And soon thereafter Ibrahim’s writing in the immensely long study that Kang had nicknamed “Mohammed Meets Confucius” included the following passage:
When observing the tendency towards physical extremism in Islam, ranging from fasting, whirling and self-flagellation, all the way up to jihad itself, one wonders at its causes, which may be several, including the words of Mohammed sanctioning jihad, the early history of Islamic expansion, the harsh and otherworldly desert landscapes that have been the home of so many Muslim societies, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that for Islamic peoples the religious language is by definition Arabic, and therefore a second language to the great majority of them. This has fateful consequences, because one’s native tongue is always grounded in a physical reality by vocabulary, grammar, logic, and metaphors, images and symbols of all kinds, many of them buried and forgotten in names themselves; but in the case of Islam, instead of having a physical reality attached to it linguistically, its sacred language is detached from all that, for most believers, by its secondary and translated quality, its only-partly-learned nature, so that it conveys only abstract concepts, removed from the world, conveying the devout into a world of ideas abstracted and detached from the life of the senses and the physical realities of life, creating the possibility and even the likelihood of extremism resulting from a lack of perspective, a lack of grounding. To give a good example of the kind of linguistic process I mean: Muslims who have Arabic as a second language do not “have their feet on the ground”; their behaviour is all too often directed by abstract thought, floating alone in the empty space of language. We need the world. Each situation must be placed in its setting to be understood. Possibly, therefore, our religion should be taught mostly in the vernacular tongues, the Quran translated into all the languages of Earth; or else better instruction in Arabic be given to all; although taking this road might entail requiring Arabic to become the first language of all the world, not a practical project and likely to be regarded as another aspect of jihad . . .
[“Mohammed Meets Confucius”: presumably the work in five volumes published in the sixtieth year of the Qianlong as “Reconciliation of the Philosophies of Liu Zhi and Ma Mingxin”.]
Another time, when Ibrahim was writing about the theory of dynastic cycles, which was held in common by both Chinese and Islamic historians and philosophers, his wife had brushed it all aside like a piece of botched embroidery: “That’s just thinking of history as if it were the seasons of a year. It’s a most simple-minded metaphor. What if they are nothing at all alike, what if history meanders like a river for ever, what then?”
And soon afterwards Ibrahim wrote in his “Commentary on the Doctrine of the Great Cycle in History”:
Ibn Khaldun, the most influential of Muslim historians, speaks of the great cycle of dynasties in his “Muqaddimah”, and most of the Chinese historians identify a cyclic pattern in history as well, beginning with the Han historian Dong Zhongshw in his “Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals”, a system which indeed was an elaboration of Confucius himself, and which was elaborated in its turn by Kang Yuwei, who in his “Commentary on the Evolution of Rites” speaks of the Three Ages, each of which, Disorder, Small Peace and Great Peace, go through internal rotations of disorder, small peace and great peace, so that the three become nine, and then eighty-one when these are recombined, and so on. And Hindu religious cosmology, which so far is that civilization’s only statement on history as such, speaks also of great cycles, first the kalpa which is a day of Brahma, said to be 4,320,000,000 years long, divided into fourteen manvantaras, each of which is divided into seventy-one maha-yugas, length 3,320,000 years. Each maha-yuga or Great Age is divided into four ages, Sarya-yuga, the age of peace, Treta-yuga, Dvaparayuga and Kali-yuga, said to be our current age, an age of decline and despair, awaiting renewal. These spans of time, so vastly greater than those of the other civilizations, seemed to many earlier commentators excessive, but it must be said that, the more we learn of the antiquity of the Earth, with stone seashells found on mountaintops, and layers of rock deposits enjambed perpendicularly to each other, and so on, the more the introspections of India seem to have pierced through the veil of the past most accurately to the true scale of things.
But in all of them, in any case, the cycles are only observed by ignoring most of what has been recorded as actually happening in the past, and are very probably theories based on the turning of the year and the return of the seasons, with civilizations seen as leaves on a tree, going through a cycle of growth and decay and new growth. It may be that history itself has no such pattern to it, and that civilizations each create a unique fate that cannot be read into a cyclic pattern without doing damage to what really happened in the world.
Thus the extremely rapid spread of Islam seems to support no particular cyclic pattern, while its success perhaps resulted from it proposing not a cycle but a progress towards God, a very simple message — resisting the great urge to elaboration that fills most of the world’s philosophies in favour of comprehensibility by the masses.
Kang Tongbi was also writing a great deal at this time, compiling her anthologies of women’s poetry, arranging them into groups and writing commentaries on what they meant in the aggregate. She also began, with her husband’s help, a “Treatise on the History of the Women of Hunan”, in which her thoughts very often reflected, or commented on, those of her husband, just as his did hers; so that later scholars were able to collate the writings of the two during their Lanzhou years, and construct of them a kind of ongoing dialogue or duct.
Kang’s opinions were her own, however, and often would not have been agreed with by Ibrahim. Later that year, for instance, frustrated by the irrational nature of the conflict now tearing the region apart, and fearful of greater conflict to come, feeling as if they were living under a great storm cloud about to burst on them, Kang wrote in her “Treatise”:
So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive notion of gods as helpers, as big people watching from above, like parents who nevertheless act like bad children, deciding capriciously whom to reward and whom not to, on the basis of craven sacrifices made to them by the humans dependent on their whim. The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god like that, to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people. It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it.
Ibrahim read this in manuscript and shook his head, sighing. “I have married one wiser than myself,” he said to his empty room. “I am a lucky man. But sometimes I wish that I had chosen to study not ideas, but things. Somehow I have drifted outside the range of my talent.”
• • •
Every day news of more Qing suppression of Muslims came to them. Supposedly the Old Teaching was favoured over the New Teaching, but ignorant and ambitious officials arrived from the interior, and mistakes were made more than once. Ma Wuyi, for instance, the successor to Ma Laichi, not to Ma Mingxin, was ordered to move with his adherents west to Tibet. Old Teaching to new territory, people said, shaking their heads at the bureaucratic mistake, which was sure to get people killed . It became the third of the Five Great Errors of the suppression campaign. And the disorder grew.
Eventually a Chinese Muslim named Tian Wu rallied the jahriyas openly, to revolt and free themselves from Beijing. This happened just north of Gansu, and so everyone in Lanzhou stockp
iled again for war.
Soon the banners came, and like everything else the war had to move through the Gansu Corridor to get from east to west. So though much of the fighting took place far away in eastern Gansu, the news of it in Lanzhou was constant, as was the movement of troops through town.
Kang Tongbi found it unnerving to have the major battles of this revolt happening east of them, between them and the interior. It was several weeks before the Qing army managed to put down Tian Wu’s force, even though Tian Wu had been killed almost immediately. Soon after that, news came that Qing general Li Shiyao had ordered the slaughter of over a thousand jahriya women and children in east Gansu.
Ibrahim was in despair. “Now all the Muslims in China are jahriya in their hearts.”
“Maybe so,” Kang said cynically, “but I see it doesn’t keep them from accepting jahriya lands confiscated by the government.”
But it was also true that jahriya orders were springing up everywhere now, in Xizang, Turkestan, Mongolia, Manchuria, and all the way south to distant Yunnan. No other Muslim sect had ever attracted so many adherents, and many of the refugees streaming in from the wars to the far west became jahriya the moment they arrived, happy after the confusions of Muslim civil war to join a straightforward jihad against infidels.
Even during all this trouble, in the evenings Ibrahim and the heavily pregnant Kang would retire to their verandah and watch the Tao River flow into the Yellow River. They talked over the news and their day’s work, comparing poems or religious texts, as if these were the only things that really mattered. Kang tried to learn the Arabic alphabet, which she found difficult, but instructive.
“Look,” she would say, “there is no way to mark the sounds of Chinese in this alphabet, not really. And no doubt the same is true the other way around!” She gestured at the rivers’ confluence. “You have said the two peoples can mix like the waters of these two rivers. Maybe so. But see the ripple-line where the two meets. See the clear water, still there in the yellow.”
“But a hundred li downstream . . . “ Ibrahim suggested.
“Maybe. But I wonder. Truly, you must become like these Sikhs you talk about, who combine what is best from the old religions, and make something new.”
“What about Buddhism?” Ibrahim asked. “You say it has already changed Chinese religion completely. How can we apply it to Islam as well?”
She thought about it. “I’m not sure it’s possible. The Buddha said there are no gods, rather that there are sentient beings in everything, even clouds and rocks. Everything holy.”
Ibrahim sighed. “There has to be a god. The universe could not arise from nothing.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I believe Allah made it. But now, it may be that it is up to us. He gave us free will to see what we would do. Again, Islam and China may have two parts of the whole truth. Perhaps Buddhism has another part. And we must find whole sight. Or all will be desolation.”
Darkness fell on the river.
“You must raise Islam to the next level,” Kang said.
Ibrahim shuddered. “Sufism has been trying to do that for centuries. The sufis try to rise up, the Wahhabis drag them back down, claiming there can be no improvement, no progress. And here the Emperor crushes both!”
“Not so. The Old Teaching has standing in imperial law, the books by your Liu Zhu are in the imperial collection of sacred texts. It’s not like with the Daoists. Even Buddhism finds no favour with the Emperor, compared to Islam.”
“So it used to be,” Ibrahim said. “As long as it stayed quiet, out here in the west. Now these young hotheads are inflaming the situation, wrecking all chance of co-existence.”
There was nothing Kang could say to that. It was what she had been saying all along.
Now it was fully dark. No prudent citizen would be out in the streets of the rude little town, walled through it was. It was too dangerous.
• • •
News arrived with a new influx of refugees from the west. The Ottoman sultan had apparently made alliances with the steppes emirates north of the Black Sea, descendant states of the Golden Horde that had only recently come out of anarchic conditions, and together they had defeated the armies of the Safavid empire, shattering the Shiite stronghold in Iran and continuing east into the disorganized emirates of central Asia and the silk roads. The result was chaos all the across the middle of the world, more war in Iraq and Syria, widespread famine and destruction; although it was said that with the Ottoman victory, peace might come to the western half of the world. Meanwhile, thousands of Shiites Muslims were headed east over the Pamirs, where they thought sympathetic reformist states were in power. They did not seem to know that China was there.
• • •
“Tell me more about what the Buddha said,” Ibrahim would say in the evenings on the verandah. “I have the impression it is all very primitive and self-concerned. You know: things are the way they are, one adapts to that, focuses on oneself. All is well. But obviously things in this world are not well. Can Buddhism speak to that? Is there an “ought to” in it, as well as an “is”?”
“ ‘If you want to help others, practise compassion. If you want to help yourself, practise compassion.’ This the Tibetans’ Dalai Lama said. And Buddha himself said to Sigala, who worshipped the six directions, that the noble discipline would interpret the six directions as parents, teachers, spouse and children, friends, servants and employees, and religious people. All these should be worshipped, he said. Worshipped, do you understand? As holy things. The people in your life! Thus daily life becomes a form of worship, do you see? It’s not a matter of praying on Friday and then the rest of the week terrorizing the world.”
“This is not what Allah calls for, I assure you.”
“No. But you have your jihads, yes? And now it seems the whole of Dar al-Islam is at war, conquering each other or strangers. Buddhists never conquer anything. In the Buddha’s ten directives to the Good King, non-violence, compassion and kindness are the matter of more than half of them. Asoka was laying waste to India when he was young, and then he became Buddhist, and never killed another man. He was the good king personified.”
“But not often imitated.”
“No. But we live in barbarous times. Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. Islam will use force, the Emperor will use force. They will rule the world. Or fight over it, until it is all destroyed.”
Another time she said, “What I find interesting is that of all these religious figures of ancient times, only the Buddha did not claim to be a god, or to be talking to God. The others all claim to be God, or God’s son, or to be taking dictation from God. Whereas the Buddha simply said, there is no God. The universe itself is holy, human beings are sacred, all the sentient beings are sacred and can work to be enlightened, and one must only pay attention to daily life, the middle way, and give thanks and worship in daily action. It is the most unassuming of religions. Not even a religion, but more a way to live.”
“What about these statues of Buddha I see everywhere, and the worship in the Buddhist temples? You yourself spend a great deal of time at prayer.”
“Partly the Buddha is revered as the exemplary man. Simple minds might have it otherwise, no doubt. But these are mostly people who worship everything that moves, and Buddha is just one god among many others. They miss the point. In India they made him an avatar of Vishnu, an avatar who is deliberately trying to mislead people away from the proper worship of Brahman, isn’t that right? No, many people miss the point. But it is there for all to see, if they would.”
“And your prayers?”
“I pray to see things better.”
• • •
Quickly enough the jahriya insurrection was crushed, and the western part of the empire apparently at peace. But now there were deep-seated forces, driven underground, that were working all the while for a Musli
m rebellion. Ibrahim feared that even the Great Enterprise was no longer out of the question. People spoke of trouble in the interior, of Han secret societies and brotherhoods, dedicated to the eventual overthrow of the Manchu rulers and a return to the Ming dynasty. So even Han Chinese could not be trusted by the imperial government; the dynasty was Manchu after all, outsiders, and even the extremely punctilious Confucianism of the Qianlong Emperor could not obscure this basic fact of the situation. If the Muslims in the western part of the empire revolted, there would be Chinese in the interior and the south coast who would regard it as an opportunity to pursue their own rebellion; and the empire might be shattered. Certainly it seemed that the sheng shi, the peak of this particular dynastic cycle (if there were any such thing) had passed.
This danger Ibrahim memorialized to the Emperor repeatedly, urging him to infold the Old Teaching even more firmly into imperial favour, making Islam one of the imperial religions in law as well as fact, as China in the past had infolded Buddhism and Daoism.
No reply ever came to these memoranda, and judging by the contents of the beautiful vermilion calligraphy brushed at the bottom of other petitions returned from the Emperor to Lanzhou, it seemed unlikely that Ibrahim’s would be received any more favourably. “Why am I surrounded by knaves and fools?” one imperial commentary read. “The coffers have been filling with gold and silver from Yingzhou for every year of our rule, and we have never been more prosperous.”
He had a point, no doubt; and knew more about the empire than anyone else. Still, Ibrahim persevered. Meanwhile more refugees came pouring east, until the Gansu Corridor, Shaarixi, and Xining were all crowded with new arrivals — all Muslim, but not necessarily friendly towards each other, and oblivious of their Chinese hosts. Lanzhou appeared to be prospering., the markets were jammed, the mines and foundries and smithies and factories were all pouring out armaments, and new machinery of all kinds, threshers, power looms, carts; but the ramshackle west end of town now extended along the bank of the Yellow River for many li, and both banks of the Tao River were slums, where people lived in tents, or in the open air. No one in town recognized the place any more, and everyone stayed behind locked doors at night, if they were prudent.