The Mahdi Times The Mahdi Times July 2014 | Page 55

Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) And The Black Arabs:
The Witness Of Pre-Modern Chinese Sources
by Wesley Muhammad

China has a remarkable Sinophone
Muslim community, the Hui, which is at
least 1300 years old and may actually go
back to the time of the Prophet
Muhammad (d. 632) who, according to
Chinese Muslim tradition, is supposed to
have sent ambassadors to China to teach
Islam [Lipman 1997; EI2 s.v. al-Sin].
Numbering around nine million today,
this Chinese Muslim community began
as Arab (and later Persian and Central
Asian) migrants (diplomats, traders,
soldiers) during the T’ang dynasty (618907) who settled, married local women
and, through a long and gradual process
of assimilation and acculturation,

became nearly totally sinicized [Leslie,
1998; idem, 187; Israeli, 1979; Lipman,
1997].
This community of Islam is remarkable
on a number of accounts: (1) While
Islam arrived in China around the same
time Judaism and Christianity did, these
latter along with other non-indigenous
religious traditions like Manichaeism
failed to survive the purge of all things
foreign by and during the Ming dynasty
(1368-1644). Islam not only survived
this purge, but prospers a fact that
continues to raises questions for
researchers. (2) Chinese Islam survived
and prospers despite its near-total