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Taipei Grand Mosque looks like a mini global village. Every Friday, the prayerhall is always overcrowded with Muslims from diverse ethnic backgrounds, includinglocal Chinese Muslims (Hui), Arabs, Turks, Africans, Malaysians and Indonesians.They meet each other and exchange ideas after the congregational prayer. However, inthe 1970s, there was a different image of Islam in Taiwan. Only Chinese Muslims wereincluded in the congregation. The first generation of Chinese Muslims (around 20 to 50thousand people) arrived in Taiwan with the National Government in 1949 and early1950s when the Communist Party took over China. These Chinese Muslims showeddistinctive features of ‘Chinese Islam’ in Taiwan. The elites among these Chinese Muslimswere those who played a leading role in the revival of Islam in China during the1930s and 1940s. When they settled in Taiwan, they resumed work serving Islam asthey did the same in China, such as constructing mosques, building Muslim cemeteriesand dispatching Muslim students to Middle Eastern countries. However, with the passageof time, their work on the revival of Islam seems to have been unsuccessful. Thepopulation of Chinese Muslims stagnated and even declined. Instead, with the openpolicy for drawing in foreign workers and students by the government in Taiwan duringthe 1990s, foreign Muslims from various countries began to appear in Taiwan, therebyexhibiting another images of Islam to the public. Nowadays, Chinese Muslims seem tobe an invisible community in Taiwan as they and their descendants have become outnumberedby foreign Muslims. This paper aims to describe and analyze the paradigmshift in images of Islam in Taiwan over a half century.

Images of Islam , Hui Muslim , Taiwan , Foreign Muslim

2019

مجله الاسلام في آسيا

مجله الاسلام في آسيا