Talk Kicks Off Islam Awareness Week

Visiting professor Jonathan N. Lipman ’69 spoke to a room of 30 students last night in the Lowell Junior Common Room about the striking diversity of Islam in China, as part of the ongoing Eighteenth Annual Islam Awareness Week.

Organized by the Harvard Islamic Society (HIS), the week consists of five days of events—from April 6 to April 10­—that aim to inform the Harvard community about the practices, beliefs, and cultures of Muslims on campus.

According to HIS president Na’eel A. Cajee ’10, the annual Islam Awareness Week seeks to raise awareness among the student body not only about specific beliefs and practices associated with Islam but also about the multiculturalism to be found among Islamic peoples.

“They say that the religion itself can be likened to a clear river,” Cajee said. “When it flows over China, it looks Chinese; when it flows over Africa, it looks African.”

Lipman’s talk, titled “Spotlight on: Chinese Muslims” and jointly organized with the Chinese Students Association, stressed similar points. He described the diversity of Chinese Muslims, who vary from practicing Turkic-speaking Uyghurs in the west to non-practicing Chinese-speaking descendents of Muslims in the east.

“I wanted to mess with [audience members’] minds,” he said in an interview after the event. “The idea that ‘Muslim’ and ‘Chinese’ are whole homogenous black-box categories—that you are either Chinese or Muslim—is just not reality.”

Lipman, also a history professor at Mount Holyoke, said he was careful to distinguish culture, ethnicity, and religion in his speech. Different aspects of a person’s identity can be reconciled in many different ways, he added.

“You carry your ethnicity on your ID card,” he said. “You carry your religion in your heart.”

Lipman also touched on the politics of Islam in China. He mentioned that the government’s statistical categorization of Muslims could reductively split the Muslim population into forced groups, an effect harmful to the ummah—or sacred sense of unity—of the Islamic community there. He also said that the translation of Islamic concepts into Chinese, a language with no monotheistic verbiage, poses a particular challenge.

Several students, who did not attend the speech, said they felt well-informed about Islam already and found Harvard to be a religiously tolerant environment. Similarly, Professor David G. Mitten, faculty advisor to HIS, said that Harvard students and administration have upheld an actively sympathetic relationship with the Islamic community.

“I don’t know of any cases where individuals have been victims of prejudice or discrimination,” he said.

But he added that this does not make the awareness week unnecessary, as he credited it with helping improve the relationship.