Hey everyone, I'm pretty new here so I'm excited to be a part of this amazing community. This was an alternate history I've been thinking about for a while, where there are sizable minorities of Sunni Muslims throughout East Asia, and I was hoping the community here could help confirm or adjust it for realisticness, and maybe, someone could turn it into a full story-like alternate history.
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During the time of the Tang Dynasty, Arab and Persian merchants arrive into China to trade, and along the way, spread the religion of Islam. Whether through more active missionary work than in OTL or even more support from the Emperor, Islam gains a lot more traction than it does OTL. It is adopted by up to 25% of the ethnic Han Chinese population and does so through syncretizing with existing Chinese beliefs.
Confucian philosophy heavily impacts Chinese Sunni Islam, with Confucius being acknowledged as a prophet of Allah, albeit still below Muhammad, and the consumption of alcohol and pork becomes widespread. While I never really thought about it, extra points if you could find a way for the emperor to convert to Chinese Sunni Islam, however, it's not required. From China, Islam spreads into Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, where it also becomes the religion of between 10-50% of the native population there, depending on the nation.
Islam reaches its peak influence during the Ming Dynasty where, regardless of whether or not the emperor is or isn't Muslim himself, Chinese Muslims actively control political, economic, and military affairs, almost like a puppetmaster. However, when the Qing Dynasty takes over, they actively discriminate against Muslims, as they are associated with the old regime, greatly reducing their past political power and shaping public opinion of Muslims, something that will become important later.
Shifting the view over to Japan centuries later, Emperor Meiji, out of fear that Muslims are "foreign" and will pose a threat to the Japanese Empire by rather allying with foreign Islamic powers, adds a new, horrifying part to his Meiji Restoration, called the
Tsuihō (追放). Similar to the mass persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, the Japanese Empire mass-persecutes primarily Japanese and Korean Muslims throughout its territories, massacring Muslim men, forcing Muslim boys to grow up to serve in the Japanese military and abandon their faith, and pushing Muslim women and girls into becoming comfort women.
Meanwhile, in China, the Qing Dynasty collapses and the Kuomintang rises to power, with Chinese Muslims once again becoming politically powerful and influential in the new Chinese regime, expressing fierce support for the new government.
By the time the
Tsuihō ends with the defeat of the Japanese at the end of WW2, the Muslim population in Korea and Japan has been halved, with the other half either having been killed, moving to the West Coast of the United States and Canada as refugees, or fleeing to neighboring regions with prominent Muslim populations, such as modern-day Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore, where they form very large portions of the population.
The
Tsuihō has permanently affected Japanese and Korean Muslims. Similar to how reformist Islamic movements in the Middle East became more popular during and after European colonization of the Middle East, movements that seek to revert back to the "true Islam" become popular among Japanese and Korean Muslims. While this doesn't cause any major political issues, as the new governments seek to repent from their war crimes, this does cause a cultural shift among Japanese and Korean Muslims. Muslim women begin wearing hijab much more frequently, religious knowledge and influence deviate from East Asian texts to near-exclusively the Quran and Sunnah, and they once again make pork and alcohol forbidden for themselves and heavily abstain from it. Chinese Muslims, despite now having some political influence, adopt many of these changes out of remembrance of their past- and still-existing discrimination.
After the Communist Party takes over in China, many Muslims flee over to Taiwan alongside the Kuomintang, with up to one-third of the Taiwanese population being composed of Chinese Muslims. In the mainland, life for Chinese Muslims proceeds as normal, however, a few of the adopted cultural changes are reversed due to government mandates and restrictions on organized religion, with hijab being banned by the regime.
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If anyone is interested in writing this scenario into a full alternate history, please let me know, I would love to see it!
