While listening to the recitation of Ma Rui, the female Ahong of Jian Guo Xiang women’s mosque, it was hard to believe that she was a Chinese Muslim and never been to any Arab country. The difference is immediately perceptible when one hears an Ahong reciting Quran in the mosque of a Reform faction. They are advocates of biaozhun Alaboyu (standard Arabic pronunciation) and for them the Arabic pronounced by reading Jingtang Jiaoyu script is Hanyu de awen (Chinese Arabic). They emphasize upon the primacy and supremacy of Arabic language with integrity of its standard pronunciation and script. The voices of reform among Chinese Muslims call for refraining from the scripts emerged as a result of linguistic integration between Chinese and Arabic. unlearning some of the past habits of one’s cultural elements (Kim 1988). The progress of the Gulf countries and the status of Arab Muslim countries in the contemporary world has raised the status of Arabic as a prestigious language and this phenomenon has influenced the linguistic preferences and patterns of Chinese Muslims a great deal. The pressure of integration is no more as vigorous as it was in imperial China. With the establishment of the Communist government and the opening of China to the new world, Muslims are exposed to the outer Muslim world. This trend has changed considerably in contemporary times. They compromised the script of their sacred language while endeavouring to adapt to their host majority society. The emergence of this syncretic script with the primary focus upon the Chinese characters is an evidence of the integration of Muslims in China and their acceptance and adoption of Chinese as their primary language. The common Muslim populace, though, depended upon only Jingtang Jiaoyu text for recitation. Traditionally, the religious scholars trained in the mosque education were chosen to transliterate the Holy Quran and other Arabic texts as they were bilingual and knew both Arabic and Chinese scripts. Such a practice is found in other parts of the world as well, for instance Quranic Arabic is also transliterated in English in order to help the readers who cannot recognize Arabic script or produce the sounds of Arabic alphabets. They can read the Chinese characters and thus pronounce the sounds which look like the original word. This method enables people to read the Quran and other sacred Arabic texts who are unfamiliar with Arabic script and alphabets. Not only Quran, but also the texts of prayer and other ritual texts written in Jingtang Jiaoyu script are also available in the shop. the Arabic verses, transliterated Chinese verses and then Chinese translation of the meaning of the verses. The shop in front of the Huajue Xiang mosque selling Islamic literature and related stuff sells the pamphlets with Jingtang Jiaoyu text, i.e. In the Muslim community of today’s Xi’an, most of the elder people recite the Quran using Jingtang Jiaoyu method and have their copies of Quran with the verses transliterated in Chinese and use these copies for recitation. In this way, the pronunciation is fallible as the exact phonetic representation of Arabic is not possible in Chinese characters. Similarly, the common Muslim greetings called ‘salam’ become sailiang mu when written in Jingtang Jiaoyu script and the readers pronounce it Salaam Aleikun ending with nasal sound again, whereas the standard pronunciation in Arabic is Assalam o alaykum. For instance, Allah is pronounced as An-la-hu in Jingtang as each of the syllables is presented by a Chinese character and this approximation adds the nasal sound of Arabic alphabet ‘noon’ originally not pre- sent in standard Arabic pronunciation. It was not a way to learn and understand Quran, but rather just to pronounce it. The sound of Chinese characters pronounced collectively creates a rough approximation of the Arabic words with the least emphasis upon under- standing the meaning of the text. The Chinese characters are employed not to translate the meaning, but instead the text itself is phonetically represented. #Chinese transliteration how to#The Jingtang Jiaoyu method of teaching Quran relies on written Chinese transliteration of Arabic to teach students how to pronounce and recite the Quran. 12 So they developed this technique of producing Arabic in Chinese script to keep the Islamic faith and knowledge alive and to assure the continuous usage of Arabic language in the religious sphere. Muslim populace – rather the Chinese script was becoming fashionable.
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