Yiwu is the 'fastest growing Muslim community' in China

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

08/11/2012

Yiwu is the 'fastest growing Muslim community' in China

YIWU, CHINA // Go back little more than a decade, and a group of Muslim residents in Yiwu, a city in eastern China, had to rent a hotel room so that they would have somewhere to pray.

As their numbers increased from about 100, they moved to a rented car park - but soon they had outgrown that, too, and worshippers spilt into the nearby street.

Today, the finishing touches are being put on a 25 million yuan (Dh14.4 million) mosque that is already being used by Yiwu's Chinese, Arab and South Asian Muslim residents and visitors.

Yet despite the construction of the mosque, one thing has not changed. Such has been the growth of the city's Muslim population that at busy periods, there is still not enough room for everyone inside and some worshippers have to find space outside to pray.

Read more at The National

Aug 11, 2012 11:26:16 PM | Current Affairs, Religion

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