Scholarship on Chinese-speaking Muslims has, on the whole, focused on local dynamics, ethnic politics and intellectual innovation within the geographical scope of China. Kelly Hammond's new transnational history of this community in the 1930s and 1940s instead traces a geography of Islam through and beyond the Japanese empire. In doing so, she undermines our assumptions about Sino-Muslims in the 20th century and opens a whole range of new research questions.
China's Muslims and Japan's Empire demonstrates how Sino-Muslims engaged with the Japanese imperial state and, in so doing, shaped the empire and their own community. By “Sino-Muslims,” Hammond indicates people we normally think of as “Hui” – but, as she rightly points out, Chinese Muslim identities were in flux in the mid-20th century, and so the term “Hui” is somewhat anachronistic. She argues convincingly that interactions with the Japanese empire played a key role in creating that modern sense of Hui ethnoreligious identity, as Sino-Muslim leaders appropriated the language and institutions of the Japanese empire and articulated their community through global circulations that imperial patronage facilitated. Moreover, exploring the superficially peripheral case of Sino-Muslims illuminates how Nationalist and Japanese competition over their loyalties generated new flows of people, goods and ideas that transcended imperial and national geographies as well as the temporal span of the war in Asia.
Hammond weaves together disparate stories from archives, memoirs, intelligence reports and newspapers across China, Japan, Eurasia and the world. The book's scope is difficult to encapsulate, but it moves outward in stages. The first two chapters examine Japanese intellectuals’ growing interest in Islam in the early 20th century, and how it played into the struggle over Sino-Muslim loyalties in occupied China. Hammond shows a range of Sino-Muslim responses to the occupation but focuses on how leaders appropriated Japanese education projects, meant to demonstrate the empire's benevolence towards Muslims, for their own purposes. State patronage intersected with ongoing movements within the Sino-Muslim community aimed at cultural awakening.
As the book shifts in the following chapters to the wider world, it becomes clear that this intersection of interests had global consequences. We learn that Nationalist- and Japanese-sponsored Hajj delegations that were meant to raise those powers’ international profiles instead reinforced a distinctive Sino-Muslim identity while helping hajjis build solidarities with their fellow Muslims. Hammond follows pilgrims on either side as they encountered alienation and hostility in Japanese-occupied territories, but common cause in the empire's Islamic “suburbs,” the outer reaches of Japan's aspirational empire that scholarship often neglects (p. 188). Those networks of association with the broader Muslim community persisted long after the end of the Second World War. More short-lived was the Japanese empire's attempt to deploy Sino-Muslim agents to challenge capitalist economic hegemony. Hammond uncovered a trove of documents concerning the empire's employment of Sino-Muslims to open new markets in Muslim-majority countries for high-quality tea produced in Japan and for low-quality tea produced in China under Japanese sponsorship. Tea as a commodity allowed the empire to demonstrate its value and benevolence globally while disrupting British and other economic interests, while tea as a consumable laden with ritual and symbolism was meant to project the common cultural values and practices that Muslims and Japanese shared. In either case, Hammond engages with the literature on mobilities in the Japanese empire – but imperially licensed and “transgressive” – to show how spaces far beyond the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere were nevertheless critical to the maintenance of the empire, but also how they allowed for the creation of new and unexpected geographies.
Such circulations of people and goods both “within” and “beyond” the empire – although Hammond challenges this distinction – were closely related to new articulations of nationalism and internationalism. China's Muslims ends with an unexpected journey through Japan's involvement with Muslim communities from China to Detroit, North Africa and Afghanistan as its agents pursued a global Muslim strategy fashioned in part on Nazi and Italian Fascist policies, with occasionally surprising success. In the end, we meet Japanese and Nazi agents in Afghanistan, where both parties imagined connections to pre-Islamic Buddhism that justified their claims on Afghan support. Their co-annexation of the past betrays a mixture of romantic and cynical motivations behind fascist empires’ presentation to Muslims of an alternative to Western imperialism.
Ultimately, Japan's engagement with Muslims was in important respects an act of self-fashioning, an attempt both to associate the empire with other right-wing imperial projects and to articulate the meaning of the empire and the Asian-ness it claimed to represent. Discourse and policy on Islam were closely entangled with the empire's ideals and strategies in occupied China. Hammond then leaves us with disturbing conclusions: that the empire's patronage of Muslims provided substantial parts of the organizational and discursive framework of the postwar decolonial movement; and that their treatment of Sino-Muslims in particular provided a model for Chinese Communist policies.
The story in China's Muslims can be traced through the Cold War and beyond, and it has significance for contemporary policies towards Muslims in China. Moreover, Hammond's ambitious book throws open the gates to future research that considers Sino-Muslim history and the war in Asia through new scopes and scales. It represents a wave of emerging scholarship on transnational Hui history in the 20th century and earlier. Yet it also leads to questions about other unseen geographies of Sino-Muslim life, from the very local – as hinted at by Hammond's discussion of “collaborators” in occupied cities – to the unexpectedly global.
