. From
2010 to 2015, he has organized and moderated about 25 “Henriette van Lynden” lectures on the Middle East, in the debating hall De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. The list of speakers includes Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, Iran- expert Vali Nasr, Brookings Doha director Salman Shaikh, Saudi expert Robert Lacey, Egyptian rapper Sadat, Islam expert Bernard Haykel and many others. Ernesto is an experienced moderator and chair of lectures, panel discussions and seminars on varied topics. He is also a trained trend forecaster and founder of the Dutch Ministry’s Strategy Lab.
Jianhua Yu currently is Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of International Relations (IIRS), Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), and also Standing Director of Chinese Society for Middle East Studies. He was director of the Institute of Eurasian Studies at SASS from 2009-2012. Dr Yu holds a PhD in political sciences from the College of Law & Political Science, East China Normal University (ECNU) in 2003, and has History MA Degree from Department of History, ECNU in 1988. His research fields are International Relations and World History, mainly in Issues in Middle East and Central Asia, Jewish Studies, Nationalism and Ethnic Confliction, International Energy Politics, Terrorism and International Security, etc. He is author (or co-author) of the following academic works from 1990s: On Evolution of World’s Terrorism (Shanghai, 2015), World Energy Politics and China’s Energy International Cooperation (Changchun, 2011), On Non-traditional Security of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Shanghai, 2009), Studying on the National Question in Yugoslavia (Beijing,
2004), From Silk Road to ASEM: the Relationship between Asia to Europe for 2000 Years (Beijing, 2004), The Jews in China (Beijing, 2001), Chronicle of World History (Shanghai, 2001), Jewish Civilization (Beijing, 1999), Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Shanghai,1999), The Revitalization of the Jewish People (Shanghai, 1998) and Opening Door Policy in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Sichuan, 1992),etc.
Nisha Mathew is Muhammad Alagil Postdoctoral Fellow in Arabia Asia Studies within the Inter-Asia Engagements Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Dr Mathew received her PhD in History from Wits University, Johannesburg in 2014. Her dissertation, Understanding Space, Politics and History in the Making of Dubai, A Global City, is a commercial history of the city explored through the complex interface of commodity, capital and community across the Indian Ocean from the 19th to the 21st century. Her research interests include gold, money, mobility and the contours of the Indian Ocean after empire.
Born in China to Hui Chinese Muslim parents, Rosey Wang Ma grew up in Pakistan and Turkey. She had her education in Catholic French schools in Istanbul, then went to Taiwan to study Diplomacy and Political Science at Zhengchi University; and later to France to qualify for a French language teaching certificate. Marriage took her to live in Malaysia where she has spent more than 40 years. After raising 6 children she did a Masters in Education (as a very adult student), specializing in Guidance and Counselling, which made her change a career from teaching French to being a student counselor and also training teachers and care-givers in an English boarding school. Somehow, events and writings pushed her into being interested in Chinese Muslims, which opened up for her a whole new world of research are in her own ethnic and religious roots and to a Doctorate degree in Socio-Anthropology. She has been in these studies and research for nearly twenty years. After retiring this year from Fatih University in Istanbul, Rosey resides in Istanbul and tries to keep up with new research and publications about the Hui from various scholars; also goes on with her own research on the colourful multiple identities of the Hui diaspora scattered in many countries in the world.
Shuang Wen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in History from Georgetown University and an MA in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo. Her publications include “Muslim Activist Encounters in Meiji Japan”, in Middle East Report 270: China in the Middle East. Washington, DC: Middle East Research and Information Project,
2014.
Yueyang Chen is currently a Lecturer at the Department of Arabic Language and Literature, and a Research Fellow at Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Studies Center at Shanghai International Studies University. She is also a Postdoctoral Fellow in Middle East Institution for youth movements in Gulf countries analysis. Dr Chen received her PhD in Arabic Language and Literature from Shanghai International Studies University. Her research during graduate school focused on the cultural interaction between China and the Arab World and was published entitled Arabic Culture in China – taking the 20th century as an example (2016). Her current projects include research on the youth movements of the Islamic States; protection of intangible cultural heritage in the Sultanate of Oman.
LIST OF CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Alvin A. Camba
Johns Hopkins University, USA
acamba1@jhu.edu
Angela Schottenhammer University of Salzburg, Austria, and McGill University, Canada
angela.schottenhammer@sbg.ac.at
Cemil Aydin
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA caydin@email.unc.edu
Dror Weil
Princeton University, USA
dweil@princeton.edu
Engseng Ho
National University of Singapore meihes@nus.edu.sg
Ernesto H. Braam
Dutch Embassy in Singapore ernesto.braam@minbuza.nl
Florian Sobieroj
Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany x8sofl@uni-jena.de;
florian.sobieroj@uni-jena.de
Ghadda Hayat
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan ghadha15@apu.ac.jp
Ira N. Hubert
McGill University, Canada ira.hubert@mail.mcgill.ca
Jianhua Yu
Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, China yjh@sass.org.cn
Jiangtian Xu
University of East Anglia, UK
xujiangtian@icloud.com
Jilian Ma
Middle East Technical University, Turkey jilianma@gmail.com
John Chen
Columbia University, USA
jtc2148@columbia.edu
Jonathan Rigg
National University of Singapore aridir@nus.edu.sg
Ka-Kin Cheuk
Leiden University, Netherlands k.k.cheuk@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Liangxiang Jin
Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, China jinliangxiang@siis.org.cn
Magnus Marsden University of Sussex, UK m.marsden@sussex.ac.uk
Mohammed Al-Sudairi
University of Hong Kong, and King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, Saudi Arabia msudairi@gmail.com
Nisha Mathew
National University of Singapore arinmm@nus.edu.sg
Nizar F. Hermes
University of Virginia, USA
nfh5x@virginia.edu
Rian Thum
Loyola University New Orleans, USA
thum@loyno.edu
Riyan Hidayat Universitas Indonesia riyan.hidayat51@ui.ac.id
Rosey Wang Ma Independent Scholar roseyma@gmail.com
Selim Hai Peng Reuters News Agency heipern1988@163.com
Shuang Wen
National University of Singapore meiwens@nus.edu.sg
Tansen Sen
City University of New York, USA
tansen.sen@baruch.cuny.edu
Yang Yang
University of Colorado – Boulder, USA
yang.yang@colorado.edu
Yi Liu
Shanghai University, China translation.liu@163.com
Yueyang Chen
Shanghai International Studies University, China feheama@hotmail.com
Zeyneb Hale Eroglu Sager Harvard University, USA hale.sager@gmail.com