06-18-2003, 05:06 AM
[b:04d6e99a54]self introduction [/b:04d6e99a54]
I’d like to introduce myself in a few words for brothers and sisters on the board in response to the administration’s question. I belong to Hui community, and it almost means I am a Muslim by birth. As I referred before a Muslim with Han identity in China commonly is a reverter.
My family lives in a township in the center part of Yunnan Province. After finishing my middle school, I enterred a university in Beijing and afterwards I came back working as an engineer in a design institute in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Provice.
My family name is Li. My grandfather’s grandfather is not a Muslim by birth. He was an ethnic Yi with the family Name of Pu living in the mountains in the neighborhood of a Hui Muslim district. Later, he got down and married my grandfather’s grandmother while became a Muslim. The children of them named Li perhaps because my grandfather’s grandmother’s family name was Li and the later descendants are all named Li. Today, they intermarry with other Muslims and develop into a big Muslim family.
However, Li is not a typical name of Hui Muslim. When the Ming Dynasty asked Muslims to adopt Chinese name, they usually used the first Chinese character of their original name. For example, the offspring of a family named Mohammed or Mustafa now named Ma. They are many Muslim distinctive names used by Chinese Muslims including Na, Sa, Ha etc., which come from Nasr al-Din, Salih, Hasan and the like respectively, while others picked up a name casually just because the name was popular, or it was an empire’s name, or an empire granted it, to avoid being regarded as non-natives. Nevertheless, why my grandfather’s grandmother’s family name is Li remains a mystery for me. Maybe the history of my family gives a picture how Islam develops in China.