Little Mecca in Canton: representations and resurgences of the graveyard of Sa’d ibn Abī Waqqās

ABSTRACT

The tomb of Sa'd ibn Abī Waqqās, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad mythologized to have as having been buried in Canton, has attracted pilgrims from across China and beyond for the past three centuries. The repertoire on Abī Waqqās, an arriver from Mecca buried in Canton, is intriguing less for its factual veracity than the its manifold afterlives of the personage. This paper expands the scope of existing scholarship on Islam in China by directing attention to the previously unexamined textual corpus – stele inscriptions, imperial geographic surveys, mosque records, print periodicals, and recent unofficial historical surveys that date between from the fourteenth century and to the present. Transported between different mediums, Abī Waqqās as an ancestral figure has provided a powerful regenerative force for Chinese Muslims' historical consciousness that unfolds through a circular rather than linear time, and incorporates distant geographies without physical mobility. Moving beyond the textual realm, repetitions of the narrative materialized into a cemetery – a focal point that has mediated long-distance travels and donation networks; absorbed hybrid religious rituals ranging from ancestor worship grave rituals to dhikr practices; and capitalized on the Chinese state’s rhetoric of silk roads diplomacy. By unearthing rediscoveries of a symbolic figure through tides of time, the article shows how a supposedly unscientific myth narrativized conceptions of dual homes, here and elsewhere, and further established a regional Islamic hub, or a “little Mecca” in coastal China.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• historiography
• religion and politics
• space and time
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The campaign requires that mosques raise the national flag of China, and learn and promote the Constitution and laws, core socialist values, and China’s traditional culture. (Chinese Islamic Association 2018)

2 The said tomb likely referred to ‘Gaisimu (盖斯墓),’ otherwise known as ‘Lügongbe i绿拱北’ in Hami. For images by tourist visitors, (‘Hamishi Gaisimu 哈密市盖斯墓’ n.d.) The politics and history of this structure’s construction requires separate research.

3 While the date of mosque’s construction has been disputed, writers of the Song period in the twelfth century have given descriptions of the mosque and the minaret. See (Steinhardt 2015, 62) and (Chaffee 2018, 104–7)

4 For translations of Wu Jian’s text, besides Chen Dasheng’s work, see (Park 2012, 119–21). Park’s book also touches on how geographers in China between the eighth and thirteenth centuries differently characterized Dashi. Dashi was a transcription of the Persian word Tājik or Tāzī that had been used to the refer to the Arabs.Whether Wu Jian’s original inscription actually contained the description on ‘Sahabat Sayyid Waqqās’ has been questioned in (Chen 2015, 39)

5 The term ‘Huihui’ first started to be used during the Yuan Empire, probably originating from the term Huihe 回紇or Huihuihu 回回鶻, indicating Turki Muslims in present-day Xinjiang and Central Asia. (Park 2012, 226, note 30).

6 For the ban on maritime trade during the early years of Ming China and the mandate that directed semuren who had assisted the Yuan to adopt Chinese attire and names, and to marry Chinese populations, (Chaffee 2018, 162–69).

7 Mecca appears as ‘Majia (麻嘉)’ in Zhou Qufei’s Lingwai Daida (Notes from the Land beyond the Passes, 1178) and Zhao Rugua’s Zhufan zhi (Description of the Foreign Lands, 1225), wherein the city is described as the birthplace of the Buddha Ma-xia-wu, and the Ka’ba as the Buddha’s House that attracts all countries of Dashi every year. See (Park 2012, 46–47) and (Hirth and Rockhill 1911, 124–25). In Daoyi zhilue (Shortened Account of the Non-Chinese Island Peoples, 1330) by Wang Dayuan of Quanzhou, Mecca appears as ‘Tiantang,’ a Buddhist descriptor for the netherworld. For a partial translation of the book’s section on Mecca, (Bretschneider 1888, 300–301) Park offers an overview of Wang Dayuan’s account in (Park 2012, 114–18)

8 Different versions of the narrative were reiterated on stelae throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Interestingly, the stele of ‘Babasi 巴巴寺’ in Sichuan’s Langzhong 閬中 (1747) that celebrates the arrival and teachings of the well-known Afaq Khoja writes that Afaq Khoja, ‘whose ties extend to the ancestral country of the Heavenly Square (Tianfang),’ had arrived in the Central Plains (China) following the footsteps of ‘Ṣahāba Sa‘d Waqqās.’ (Yu and Lei 2001, 489–90).

9 Ramadan had been living in Wanping 宛平 in present-day Beijing and serving as a darughachi in Rongzhou 榮州 in southeastern Guangxi Province, which borders Guangdong to the east and had served as an important gateway into Vietnam via the western South China Seas. He died at the age of thirty-eight and was buried in Guangzhou. (Yuanxiu, Jianzhao, and Fengda 1989, 91–92). Ramadan may have been part of Uyghur Turkic settlers in Korea who had occupied roles in administration and maritime commerce during the Mongol period (Lee 2007). The epitaph of Ramadan, discovered in 1985, became the subject of an extensive investigative documentary produced by KBS (KBS 2006)

10 The translation comes from (Broomhall 1910, 113–14). I have not been able to identify which mosque ‘masjid Darkahah’ refers to.

11 On Chinese entrepreneurs’ uses of the global trade networks in Canton, (Wong 2016). For an exploration of presence of Muslim or ‘Moor’ merchants in Canton and Macao in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who had potentially sailed from Surat, (Smith and Van Dyke 2004).

12 The graveyard as a ‘symbolic representation of the social order’ that reflects and shapes the continuity of a property-holding kinship group is explored in (Bloch and Parry 1982, 32–38).

13 These transitional points included Zhaoqing 肇慶, Wuzhou 梧州, Xunzhou 潯州, Nanning 南寧, and ‘Beisai’ 北賽/白色. On Ma Dexin’s journey and intellectual productions, (Petersen 2018; J. Wang 2014)

14 Shādhilīyya order, which initially originated and fluoresced in Morocco and Egypt in the thirteenth century, is one of the most important and influential Sufi currents in the Islamic world. P Lory (n.d.), ‘Shadhiliyya,’ in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition.

15 Original manuscript is available in (Ma 2008b) For a reprint, (Ma 2008a)

16 In a related series of articles, Zhao also discredited Huihui Yuanlai and Xilai Zongpu as uncredible historical writings (Zhao 1926).

17 Recent research has recast the city as a critical trans-local or transnational node where different populations from Asia such as Sikh and Korean diasporas dwelled for extended periods of time and harbored their passion for arts, films, and revolutions back home (Han 2015; Cao 2017). For the rise of Shanghai as a hub for steamship transport, where post-1895 railway projects also intersected, see (Reinhardt 2018, 64, 114).

18 The stele is displayed within the Abī Waqqās mosque-cemetery complex. Author visit in December 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Global Religion Research Initiative –University of Notre Dame/Templeton Religion Trust (TRT0118) and Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (01UC2000B).