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The Dome of the Rock

The Dome of the Rock (Ar. Qubbat al-Sakhra), a large octagonal building in Jerusalem commissioned by the Umayyad caliph _Abd al-Malik in 692 C.E., is the earliest major monument of Islamic architecture to survive. Muslims today consider it the third holiest shrine in Islam, after the Kaaba in Mecca and the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina. Its age and its sanctity, along with its visibility and extraordinary decoration, make it a major monument of world architecture and one of the most important sites in Islam.

The Dome of the Rock is set over a rocky outcrop near the center of the large esplanade known in Arabic as al-Haram al- Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), which was once the site of the Jewish Temple, the traditional religious center of Jerusalem.

The building is a large low octagon divided internally by an arcade into two octagonal ambulatories encircling a tall cylindrical space measuring approximately 20 meters (65 feet) in diameter. A high wooden dome, whose metal roof is plated with gold, spans the central space and covers the rock.

The glory of the building is its decoration. Above a high dado of quartered marble, the exterior and interior walls were once entirely covered in a mosaic of small cubes of colored and gold glass and semiprecious stones. In the sixteenth century the mosaics on the exterior were replaced with glazed tiles, themselves replaced in the twentieth century, but the mosaics on the interior stand much as they did when they were put up in the late seventh century. They depict a vast program of fantastic trees, plants, fruits, jewels, chalices, vases, and crowns. A long (about 250 meters, or 820 feet) band of Arabic writing in gold on a blue ground runs along the top of both sides of the inner octagon. The text is largely Quranic phrases and contains the earliest evidence for the writing down of the Quran. It ended with the name of the patron, the Umayyad caliph _Abd al-Malik (replaced in the ninth century by that of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma_mun), and the date of construction.

In form, materials, and decoration, the Dome of the Rock belongs to the tradition of late Antique and Byzantine architecture that flourished in the region before the coming of Islam. The domed, centrally planned building was a typical form for a martyrium, and the Dome of the Rock is similar in plan and size of dome to the nearby Holy Sepulcher, the building (also raised over a rock) that the emperor Constantine had erected in the fourth century to mark the site of Christ’s burial on Golgotha. Other Christian buildings erected in the area in the eighth century, notably the Church of the Nativity in Bethelem, show a similar use of marble and mosaics, perhaps executed by the same team of mosaicists.

Despite its antecedents and even its workmen, the Dome of the Rock is clearly a Muslim building, commissioned by a Muslim patron for Muslim purposes. Its mosaic decoration, notably its inscriptions in Arabic and its lack of figural representation, immediately distinguishes it from contemporary Christian buildings in the area. It was not intended as a place for communal prayer; that function was fulfilled by the nearby Aqsa Mosque. Rather its domed octagonal form suggests a commemorative function, though its exact purpose is unclear.

Already in the ninth century several alternative explanations for its construction were proposed. One author suggested that _Abd al-Malik had commissioned the Dome of the Rock to replace the Ka_ba, which had fallen into enemy hands. This explanation, however, is simplistic and undermines one of the five central tenets of Islam, though the building could have functioned (and does today) as a secondary site of pilgrimage. Another explanation, also current from the ninth century, associates the building with the site of Muhammad’s mi_raj, his miraculous night-journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and back. However, the Qur_anic inscriptions around the interior of the Dome of the Rock, the only contemporary source for explaining the building’s purpose, mention neither of these subjects. Rather, they deal with the nature of Islam and refute the tenets of Christianity. The inscriptions suggest that the building was intended to advertise the presence of Islam. Together with the traditional identification of the rock as the place of Adam’s burial and Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son and of the esplanade as the site of Solomon’s Temple, the inscriptions suggest that the Dome of the Rock was meant to symbolize Islam as the worthy successor to both Judaism and Christianity.

The Dome of the Rock continued to play an important role long after it was built. The Abbasids, who succeeded the Umayyads, restored it several times, and the Fatimids restored it in the eleventh century after the dome collapsed in the earthquake of 1016. The Crusaders considered it Solomon’s Temple itself and rechristened the building Templum Domini. Saladin, the Ayyubid prince who recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims in 1187, had the building rededicated as part of his campaign to enhance the city’s sanctity and political importance. The Mamluks, rulers of Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517, had the wooden ceilings of the ambulatory and the central dome restored. The Ottoman sultan Suleyman (r. 1520–1566), whose name is the Turkish form of Solomon, ordered the building redecorated as part of his program of embellishing the holy cities of Islam. It was restored six more times in the twentieth century and has become a popular icon of Islam, decorating watches and tea towels and replicated in miniature models made of motherof- pearl and plastic. The first great monument of Islamic architecture, it has taken on a new life as the symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.

EAST ASIAN CULTURE AND ISLAM

Within the field of Islam in East Asia, the major developments and most lasting influences between Islam and the indigenous peoples have taken place in China, where Muslims traders first settled in the early decades of the hijra. This early interest in China as a destiny for Muslim travelers is reflected in the famous hadith, “seek knowledge, even unto China.” Despite centuries of relative isolation from the rest of the Islamic world, the Muslims in most regions of China have managed to sustain a continuous knowledge of the Islamic sciences, Arabic, and Persian. Given extended periods of persecution combined with periods of intense government efforts to legislate adoption of Chinese cultural practices and norms, that Islam should have survived, let alone flourished, is an extraordinary historical phenomenon. Although some scholars have attributed the survival of Muslim communities in China to their ability to adopt Chinese cultural traditions, when asked themselves, Chinese Muslims usually attribute their survival to their strong faith and God’s protection.

In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a period of extreme political violence and chaos when Muslims together with other minority groups were persecuted, Muslim communities throughout China actively sought to reclaim their religious identity and revive Islamic education.

In addition to repairing and rebuilding mosques returned to them after the revolution, Muslim communities have also pooled their resources to build new mosques and Islamic schools. These schools are filled with students of all ages, including the elderly, who after decades of government control are anxious to study Islam and Arabic. More recently a growing number of Chinese Muslims are pursing advanced Islamic studies at international Islamic centers of learning. Although there are now Muslims present in virtually every region of China, there have undoubtedly been many communities that were either completely destroyed during government military campaigns, or that simply assimilated to the point of dissolution. One interesting example of a community that came to the brink of complete assimilation, only to be revived for political reasons, was documented by an anthropologist in the early 1980s. In Quanzhou (known as Zaytun in the Arabic sources), a city located along China’s southeast coast, a large clan existed whose members had so assimilated to local customs as to be completely indistinguishable from the local Han Chinese. They took part in the full range of traditional religious practices, many of which had to do with  honoring one’s ancestors. They knew nothing of Islam, ate pork, and drank alcohol. There was one slight difference though: During the annual sacrifices made to one’s ancestors, when preparing food to offer ceremoniously to their ancestors, they would not include pork or alcohol. This tenuous connection to their ancestors (Muslim traders and officials who had first settled in this region in the early years of the hijra) was called upon in 1981 when this extended family sought government recognition as one of the officially recognized minority groups. As they had the genealogical records to prove their descent from Muslims, they were able to change their status from Han Chinese to Hui (Chinese Muslim).

Mosques and Calligraphy

Mosques and the calligraphy within them have also served as an interesting barometer of the waxing and waning of traditional Chinese influences on the development of indigenous Chinese Islamic traditions.

Although no mosques dating back to the pre-Mongol period have survived, it is assumed that mosques during this  period reflected the architecture of the immigrant Muslims who built them, as they were required to live in special districts separate from the general population. By the Ming period in the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, however, there was significant pressure for Muslims to outwardly conform to Chinese traditions. The Huajue mosque in Xian, which dates back to the Ming period and has survived down to the present, is an exquisite example of how Chinese Muslims were able to incorporate traditional Chinese motifs,  decorative arts, and temple architectural styles into the structureand decoration of mosques. In this mosque, as in most others in China, Arabic calligraphy is interspersed with carvings and paintings of traditional Chinese images of flowers, fruit, mythical animals, and Chinese calligraphy. The rooftops are protected by small animal figures along the ridges of roof tiles, and the minarets take the form of pagodas. In addition, the Arabic calligraphy is a highly stylized form that differs from region to region and reflects local calligraphic traditions that have evolved in relative isolation over centuries. However, in recent years, in part as a result from pressure from outside funding sources and the growing number of Chinese Muslims going overseas for the hajj and to study, many communities have torn down these traditional mosques and replaced them with ones believed to be more “authentic.” Over the past twenty years untold numbers of mosques dating back centuries have been destroyed. Nevertheless, in some parts of China in recent years, there has been a growing movement among Chinese Muslims to protect their unique architectural traditions.

Local Celebrations

As there are Muslims communities in every part of China with their own histories and local traditions it would be difficult to generalize about the ways in which Islamic practices have been influenced by other local Chinese traditions. However, by looking at local celebrations of _Id al-Fitr and the Maulid (birthday of the prophet Muhammad) one can gain some sense of the variety of ways in which these interactions have developed. For example, in Yunnan province in southwest China, Muslim communities spread throughout the region. Many are direct descendants of Sayyid _Ajall Shams al-Din, a Muslim from Bukhara, who served as an  official under the Mongol Yuan dynasty and settled in Yunnan at the end of the thirteenth century. Seven centuries later, during the annual celebrations of _Id al-Fitr, after communal prayers at the mosque, Muslims from different areas travel to the site of Sayyid _Ajall’s grave where special prayers are held.

First there are readings from the Qur_an, then the tomb is swept and cleaned (reminiscent of the traditional Chinese Qingming festival held once a year when Chinese go to the graves of their ancestors, sweep and clean the area and then make food offerings), and then the accomplishments of Sayyid _Ajall are retold. In conclusion, a special service is held to honor the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed during the Qing dynasty, and the hundreds killed more recently in this area during the Cultural Revolution.

In another region of Yunnan, a group of Muslim villages spread out over a vast plain have developed there a way of celebrating the birthday of the Prophet, which allows them to  reassert their ties to one another. Every year the Mawlid is celebrated in the fall over a period of two months beginning with the end of the major harvests. Each village is assigned a weekend when it will host all the other villages in a Mawlid celebration. Although the dates clearly are not connected with the Islamic calendar, their tradition allows them to share their bounty with their neighboring Muslim communities and strengthen their networks.

Meanwhile, in northwest China, the decision of when to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday is influenced not by seasonal harvests, but rather by the desire to offer younger Muslims an alternative activity during the widely and elaborately celebrated Chinese New Year. In recent years local Muslim religious leaders in Xian have considered scheduling celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday to coincide with the festivities surrounding the Chinese New Year.

The Role of Women

Another example of how local histories and traditions within the diverse communities of Muslims in China have evolved  over the centuries can be seen in the roles of women in different communities. In central China there is a long tradition of active involvement by women in both Islamic education and religious leadership. Not only is there a long  history of women imams in this region, there is also a tradition of separate women’s mosques. In northwest China, however, women have tended not to play an active leadership role within Muslim communities, and usually they do not pray in the mosques with the men. According to Muslims in other parts of China, these attitudes in the northwest toward women are the result of the Muslims adopting local Chinese views, which are considered quite chauvinistic. In southwest China, however, women play an active role within Muslim communities and are also widely credited with insuring the survival of the Muslim population in the aftermath of a brutal massacre that took place in the 1870s. In most mosques men and women pray side by side with a half curtain dividing the prayer hall. Although over the centuries many Chinese Muslim women adopted the custom of footbinding, historically and down to the present, the Muslim community has not adopted the widespread practice of female infanticide. In conclusion, although maintaining their religious beliefs and practices over the centuries has been a continual challenge, Muslims in China have always been confident of their identities as both Muslims and Chinese. Although some Western scholars have presumed that these identities were somehow inherently antagonistic if not mutually exclusive, the survival of Islam in China belies these assumptions. Islamic and Chinese values have both proven to be sufficiently complementary and dynamic to allow for the flourishing of Islam in China.

Islam in East Asia

Islam has spread to all parts of East Asia, a region that features  some of the world’s major centers of Islamic influence.

Islam in China

With a Muslim population conservatively estimated at twenty million, China today has a larger Muslim population than most of the Arab countries of the Middle East, and yet few scholars have concentrated on this unique community located at the far reaches of the Muslim world. Of China’s fiftyfive officially recognized minority peoples (China’s majority ethnic group is known as Han Chinese), ten are primarily Muslim: the Hui, Uighur, Kazak, Dongxiang, Kirghiz, Salar, Tajik, Uzbek, Bonan, and Tatar. The largest group, the Hui, are spread throughout the entire country, while the other nine live primarily in the northwest.

As a result of the extensive sea trade networks between China and Southwest Asia dating back to Roman times, there have been Muslims in China since shortly after the advent of Islam. Small communities of Muslim traders and merchants survived for centuries in cities along China’s southeast coast, the most famous settlements being Canton and Quanzhou (Zaitun in the Arabic sources). During the first several centuriesthere was limited intermixing between the Muslim traders  and the local Chinese population. It was not until the thirteenth century with the establishment of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty (1278–1368) that thousands of Muslims from Central and Western Asia were both forcibly moved to China by the Mongols as well as recruited by them to assist in their  governance of their newly acquired territories. Although some of the higher-ranking Muslim officials may have been able to arrange marriages with women from their places of origin, it is generally assumed that most of the soldiers, officials, craftsmen, and farmers who settled in China during this early period married local women. Despite centuries of intermarriage, the Muslims who arrived at this time were able to establish communities that have survived with many of their cultural and religious traditions intact down to this day.

Islam during Ming Dynasty 

During the early part of the Ming period (1368–1644), the emperor Yongle ordered Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from Yunnan in southwest China, to lead a series of massive navalexpeditions to explore the known world. In all, between 1405 and 1432, seven major expeditions were launched involving hundred of Chinese vessels and thousands of tons of goods and valuables to be traded throughout the southeast Asian  archipelago, the Indian Ocean, and as far as the east coast of Africa. The success of these trading expeditions was no doubt in part due to Zheng He’s religion and his ability to interact with many of the Muslim rulers and merchants encountered along the way. However, shortly after the death of the Yongle emperor, China’s cosmopolitan and international initiatives gave way to a period of conservatism and the redirection of imperial resources toward domestic issues and projects. During this period numerous laws were passed requiring “foreigners” to dress like Chinese, adopt Chinese surnames, speak Chinese, and essentially in appearance become Chinese.

Despite these restrictions and requirements, the Muslims of China continued to actively practice their faith and pass it on to their descendants. By the end of the Ming dynasty there were enough Chinese Muslim intellectuals thoroughly educated in the classical Confucian tradition that several scholars developed a new Islamic literary genre: religious works on Islam written in Chinese that incorporated the vocabulary of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist thought. These texts, known as the Han Kitab, were not apologist treatises written to explain Islam to a non-Muslim Chinese audience, but were rather a reflection of the degree to which the Muslims of China had become completely conversant in intellectual traditions of the society in which they lived. Moreover, as more and more Chinese Muslims lost their fluency in Arabic and Persian, it became clear that in order to insure that future generations of Muslims were able to have a sophisticated understanding of their faith, religious texts had to be written in Chinese.

The linguistic challenges of transliterating Arabic and Persian religious terms and proper names into Chinese also facilitated the blending of Chinese and Islamic principles as Chinese Muslim authors sought to create new Chinese terms to replace Arabic and Persian ones. Several of these terms are striking in their ability to use traditional Chinese characters to reflect fundamental Islamic concepts: God is translated as zhen zhu, or “the true lord”; Islam is qingzhen jiao, or “the pure and true religion”; the five pillars of Islam become the five constants, wu chang; and the prophet Muhammad is known as zhi sheng, or “utmost sage.”

Islam during Qing Dynasty

In 1644, the Qing dynasty was established, marking the beginning of a period of unparalleled growth and expansion, both in terms of territory and population. Travel restrictions  were lifted, and the Muslims of China were once again allowed to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and study in the major centers of learning in the Islamic world. During this period several Hui scholars studied abroad and upon their return they started a movement to revitalize Islamic studies by translating the most important Islamic texts into Chinese and thus making them more accessible.

Despite the opportunities for travel and study that arose during this period, the Qing dynasty also represented a period of unparalleled violence against the Muslims of China. As reform movements led by Muslims who had studied overseas spread, conflicts arose between different communities.

In several instances the government intervened, supporting one group against another, leading to an exacerbation of the conflict, outbreaks of mass violence and the eventual slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and several rebellions.

In southwest China, it was the growing number of Han Chinese migrants moving into areas where Muslims had lived for centuries that led to violent conflicts. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China experienced a massive population explosion resulting in millions of Han Chinese moving into the frontier regions. As more immigrants moved into Yunnan province along the southwest frontier, there were increasing clashes with the Hui who had settled there in the thirteenth century and whose population is estimated to have been one million. In a series of disputes between newly arrived Han migrants and Hui who had lived there for centuries, local Han Chinese officials (who themselves were not local residents), repeatedly decided to support their fellow Han Chinese against the local residents. Fighting escalated and eventually a Chinese Muslim leader led a rebellion and in 1856 established an independent Islamic state centered in Dali, in northwest Yunnan. The state survived for almost sixteen years, and the Muslims worked closely together with other indigenous peoples. Eventually, however, the Chinese emperor ordered his troops to concentrate their efforts on destroying it. The massacres that ensued wiped out the majority of Muslims in Yunnan. Some fled to nearby Thailand, and their descendants still live there, while others fled to Burma or neighboring provinces. Estimates of those killed range from 60 to 85 percent, and more than a century later, their population has still not recovered its original number. Another consequence of the rebellion was a series of government regulations severely restricting the lives of Muslims.

In the aftermath of the rebellions, the first priority of the survivors was to pool their resources, rebuild their mosques, and open Islamic schools. Having lost most of their material possessions, they were clearly determined not to lose their religious legacy. This period saw renewed contact with other centers of learning in the Muslim world and the establishment of schools that concentrated equally on secular and religious education.

The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 was followed by a period of unrest and warlordism. After the rise of the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party, a civil war ensued, in which both parties sought the support of the nation’s largest minority groups with promises of religious freedom and limited self-government. Many of the Muslims chose to support the Communists, and in the initial period of the People’s Republic of China, the Muslim minority peoples enjoyed a period of religious freedom. However, during subsequent political campaigns, culminating with the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the Muslims of China found their religion outlawed; their religious leaders persecuted, imprisoned, and even killed; and their mosques defiled, if not destroyed. During this period all worship and religious education were forbidden, and even simple common utterances such as insha_allah (God willing), or al-hamdulillah (thanks be to God) could cause Muslims to be punished. Despite the danger, Muslims in many parts of China continued their religious studies in secret.

In the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, the Muslims of China lost no time in rebuilding their devastated communities. Throughout China, Muslims began slowly to restore their religious institutions and revive their religious activities. Their first priority was to rebuild their damaged mosques thereby allowing communities to create a space in which they could once again pray together, but also so that the mosques could reassert their role as centers of Islamic learning. Over the next two decades mosques throughout most of the country organized classes for not only children and young adults, but also for older people who had not had the opportunity to study their religion. Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing to the 1990s Islamic colleges have also been established throughout most of China. Within China, when asked how to explain the recent resurgence in Islamic education, community members cite two main reasons: a desire to rebuild that which was taken from them, and the hope that a strong religious faith would help protect Muslim communities from the myriad of social problems presently besetting China in this day and age of rapid economic development. Chinese Muslims studying overseas reiterate the need to equip themselves and their communities for their future in a state that seems to be ideologically adrift.

Islam in Korea

In some respects, the history of Islam in Korea mirrors that of China, but more as a faint reflection than as a comparable historical phenomenon. Little archaeological evidence has survived but it is commonly believed that some of the Muslim sea traders who regularly traveled to the southeast coast of China also made it as far as Korea. Arabic geographers note the existence of al-Sila, a country beyond China, and it is believed that this name is derived from the Korean dynasty Silla (668–935). Although there is some archaeological evidence of goods from Western and Central Asia being found in ancient tombs in Korea, it is not known if they were brought there directly or acquired by Korean traders in China, which had much more extensive sea and land trading routes with the rest of Asia. During the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1278–1368), Korea also fell under the control of the Mongol empire. As they had a policy of recruiting tens of thousands of men from Central and Western Asia to help them in administering their newly acquired territory, it is probable that some of these Muslims ended up serving in Korea, and that many of them settled there. However, it appears that over the centuries those who settled completely assimilated to Korean society and culture.

It was not until the modern period that Muslims returned to Korea. Beginning in the 1920s, thousands of Muslims escaping the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia fled overland through Korea, and many settled there before being forced to leave in the 1940s. The next group of Muslims who arrived were Turkish soldiers sent under United Nations auspices during the Korean War. Several soldiers settled in Korea, establishing the first mosques in Seoul, Pusan, and Taegu. Today the fledging community of Muslims living in Korea is made up of some converts, but primarily recent Muslim immigrants from South Asia.

Islam in Japan

Although Muslim traders had sailed the seas off the coast of Japan for centuries, there is no known evidence of any Muslim communities settling in Japan until the early part of the twentieth century, when of the thousands of Muslims who fled Russia in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, several hundred were granted asylum in Japan. Many were settled in Kobe and Tokyo, which became the sites of Japan’s first two mosques, built in 1935 and 1938. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the Japanese military government became increasingly interested in encouraging scholarship on Islam as part of its policy to portray itself as a protector of Islam to the Muslim communities of China and southeast Asia. As Japan invaded neighboring countries under its “Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere” campaign, it justified its actions in part as a plan to safeguard all of Asia from Western imperialism, but also to protect Islam.

At present there are an estimated 100,000 Muslims living in Japan, the overwhelming majority of which are immigrants from South Asia and Iran; only a few thousand are Japanese who have converted. Scholarly research on the Middle East and Islam has developed tremendously since the early 1980s, with several research centers at major universities around the country.