Tough Questions To Chinese Muslim! - 90% Of Chinese Are Atheist? @IsaMapc
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[Music] is it true that 90 percent of china is atheist is it true that chinese people eat anything besides human i heard that such contents about islam are blocked by the chinese government at first they were shocked you know like why are you doing this who taught you this like what is this are you a wanted man in china lisa brother can you please introduce yourself to us sure bismillah my name is and i'm from china from a northwestern province called gansu and uh i was born in a muslim family but not a practicing one so i didn't know much about islam until i went to university where i met many muslim friends from different countries and that's where i started re-educating myself about islam
and that's where i started practicing slowly i haven't known that you were muslim and i will i was going to ask you how did you first hear about islam they're muslims but they don't pray they don't read the quran they don't know much actually about the pillars of islam or the beliefs of islam and nobody ever talked to me about how to live as a muslim basically in my family i i was made to feel that there was no difference between a muslim and a non-muslim except we don't eat pork yeah so i started learning about islam in university primarily and convey what i learned to my family and then later to a wider audience to my friends you know to my um colleagues how did your family react to this
life-changing decision at first they were shocked you know and uh was it a good shock or a bad joke my general attitude towards life it becomes more uh motivated and and more positive so they started appreciating it and even eventually supporting it alhamdulillah especially my mom the change in her i think is even more intense than me like she was also not practicing at all but after witnessing this change in me she really appreciated and then she started changing herself too with a very fast pace with a very fast progression so i'm very grateful to allah that my family is also you know followed the path what are the results of your search engine in china when you type islam if you search
islam i think first you would find the islamic association of many provinces or cities their official website because in every province every city there is a so-called island like the islamic association which is the official uh agency uh appointed by the government eventually if you go to like maybe the tenth page or later you would find some questions and answers about islam by people because in china we also have websites like choral you know q a websites people will ask questions and people answer questions so there you would find people asking very random questions about islam and people giving very random answers about islam because most of the people who answer are not muslims so yeah
i think you wouldn't find much like very direct dawah things if you search islam however the chinese people introduced to islam throughout the history i have a video about that on my youtube channel so basically china was one of the first countries that islam reached so basically about there are different different opinions about when first when islam first reached china but it's generally in the area of about 10 years after the prophet sallallahu al-islam passed away so it's very early and some historians even believe before he passed away ali isla islam there were already some sahaba as messengers that were sent to the east sent to china in in the 7th century earlier than many muslim
countries nowadays and how it was introduced in the beginning i think uh there were official messengers from the from the muslims to introduce islam but they were not the ones who made the real influence because they were there were few you know one or two maybe just a few people would go and visit the emperor and it didn't make a big impact the big impact was actually from arab merchants who came in large numbers to the southern part of china for business but then as you know this is the muslims wherever they go they carry islam wisdom right so they go to china but they have to pray so they you know find a place and make it a masjid they pray together and in their business dealings they
have the club of islam they're honest you know they're cheerful they're respectful etc so um at first they had their own communities uh muslim communities mostly foreigners but then gradually they influenced the chinese people around them as well and then there started to be chinese muslims so actually islam started in china from the south earlier than the north after some time there were business uh there were merchants from the north as well from the selk road the famous silk road but that was much less in number because uh traveling on road in that time was much more difficult than traveling on the sea so there were more muslims in the south and the impact was mostly from merchants in
their business dealings and in their lifestyle so that's how islam started in china is it true that chinese people eat anything besides human i think this is like a popular impression that foreigners have about chinese people uh even in hong kong many of my muslim friends say that oh you guys eat everything right you guys eat like cockroaches and ants right and i was like ew i can't even imagine that um so maybe like there are in some areas i think uh in in southern part uh especially people tend to be more liberal in their in their choice of food they may eat things that others feel weird especially in the canton province i think so it's a regional thing it's not universal in china for us
the chinese people look like each other very much do chinese people feel the same for us i think so but uh it depends on which country because like turkey is is a special case because i mean turkey um you know it covers a part of asia and a part of europe and because of its history you know as a big empire it has uh citizens from different races different ethnicities but if you are talking about a country like let's say uzbekistan then we see all of them are same and all of them are actually similar to chinese in our eyes so i i think and also i think some chinese people can't differentiate between arabs like you know syrians and palestinians palestinians to them just look the same is it
true that 90 percent of china is atheist i i just can't believe this please explain this to me it's uh almost impossible to really measure this because there are so many people but what what we uh know from uh interacting with the chinese people is that most people would not identify themselves with a specific organized religion but everyone has some sort of belief they have certain spiritual beliefs and they believe in uh consequences to their actions and they believe in sometimes they say they are hindu like reserve some reserve some how to say hidden like a rape you know hidden luck for yourself and you do some good things so that when you're in trouble this hidden luck will help you so
people have beliefs but not very specific religions um in terms of whether 90 of the people are atheist i would say no i think 90 of the people are uh not uh not sure whether there is a god they are more in a confused state rather than because an atheist is someone who clearly states i don't believe there is a god but if you ask chinese people do you think there is a god most of them i believe will say i'm not sure or i never thought about it or maybe so the people that i've interacted most of them seem maybe and but many of them think it's not none of my business maybe there's a god maybe there's not a god it doesn't really matter to me education does play a role because our education is a
strictly atheist education it's very clear that you know the regime doesn't believe there's a god you're producing islamic content videos are you a wanted man in china i think of course when you do these things they would pay attention to you you know the security people they'll pay attention to you and we have this term in china that we use humorously called uh inviting your for tea like you know if they want to get to know more about you for security reasons they will invite you for tea um so so i've been invited for tea in china they'll ask you what have you been up to what are you doing why are you doing this who told you to do this and uh are you in contact with any foreign
organizations we would like like to know about that conversations if you tell us personally all of these people i met are respectful people um when they talk with me they are polite and they're respectful so they know that i'm muslim and i don't hide at all about my passion for islam and my desire to spread islam and they respect that um what they are most uh i think you know it's a general rule uh for such a big for any big country that the most important thing is the stability of the authority is the stability of the regime um so as long as they can make sure that you're not threatening the regime like you're not running for president or anything like you don't want power in this country
they don't mind you that much so in this conversation they asked me about many things um like what's your plan in the future uh where did you study your islamic knowledge and uh um for example once i went to morocco just just for a cultural trip and i came back and they they met me and they asked me like why did you come to why did you go to morocco what do you do there who did you meet there they're very threatened by any of any form of contact with foreign countries or organizations i heard that such contents about islam are blocked by the chinese government some of them are deleted some of them are censored but i would say that's a small portion maybe 10 to 20 percent 80 of the content
are still up and vietnam this day up for example you are in china and you have your computer with you yeah and you have your own youtube what was that called uh it's called uh billy billy i think billy billy when you type uh for example no money khan to to that side can you see pneumonical i've never tried but i'm aware that there are many translated videos of nom alican circulating among chinese muslims do you feel freedom in china in terms of freedoms of speech i would often feel restricted and i would feel frustrated about these restrictions such as i told you some of my articles and videos uh this content will be censored or deleted which i dedicated a lot of effort to and which i find
it to be beneficial to people but for reason that i i don't know for sure they are deleted or censored of course this frustrates me in some points you're criticizing the system do you think the officials will watch this video and ask for a t i was telling my wife that there's this turkish turkish guy who wants to interview me i think i think this is where i get arrested for uh i told her that so like yeah sometimes i do have concerns 99 of the time i say what i think only one percent of the time when it comes to very sensitive issues for example the issue of a specific area in china and a specific ethnicity and you know what i'm talking about so this is a very sensitive topic and i i tend to
uh i tend to avoid it um because i'm afraid it might bring trouble to me for example how do you give dawah right now to chinese people one way is i as i mentioned i have a wechat official account which is a social media platform that has currently close to 60 000 subscribers and uh i have articles audios videos about islam and as i said most of them can can circulate freely that's one way through social media and also through offline uh you know gatherings small gatherings not like a very public like uh conference or anything like that in in north america because that would invite a lot of trouble but we have small family gatherings and it's very common in china now so like you know the
father of a family would invite many other families a few other families to come for a mew can chinese muslims perform their prayer freely did you have any hardships regarding this matter in my area there was no problem praying in a masjid whenever you want it's open all day and uh people pray in jamaica people pray juma's people pray i eat on the street actually there is a city in qinghai province and they have made documentary about this there are like hundreds of thousands of muslims i don't know i think tens of thousands of muslims are praying together and of course the masjid is not enough so the local traffic police would actually block the road reserve one whole road for muslims to
pray and it happened every year they have documentaries about this so so in terms of prayer uh i i felt there's sufficient freedom for us to do what we have to do but now i think in many massage it they prevent people under the age of 18 to enter which i feel is very weird but i think that not all masajid some massage they prevent people under the age of 18 to enter and as i mentioned earlier communist party members cannot enter masajid because they are supposed to be atheists and don't believe any religion in islam we pray we fast during ramazan did any of them seem difficult to you at first um it was not difficult in university because we had a prayer room in the university so at first i
was not praying regularly and then one day i think it's a sudden thought to me i was you know just motivated to feel that wait a minute like allah commanded muslims to pray five times a day and why am i not praying five times five times a day you know it's a normal thought but all of a sudden i said you know you know what starting from tomorrow from fajr i will start praying five times a day i'll see what's the big deal i'll see if i can do it or not i just want to experiment and then the next day i woke up early i prayed fudge and then i prayed all the five daily prayers and i was like ah it can be done and it didn't really you know affect my life that much it didn't really make me um
busier or anything it didn't take much of my time so i started doing this regularly and once i started doing this regularly everything else seemed to have become easy so either like that other kinds of worship like fasting um like learning islamic knowledge trying to recite the quran all of the other things seemed to start to become easy once i started praying regularly so no wonder allah says you know seek help from patience and prayer once you start praying help comes to you in your other actions in your other kinds of work so yeah um nothing was particularly difficult for me alhamdulillah i think things just happened naturally did you have some bad habits like drinking alcohol and dating
so when i first learned that muslims shouldn't date or should i have boyfriend and girlfriend um i was actually shocked i was like what how can that be possible how can people get married without you know dating without going out and learning about each other so at first that was sort of a hard one for me to accept and i used to have long conversations with my muslim friends about this point but then you know while i have these conversations and also reflect within myself and also learn more you know about the this topic and gather more knowledge eventually i accepted and there was a funny experience like one day i was lying on bed and i was thinking to myself like you know what i don't
think it's that bad to have a relationship you know i'm praying i fast i don't drink alcohol and i just have a relationship it's not it's not so bad i'm thinking to myself maybe i can be a more liberal muslim you know i practice all of these things but i will have a relationship and then i felt i fell asleep right after that thought and then i heard a voice i actually heard a voice uh saying to me in english weirdly enough my mother told me it's chinese but i heard a voice in english no you can't like no you can't have a relationship while being a practicing muslim and that was funny to me maybe it's just a dream or something is it not it's not necessarily a miracle or a wahi like you know
revelation but but that basically pushed me to think more about this topic and then eventually you know uh logically you know rationally and also um just the fact that we should submit once there's enough evidence to suggest that you shouldn't do something even if you uh emotionally don't want to accept it it is of our duty as a muslim to submit to accept and even if it's against your wishes even if it's against your feelings so uh i just sort of i was harsh on myself and i accepted it and i just convinced myself not to have such relationships and eventually it worked out well you know it's a form of protection are you married right now yes alhamdulillah i'm married how is that possible to
get married without knowing each other if if it is haram to date well i didn't meet my potential marriage candidate once just once and uh for a few days like you know consecutively i met her and we talked about the important things about marriage like you you know how many kids you want to have that's important question and uh would you like to work you know what's your what's your goal and what's the most important thing to you in terms of this life you know of course we all want uh you know gender and success in africa but in terms of this life what is your goal what is your arrangement for yourself all of these important questions we uh exchanged our thoughts and then once it's suitable
you just decide you know you you have some trust towards allah because you can never be entirely true entirely certain so you know faith once you are you've you've made your made up your mind then trust allah because there will always be something uncertain but once you've made up your mind trust allah and then pray pray solatul is tihara of course then just make that decision and know that in every marriage there are problems and in every marriage there are advantages there's no marriage that will definitely absolutely work perfectly and there's no marriage that is definitely a disaster it's all about how you handle it how you manage it you know how you uh protect it and how you construct
it so um so it was a rational decision uh after knowing this this well now she's my wife but at the time this sister and then we just decided to get married and so far so good is that true that chinese government doesn't let people to have so many kids like in my generation in the decade that i was born 1990s there was a policy called one child policy so every family can only have one child to control the population growth and then after i think um about a decade ago they uh removed this policy and they made it to child to two children policy so now now people can have two kids and i think they change changed it again to three because now we face a bigger problem than population growth which
is um the aging problem there are more old people than young people in society why did you feel the need to make a research about islam it's very normal when people grow to a certain age of mental maturity he will start thinking about some very basic but very hard questions like what's the purpose of life why am i even alive what's going to happen after i die this is very basic but also very difficult questions right if you help others you will die they will die what's the point of helping them everyone dies eventually so this really frustrated me in the beginning and i started reading about many different religions and spiritual schools the reason why i started all of this research is
questions which i believe all people have at one stage in their life so before you read quran you read some other books right yes am i right yes what was that book and what was your reaction so for um buddhism i read um in chinese hunting it's it's a it's a actually the collection of saiyans of a very famous uh buddhist monk from southern part of china in history and when i read about it i felt like there is tremendous wisdom and this his philosophy is mostly about um you can see introspection which is looking into yourself looking at your naps in our language looking at your ego and restraining your ego and he basically said that the whole world is a reflection of your own ego of your inner
state so he said anything that has an appearance is all fake like the real things the essence of things don't have appearances you know it doesn't really talk about what's going to you it doesn't really talk about what's going to happen after i die what's the purpose of my life it's more about how to live happily how to live calmly how to have a better life so that's buddhism and then i read about uh christianity in the beginning of the bible i already felt that this the description of god in the bible is too uh personified it doesn't suit what i expect god to be like for example in the bible the story of adam al-islam you know in the bible he ate from the apple and god was very angry like
god was very frustrated they used words like this and he regretted creating adam i think this they said something like this so i was thinking how can god regret he knows what's going to happen in the future how can god feel bad about a past action that doesn't make any sense and there are many incidents like this where god is described like a person not like a god so i felt like maybe you know the later people they uh changed the words or whatever and the it's not really i don't think this is the original text from god i don't think god would be like this and i respect the people who follow them but i just didn't find them to be the answer to my questions eventually what aspect of the quran
affected you the most and what is the i that touched your heart most studying islam is like climbing stairs you keep going up and there are different platforms different stage so in the beginning stage what struck me the most was sort of like emotional impact the fact that and many people experience this when you read the quran it feels as if quran knows what you're thinking like you're reading and you had a thought and then what's coming after it the next ayah answers your thought or replies to your thought so that happened to me many times i feel like the quran knows what i'm thinking and is consciously conversing with me talking with me specifically to me about what i think so that's
quite impactful i really felt impressed by the way that allah uses the language so different from human beings uh and so unique yet so beautiful and so impactful so that's another aspect of the quran that touched me and another one is as i mentioned earlier uh the directness or the power of the quran like when you read the quran you just know this is not a man talking men they're not speak like this right it just feels like the speech of god in in terms of its tone um i think one of the ayah that really touched me is uh he said all human beings indeed we created you from different nations and different tribes different ethnicities so that you may know each other and the most honorable among
you are those who have most taqwa most most conscious and pious of you indeed allah is all-knowing and all aware so this ayah attached me the most because i feel like it just fundamentally solves the problem of racism and bigotry and any form of uh you know conflict between different people cultural conflict or whatever because there's only one standard for gauging your honor and this standard taqwa is hidden you know only allah knows and you and you may know a little bit of it so that really touched me and there are many other ayat when you look at chinese people there are more than one billion people who need this dawah who need to hear about prophet ali salat wasallam i want to ask you
suppose that there was a chance for you to speak all non-muslims in china all of them are hearing you right now what would you like to say so much my fellow chinese people my people of my land of my blood i would like to invite you to think about the meaning of life and the purpose of life and what's going to happen after we die these are important questions because without answering these questions our life is in vain and it doesn't accomplish anything and in the end you will lose all the things you gather in this world they will not go with you and you will feel a sense of regret if you dedicate all of your life to the temporary possessions and temporary projects in his life so i would
like to invite you to at least start thinking about the purpose of life and to look for answers uh start exploring and try to find the answer and i would like to um inform you of my belief which is not something that i came up with but it's something that many prophets and messengers in our belief in history who came to different nations and conveyed this message that we are created by one single creator who is merciful who is wise and who is powerful and who promised us that after this life we will be resurrected and we will be judged and the good people will go to heaven that is uh entirely an eternally happy place and people will be busy with enjoyment and it's peaceful and and this this
creator is merciful and he wants us to go to heaven he wants us to live this happy and peaceful life and he has offered us the answer uh to to this afterlife and he has offered us an example you know by these prophets and messengers especially the last prophet muhammad to show us how to live an accomplished life how to live a life that is happy and fulfilled and also lead to real success in the hereafter so you may not necessarily believe these things but i'm inviting you to at least think about them and get to know these these beliefs of islam and hopefully if you are a sincere person and if you're honest to your heart i believe i am quite certain that you will find it in harmony with what
you already believe you will find it in harmony with what you already know in your heart in the deepest sense of your nature and i invite you after that to accept islam and to live the life uh according to the example given by prophet muhammad who is really the best of mankind if you look at his life if you read about his biography you will see that he is indeed the most honorable and the most righteous and the most virtuous person and i hope one day we will be brothers and our tie will be stronger than a tie of blood thai will be stronger than the tile of land it will be a tie of faith and this tie will make us brothers and we will help each other live this life peacefully and happily and
enter the eternally peaceful life in hereafter together so embark on this journey and ask god to guide you even if you believe there's a possibility that there's a higher being who knows what you're thinking and who created the word even if you acknowledge this possibility ask him call upon him he hears you he knows what you want and he will guide you and when he guides you you will find the truth no matter how many difficulties there are so embark on this journey and may allah may the creator guide us all towards the truth and towards the best best way of life i mean it was so nice to meet you you have a good story insha'allah you will gather all the muslims in china together without
without drinking a tea from the officials inshallah you
and that's where i started practicing slowly i haven't known that you were muslim and i will i was going to ask you how did you first hear about islam they're muslims but they don't pray they don't read the quran they don't know much actually about the pillars of islam or the beliefs of islam and nobody ever talked to me about how to live as a muslim basically in my family i i was made to feel that there was no difference between a muslim and a non-muslim except we don't eat pork yeah so i started learning about islam in university primarily and convey what i learned to my family and then later to a wider audience to my friends you know to my um colleagues how did your family react to this
life-changing decision at first they were shocked you know and uh was it a good shock or a bad joke my general attitude towards life it becomes more uh motivated and and more positive so they started appreciating it and even eventually supporting it alhamdulillah especially my mom the change in her i think is even more intense than me like she was also not practicing at all but after witnessing this change in me she really appreciated and then she started changing herself too with a very fast pace with a very fast progression so i'm very grateful to allah that my family is also you know followed the path what are the results of your search engine in china when you type islam if you search
islam i think first you would find the islamic association of many provinces or cities their official website because in every province every city there is a so-called island like the islamic association which is the official uh agency uh appointed by the government eventually if you go to like maybe the tenth page or later you would find some questions and answers about islam by people because in china we also have websites like choral you know q a websites people will ask questions and people answer questions so there you would find people asking very random questions about islam and people giving very random answers about islam because most of the people who answer are not muslims so yeah
i think you wouldn't find much like very direct dawah things if you search islam however the chinese people introduced to islam throughout the history i have a video about that on my youtube channel so basically china was one of the first countries that islam reached so basically about there are different different opinions about when first when islam first reached china but it's generally in the area of about 10 years after the prophet sallallahu al-islam passed away so it's very early and some historians even believe before he passed away ali isla islam there were already some sahaba as messengers that were sent to the east sent to china in in the 7th century earlier than many muslim
countries nowadays and how it was introduced in the beginning i think uh there were official messengers from the from the muslims to introduce islam but they were not the ones who made the real influence because they were there were few you know one or two maybe just a few people would go and visit the emperor and it didn't make a big impact the big impact was actually from arab merchants who came in large numbers to the southern part of china for business but then as you know this is the muslims wherever they go they carry islam wisdom right so they go to china but they have to pray so they you know find a place and make it a masjid they pray together and in their business dealings they
have the club of islam they're honest you know they're cheerful they're respectful etc so um at first they had their own communities uh muslim communities mostly foreigners but then gradually they influenced the chinese people around them as well and then there started to be chinese muslims so actually islam started in china from the south earlier than the north after some time there were business uh there were merchants from the north as well from the selk road the famous silk road but that was much less in number because uh traveling on road in that time was much more difficult than traveling on the sea so there were more muslims in the south and the impact was mostly from merchants in
their business dealings and in their lifestyle so that's how islam started in china is it true that chinese people eat anything besides human i think this is like a popular impression that foreigners have about chinese people uh even in hong kong many of my muslim friends say that oh you guys eat everything right you guys eat like cockroaches and ants right and i was like ew i can't even imagine that um so maybe like there are in some areas i think uh in in southern part uh especially people tend to be more liberal in their in their choice of food they may eat things that others feel weird especially in the canton province i think so it's a regional thing it's not universal in china for us
the chinese people look like each other very much do chinese people feel the same for us i think so but uh it depends on which country because like turkey is is a special case because i mean turkey um you know it covers a part of asia and a part of europe and because of its history you know as a big empire it has uh citizens from different races different ethnicities but if you are talking about a country like let's say uzbekistan then we see all of them are same and all of them are actually similar to chinese in our eyes so i i think and also i think some chinese people can't differentiate between arabs like you know syrians and palestinians palestinians to them just look the same is it
true that 90 percent of china is atheist i i just can't believe this please explain this to me it's uh almost impossible to really measure this because there are so many people but what what we uh know from uh interacting with the chinese people is that most people would not identify themselves with a specific organized religion but everyone has some sort of belief they have certain spiritual beliefs and they believe in uh consequences to their actions and they believe in sometimes they say they are hindu like reserve some reserve some how to say hidden like a rape you know hidden luck for yourself and you do some good things so that when you're in trouble this hidden luck will help you so
people have beliefs but not very specific religions um in terms of whether 90 of the people are atheist i would say no i think 90 of the people are uh not uh not sure whether there is a god they are more in a confused state rather than because an atheist is someone who clearly states i don't believe there is a god but if you ask chinese people do you think there is a god most of them i believe will say i'm not sure or i never thought about it or maybe so the people that i've interacted most of them seem maybe and but many of them think it's not none of my business maybe there's a god maybe there's not a god it doesn't really matter to me education does play a role because our education is a
strictly atheist education it's very clear that you know the regime doesn't believe there's a god you're producing islamic content videos are you a wanted man in china i think of course when you do these things they would pay attention to you you know the security people they'll pay attention to you and we have this term in china that we use humorously called uh inviting your for tea like you know if they want to get to know more about you for security reasons they will invite you for tea um so so i've been invited for tea in china they'll ask you what have you been up to what are you doing why are you doing this who told you to do this and uh are you in contact with any foreign
organizations we would like like to know about that conversations if you tell us personally all of these people i met are respectful people um when they talk with me they are polite and they're respectful so they know that i'm muslim and i don't hide at all about my passion for islam and my desire to spread islam and they respect that um what they are most uh i think you know it's a general rule uh for such a big for any big country that the most important thing is the stability of the authority is the stability of the regime um so as long as they can make sure that you're not threatening the regime like you're not running for president or anything like you don't want power in this country
they don't mind you that much so in this conversation they asked me about many things um like what's your plan in the future uh where did you study your islamic knowledge and uh um for example once i went to morocco just just for a cultural trip and i came back and they they met me and they asked me like why did you come to why did you go to morocco what do you do there who did you meet there they're very threatened by any of any form of contact with foreign countries or organizations i heard that such contents about islam are blocked by the chinese government some of them are deleted some of them are censored but i would say that's a small portion maybe 10 to 20 percent 80 of the content
are still up and vietnam this day up for example you are in china and you have your computer with you yeah and you have your own youtube what was that called uh it's called uh billy billy i think billy billy when you type uh for example no money khan to to that side can you see pneumonical i've never tried but i'm aware that there are many translated videos of nom alican circulating among chinese muslims do you feel freedom in china in terms of freedoms of speech i would often feel restricted and i would feel frustrated about these restrictions such as i told you some of my articles and videos uh this content will be censored or deleted which i dedicated a lot of effort to and which i find
it to be beneficial to people but for reason that i i don't know for sure they are deleted or censored of course this frustrates me in some points you're criticizing the system do you think the officials will watch this video and ask for a t i was telling my wife that there's this turkish turkish guy who wants to interview me i think i think this is where i get arrested for uh i told her that so like yeah sometimes i do have concerns 99 of the time i say what i think only one percent of the time when it comes to very sensitive issues for example the issue of a specific area in china and a specific ethnicity and you know what i'm talking about so this is a very sensitive topic and i i tend to
uh i tend to avoid it um because i'm afraid it might bring trouble to me for example how do you give dawah right now to chinese people one way is i as i mentioned i have a wechat official account which is a social media platform that has currently close to 60 000 subscribers and uh i have articles audios videos about islam and as i said most of them can can circulate freely that's one way through social media and also through offline uh you know gatherings small gatherings not like a very public like uh conference or anything like that in in north america because that would invite a lot of trouble but we have small family gatherings and it's very common in china now so like you know the
father of a family would invite many other families a few other families to come for a mew can chinese muslims perform their prayer freely did you have any hardships regarding this matter in my area there was no problem praying in a masjid whenever you want it's open all day and uh people pray in jamaica people pray juma's people pray i eat on the street actually there is a city in qinghai province and they have made documentary about this there are like hundreds of thousands of muslims i don't know i think tens of thousands of muslims are praying together and of course the masjid is not enough so the local traffic police would actually block the road reserve one whole road for muslims to
pray and it happened every year they have documentaries about this so so in terms of prayer uh i i felt there's sufficient freedom for us to do what we have to do but now i think in many massage it they prevent people under the age of 18 to enter which i feel is very weird but i think that not all masajid some massage they prevent people under the age of 18 to enter and as i mentioned earlier communist party members cannot enter masajid because they are supposed to be atheists and don't believe any religion in islam we pray we fast during ramazan did any of them seem difficult to you at first um it was not difficult in university because we had a prayer room in the university so at first i
was not praying regularly and then one day i think it's a sudden thought to me i was you know just motivated to feel that wait a minute like allah commanded muslims to pray five times a day and why am i not praying five times five times a day you know it's a normal thought but all of a sudden i said you know you know what starting from tomorrow from fajr i will start praying five times a day i'll see what's the big deal i'll see if i can do it or not i just want to experiment and then the next day i woke up early i prayed fudge and then i prayed all the five daily prayers and i was like ah it can be done and it didn't really you know affect my life that much it didn't really make me um
busier or anything it didn't take much of my time so i started doing this regularly and once i started doing this regularly everything else seemed to have become easy so either like that other kinds of worship like fasting um like learning islamic knowledge trying to recite the quran all of the other things seemed to start to become easy once i started praying regularly so no wonder allah says you know seek help from patience and prayer once you start praying help comes to you in your other actions in your other kinds of work so yeah um nothing was particularly difficult for me alhamdulillah i think things just happened naturally did you have some bad habits like drinking alcohol and dating
so when i first learned that muslims shouldn't date or should i have boyfriend and girlfriend um i was actually shocked i was like what how can that be possible how can people get married without you know dating without going out and learning about each other so at first that was sort of a hard one for me to accept and i used to have long conversations with my muslim friends about this point but then you know while i have these conversations and also reflect within myself and also learn more you know about the this topic and gather more knowledge eventually i accepted and there was a funny experience like one day i was lying on bed and i was thinking to myself like you know what i don't
think it's that bad to have a relationship you know i'm praying i fast i don't drink alcohol and i just have a relationship it's not it's not so bad i'm thinking to myself maybe i can be a more liberal muslim you know i practice all of these things but i will have a relationship and then i felt i fell asleep right after that thought and then i heard a voice i actually heard a voice uh saying to me in english weirdly enough my mother told me it's chinese but i heard a voice in english no you can't like no you can't have a relationship while being a practicing muslim and that was funny to me maybe it's just a dream or something is it not it's not necessarily a miracle or a wahi like you know
revelation but but that basically pushed me to think more about this topic and then eventually you know uh logically you know rationally and also um just the fact that we should submit once there's enough evidence to suggest that you shouldn't do something even if you uh emotionally don't want to accept it it is of our duty as a muslim to submit to accept and even if it's against your wishes even if it's against your feelings so uh i just sort of i was harsh on myself and i accepted it and i just convinced myself not to have such relationships and eventually it worked out well you know it's a form of protection are you married right now yes alhamdulillah i'm married how is that possible to
get married without knowing each other if if it is haram to date well i didn't meet my potential marriage candidate once just once and uh for a few days like you know consecutively i met her and we talked about the important things about marriage like you you know how many kids you want to have that's important question and uh would you like to work you know what's your what's your goal and what's the most important thing to you in terms of this life you know of course we all want uh you know gender and success in africa but in terms of this life what is your goal what is your arrangement for yourself all of these important questions we uh exchanged our thoughts and then once it's suitable
you just decide you know you you have some trust towards allah because you can never be entirely true entirely certain so you know faith once you are you've you've made your made up your mind then trust allah because there will always be something uncertain but once you've made up your mind trust allah and then pray pray solatul is tihara of course then just make that decision and know that in every marriage there are problems and in every marriage there are advantages there's no marriage that will definitely absolutely work perfectly and there's no marriage that is definitely a disaster it's all about how you handle it how you manage it you know how you uh protect it and how you construct
it so um so it was a rational decision uh after knowing this this well now she's my wife but at the time this sister and then we just decided to get married and so far so good is that true that chinese government doesn't let people to have so many kids like in my generation in the decade that i was born 1990s there was a policy called one child policy so every family can only have one child to control the population growth and then after i think um about a decade ago they uh removed this policy and they made it to child to two children policy so now now people can have two kids and i think they change changed it again to three because now we face a bigger problem than population growth which
is um the aging problem there are more old people than young people in society why did you feel the need to make a research about islam it's very normal when people grow to a certain age of mental maturity he will start thinking about some very basic but very hard questions like what's the purpose of life why am i even alive what's going to happen after i die this is very basic but also very difficult questions right if you help others you will die they will die what's the point of helping them everyone dies eventually so this really frustrated me in the beginning and i started reading about many different religions and spiritual schools the reason why i started all of this research is
questions which i believe all people have at one stage in their life so before you read quran you read some other books right yes am i right yes what was that book and what was your reaction so for um buddhism i read um in chinese hunting it's it's a it's a actually the collection of saiyans of a very famous uh buddhist monk from southern part of china in history and when i read about it i felt like there is tremendous wisdom and this his philosophy is mostly about um you can see introspection which is looking into yourself looking at your naps in our language looking at your ego and restraining your ego and he basically said that the whole world is a reflection of your own ego of your inner
state so he said anything that has an appearance is all fake like the real things the essence of things don't have appearances you know it doesn't really talk about what's going to you it doesn't really talk about what's going to happen after i die what's the purpose of my life it's more about how to live happily how to live calmly how to have a better life so that's buddhism and then i read about uh christianity in the beginning of the bible i already felt that this the description of god in the bible is too uh personified it doesn't suit what i expect god to be like for example in the bible the story of adam al-islam you know in the bible he ate from the apple and god was very angry like
god was very frustrated they used words like this and he regretted creating adam i think this they said something like this so i was thinking how can god regret he knows what's going to happen in the future how can god feel bad about a past action that doesn't make any sense and there are many incidents like this where god is described like a person not like a god so i felt like maybe you know the later people they uh changed the words or whatever and the it's not really i don't think this is the original text from god i don't think god would be like this and i respect the people who follow them but i just didn't find them to be the answer to my questions eventually what aspect of the quran
affected you the most and what is the i that touched your heart most studying islam is like climbing stairs you keep going up and there are different platforms different stage so in the beginning stage what struck me the most was sort of like emotional impact the fact that and many people experience this when you read the quran it feels as if quran knows what you're thinking like you're reading and you had a thought and then what's coming after it the next ayah answers your thought or replies to your thought so that happened to me many times i feel like the quran knows what i'm thinking and is consciously conversing with me talking with me specifically to me about what i think so that's
quite impactful i really felt impressed by the way that allah uses the language so different from human beings uh and so unique yet so beautiful and so impactful so that's another aspect of the quran that touched me and another one is as i mentioned earlier uh the directness or the power of the quran like when you read the quran you just know this is not a man talking men they're not speak like this right it just feels like the speech of god in in terms of its tone um i think one of the ayah that really touched me is uh he said all human beings indeed we created you from different nations and different tribes different ethnicities so that you may know each other and the most honorable among
you are those who have most taqwa most most conscious and pious of you indeed allah is all-knowing and all aware so this ayah attached me the most because i feel like it just fundamentally solves the problem of racism and bigotry and any form of uh you know conflict between different people cultural conflict or whatever because there's only one standard for gauging your honor and this standard taqwa is hidden you know only allah knows and you and you may know a little bit of it so that really touched me and there are many other ayat when you look at chinese people there are more than one billion people who need this dawah who need to hear about prophet ali salat wasallam i want to ask you
suppose that there was a chance for you to speak all non-muslims in china all of them are hearing you right now what would you like to say so much my fellow chinese people my people of my land of my blood i would like to invite you to think about the meaning of life and the purpose of life and what's going to happen after we die these are important questions because without answering these questions our life is in vain and it doesn't accomplish anything and in the end you will lose all the things you gather in this world they will not go with you and you will feel a sense of regret if you dedicate all of your life to the temporary possessions and temporary projects in his life so i would
like to invite you to at least start thinking about the purpose of life and to look for answers uh start exploring and try to find the answer and i would like to um inform you of my belief which is not something that i came up with but it's something that many prophets and messengers in our belief in history who came to different nations and conveyed this message that we are created by one single creator who is merciful who is wise and who is powerful and who promised us that after this life we will be resurrected and we will be judged and the good people will go to heaven that is uh entirely an eternally happy place and people will be busy with enjoyment and it's peaceful and and this this
creator is merciful and he wants us to go to heaven he wants us to live this happy and peaceful life and he has offered us the answer uh to to this afterlife and he has offered us an example you know by these prophets and messengers especially the last prophet muhammad to show us how to live an accomplished life how to live a life that is happy and fulfilled and also lead to real success in the hereafter so you may not necessarily believe these things but i'm inviting you to at least think about them and get to know these these beliefs of islam and hopefully if you are a sincere person and if you're honest to your heart i believe i am quite certain that you will find it in harmony with what
you already believe you will find it in harmony with what you already know in your heart in the deepest sense of your nature and i invite you after that to accept islam and to live the life uh according to the example given by prophet muhammad who is really the best of mankind if you look at his life if you read about his biography you will see that he is indeed the most honorable and the most righteous and the most virtuous person and i hope one day we will be brothers and our tie will be stronger than a tie of blood thai will be stronger than the tile of land it will be a tie of faith and this tie will make us brothers and we will help each other live this life peacefully and happily and
enter the eternally peaceful life in hereafter together so embark on this journey and ask god to guide you even if you believe there's a possibility that there's a higher being who knows what you're thinking and who created the word even if you acknowledge this possibility ask him call upon him he hears you he knows what you want and he will guide you and when he guides you you will find the truth no matter how many difficulties there are so embark on this journey and may allah may the creator guide us all towards the truth and towards the best best way of life i mean it was so nice to meet you you have a good story insha'allah you will gather all the muslims in china together without
without drinking a tea from the officials inshallah you