The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam A Mosque of Their Own by Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun (London: Routledge & Curzon Press, 2000. 361 pages.)

Abstract

This remarkable collaboration of primarily Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun
(with contributions from nine other mostly Muslim Chinese women who are
duly acknowledged), contains a wealth of information on a subject that most scholars of Muslim communities have never considered or perhaps even
imagined: the existence of bona fide women’s mosques in China. Through
painstaking historical, archival, interview, and field research, the authors lay
out a convincing argument that such mosques have existed in China and continue
to experience a “rapid increase” (p. 15), at least since the late Ming
dynasty (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries), proliferating in northern China’s
central plains region (mainly Henan, Hebei, Shandong, and Anhui) during the
Qing emperor Jiaqing’s reign (1796-1820) (pp. 67-69).
This work sheds light on “how women [in China] engendered and sustained
faith, aspiration and loyalties under often challenging conditions” (p.
5) – which is putting it mildly. Strenuously caught between Confucian,
Islamic, and patrimonial requirements, they developed an institution of learning
and cultural transmission perhaps unique to the Muslim world. While the
authors never fully address why “women’s mosques” and madrassahs developed
so fully in China (and almost nowhere else), they do richly demonstrate
the extraordinarily important role these religious and educational centers
have played in preserving and promoting Islamic understanding among
China’s Muslims, known as the Hui national minority (with a year 2000 population
of approximately 9.8 million, out of a total 20.3 million Muslims in
China, according to the especially accurate PRC state census).
While the authors claim these women’s “prayer halls” (the Chinese term
is ambiguous) and the women who lead them are fully-fledged ahongs or
imams (again, the Chinese term, like the Arabic and Persian equivalents, is
not clear about the teacher’s actual status), the issue here is whether they have
any authority over men. Since they clearly do not, ahong should be taken in
its more general sense of “one possessing advanced Islamic knowledge” or
training, and does not imply institutionalized authority beyond the sphere of
women (and children, which in most instances includes boys). Nevertheless,
it is significant that they have such organized authority, training, and separate
prayer halls or mosques among themselves ...