The Mahdi Times The Mahdi Times July 2014 | Page 60

There is an alternative version of this
myth of the Chinese Emperor’s dream
that is relevant also:
One night the Emperor Tai Zong of the
Tang dynasty dreamt that a roof beam
of his golden palace was collapsing. The
roof beam nearly smashed his head, but
it was intercepted and pushed back by
the right hand of a man. The man wore a
green robe, and a white turban was
around his head. He had a towel draped
over his should and a water kettle in his
left hand. He had deep eye sockets, a
high nose bridge, and a brown face. [Li
and Luckert, 1994: 237; Benite, 2004:
83]
While this version of the myth continues
in a way similar to the above, our
attention is drawn to the description of
the turbaned Muslim, Muhammad
(s.a.w): here he is brown complexioned.
This too is consistent with what we find
in the Classical Arabic tradition.

In two reports on the authority
of the famous Companions Anas
b. Malik and ‘Abd Allah b.
‘Abbas the Prophet (s.a.w) is
described as having a “beautiful
brown-complexioned
(asmar) body”
[See sources in Muhammad, 2011: 20].
Asmar is a colour term denoting a dark
brown, short of black [Borg, 1999: 129;
Stewart, 1999: 111-112; Vollers, 1910:
88].

Thus, the two descriptions of the
Arabian Prophet (s.a.w) that feature in
the central and most wide-spread myth
of Chinese Islam – indeed the defining
myth – precisely correspond to the two
descriptions we meet with in the early
Arabic literature. But this general
description of Muhammad (s.a.w) as a
very dark-skinned Arab more or less
completely disappears from the Arabic
literature of a later period and is
replaced by what will become the
orthodox and popular description of
Muhammad (s.a.w): abyad musrab bihumra, ruddy white-skinned [see
Muhammad 2011:25-28].

Being that the black-skinned
Muhammad (s.a.w) completely
disappears from the Arabic
Islamic tradition and is almost
totally forgotten, and that the
ruddy-white Muhammad (s.a.w)
becomes universally recognized
throughout Muslim and nonMuslim literature and
iconography, how is it that
Chinese Islam clung to this
black Arab Muhammad (s.a.w)
for so long?
The Chinese myth is difficult to date, but
a printed version of it was probably in
circulation in the late Ming period (ca.
1622), certainly by the early Qing
[Leslie, Daye and Youssef, 2006: 144;
Leslie, 1981: 55; Garnaut, 2006; Benite,
2004: 84].
However, as Anthony Garnaut reminds
us, legends such as this are the material