Losing centrality and socialization of Islam in Suzhou Memories, identities and positionality around the city mosques

Abstract

Cultural and political alterity in China is levelled by disrupting local communities and networks, both necessary to keep memories and sense of identity alive through sharing and socialising. By taking Suzhou’s mosques as focal lens, the author assesses an experiential void which is politically and socially created, and shows the consequences of rewriting history. The broken nexus between buildings, communities and memories impacts the historical centrality and socialization of Islam in Suzhou, where communities are dispersed and shared memories are lost. Mosques’ positionality in the urban fabric is assessed through interviews and interaction with local Muslims, and the identification of past surrounding communities and networks. The assessment of the heterotopic dimension and contested memories of Suzhou’s mosques in a contemporary context — performed by collecting historical, intellectual, topographical and architectural fragments — allows us to grasp the highly symbolic dimensions of a past diversity in identity spaces. The role of communities in relation with the city’s rich intellectual past — including its tradition of literati translating Islamic classics from Persian to Chinese — is understood as central, together with a spiritual geography made of connections and relations among places.

Introduction

Suzhou, today a developed and wealthy city close to Shanghai in South-East China, is one of the first cultural centres in history where Islamic scriptures were published in Chinese language. The first Islamic classics in Persian were translated into Chinese language in the sixteenth century Suzhou by scholars such as Zhang Zhong and Zhou Shiqi, making the city an early hub of Islamic intellectual culture hybridised in a Chinese context.¹ During the Ming dynasty, the very centre of Sinophone Islamic scholarship became in fact Southeast China: a whole range of local intellectuals developed a tradition of Chinese Islam also thanks to the already advanced book culture in that area. In Imperial and Republican China, the dynamic and evolving map of Suzhou Muslims’ spiritual geography was shaped by daily social and religious practices, displaced and replaced according to cycles of continuous renegotiations of identity.² Over the last 70 years, changes in the urban geography as well as national and city politics have completely reshaped the landscape of the city, mosques’ buildings have been demolished or devoted to other purposes, and such significant alterations of the urban built environment have substantially impacted memories and sense of community among local Muslim minorities.

The reflective, interpretative and recording nature of this piece aims moves away from a more traditional argumentative perspective, in an effort to make authorial meditations an act of potential recovery and voice in tension with the condition of alterity, and given the author’s own positionality as a female European academic whose research focus is Islamic communities in China.

After delving into the concepts of ‘memories’, communities’ and ‘space’ from a theoretical perspective, the author takes the reader to the alleys where lost memories — represented by fragments and signposts — are brought to new life through scholarly narration. By relying on topographic material, archive sources, interviews and participant observation, the author’s main argument here is that narrating stories of lost places and lost memories is a fruitful endeavour, even if only partially socialised and recognised, with the awareness that this kind of acts of scholarship provides the basis for recovery but also offers a different experience and ways to of seeing a city. The obliterated history of Suzhou gives the author the chance to offer an important recovery of lost memories, and the provisionality of the argument — together with the author’s own positionality — deploys a rich potential for future research.

The context

The twenty-one million Muslims currently living in China belong to different religious schools and traditions, as well as ethnic groups. A broad variety of Islamic traditions were historically and are currently present in China: from Sunni to Sufism, from Wahhabism and female Islamic traditions to Shia Islam. The main Muslim ethnic group is represented by the Hui, a population of Central Asian origin whose scholars worked on the understanding of the Koran and other Islamic texts within the Confucian and Taoist cultural traditions of China,³ and the Uyghurs, a Central Asian population of Altaic and Indo-European origins who speaks a Turkic language and lives predominantly in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.⁴ The history of Islam in China goes back to the sixth and seventh century AD when the first Muslims arrived in the imperial territories through diplomatic channels and the maritime routes. As it is proved by the literature on the history of China and by the presence of historical mosques in all China’s urban and rural areas, Muslims have been a fundamental part of the Chinese society until the outbreak of two main Muslim rebellions in the nineteenth century in the provinces of Yunnan and Gansu.⁵ These represent a watershed in the history of Muslims in China: before these turbulent events, Islam and Muslims were seen by emperors as conducive to harmony in domestic socio-political relations, thanks to the ethics that this religion was endorsing and promoting among followers and within the larger society. Emperors — especially during the Ming dynasty — considered Islam as a helpful social tool in their task of keeping the empire stable and peaceful, and they adopted the pragmatic approach of supporting religious leaders and mosques, by granting protection and preferential policies, policies which helped preserving the uniqueness and identity of these communities. For instance, Muslims enjoyed a certain degree of extra-territorial rights (Broomhall, 1910:228); pilgrimage to Mecca was supported by the court; in certain periods, a cap to Han settlers allowed to reside in Muslim areas, for example in Southern Xinjiang, was in place; publications from Arabic and Persian were translated into Chinese; and influential foreign religious leaders were invited to visit and interact with Muslim communities in the empire. Even if it is difficult to estimate the number of Muslims in China before the two rebellions, what is sure is that they were present and active in every city and village of the empire, as the presence of mosques and religious schools testify. Mosques were located in the central districts of urban areas, they had different sizes, the biggest ones were called djami and the smaller ones masjid. Affiliated to almost every mosque there were schools⁶ run by Muslim headmasters, turned afterwards into public schools. These communities used to create large networks both within and among urban and rural areas.⁷ Their activities were mainly connected to sultry butchered practices; restaurants; grinding tools; tools for working with metals; tanning; horse transportation; education; jade trade; and pharmacy.

We can say that they were dispersed, but still interconnected through education, business and networks, religious leaders and wealthy families were of reference for the communities, and they enjoyed the favor of the emperors.

After the two rebellions, a sense of distrust started to dominate at court, and Muslims in China started to be seen as powerful interest groups and lost the favor of the emperors. Millions were killed, millions migrated in neighbouring countries, policies to prevent them to rent land and to take official positions in the government were enforced in different areas of the empire, while communities and mosques were relocated outside the city walls, together with foreign concessions (such as the Japanese and German ones in Suzhou), foreign hospitals and missions. Prejudices and negative views started to circulate among the population, and Muslims became the “Others”, the “Them” against “Us”. In Suzhou as well, in particular after the Cultural Revolution, all mosque activities got concentrated outside the city walls, in Taipingfang, and the original mosque buildings were turned into schools and factories, or demolished. Suzhou authorities preserved elements of the city past, but in a highly selective and politically careful way. Deleting the history of Muslims in the city became possible by creating community voids and breaking the channels for the transmission of memories. In this way, Suzhou became the city of the canals and classical gardens. Suzhou and the overall Jiangnan area’s (Nanjing, Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, Suzhou and Shanghai) peculiar positioning within the context of China’s Islamic traditions, as loci of the tradition of translating Islamic classics from Persian into Chinese, and of some the major Sufi communities in China, is now lost.

Argument, meanings and understandings

The meaning of this article rests in Suzhou’s forgotten alleys and lanes, where grey and white are the dominant colour of the walls made of stones, and where the expression of Muslim alterity used to be embedded in the social fabric and integrated in the city life. These places still symbolise a forgotten past through physical signs of alterity which — according to an extensive ethnography and interview outcomes — are not anymore shared, but still show that in the city’s past centuries Muslim communities were conducting their daily life around the visual and spiritual centre of their identity, the mosque. The mosque as physical and symbolic identitarian mark, as well as compass orienting our understanding of community life, is also the centre of this work. While Suzhou’s cultural heritage is rich and allegedly well-preserved, failure to protect the remnants of Islamic life — symbols and narratives of alterity — allows us to argue that preservation measures have been taken and implemented in a selective way, which responds more to political concerns than to claims and needs emerging from the society.

This narrow interpretative micro-historical lens shows that socio-political diversity in Suzhou has been lost due to the disruption of community identity achieved by selectively neglecting cultural and architectonical heritage and simultaneously dispersing communities. Starting from this argument, the author delves into key aspects of the long historical connection between Suzhou and Islamic traditions, and assesses how dimensions of Muslim alterity are being neglected to the point of being erased from local collective memory.

Buildings: the nexus between memories and communities

Memories and buildings

Suzhou does not have historical buildings stricto sensu, as the oldest ones can be traced back as built (or rebuilt) from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Part of these edifices is a faithful reproduction of ancient ones. Among the oldest, the Northern Pagoda, which dates back to the second century AD. Recent rebuilding does not deprive Suzhou of the reputation of being a city with a unique historical value, particularly domestically but also internationally. This apparent contradiction is explicable by delving into the meaning of “history” and “past” in today’s China, and looking at how Suzhou is recorded in written documents and perceived by its residents’ cultural awareness.⁸ In fact, a selective approach guides the overall preservation of buildings, streets and districts, first reduced to rubbles and then rebuilt on the basis of the original structure, in a way that respects the understanding of the past because of the different building materials and too vivid colours of the facades. Interestingly enough, some of these areas are named with newly coined contradictory toponyms such as “new old street”, or “new old district” (xin lao jie 新老街 and xin lao qu 新老区 in Chinese, respectively). While in some cultural environments these would be considered as areas and buildings conveying an idea of a-historicism, artificiality and falsification, in China, they are symbols of a glorious past.⁹ The history of Suzhou cannot be represented by buildings, but is recorded with words, including those available to all and written on official signposts placed almost at every city corner by the Municipal government: historical events occurred in a specific alley, stories behind an ancient well, a bridge or a temple, a building or simply an old tree are recorded there. The lives, works and deeds of famous literati and imperial officials who lived or are related to those places are included too. These written words walk together with the absent-minded passer-by and visitor, triggering inspiring thoughts and symbolising the sense of place embedded in those sceneries. In some cases, only one original stone is preserved, maybe one well or one bridge, authentic flavours among rebuilt structures which disregard the language of the past.

We cannot deny though that the reproduced edifices such as the Suzhou Northern pagoda have their own voice and generate memories of the past among Suzhou’s residents and visitors. In fact, each bustling street and run-down building in the city possesses a historical dimension which is shared through words and the socialisation of memories transferred from generation to generation. In the Chinese understanding, physical objects are authentic as long as they represent and symbolise past glories, and the Parthenon’s stones do not hold a higher value than those Chinese “old new streets”. These “reconstructions of the past” are there only to remind and symbolise the past, to create the atmosphere (in Chinese qifen 气氛) for residents and passers-by.

Mote (1973) writes that Suzhou past is written in words and not on stones.¹⁰ Words preserve memories and the past, and it often happens that historical records and poetry represent more the history of China than physical buildings (Mote, 1973: 52–53). In the same way, historical records of Muslim alterity in Suzhou are preserved in words which are not shared anymore, but seem to await to be transmitted and socialised through future generations. An important cultural difference needs to be mentioned here: in contrast with the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, who — according to the legend — declared: “I found a city of bricks and left a city of marble”, monumentality and immortality of buildings were not the first concern for Chinese literati, who were instead more focused on cultivating their individual selves and serving their rulers and country. Wealth and power were of course an important part of the literati and officials’ life, but it was not a custom to show them with a lavish and rich lifestyle. The idea was that deeds and literary works were valuable to history, while the beauty and monumentality of buildings were something marginal and even inappropriate. Words held value for them, as well as the potential to be shared among future generations. For all these reasons, Suzhou can indeed be called a “city of words”, as its history can be understood and assessed only through written materials.

Part of the city memories is still alive because selectively identified as belonging to the history worth of transmission, and therefore there here has been a willingness to share it. Other memories are buried under scenes of common city life, not socialised anymore. We also need to consider that written sources on historical buildings are discordant in many cases¹¹: dates, names and locations do not necessarily coincide across texts, and this proves how much the concepts of authenticity and history are contested and politically instrumentalised. In this paper, works of Chinese scholars focusing on the history of Islam in China such as Yang (2011) at Nanjing University, Ma Jianchun (2012) at Jinan University and Ma Zaiyuan (2016) at Yunnan University have been considered as reference materials.

Communities and buildings

The dynamic and lively dimension of memories is lost if these are not shared within and across communities, groups of people with affinities or belonging to common milieus (Halbwachs, 1992) .¹² According to Halbwachs, individual memories do not exist, but only when they become collective — through the process of sharing them within and across communities and groups — history is alive.

The history of mosques in Suzhou is reflected in historical records, maps, topographical names, and represented in individual experiences and stories which are only partially shared. Symbolised by abandoned stones, windows, doors, courtyards and pagodas, these ruins of a rich past are still symbols and representations of the history of Muslim alterity in Suzhou. Today these are invisible presences, arduous to find in the labyrinth of alleys and lanes of the old city, some of them untouched since centuries (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Song dynasty map of the old city

These old edifices represent an alterity within the city context, vis-à-vis the dominant discourse according to which religious life was and is still centred around Taoist and Buddhist temples. The latter are indeed those buildings which are preserved and continue to be restored with the authorities’ support. Mosques, with their hetero-topic and counter-narrative identities (Kraus, 2013) , used to hybridize the alleys and neighbourhoods turning them into culturally, emotionally and aesthetically diverse rich environments.

We can argue at this point that the nature of history is fundamentally relational, where memories represent its meanings, and has its foundation in how it is reflected through the existence of communities. Without communities, which ensure that memories are kept alive through socialisation, there is no possibility for words and memories to turn symbols and narratives of our past into living entities. In fact, the most effective way to delete, neglect or rewrite history is to disrupt community life.

Several historical and current examples can be mentioned: Greece and Turkey engaged in exchange of populations and memories’ removal already in the 1920s; the State of Israel removed marks of identity of ethnic Palestinian communities¹³ by changing village names and places’ environmental features, as well as depriving Islamic religious venues of their meanings¹⁴; the Chinese government succeeded in disrupting Uyghur, Mongolian and Tibetan communities by downscaling the importance of their culture, language, publications, identity, religious and collective awareness in the public sphere, together with censoring their public discourses.

For instance, according to respondents interviewed from October 2020 to June 2022 in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui provinces and Shanghai, the traditional way of greetings as-salāmu ʿalaykum — a distinctive sign of religious identity and community life for Muslims in China and all over the world — has been forbidden in Xinjiang province and across all China since 2020. Moreover, Uyghur children cannot be given names with Islamic meanings, and the appellations of Uyghur restaurants’ have to be secular and non-political (all those with an Islamic meaning have been changed, including those of past Uyghur leaders, such as Mukhlisi, reminding Yusupbek Mukhlisi¹⁵). The Uyghurs’ Jamaat (‘community’) is eventually being disrupted and destroyed in multiple ways, including the elimination of bilingual schools leading to elders speaking in Uyghur and younger generations replying in Mandarin Chinese.¹⁶

Reasons for dispersing communities can also depend on policy-related factors such as plans for urban and economic development. In these cases, the meaning of ‘place’ is devoid of emotional attachment, rootedness and sense of belonging. With no social interactions and shared common customs and values there is no sense of proximity and familiarity anymore. The place becomes something alien and disconnected from residents, not characterised by any historical or social dimension (Arefi, 2007: 182). The transformation of urban space impacts the concept of community itself, moving from “communities of place” to “communities of interest” (Arefi, 2007: 182). At the same time, the importance that “a place with a name” plays for people is highlighted by Cox, 1968, p. 423). By taking the reconstruction of Warsaw after the Second World War as an example, Cox shows how buildings, even if rebuilt, can be an indispensable symbolic focus for communities, and how the meaning and memory of a place can endure long after the place itself may have been demolished or physically altered. In the case of the forgotten mosques of Suzhou, Muslim communities in the city lose a key mark of their identities as cohesive communities, as the buildings are demolished or fundamentally altered and have lost all marks of their original features. As Cox argues, “our sense of identity as a society is mediated to us through the names of the places and occasions associated with the history of our people” (ibidem.).

The coherence of collective discourses is key to Auge Marc, 1995, p. 45) understanding of ‘space’, where “the terms of this discourse should tend to be spatial, once it has become clear that it is the spatial arrangements that express the group’s identity (its actual origins are often diverse, but the group is established, assembled and united by the identity of the place), and that the group has to defend against external and internal threats to ensure that the language of identity retains a meaning”. The “places of identity, of relations and of history” (ibidem, p. 52) represent a “shared identity conferred on them by their common occupancy of the place” (ibidem, p. 54). If places do not have any dimension of identity, relations and history, they are defined by Augé as ‘non-places’. Moreover, “Gods need shrines, as sovereigns need thrones and palaces, to place them above temporal contingencies”, because “they thus enable people to think in terms of continuity through the generations” (ibidem, p. 60). The erasure of buildings and memories deprive spaces of traditional authority, enacting a low levels of social solidarity while social relations become mere transactions. The ‘places’ of once coherent Muslim communities in China are being turned into physical and social ‘non-places’, without too much consideration of the possibility that these non-places can become — if not filled by new acknowledged and shared meanings — breeding grounds for extremist mobilisation. Party ideology and slogans are intended as new meanings, but they struggle to gain political or any other kind of authority within the community. Erasing places and occasions to socialise the past is an effective way to delete a community, but many other problems could possibly arise.¹⁷

What might seem contradictory is that while the Chinese government is turning the loci of identity for its Muslim population into non-places, investments are still pouring into creating international Muslim places in China to promote Muslim tourism from the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia. For instance, the construction of a massive Muslim amusement park¹⁸ in the capital of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Yichuan, and the promotion of tourism to the tomb of a fifteenth century Malay Sultan of Sulu located in Dizhou,¹⁹ together with the preservation and turisticization of historical mosques in Hangzhou, Nanjing, Yangzhou and Beijing, are intended to promote the image of China as a Muslim friendly country. There are basically two interpretations for this apparent contradiction: (1) these could interpreted as efforts to mitigate China’s image as violator of human rights in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and to garner Muslim international opinion to support the Belt and Road Initiative (which develops across a large number of Muslim countries); (2) the removal of Muslim communities from Chinese urban areas cannot be interpreted as an anti-Muslim move, but as something aiming at monitoring the society because of a potentially dangerous political threat to the Party could emerge. This highlights the still limited knowledge of Islam from the side of Chinese scholars and policymakers, as it is not easy for them to understand the concept of umma (in Arabic, the ‘Muslim community’), from which derives that of Muslim solidarity, according to which the effort of dispersing Muslim communities in China should be condemned by the whole of the Muslim world; (3) in the pragmatic political approach adopted by Chinese policymakers, there is no contradiction in interacting with Muslim countries by means of economic diplomacy and trade on one side, and tightly control the Muslim population domestically on the other. (4) Moreover, the above-mentioned museology practices highlight how China uses its diverse population in an instrumental way for its own political agenda and ‘country branding’. We can argue that there is no stricto sensu Islamophobia in China, but only the perception that diversity is a potential threat — as it generates interest groups difficult to control — and needs to be levelled (Tobin, 2020) .

Muslim communities in Suzhou

Arefi (2007: 182) writes about ‘rootedness’ and ‘sense of place’: the former signifies the spontaneous and natural sense of belonging felt by simply living a place, while the latter is an ‘awareness of the place’, a sense of belonging mediated by rationality and reason, which can be normally perceived also in reconstructed historical districts and theme parks. This author understands ‘spontaneity’ in a way that can be still experienced in one of Suzhou’s mosques, currently the only active one in the city and still now identifiable — in Arefi’s terminology — as a “pre-modern place”: the mosque of Taipingfang (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Taipingfang Mosque today

This mosque is the sole venue where all the activities once performed across the several old mosques, in the past, take place today. In a series of interviews with the Imam conducted in the summer of 2019, it emerged that around 10,000 Muslim residents live in the city as residents (where the overall population is of 12 million), and Taipingfang is their only mosque. Many more Muslims live in the city as students and businessmen, and they are not registered as residents. The plan developed by the municipality to build a new mosque has been abandoned due to resistance by Suzhou’s residents who rejected the idea of allocating public funding for this purpose. This debate occurred over the past ten years and is documented extensively in social media and local gazettes. By relocating religious practices and activities in Taipingfang — which became the core of Muslim socialization and community life — communities got alienated from their multiple centres represented by the mosques, a concentration of Muslim life in Taipingfang, outside the city wall is created, in the context of an entertainment district which is socially diverse, where community identity has been successfully downscaled and diluted. The rule — in force since the 1950s — to comply with “patriotic Islam”, which imposes a series of Party criteria to mosque activities, religious leaders and followers, as well as in terms of theological understandings of the scriptures,²⁰ represents an additional problem for Muslim communities in China, contributing to their sense of alienation, displacement and uprooting. According to interviews conducted with Hui Muslims in the city in 2020 and 2021, it is difficult to go to the mosque regularly as it was far from where people live and work; therefore, Taipingfang is currently visited only by a tiny part of the community, as well as by foreigners of Islamic faith who are willing to reach it from different parts of the city. Some community members have books which are not available in bookshops and are collected in extensive libraries at home, texts on which they rely to study and prey at home. Moreover, as the current Imam is also a member of the Communist Party, he does not have the reliability of a credible religious leader among community members, but is seen more as a cadre with the task of bridging Party-State authorities with local communities.²¹

As a result, the physical signs of those mosques which existed in the past, plus written historical records about those buildings and communities, lose their meaning in the present days, due to the absence of loci and people for sharing their memories. According to one respondent, “We have lost our old histories as well as our ability to create new ones. We are trapped in a never-ending present, with no thought or conception of a ‘yesterday’ and a ‘tomorrow’”.²²

Spiritual geography

Cox, 1968, p. 423) writes of a “pre-perceptive background which provides the people of a city with a sense of style and ambiance. This has to do not just with the preservation of worthwhile architectural monuments, but also with the perceptual field created by the relationships between buildings, streets and open objects of visual orientation, the pre-perceptive background which provides the people of a city with a sense of style and ambiance, (…)”. For Muslims, this background is dotted by mosques, bazars, schools affiliated to the mosque, butchers, canteens, open markets, alleys and the decorative elements characteristic of Muslim architecture. These are still visible in some Chinese South-Eastern cities such as Nanjing and Hangzhou.

In Suzhou, some elements of visual orientation which are important to the identity of city residents have been preserved: the North Pagoda, the double Pagodas, classical Gardens, edifices of the Medieval trade unions, ancient commercial streets such as Pingjiang lu and Shangtang jie, ancient wells, pailou — the arches of the traditional Chinese architecture — Taoist and Buddhist temples.²³

In their re-qualification and gentrification plans, local authorities and developers did not consider the presence of mosques as worth of attention nor as important visual elements of identity. Stones and architectural elements which are still visible today have been quickly removed from the cityscape. This selective way of dealing with cultural and architectural heritage sent these last symbols of community life into oblivion, together with the idea of historical continuity and connection among visual elements related to the city’s Muslim life.

What emerges from historical records is that in one specific area of Suzhou, the North-Western districts of Shilu and Changmen, there was a network of mosques of different sizes, one female mosque, several Muslim schools and activities, and they were all connected through a network of wealthy families involved in the jade business.²⁴ Their support and donations were of key importance for Muslim communities in the city. More in details, the Yang family, merchants who used to own the Zhubaodian Jade Shop and the Shandetang pharmacy in the Tangjia alley, actively supported these mosques and their communities. Their villa in Tangjia alley is still visible today with Ming and Qing dynasty stone and wood decorations, and is inhabited by poor families who share its once-noble spaces (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Map of Suzhou and locations of the mosques (created by Wenjun Liu)

According to interviews conducted with representatives of the Suzhou Islamic Association and with members of the Yang family who are still in the city and maintain the ownership of part of the Tangjia alley villa, social relations among Muslims in Suzhou were reflected in spacial networks, symbolised and constantly remembered by communities around architectural elements, and kept together by the multiple trajectories of daily interactions represented by religious and business activities, schools and common customs, festivities and religious practices. This spiritual geography was granting common meanings to the different community members, as well as providing the basis for shared histories and memories. In this context, the mosque was at the centre of the spiritual map. With city planners not making any effort to preserve these spatial and identitarian relations, the contemporary desacralised landscape of the city became dotted with shopping malls, high-rise blocks, bad quality run-down buildings of the 1980s and 1990s. Visual elements which used to give an orientation to the majority of residents are still there (Taoist halls, Buddhist temples, small local God-temples, old canteens, squares and alleys where old people meet to play mah-jong or dance altogether), with several generations giving meanings and re-negotiating their identities in different ways. Respondents argued that the majority of young people take workplaces and shopping malls as marks of identity and positionality, while the older ones consider alleys, squares and parks as identifiers of their social life. This wide and developing dispersion of activities across different generations within the city context contrasts with today’s concentration of Muslim practices in one single mosque, Taipingfang, where the struggle to rebuild a sense of identity is clear. According to the Imam in Taipingfang and his two helpers, in the history of Islam in the Jiang’nan Area — South of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River — Muslim activities were dispersed across multiple identitarian loci within the city and also intra-city, all linked together through community networks defined by the mosques, the bazars, written texts, art, food, common businesses, religious awareness and ethnic\religious consciousness.²⁵ There were Muslim communities in every Chinese city, and they were all connected. In the Eastern part of Suzhou, in Moye Road, Uyghur Muslims used to reside and gather, and until 2012 buses from Xinjiang were arriving at the local bus stop. This district has been completely rebuilt and, according to respondents, before developing and implementing the new plan for the district, no consultation with those living and working in those areas has been conducted.

Today the only spacial identifier of Muslim spirituality represented by the mosque is located outside the city walls under the careful control of the Party-State, with closed-loop cameras at every corner and anti-riot police outside the mosque on Fridays for monitoring the weekly prayers. This control is also symbolised by the Chinese national flags that each mosque has the obligation to expose since 2019 (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

The Taipingfang Mosque during the 1 October celebrations

This mosque’s limited spacial relations remains today a defining element of the identity of the community and the backbone of its spiritual geography.

The mosques of Suzhou: symbols, memories and communities

The existence, number and socio-political weight of mosques in the history of Suzhou have been varying according to different factors, from the size and relative importance of local Muslim communities to the level of the Emperor’s support they enjoyed across centuries. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republican era, Muslims started to receive support by the Japanese Consulate in the Japanese Concession (riben zujie 日本租借) located in the Southern part of the city outside the city walls, where also the foreign business associations — mainly German ones — had their offices. This support has been confirmed by local historians and is in line with Hammond's research (2020) on Muslims in China during the period of the Japanese occupation. An existential threat towards mosques — and to their value to the communities — arrived with the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when all religious activities stopped, buildings were desacralised, looted and destroyed, and eventually demolished or destined to other uses. In the majority of cases, they were turned into factories, storage areas, poor residential buildings or — in the best case — schools.²⁶

Historical records and fragments of memories

According to historical records of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the first mosque of Suzhou was built during the Yuan dynasty in the twelfth century, and from the thirteenth century onwards other nine mosques, at least, existed in the city.²⁷ In Suzhou’s local histories (difangzhi 地方志), seven mosques are recorded. According to Yang Xiaochun (2012), Ming and Qing historical chronicles²⁸ report the existence of another Mosque in Yice alley, on the South-Eastern side of today’s Shangjin Bridge, built in the Ming dynasty, the oldest well-preserved bridge in Suzhou.

According to a range of sources put together by local historians met and interviewed by the author,²⁹ another mosque was built in Zhijia alley during the Ming dynasty, in the same period of the Yice alley mosque. Another mosque is recorded as being located in Dingjia alley, very close to Yice alley. There is the possibility that these three mosques were in fact one, even if reported in three different — but very close — locations. The area is currently a huge building site and makes it impossible to check the indicated locations. The only possible way to locate both Dingjia and Yice alley is to refer to maps of the late-Qing and beginning of the Republican era, where both shapes and names of the small alleys are clearly indicated. These tiny and tortuous alleys lie outside Chang Gate, a historical district of the city which is currently interested by a transformative large-scale re-qualification scheme aimed at replacing one or two-storey buildings with tower blocks, shopping malls and luxury villas. Both Yici and Dingjia alley appear in the maps as being well inside the demolition site, which started — according to local residents — in 2012. The mosque was just next to the monumental building of the famous Chaozhou Huiguan, which is still there³⁰ and looks impressive in its grey-brick compact and solid structure after the recent restoration works (Figs. 5 and 6).

Fig. 5

Yice alley in a late Ming map. The Mosque in Dingjiaxiang is visible as Huihui bieshu 回回别墅, Muslim Villa (source: Internet)

Fig. 6

The monumental historical building of the Chaozhou Huiguan

What is worth noting is that the current Suzhou local histories do not record the existence of any mosque in the urban settlement before the Ming dynasty. In a number of historical sources, according to Yang (2013) , the mosque built during the Yuan dynasty is reported as close to Xiguang Bridge. The oldest recorded mosque in Suzhou, it was located in the central part of the old city and was called Xiguang Bridge Mosque. During the Yuan dynasty, when it was built, it was connected with the well-known Sayyid family and the Yunnan provincial governor, Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din Omar al-Bukhari (1211–1279), whose clan probably financed its construction. In the Ming dynasty, the mosque building was incorporated in the headquarters of the Prefectural government, the Yamen. Unfortunately, nothing remains today both of the mosque and the bridge, while the whole Yamen area has been rebuilt and functions now as a middle school and cultural heritage preservation site (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7

The site of the Ming Yamen in today’s Suzhou

Local histories report the exact addresses where the buildings of the seven mosques were once located and active, and have been all identified by the author during the fieldwork conducted from March 2020 to May 2022. Without those addresses recorded in writing, identifying those buildings as mosques would not have been possible, as the original structures got demolished or turned into something else.³¹

While Taipingfang Mosque is the only recognizable mosque, what is currently replacing the other six mosques are either a school, a modest residence, an empty building or nothing identifiable anymore, and nothing can define their identity anymore — except for some hidden signs which are visible only to those who look for them and will be described later in this article.

Mosques as loci of identity

Shapixiang Huimin Mosque — Shapixiang Huimin Libaisi 砂皮巷惠敏礼拜寺

The original name of this mosque was “Huimin Libaisi”, and it appears in Qing dynasty maps as huijiao libaisi 回教礼拜寺 (literally: “temple of the Hui religion”). Judging from the size of the symbol identifying the building in the map, it looks like an important edifice within the city fabric identified with the cross, the mark for venues where foreign religions were professed. It is known among Muslims in Suzhou for being an ancient mosque, the second oldest in the city after Xiguang Mosque, built during the Yuan dynasty. One of the hypotheses put forward by local historians is that when the Yuan dynasty mosque area was occupied by the Ming dynasty Yamen, all religious activities and mosque’s belonging were relocated to Shapixiang. This mosque is famous for being the site of an imperial edict engraved on a stone tablet written by the Ming emperor Yongle.

Located in today’s Shapi alley No. 42,³² the mosque was built during the first year of reign of the Ming emperor Hongwu, 1368.³³ According to Broomhall (1910, p. 92), Emperor Hongwu, founder of the Ming dynasty, “was generously disposed to the Moslems”. His past as Buddhist priest before leading the rebellions which led to the overthrown of the Yuan dynasty, and his constant support to Buddhism during his reign, makes Broomhall argue that “it is just possible that the Moslems had assisted him in defeating the Mongol armies. But this is only conjecture” (ibid.). Another hypothesis is that Emperor Hongwu was himself a Muslim, having ordered the construction of several mosques in South China and presenting himself as an admirer of Islam.³⁴ Referring to an edict written in 1406 by Emperor Hongwu and preserved in the Great Mosque of Xi’an, Broomhall (ibid.) writes: “Whether this edict was in acknowledgment of some such service or otherwise must be left an open question. The real value of the monument is that it shows that the Moslems enjoyed considerable favour under the new Ming dynasty, as they had under the preceding Yuan dynasty. The many mosques which, according to the inscriptions they contain, were built during the Ming dynasty, all indicate that Mohammedanism flourished considerably during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries”.³⁵

The Shapixiang stele was written in the fifth year of Emperor Yongle reign (1407),³⁶ when the Imam of Shapi mosque Milishang Siding was ordered by the Emperor to preach all over the country. The fact that the emperor personally encouraged missionary work shows openly his fondness and support for Islam.

The imperial edict

The stele was written and erected in order to protect the Imam, and the inscription addresses Imam Milishang Siding with a friendly tone and with the court’s favour:

“The Imperial Edict of the Great Ming Emperor to the Imam Milishang Siding: I believe that if people want to be good, they have to respect God and perform good deeds. This helps maintaining harmony in the empire, and plays an invisible role in maintaining social stability and guiding people away from the wrong path. As a consequence, happiness will come from Heaven, and people will enjoy boundless happiness. I deeply respect you, Milishang Siding, your belief in Islam since your early years is encomiable. You have been unwavering in your devotion to purity and virtue, guiding people to perform good deeds, respecting God, and serving the Emperor, and making persistent and faithful contributions to the country and society. These good deeds deserve to be rewarded. All officials, soldiers and civilians who pass from this Mosque are not allowed to be disrespectful. If someone dares to disobey my imperial edict, to humiliate and intimidate the Muslims, the pure people, the Court will punish them as guilty of a serious crime. It is hereby announced. May 11, the fifth year of Yongle”.³⁷

This stele is now preserved in the Taipingfang mosque and is an important relic of Suzhou’s cultural heritage (Figs. 8, 9, 10, and 11).

Fig. 8

Façade of the Shapixiang Huimin Mosque in the Ming dynasty

Fig. 9

Façade of the Shapixiang Huimin Mosque in the Republican period

Fig. 10

Stone stele of the Shapixiang Huimin Mosque located today in Taipingfang

Fig. 11

The area of the Shapixiang Huimin Mosque today

Location

The mosque was located in the North-Western part of the inner city, not distant from the area outside Changmen Gate, which is today a historical monument embedded in the city walls, guarding the canal encircling the old city. Part of the Muslim communities in the city now reside outside Changmen, where Taipingfang Mosque is located.³⁸

The current building does not bear any sign of its past spiritual and community meaning. What remains is a huge complex hosting a vocational school. An old pagoda, a stone bench and part of an ancient garden — now part of the courtyard of the school — were possibly part of the Mosque’s vast complex. Around the alley, now residential and quiet, there are other lanes with poor residences, shops with objects for daily use, and labs where craftsmen work metals, copper, as well as where tools and machines for tanning are produced and sold (a common activity among Muslims in imperial times, according to Broomhall, 1910, p. 189). The whole of Xizhonglu, the main street heading East to West towards Changmen and intersects Shapi alley, towards the outskirts of the city, is full of such shops and labs. Some Muslim restaurants and food staples are still there. Much more numerous are those just outside Changmen Gate, with three Uyghur restaurants and several Hui canteens. The old and still present artisans’ workshops are located in alleys named fang 坊, which stands for “settlement”, which indicates — in imperial maps and together with the character fan 藩 (peoples of the borders, vassal states) — areas where foreigners used to live.³⁹ Buildings of the Republican period are mixed with low wooden and variously shaped structures, in an area dominated by one and two-storey buildings, where craftsmanship is still alive and diversifies the city economy.

A sign at the entrance of the alley reads:

“In the Pingjiang Map it is written that the archway on the Eastern end of Shapi lane was called Deqing Fang, and for this reason the alley was called Deqing. The total length of the alley is 248 m, and during the Republic of China it was renamed Shapi Lane after the tanning workshops were established there. The Hui Mosque is on the Eastern end of the lane, it became the Huimin Primary School after the Sino-Japanese war, and in 1956 was renamed Shapi Primary School and destined to workers. Bao Tianxiao ran the Suzhou Vernacular Newspaper 苏州白话报 in the lane at the end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republic” (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12

Plate placed at one end of the Shapixiang Alley

The presence of the Yangfu Buddhist Temple close to the alley signifies the highly diverse socio-cultural environment of the area. In 1923, one local Muslim of the Yang family who owned the jade shop Zhubaoshang⁴⁰ collected funding for the restoration of the mosque building. The Mosque had more than 50 rooms and occupied 2.42 mu (more than 1600 sqm). On the Eastern side, there was a small pavilion with a rock garden (still visible today), old trees, and all sides were linked together through a long hallway, with big granite columns, impossible for one person to embrace. There were also storey buildings and very sophisticated pavilions, with roof beams and window frames full of engravings, the bricks of the building at the gateway were carved with particularly refined decorations, while in the middle of the relief sculpture on the eaves of its veranda the three characters of libaisi 礼拜四 (prayer hall) were inlaid….it was a monumental Mosque. Two granite lions still lie on the top of the main entrance to the school, the authenticity of which is contested. In 1930, the Mullah became ahun and started his teaching. In October 1937, the Japanese military aircrafts bombed and badly destroyed the buildings, and the Mosque was reduced to a stable for horses. After the victory of the War of Resistance against Japan, the ahun died. The building was further restored, rented by Tian Defu, a Hui member of the community who turned it into a private elementary school which was meant to benefit all the people, with Tian naming himself principal of the school. After 1949, the building was turned into an elementary school for Muslim children, and after 1956 became a primary school for workers, called Red Splendour Elementary School. During the Cultural Revolution it was turned from the Primary School of Shapi alley into the Huaguang factory of metal hardware (nuts and bolts) and into the Dengyue factory of electronic wrist watches, and what remained of the Ming Dynasty Hall was demolished, with all its spaces allocated for other uses. In 1983, the land belonging to the building was expropriated, and a compensation of 40.000 RMB was granted to the owners. Since 1999, during a revitalization scheme of the neighbourhood, the whole area has been transformed and many parts demolished. Because at the time there was no expiration date in the certificate of land use, considering the problems related to the jurisdiction of property rights, objections were raised, as the economic compensation was not yet workable at that point. In 2003, the Housing Management Bureau decided on the issue of the housing property rights as far as the former Mosque buildings located in Shapi alley 42 and 46 were concerned. The building at No. 42 was seized and demolished, and a compensation of 53,643 RMB was given to the owners. In 2004, a compensation of 18,965 RMB was given to the owner of the building at No. 46, which was also seized and demolished.

Dingjiaxiang Ruining Mosque — Dingjiaxiang Ruining Libaisi 丁家巷瑞凝礼拜寺

Some local historians argue that the mosque was built in the same period of another one in Zhijia alley (not recorded in any official source), and also identify it as the oldest in Suzhou.⁴¹ It is recorded in late-Qing maps as huihui bieshu 回回别墅, “Muslim Villa”. Located in North Dingjia lane, an area rich of historical buildings, according to official written sources it was built during the first year of the Ming emperor Chongzhen, in 1628, later destroyed during the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion (1851–1864) and restored during the reign of Guangxu (1871–1908) in the Qing dynasty. Local histories report that in 1931 approximately 200 Muslims were going to this mosque for worshipping. Due to the gradual concentration of resources and activities in Taipingfang, this mosque’s importance was gradually downscaled. One room was kept for worship purposes, while the remaining facilities and rooms were all rented out. In 1959, the building became the headquarters of a public–private joint venture, later it was rented to a real estate company, and it is now included in city redevelopment plan after the mosque property rights have been rescinded.

Tiejunong Mosque — Tiejunong Qingzhensi 铁局弄清真寺

Located in Datieju Alley No. 14, it was built over three years during the reign of the Qing emperor Guangxu, from 1879 to 1881. It appears in Republican era maps as libaisi 礼拜寺, “temple”. It was the biggest mosque in Suzhou, occupying an area of over 3000 square meters, with seven courtyards, a very high minaret, and many trees such as an orange osmanthus, a subgenus Magnolia, an ancient cypress, and a pine tree. The main hall for Friday prayers had 10 rooms and could contain more than 300 people. The courtyard of the Mosque included the minaret and a pavilion housing an imperial stele. On the top of the door, there was an engraved inscription, two limestone lions looking at each dominated the main entrance, and inside the mosque there were decorative and precious objects purchased by the Yang family, the same who was supporting Shapixiang Mosque. During the Republic of China, more than 100 followers were regularly going to this mosque. Later, because of the quantity of Islamic scriptures in Tiankuqian Mosque, the number of followers decreased gradually, and the mosque became a primary school for Muslim children. In 1956, it was turned into the Muguang primary school. In the autumn of 1966, it was renamed Hongguang primary school. The main hall and other ancient buildings were demolished and rebuilt for turning it into a modern school in the early 1980s, and spaces were adjusted to become teaching buildings.

Now a middle school, it is recognisable from outside from the architecture (simple but peculiar if considered in the context of a poor and run-down alley) and an ancient wooden engraved side door. Beyond a monumental entrance, there is still the idea of the main courtyard surrounded by trees. Now there is a huge football field, and the trees on the sides of the walkway are still visible from their chopped trunks. The ablution area covered by blue tiles clearly shows the past presence of a mosque. A corner stone, probably a foundation stone, which has been estimated belonging to the original building and possibly from belonging to the Xiguan bridge mosque and relocated in Tieju alley, is the only authentic element of the whole building. It could be a Yuan dynasty piece representing flames (火), a mountain (山) and coral (珊) (Figs. 13 and 14).

Fig. 13

Tiejunong mosque now turned into a school. The ablution area is still visible in the school’s courtyard

Fig. 14

Foundation stone in Tiejunong

Tiankuqian Mosque — Tiankuqian Qingjing Xue 天库前清经学

Located where now is Tiankuqian No. 56, the mosque was built in 1906, during the 32nd year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu, in the Qing dynasty. An important Koranic school was affiliated to this mosque. The alley is very close to Tiejunong, and the mosque building is recognisable only from the engraved roofs. The building is now closed and its façade not visible as added structures inhabited by poor families hide it. These structures have been recently removed (May 2022) and the original walls are not visible. The mosque used to cover an area of almost 2000 square meters. In addition to the main hall, the guest hall and the ablution room, there were corridors, pavilions, rock gardens, stalagmites and ancient wells. The structure of the main hall was like a large lecture place, containing a gingko wood horizontal plaque written in calligraphy by master Yu Yue. Because many jade workers had their businesses in Tiankuqian and Zhuanzhu alley, the majority being Muslim, donations made the mosque the most prosperous in the Republic of China. In the 1920s, a school teaching the Islamic and Confucian texts was opened for Hui children in the mosque. Just before the beginning of the Anti-Japanese War, the activities of the school stopped because of lack of funds. Since the late 1950s, it had been the only place for religious activities in the urban area, with the Hall with Islamic scriptures becoming the only one for Suzhou Muslim residents to perform religious activities. During the “Cultural Revolution”, all religious activities were stopped. After 1979, the mosque building was restored and repaired for the famous Suzhou pharmacy company Leiyunshang, to occupy the buildings and establish its pharmacy labs. After several negotiations and according to the government plans, in 1982, the site of the Mosque was due to be fully transferred to Leiyunshang Pharmaceutical Factory, with the latter paying for the restoration of the Taipingfang mosque. This plan was eventually abandoned.

The alley is still inhabited by Hui Muslims, and residents retain memories of the past existence of a mosque in the now-closed building.

From an explanatory sign placed at one end of the lane by the local government: “Located on the Western side of Wuqufang, Tiankuqian is a 382 m long alley. According to the Historical Chronicles written during the reign of the Qing emperor Kangxi, the Taoist Tang Zhou built here an altar to avoid evil and illnesses, this is why the lane is called tianku.⁴² There are historic remains such as the Wu’an Hall, Huoshen Temple, the Mosque, the former residence of Sheng Xuanhuai”.

Qimenwai Mosque — Qimenwai Qingzhengsi 齐门外清真寺

Qimenwai mosque was located at Qimenwai No. 274. The area where the Mosque was located is just across the Qimen Gate and has been seized for developing a residential district with high-rise buildings. No records are left about its structure and building. Old maps of Suzhou show that during the 34th year of reign of Emperor Guangxu of the Qing dynasty (1908), the mosque was marked as “Huihui villa”. At the beginning of the Republic of China, it was converted into a place for funerary rituals. It is recorded as a worship place for Muslim believers only occasionally. In the 1930s, the traffic in the city was reorganised, and funeral attendants could go directly to the cemetery without need to pass by the Mosque. By 1949, as it was an abandoned place, became the waste collection station of the nearby Dongfeng bean products factory. At present, most funeral ceremonies are held in Taipingfang mosque.

Female Mosque in front of the Baolin Temple — Baolinqian Qingzhensi 宝林前前清真女学

The female mosque was located in Baolinqian No. 15. It was built during the 11th year of the Republic of China, in 1923, by initiative of three married women from the Yang family from Tangjia lane, who donated a building and raised funding from other Muslim people to turn it into a mosque for women.⁴³ Its supervision was entrusted to the head of the community, namely the old representatives of the township. Once the mosque became operational, it was run by a female imam. During the “Cultural Revolution”, the library with the scriptures and the furniture were damaged, and the building was turned into private houses, while property rights were revoked in 1983. Nothing remains today, only a run-down and dangerous white building. This is the only mosque with a sign reporting its identity added only recently, in February 2021, and local residents have memories of the building being a mosque for women. An old woman of the neighbourhood stated that those who were running the prayers have now a butcher shop at Taipingfang mosque (Figs. 15, 16, and 17).

Fig. 15

Baolinqian female mosque

Fig. 16

Green sign appeared on the main door of the female mosque, reminding the passer-by the history of the mosque. This is the only mosque building with a dedicated sign placed by the Suzhou Islamic Association

Fig. 17

Prayer hall of the Taipingfang Mosque today

Taipingfang Mosque — Taipingfang Qingzhensi 太平坊清真寺

Taipingfang Mosque is located in the North-Western part of the city outside the ancient city walls, not far from Chang Gate and the old street of Shangtangjie. The area is a traditional and lively commercial and entertainment one leading directly to the celebrated pagoda of Tiger Hill. Taipingfang is currently the only active mosque in Suzhou, where both local and foreign Muslims (businessmen, visitors, tourists and students) go and pray on Fridays and during weekdays. As mentioned before in this piece, not many Muslims succeed in going to pray to Taipingfang due to the distance from the places where they live. The mosque is in a newly restored building, painted with a bright green colour and with gold, squeezed in a tiny alley, where small restaurants, hotels, canteens, food stalls (mainly selling meat skewers, the Uyghur and Hui nan bread, bread with roasted meat, noodles and soups) and butchers, make it busy with visitors and customers from all over Suzhou cueing outside, especially out of the small butcher shops. Shop owners in Tianzifang wear Hui and Uyghur hats; they have physiognomies which combine Central Asian and Mongolian features, and — like those in Beijing’s Muslim area of Niujie — are believed to sell the best quality of meat in town. Taipingfang is one of those multidimensional places which express a wide range of meanings (social, commercial, religious, touristic, historical and many others) and has a multifaceted identity, centred around the mosque and understood through the activities around it. It has a religious connotation, together with a sense of vitality emerging from this alley lying in the middle of an old-fashion, but lively and vibrant, shopping area, with traditional pharmacies, pottery labs, an underground church, the Women’s street, KTVs (karaoke televisions), ballrooms, cloth shops and restaurants of any kind. An illegal Christian church was there until 2020 (Fig. 18).

Fig. 18

Meeting space in the Taipingfang mosque today

It is the only Mosque which got back to its original use after the Cultural Revolution, when all the others were destroyed or occupied or destined to other purposes. Its original name was the Mosque of the Free School, and in 1924, activities such as slaughterhouses and businesses related to transportation and horses were established in between the old gates on the outer side of the city. It has been built thanks to the will of Ahun Ma Mingde, and to donations he collected from fellow Muslims in Shanghai, Nanjing and Yangzhou. When it was evident that the funding was not enough a famous Hui businessman from Nanjing, Jiang Xingjie, assumed full responsibility for its construction. In 1926, the construction works were concluded, and Ma Mingde became the Ahun. After 1940, two elementary schools where voluntaries were teaching short courses were already established, and Hui children could study Chinese and Arabic language. The original building included a temple hall, the minaret, the ablution room, the scripture hall and other rooms. The structure was made of bricks and wood. From 1949 to 1957, there were still Muslims attending religious ceremonies in the Mosque. In 1958, it became an office space. In 1960, Taiping Road Primary School was founded by locals, and after several changes, it was turned into the Suzhou mosque by the Preservation Committee in 1982, as an open place for religious activities. The newly built worship hall follows an Arabic architectural form, which is divided into upper and lower floors. The lower floor is the Ahun rest room; there is an 80-square meter ablution room and a 120-square meter worship hall. The upper floor is the room where meetings are held and hosts the offices of the municipal Islamic Association office. The Mosque has three imams and collects and preserves 12 pieces of cultural relics of the Ming and Qing dynasties (including the Shapixiang stele), originally located in the other mosques of the city. These cultural relics have high historical value. The economic situation of the mosque mainly depends on the donation of believers, while it also sells fresh beef and poultry cut according to the Muslim practice for residents and Muslim restaurants in Suzhou, and arranges the funerary rituals for Muslims.

Since 1982, Taipingfang mosque has become the centre of Islamic activities in Suzhou, with Friday prayers, Eid El Fitr and Kurban Festivals performed there. Around 1200 worshippers make it crowded during the two major Islamic festivals.

Even though lively and dynamic, Taipingfang does not gather a community around it, as it is visited by Muslims from Suzhou and abroad who do not know each other’s. The absence of the bazar, or a surrounding Muslim community and of an Imam recognised by the prayers (the current one has more the identity of a Chinese Communist Party cadre), makes the mosque a transitory locus of encounters and not a consolidated reference for today’s Suzhou Muslims (Fig. 19).

Fig. 19

Map of the end of the Ming dynasty which shows the area of Suzhou where the majority of mosques were located (source: Internet) (see also Fig. 11)

Zhang Zhong: a Suzhou Sufi master and scholar of Islamic classics

Zhang Zhong was a scholar of Islam who was born and lived in Suzhou between the end of the Ming dynasty and the beginning of the Qing. Accounts about his life are scarce: academic sources and local historians believe he was a Hui Muslim, one of the initiators and major figures of the Jingling Sufi sect,⁴⁴ whereas Jingling 金陵 is the ancient name of Nanjing. Zhang Zhong is well known as a scholar of Islamic classics and as a translator from Persian to Chinese,⁴⁵ as well as the student of the Indian Sufi master Ashege. His prefaces and postscripts of famous translations of classic works of Islam, as well as for the translation of the inscription on a stone table in Suzhou’s Dingjiaxiang Ruining Mosque (while the stone table has been destroyed, the translation by Zhang Zhongshi still exists), are part of the literary corpus of Islamic classics in Chinese language. The collection of works written by his cousin Zhou Shiqi, “Old Words of Cultivation”, are also well known. He taught Islamic classics in Suzhou, Yangzhou and Nanjing.

Zhang Zhong has different names: in written records, we find Zi Junshi, Zhizhong, Yinzhai and other pen names: “old gentleman who gathers wood on the Cold Mountain” (hanshan qiaosou, abbreviated as anqiao or anshanqiao), or “follower of the auspicious signs in Dingjiaxiang”.

What we also know is that he was born in the 12th year of reign of the Ming emperor Wanli, 1584, and during the reign of Chongzhen emperor (1611–1644), he moved to Nanjing, where he studied the Islamic classics in Chinese with Master Zhang Shaoshan, and those written in Persian with the Indian master Ashege. He wrote Ashege speeches and collected them into the volume “Returning to Allah”. The book is written in classical Chinese and only one commentary in modern Chinese is available, written by the Sufi scholar Ma Zaiyuan and published in 2016 by Huaifeng Publishing Press. A book launch was organized in Beijing’s Hutong Museum of History, and until 2019 the book was easily available in online and offline bookshops for 99 RMB (10 US dollars approximately). Currently, the book is not available anymore, nor in University libraries, nor in bookshops (both offline and online).

Approximately after the fifteenth year of the reign of Shunzhi, in 1658, Zhang Zhong returned to Suzhou after residing in Yangzhou, where he taught in the Xianhe Mosque,⁴⁶ and his disciples collected his teaching in the volume “The Four Topics about Islam”. In Suzhou, he worked on, and afterwards published, “Back to the Truth”, as well as “The Four Topics about Islam”. According to reports, in 1661 (eighteenth year of Shunzhi reign), he was still alive. During all his life, he taught to his disciples, and the contents of his teachings were collected in books (Fig. 20).

Fig. 20

Title page and first page of the text “Back to the Truth”

He was a translator from Persian to Chinese. In succession, he translated “Explanation of Kalima”, titled “Simple Introduction to initiate the understanding of Kalima”, 2 volumes; “Back to the Truth”, also titled “Simple Introduction to understand Munemuzhimole” or “Brief Introduction to Bianmeng”, 1 volume; and “The Four Topics about Islam”, also titled “Brief annotated Introduction to the Bianmeng of the four topics about Islam” and “Explanation of the Translation of The Four Topics about Islam”, 4 volumes. These volumes still exist today; they are in the hands of the heirs and represent the earliest collections on Islamic classics in Chinese language. There is no substantial scholarship on Zhang Zhongshi, and more research is needed.

Conclusions

This is a piece about forgotten words, dispersion of communities, loss of memories and the rewriting of history. It represents an effort to recover attention — through committed scholarship — on cultural and religious traditions which have been downscaled and eventually erased. The city of Suzhou and its unique Islamic intellectual, architectural and community traditions are the focal points of this research, which lasted several years in a complex fieldwork context.

As main argument, this article shows how state policies play a key role in disrupting community life, by deleting memories to create a disconnect between the city socio-political fabric and its people. Suzhou is telling us that there is indeed the need to look into vanishing spaces to understand a city, and to grasp its very inner meaning and significance. Lack of research and unavailability of literature on Suzhou’s scholars and teachers of Islam also testify an attempt to forget a relevant part of the city’s past life.

The research work started from the awareness that in today’s Suzhou, only Taipingfang Mosque is a Muslim active space, and serves the whole urban area and the overall Suzhou’s Muslim community. Located outside the city walls in the North-Western shopping and entertainment district of Shilu, it can be identified as a “pre-modern space” (Arefi 2007: 182) — which hosts individual behaviors cantered on place and shared values, beliefs accumulated over time and experience — with a substantial and visual defining element of the city socio-economic context of contemporary Suzhou.

By delving into the history of Islam in Suzhou, it emerged that mosques were key spots in the spiritual geography of the Muslims, and they used to convey a meaning and a sense of rootedness. Visual elements of spatial orientation for the communities, they were connected to a broader physical, spiritual, cultural, and affective context and, as such, generated emotional attachment.

The fieldwork brought to life fragments of that past and traditions: architectural, archival, scholarly works and pieces of literary classics which made the past presence of religious communities in the area alive. This past vitality and vivid scholarly traditions, which translated a foreign religion within the Chinese context, stand in stark contrast with today’s un-rootedness and disconnection of those same intellectual endeavors with the broader environment. The microcosms represented by fragments of mosques are characterized by a sense of placelessness; namely, they are not non-places nor squalid areas. They express the loss of meaning and proper connection with both history and modernity. They are emptied and violated loci in the urban fabric.

By breaking through the conventions of article writing for social sciences — something that needs to be done if something more than ‘making an argument’ is to be achieved — this is an article about “making for understanding”. Collecting historical evidences, architectural fragments and oral history allows to reconstruct stories of lost places/memories, which are only partially socialised and recognised, acts of committed scholarship such as this can help providing the basis for recovery and also offering a different experience and way of seeing a city.