Muslim Religious Education in China

Despite their diversity, China's Muslims 1 have been engaged for twenty years in a process of reaffirmation of their religion and identity 2 : construction and renovation of mosques, dissemination of information on Islam in the world, translation of religious texts, etc 3 . As is the case in the rest of the Muslim world, their efforts have also been aimed at the field of education. At first, in the early 1980s, education was restricted to the mosque schools, but quickly, through individual or collective initiatives, both local and provincial, a number of private Arabic or Sino-Arabic schools, as well as many institutes, have opened all over the country. During the surveys we carried out in 2000 and 2002 in the provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia, Henan, Yunnan and in Hainan, we were able to observe the extraordinary growth of this Muslim teaching 4 .