Religious oppression and the communist party’s stranglehold on power may not sound like the ideal conditions for religious innovation, but it seems that some of the most remarkable innovations in Islam are coming from just such a place: The Ningxia province of China.  
  
The Islam that has developed in the Ningxia province of China is notable both because it has been isolated from the trends and developments of the wider Muslim world and because its historical and political position has made it an unusual space for social and religious innovation.

Richard Bulliet, in his book Islam: The View from the Edge, offers a remarkable social historian’s reading of Islamic history. Instead of relying on the “view from the center,” and understanding Islamic history by charting the course of the caliphal dynasties, Bulliet contends that we should also examine the “view from the edge,” and ask how and why Islam became woven into the social structure of the citizens who were neither literally nor figuratively at the political center of the Islamic empire. The Ningxia province of China lies on the literal and figurative edges of Islam, and it provides just such a “view from the edge.”

Jin Meihua is 40, a mother, and, extraordinarily, a female imam. While her mosque is attached to a more traditional male mosque, other women have established independent women-only mosques.

Noting the uniqueness of Islam in Ningxia, Maria Jaschok, Ph.D., research scholar at the Institute for Chinese Studies and member of the International Gender Studies Center at Oxford University, states that “these are sites led by women for women, not overseen by male religious leaders … they’re independent, even autonomous. This is simply not the case anywhere else in Muslim countries.”

Additionally, as Dr. Khaled Abou el Fadl from UCLA notes, “the Wahhabi and Salafis have not been able to penetrate areas like China and establish their puritanical creed there … that’s a good thing, as it means that perhaps from the margins of Islam the great tradition of women jurists might be rekindled.”

Religious oppression coupled with communism may not sound the death knell for religious development, after all; such a place is, in fact, one of the very significant edges of Islam. The Ningxia province will be a region to observe both for the innovative interpretations of Islam it will provide and because it will be a window into a changing China’s experiment with Islam and with its 20 million Chinese Muslims.

Mimi Hanaoka