Abstract
This book by Wai-Yip Ho is a valuable work that fills a void in the growing body of English-language scholarship on the historical and current situation of Muslims and Islamic traditions in the Chinese cultural, social, political and economic sphere. Focusing on the complex make-up of the Muslim population of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Ho uses a range of methodological approaches in this study, relying mostly on years spent gathering ethnographic data from informants within the various Muslim constituencies of Hong Kong, which he combines with historiographic and archival research as his main sources. His analysis is based on multiple theories from a range of disciplines, including economics, political science, post-colonial and ethnic studies. All in all, the product is greater than the sum of its parts, providing more than a description of Muslim life in Hong Kong by delving into the lives of its subjects, sometimes on an intimate level, and tying its ethnographic narratives into much larger topics of geopolitics and global socio-economic issues. Ho unabashedly reveals himself as a devout Christian, a fact which may help to explain his particular sensitivity to the challenges faced by his Muslim informants as fellow members of religious minorities in an overwhelmingly and increasingly secular, materialistic Hong Kong society.
In Islam and China’s Hong Kong, Ho retraces terrain covered previously in separate articles and essays. On their own, they introduce a number of interesting personalities, interests and concerns – micro-historical narratives that certainly relate to the book’s many macro ideas on colonialism and post-colonialism; identity; diasporicity; human and civil rights; religious freedom and privatization; nationalism; and globalization, to mention a few. However, the assemblage of this collection of discourses from disparate and discrete parts is ambitious, and the book often reads more like an edited volume than a single discussion, despite the author’s attempt to integrate its chapters in his Introduction and Conclusion.
Ho tells us in the Introduction that while three distinct diasporic groups – South Asian immigrants, Sinophone (Hui) Muslims from mainland China, and the recent influx of female domestic workers from Indonesia – constitute the core of Hong Kong’s Muslim population, these groups have somehow coalesced to form ‘an undivided and single Islamic community’ (p. 3). The various narratives, however, often tell a different story, of successive waves of Muslim migration, first under the auspices of British imperial hegemony, then flight from the chaos of China’s turbulent 20th century, and finally as part of the globalization of labour markets in the Asian context. With the exception of a brief period when the various Chinese and non-Chinese Muslim constituencies banded together during the Japanese occupation of the Second World War, and the more recent appearance of solidarity in a 2006 protest against the publication of the controversial Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, most of Ho’s narratives speak of disunity effected by the narrow and sometimes competing interests of the various communities that make up the imagined Hong Kong ummah.
One is left to wonder, for example, why the greater Muslim community has not been able to come together to get a new mosque built in the New Territories, beyond the obvious inability to muster the necessary funds. Could the Hui not use their clout with the PRC government, or do their privileges not extend into Hong Kong? Are they not motivated to use their sociopolitical capital to benefit their non-Chinese Muslim brethren? While this reality of intra-communal division may not fit into the framework of the author’s larger argument, the challenges of trying to weave together a single communal fabric from diverse threads is and always has been an underlying theme of Islamic civilization since its earliest expansion, which this case study serves to reinforce. Rather than trying to impose unity, the book might have benefitted from highlighting the challenges to realizing it.
Nevertheless, Ho’s central argument that ‘Hong Kong is now shifting from its role as the broker that bridged East and West during the Cold War, to that of a new meditator between China and the Middle East’ (p. ii) as a hub in the ‘New Silk Road’ is compelling. Never mind that today’s transactions travel through the air or cyberspace. Hubs in the global economy are as ephemeral as they are ethereal, but Hong Kong is poised both circumstantially and deliberately to be a bridge in the alliance of civilizations. And its Muslim citizens are discovering ways to leverage their position in ‘one country, two systems’ to raise the profile of Islam in Hong Kong and in the PRC.