We are very pleased to republish this important article by Senator Mushahid Hussain, Chairman of the Pakistan-China Institute and a member of our advisory group, originally published by Wall Street International and also republished by the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency. Taking the recent ‘historic first’ of Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s address to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting in Islamabad as his starting point, Senator Hussain notes that the connection between the Chinese and Muslim civilisations dates back to the very earliest days of the Islamic faith and has been a consistent cornerstone of New China’s diplomacy since the founding of the People’s Republic to the present. Key early examples given by the Senator include China’s key role in the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia and its pioneering recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
The retrenchment of American power in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world, coupled with the war in Ukraine, has provided a geopolitical breather for China. Beijing is effectively deploying this to make strategic inroads into the region, given this vacuum and focus on Europe. The recent invitation to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to address the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) conference in Islamabad is a ‘historic first,’ and a significant breakthrough for Chinese diplomacy. For the first time, the foreign minister of the Peoples Republic of China was invited to address the most representative platform of the 57 member body representing the 1.5 billion Muslims. During his speech at the OIC conference in Islamabad on the 22nd March 2022, Foreign Minister Wang Yi talked about the “long standing relationship between China and the Muslim world” and reaffirmed that China would continue supporting Muslim countries in their quest for political independence and economic development.
Historically, China has always been etched in the Muslim consciousness as a country with a great civilisation based on knowledge, learning and development. For example, there is a famous saying of the Holy Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him), 1,400 years ago, which urged Muslims to “seek knowledge, even if you have to go to China,” implying that although China was physically far away from Arabia, it was a land of learning. Soon after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, a professor of the prestigious American university Harvard, Prof. Samuel Huntington, talked of a ‘clash of civilisations’ in which he implied that Western civilization would be at odds with both the Islamic and the Confucian civilisations. Interestingly, he also talked of a united front of the Islamic and Confucian civilisations.
Continue reading Mushahid Hussain: China’s entry into the Muslim world