As China knocks down the domes of mosques, one city pushes back

Walking through Nagu, a small town in the mountains of southwest China, the signs of a vibrant Muslim community are omnipresent. Loudspeakers broadcast passages from a Chinese translation of the Quran. Women in headscarves bring noisy children home from school. Arabic script adorns the exterior of homes.

Towering above it all is Najiaying Mosque, a white building with an emerald dome and four minarets reaching 70 feet into the sky. For decades, the mosque has been the pride of the Muslim Hui ethnic minority that lives here.

Last month it was also the scene of a confrontation.

On the morning of May 27, after authorities wheeled construction cranes into the mosque’s courtyard, a mob of residents confronted the hundreds of police in riot gear who had been deployed to supervise the work. While the officers blocked the mosque and used pepper spray, residents threw water bottles and stones.

The rare clashes, described in interviews with eyewitnesses and captured in videos posted to social media, show how one aspect of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to exert greater control over religion could become more volatile.

Since China’s leader, Xi Jinping, came to power more than a decade ago, the party has torn down Christian churches, razed Tibetan Buddhist enclaves and put Uyghur Muslims in internment camps in the name of political security. But it has also gone after lesser-known groups, including the Hui, who make up less than 1 percent of the population and have historically been well assimilated into the ethnic Han majority.

The party has systematically closed, demolished or forcibly redesigned mosques in Hui enclaves across the country, denouncing Arab architectural features, such as domes and minarets, as evidence of unwanted foreign influence on Islam in China. Resistance has been limited and the mosque in Nagu, along with another large mosque in the nearby town of Shadian, are among the last large mosques of such architecture still standing in China.

But when local officials announced plans to remove the domes from both mosques and recreate their minarets in an apparently more “Chinese” style, the people of Nagu fought back.

“This roof represents our respect and our freedom. We then freely chose it,” said Mr. Na, a Hui resident in his 30s, who asked to be identified only by his last name for fear of government reprisals. His family, like so many in the city, had helped fund the mosque’s most recent renovations in the early 2000s when the minarets were added. “Now they say, ‘My rule over your free choice.'”

The mosques in Nagu and Shadian play a special role in the story of Beijing’s relationship with Islam, which has fluctuated between conflict and coexistence. Home to both Nagu and Shadian, Yunnan province is China’s most ethnically diverse province, and the Hui people—most of whom speak Mandarin but are distinguished by their Muslim faith—have lived there for centuries. The earliest version of Nagu’s mosque was built in the 14th century, in the style of a traditional Chinese courtyard. The Muslims of Yunnan prospered as merchants trading with Southeast Asia.

Then, after the Communist takeover, officials began attacking religion as counter-revolutionary, especially during the 1966-1976 period of political turmoil known as the Cultural Revolution. Muslims in Shadian resisted and in 1975 the army destroyed the city and killed as many as 1,600 residents.

After the Cultural Revolution, when China opened up to the world, the government apologized for the carnage. It aided Shadian rebuilding and allowed locals—many of whom were able to travel abroad for the first time—to build the Grand Mosque, the largest in southwest China, in its current Arabic style. Modeled after the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, the building can seat 10,000 people and its minarets are visible from miles away. Officials promoted it as a tourist attraction.

Nagu Mosque, 90 miles from Shadian, also grew and evolved, becoming a regional training center for Imams. When the local population, from the 1980s, added a dome and other Arab features, the government did not interfere. In 2018, the local government designated it as one cultural relic.

“These mosques symbolize that the Chinese government accepted that it was wrong during the Cultural Revolution,” he said Ruslan Yusupov, a scholar of China and Islam at Harvard University. The Shadic mosque in particular, he said, serves as a reminder “both of violence but also of state-sponsored restoration.”

But in recent years, restrictions on Islam have started to pile up again, especially after a 2014 attack on civilians at a train station in Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, that killed 31 people. The Chinese government said the attackers were Uyghur separatists spent time in Shadic.

Officials stopped promoting Shadian. In Nagu, female teachers were not allowed to wear headscarves at school, residents said. A volunteer group there no longer offers free tutoring in the mosque, after officials tightened control on education.

In 2021, the so-called Sinicization campaign to remove Arabic features arrived in Nagu. Government officials began visiting homes, sometimes daily, to persuade residents to support changes to the mosque. A billboard in the city shows a representation of the government’s plan: the dome gone, the minarets adorned with pagoda-like rows. Officials have also been going door to door in Shadian recently.

“Because of the enormous authority these places hold in the imagination” of local Muslims, “they had to leave these two mosques to the end,” Mr Yusupov said.

For Hui residents in Nagu, who visited The New York Times shortly after the protest, the renovation plan heralded further suppression of their way of life.

A woman in her 30s, also called Na — a common surname in Nagu — said she grew up playing and studying in the mosque. Neighbors and relatives had studied elsewhere in China, but returned to Nagu for the pious atmosphere of a small town, where they could pass on Muslim values ​​to their children.

Ms. Na said she would be willing to accept the removal of the dome separately: “Our faith is in our heart, that’s just a building.” But she was worried, especially after seeing the authorities’ forceful tactics, that things wouldn’t stop there.

“The first step is the exterior renovation,” she said. “The second step will tell you to erase the Arabic script we have on every house.”

The authorities do not back down. A few hours after the clash began, police withdrew from the mosque before noon prayers. But the next day, the local authorities issued a notice denouncing the “serious disturbance of social order” and promising “serious action”. In the days that followed, local officials repeatedly blasted that message through loudspeakers, including late at night.

Islamophobic comments increased on China’s heavily censored social media platforms, including from commentators affiliated with the government.

In Nagu, residents went in and out of the mosque, but security remained tight, with a drone flying overhead. Plainclothes police officers approached a reporter from The Times and had her driven out of town.

Authorities in Shadian were also on high alert, with officials intercepting the reporter at the train station. Still, they agreed to take her to the Grand Mosque.

“Of course the Quran came from Saudi Arabia, but after arriving in China it has to adapt,” said Li Heng, an official of the local bureau of ethnic and religious affairs, as he stood in the square in front of the mosque.

“When our imams preach,” he said, “they must integrate the core socialist values ​​that the government promotes.”

Mr. Li insisted that officials did not compromise freedom of religion and that the plan would only be implemented with the consent of the local population.

He added: “Patriotism is the highest form of religious belief.”

Back in Nagu, the cranes were still standing in the courtyard of the mosque several days after the collision. The demolition was probably inevitable, said Mr. Na, the resident of Hui. But he hoped residents would be allowed to hold onto other freedoms they weren’t willing to compromise. For him, that included the right to pass on his religion to his children.

“If you can’t guard your bottom line, others will see you as someone with no bottom line,” he said, “and they’ll trample it over and over again.”

Li you And Joy Dong contributed research.