Spread off completely around the country

While it does not seem like it at first, it turns out that the Muslim community (communities) in China are actually fairly widespread, if this map of mosques around the country is to be taken into account

 

It's  fairly interesting to see so many mosques spread out around the country, but apparently mainly concentrated on the eastern side. One would think that the majority of the mosques would be more spread out around the northwestern borderlands areas, where groups like the Uighur population are concentrated.

In either case, it's a useful visual aid to see the widespread diversity of the faith all along China - it gives more of an indication that the religious tradition is more spread out along the country than I had initially thought.

Related to the idea of mosques in China, below is a video of the Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou - apparently one of the oldest mosques in the world.

Maps explain it all

It's true that language is a great way to examine the movement and spread of varying ethnic groups around a particular area - trends in immigration and emigration can be seen just from mapping out where particular dialects have been spread. Definitely a great way to trace the movement of the varying Muslim minority groups throughout China

It'll also be interesting to see how much of an impact, if any, the Silk Road had in bringing and spreading Islam into China. Although it's been said that Islam came to China during the Prophet's time, I would assume that during the peak point of the Silk Road's use is when a greater degree of influence came into China via merchants

Calligraphy - A Common Theme

I've always had a sort of appreciation for calligraphy...the whole art and style of it comes off as a beautiful thing to me. It's definitely something I would have liked to try my hand at, if I ever had any sort of artistic talent.

In either case, Chinese Islamic calligraphy is quite an art...and pleasing on the eyes, I think:

Because the first time is always special, amirite?

So it was only when the alarm clock on my cell rang, notifying me that I should be heading out to training soon, that I realized I'd spent the better part of this day working on this blog.  A bit too much, apparently.

Oh, setting it up and all that was simple enough....although trying to be somewhat creative with the title did, admittedly, take a little bit of time (and even then, I know I've read way better ones)...but the real challenge came in making it look -good-. I'll have to just blame some form of OCD on that - getting the right sort of colour scheme down, the right looking font...it just has to look good. That's always the hard part. Not the reading of assignments and writing out a reflection on it - it's making this thing look good that's hard. But I'm not much of a blogger to begin with; never saw a reason to do it, personally, and never really spent my time looking up other ones.

So it'll be an interesting experience for sure, figuring out how this all works (HTML being my achille's heel doesn't make it any easier), while implementing it to help myself, and hopefully others, learn about a pretty interesting and, in my opinion, little studied subject.

Coming from a family of Muslims, I suppose I've taken for granted what I know about this religion - most of what I know is what I experienced growing up, or saw in very largely 'Muslim-based' communities (having spent my high school years living abroad, in the Middle East). To be honest, I never really gave much thought about Islam being in far east Asia, China or elsewhere in that region. I guess I'm guilty of generalizing when I admit that I had a very set-definition of Islam being a 'Middle Eastern' tradition, and associating it with Arabian and South Asian cultures. I guess that's just because I was raised in those sort of communities and never had much exposure to Muslims who weren't either Arabs or South Asians. A silly generalization, I know, but that's the great thing about courses like RLG356 - we learn new things, practical things even, and incorporate them into our mindset and world view. So hey, I guess that tuition money is paying off already!