The Mahdi Times The Mahdi Times July 2014 | Page 58

between his land and China. The
turbaned man (Sa’d or Qays) replied
that the revealed scripture of the
Western Region was called the Quran,
which could be likened to the Five
Classics of China. He then expounded
the difference between Eastern and
Western ritual and teachings.
The Emperor was delighted, and so
selected 3,000 T’ang soldiers to move to
the Western Region, in exchange for
3,000 Muslim soldiers to accompany the
turbaned elder in China. These 3,000
Muslims had countless descendants, and
are the ancestors of the followers of
Islam in China today. [Broomhall, 1966
[1910]: 64-67; Mason, 1929: 46-53;
Lunde, 1985: 12]
The apocryphal nature of this story is
fairly obvious to those familiar with
Chinese history and religious literature
[Israeli, 2001: 191; Garnaut, 2006;
Mason, 1929: 53]. The literary use of the
motif of “the Emperor’s Dream” to
justify a faith newly introduced to China
also appears in legendary accounts of
the origin of Buddhism in China,
according to which emperor Han Mingi
(57-75) in 64 C.E. had a dream of a
person from the West identified by an
interpreter as Buddha. The Emperor
thus sent envoys to the Indus region to
find out all about the new religion
[Israeli, 2001: 192, 204; Broomhall,
1966 (1910): 68; Parker, 1907: 64]. It is
also the case that references to events
that occurred much later can be
discerned in this story, such as the
eighth century rebellion of An Lushan
against the Chinese emperor Xuan Zong
(712-756) which brought, by his
request, 3000 Muslim soldiers to China

who settled there and whose
descendants became a part of the
nucleus of the developing Hui
community. This myth is a ‘community
biography,’ aimed at legitimizing
Arabian Islam within a Chinese cultural
and political environment [Benite, 2004:
85; Israeli, 2002: 62]. Nevertheless,
there is undoubtedly a ‘grain of truth’
underneath all of the apologetic
accretions [Hongxun, 1985; Sushalo,
1971: 42-43 (Dyer, 1981-1983: 563);
Stratanovich, 1954: 52-66 (Dyer, 19811983: 563)].
One quite fascinating piece of this grain
of truth is no doubt the remarkable
description of the turbaned Muslim who
appears in the Emperor’s dream and
who turns out to be the Prophet
Muhammad (s.a.w) himself (See
Endnote 1). Singularly arresting is the
description of his color: black gold.
What could this possibly mean and what
is the source of this very eccentric
Chinese description of Islam’s Prophet
(s.a.w)? Black gold, one of several
‘colored gold’s’ used for jewellery, is
gold with a black oxidised layer
resulting from a cobalt component and
heat treatment. As eccentric as such a
description may seem vis-à-vis the
popular, though late, Arabic/Persian
description found in the more central
Muslim lands according to which
Muhammad (s.a.w) is ruddy white, this
Chinese description actually is curiously
consistent with an earlier Arabic
description, a description, we should
add, that is more in agreement with the
ethno-cultural context of Jahili and early
Islamic Arabia [on which see Reynolds,