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CHINA
Dr. Ghulam Nabi Mir (member, ISNA Founders Committee), who toured China with an interfaith delegation during the fall of 2009, believes that Muslim individuals and organizations, both inside and outside of China, have forgotten the values and legacies of the high societies established by our ancestors and that they simply cannot match the dedication, prioritization, and financial commitment of other faith groups.
OUTREACH: A visit by an American multi-faith delegation to China helped open new vistas
China’s indigenous estimated 23 million Muslims — more than 9 million Uighur Muslims in Chinese Turkestan (officially “Xinjiang”) alone — who have over 1,200 years of history in the country and can be found throughout the country, are not viewed as followers of a foreign and western religion, as are Christian Chinese. Despite this handicap contemporary Christian evangelists work through and fund the China Christian Council (CCC), a dynamic, powerful, unrelenting, and pervasive organization of young Christian Chinese established in 1980 as an umbrella organi24 ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2010
zation for all Protestant churches operating in the country. In addition, the West keeps pushing for religious freedom. As for their Muslim counterparts, they are nowhere to be found. With his wife Sara, Dr. Mir — representing ISNA—accompanied the fourteen-member American-Chinese Multi-Faith Religious Exchange delegation. Cosponsored by the Forest Hills Baptist Church (Raleigh, NC), the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (Washington, DC), and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (Atlanta, GA), it included Catholic, Methodist, and
Buddhist representatives. Led by Rev. Dee Froeber (associate pastor of internationals, Forest Hills Baptist Church), it apparently had the blessings of a former American ambassador to China, Zhou Whenzhong (China’s ambassador to America), and Chinese officials at China’s State Administration for Religious and Ethnic Affairs (SARA). This trip was a response to the Sept. 2008 visit by a Chinese delegation representing the country’s five officially recognized religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. That delegation, which visited various American religious