A typical hui chinese candid gal that dunno wtf is moslem. @syed putra pls give up.
Frostbytteee
Yeah I still identify as a Muslim even though I’m not that strict with the hijab and prayers. But I know a lot of hui families that move to western countries, some of their children don’t practise Islam anymore.
My worst nightmare is for my future children to not continue being muslims which is sad but it can become a reality because ultimately it is their own choice.
THREISNOMEMEHAJIMEE
Same here! My mom (hui) doesn't really teach me anything concerning culture and Islam. Rly had to dig for answers myself since my mom was concerned abt islamophobia and me being a target of that.
Anonymous
My extended family in Singapore have Hui Chinese roots. However, my late grandparents who migrated from China were the last Muslims in my family. My uncles, aunts and cousins have become Buddhists, Catholics and Protestant Christians .... some freethinkers and maybe a few Taoists. What is certain is that no one in the family is a Muslim anymore - practicing, observing or even just being slack at it.
Qi Fanqiqi
yes, I am a hui Chinese, I have talked or mingled with Uyghur Chinese many times, there is a xinjiang barbecue restaurant right out my house which is opened by a Uyghur family, if I don't talk to them how do I get the delicious lamb kebab I need?
Ricard
The only difference between Hui and Han is whether they believe in Islam or not. If a Hui no longer believes in Islam, he,as an apostate from Islam,would be regarded as following the customs of the Han, not the Hui. If a Han believes in Islam, he ,as a muslim,would be regarded as following the customs of the Hui, not the Han.
Hujian
The Hui are characterized by a very large number of sources, basically a hodgepodge of European immigrants, Middle Eastern immigrants, South Asian immigrants, and Southeast Asian immigrants from China's past. Very few of them are really from Arabia.
Hui is the abbreviation of Hui Hui nationality, the term "Hui Hui", first seen in the Northern Song Dynasty Shen Kuo's "Mengxi Pen-talk", refers to the "Huihe" people ("Hui-falcon") in the area of Anxi (present-day southern Xinjiang and parts of the western part of the Onion Ridge) since the Tang Dynasty. The term "Huihui" may refer to the "Huihe" people in the area around Anxi (present-day southern Xinjiang and west of the Onion Range) since the Tang Dynasty. "Huihui" may be the phonetic transcription of "Huihe" or "Hui-falcon" or the common writing. In the early thirteenth century, during the Mongolian army's western conquest, a group of Central Asian people who believed in Islam, as well as Persians and Arabs, were constantly issued or automatically migrated to China. They were called "Hui Hui people", which was the main part of the "colorful people" at that time, and later they also called themselves "Hui Hui". In the course of history, they were called "Luo Li Hui" and "Green-eyed Hui" in the Yuan Dynasty, and Christians and Zoroastrians who were converted to Islam became the ancestors of the Hui people today. During the Song and Yuan dynasties, the "Cham Hui", who lived in Chamchung (present-day south-central Vietnam), and the "Kunlun Hui", who belonged to the Malay race in the southern part of the Sino-Indian Peninsula and the islands of the South China Sea, became the ancestors of the Hui people by moving to China.
However, after more than a thousand years of intermarriage in China, the Hui in China have now become predominantly Han Chinese in terms of genetic composition.
There is also a large group of what the Chinese now call "fake Hui", whose ancestors did not have foreign genes at all, but changed into Hui mainly because of some historical reasons. A typical example is a Middle East expert, Ma Xiaolin, who went to do a DNA test to prove his "noble" Arab ancestry to netizens, and he posted the results on Weibo, which turned out to be a tragedy. ...... There is no Arab gene, but a proper Han gene. And is a common genetic ploidy in the Yangtze River Valley.
The Hui look basically no different from the Han, and it is impossible to distinguish them from the Han from their appearance.
Frank
A majority of Hui people are the descendants of both muslim Uyghurs and Hans.
On the Uyghur side they descend from Huihe or Huihu populations living in modern day Xinjiang, Bactria, and Ferghana.
They came around Western China due to Gansu and Shaanxi’s depopulation after the Mongols genocided the Qiangic Tangut, who were the Buddhists rulers of that area.
These populations descend from Muslim merchants who massively settled the western fringes of China, Gansu, Shaanxi, during imperial times and became Chinese subjects of the Emperor.
During the Ming dynasty, Emperors eager to avert confessional and social uprising and riots, encouraged and edicted that some Muslim populations marry out of their Muslim community to further defuse socio ethnic community segregation.
That is how they became practically the modern Huis as we know today.
That is what explains the fact that they speak Chinese but practice Islam.
They have undergone a similar fate to some Greek populations in Anatolia, who were asked to choose between faith or language in the late Middle Ages.
They are a particular ethnic group of their own.
Note that some Huis are not from those mixed Uyghur/Hans people.
That's because China lumps all Muslims unto the category Hui indistinctly.
So they might instead be Zhengzhou Muslims, or Guangzhou Muslims or Quanzhou Muslims, or even Utsuls.
In a way Hui designates a socio ethnic grouping which both Muslim and non Muslim Chinese can easily identify and refer the group to, seeing as their faith is the essential characteristic that defines their social identity.
It helps acknowledging specificities about their communities, while giving them a place within the macro China spectrum.
PS. Not every then Hui is classified as such today, many have intermarried and become Hans overtime.
Feng Xian
Modern Hui Chinese was politically constructed since 1949 by roughly defining anyone who was a Muslim but spoke no other language as Hui. This definition would get a bit absurd nowadays because many Hui are no longer Muslims.
Hui in ancient time was the term for Islam, rather than an ethnic group. Some hence once called Xinjiang the Hui Jiang (Jiang means territory) and Muslims were called Hui and Islam the Hui religion.
In the early period, the Hui was roughly referring to Arabs, Jews (Chinese called Jews the blue hat Hui as they couldn’t differentiate Judaism from Islam so they thought only the hat’s color mattered here), Iranian, Uighurs… who were Muslims or assumed to be Muslims as Hui.
Later on, what happened was in the Ming Dynasty, Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang pushed for a mandatory assimilation policy. Because of that, Mongols and Semu (a rough term for “barbarians’ that Mongols were not included) were forced to marry the Han population. Since Han women were not willing to marry Hui men because of mandatory conversion into Islam and social restriction, a lot of Hui women, however, were able to do so with Han men because the poor Han peasants wouldn’t mind just going through some rituals to get a woman.
Hence, Hui as a religious group practiced mostly by the Semu population had been “sinicized” since the early Ming Dynasty by just one generation. Then the time passed until 2019, Hui has been given different meanings and has little to do with Arabs. DNA tests and basic facial recognization can tell that easily.
Douglas
Han refers to the majority ethnicity, while Hui refers to an ethnic minority in China. A person who is of mixed heritage may claim for official purposes that he is a Hui minority, but this does not change the fact that he is part Han.
Qi Fanqi
I am hui, but I am not muslim I have relatives are muslims, actually as a minority ethnicity I feel I have more advantage in many places due to the government’s minority affirmation policies not only in school but also in working place, sometimes i feel bad about, since it just too unfair for other people, for example, I am not subject to one child policy, it only subject to han, I have 1 brother but literally all my han friends are the only child in their families, if I am one of them i probably would be very angry, there is a joke in china, minority is first class citizen, han is second, in some extend it is true.
Ma Xian
I am a hui, but I am not muslim.
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