Histories of Sinophone Islam in Macau: A Tapestry of a Multi-ethnic Muslim Community

Number: 72
Hung Tak Wai

Since the fifteenth century, Macau has enjoyed the status of being one of the major entrepots of international commerce in Asia. Despite the historic and deeply rooted involvement of Muslims in inter-Asian maritime trade, however, historians have rarely acknowledged the longstanding history of the Muslim community there. The absence of a detailed study of Macau’s Islamic community probably stems from the prevalence of the Portuguese and, therefore, Catholic colonial presence and its associated legacy of religious intolerance. The surprising thing is that it was the Europeans themselves who brought Islam to this enclave: Macau’s only mosque and Muslim cemetery, together known as ‘Moluo yuan’ 囉園 or ‘Garden of the Moors,’ were established around 1774, while the first mosque in Hong Kong, the Shelley Street Mosque, was not built until 1860. Since then, Muslims have been an integral part of the social fabric of Macau. At present, the Muslim population stands at around 10,000, with several hundred among them –mostly Muslims from China or South Asian countries– who have been settled there for many generations. The rest of the community includes foreign laborers from Southeast Asia, who work as household-based domestic workers or as employees in the service and recreational sectors. Muslim religious life in Macau still revolves around the abovementioned mosque, which serves the congregation in Chinese, English, Portuguese, and other languages. This study aims to provide a long-durée sketch of the history of Islam in Macau. It is divided into three sections. It begins with an overview of the early Muslim presence from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, drawing heavily from existing scholarship. The second section focuses more on the twentieth century –which has not garnered as much attention– and draws upon the oral testimonies of two groups of Sinophone (Chinese-speaking) Muslims, those from South Asia followed by those properly from China. Though Sinophone Muslims are conventionally imagined to denote those with Chinese origins, such as the Hui, by this term, I also refer to Muslims with discernibly non-Chinese ethnic or cultural identities and backgrounds who ended up speaking a variety of Sinitic languages, most notably Cantonese and Mandarin. The study reconstructs aspects of twentieth century Muslim history in Macau through the diverse stories of its members, all while seeking to underscore the complexities entangled with the term Sinophone. The third and final section of this study concludes with some reflections on what the Muslim presence and the history of Islam means for Macau itself.