Abderrashid Ibrahim

Abdurreshid Ibrahim or Ibragimov (, , ; 1857 – 1944) was a Russian-born Tatar Muslim alim, journalist, and traveller who initiated a movement in the first decade of the 20th century to unite the Crimean Tatars. He visited Japan during Meiji period and became the first imam of the Tokyo Mosque.

Biography

Abdurreshid Ibrahim, or Ibragimov, was born on April 23, 1857, in the town of Tara, which is now in the Omsk Oblast. His ancestors were Turkic people by language and origin, and he identified himself as a Tatar. His father Gumer (Ğomär, i.e., Omar) was descended from the Siberian Bukharans.

He started school at seven and at the age of 10 entered the Almenevo village madrasa. Orphaned at 17, he left for Tyumen, where he continued his studies at the Yana Avyl madrasa, and then at the Qışqar village madrasa (now in the Arsky District of Tatarstan).

In his youth, Ibragimov followed Jadid ideas and aimed to liberate all Muslim peoples from colonial oppression by "infidels". He visited the Ottoman Empire in 1897 to create a united anti-Russian Muslim front and traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. In 1898, he was entitled to participate at the election of the public members of the Tara Town Council for the second four years term for 1898–1902.

In 1900, he began publishing the Chagatai-language magazine Mir'at (Mirror) in Saint Petersburg. While he praised the commitment of Chinese Muslims to Islamic rules, he felt that the Chinese ahongs were stubborn when corrected, saying that:The people who call themselves ulama and ahong do not deserve to be ulama, as compared with Muslims in Imperial Russia or other countries.He was also critical of their traditional narrative of the entry of Islam into China:The creed of the Chinese people in this respect is peculiar .... They say, "Islam had already entered into Kuntun [Guangdong] City from southern China in the era of peace [the era of Muhammad], and the second time, it came into Beijing from Chinese Turkestan". The faith of the Chinese in this respect is contrary to the whole of history and the Hadith. However, regarding this matter, all the Muslims in China are in accord. There are many books about this. [...] They call an old masjid in today's Kuntun [Guangdong] Seyyidan Sa’d bin Vakkâs Masjid.

Besides this, there is a family named Van Kuan [Wang Kuan] among the Chinese and they regard themselves as the offspring of Vakkâs ...... This history is indisputable to the Chinese and it would seem to be impossible to persuade them that this was not the case ..... Sa’d bin Vakkâs was a famed person among the Noble Companions and the ten companions who were promised Paradise, and his biography is well known to Muslims. If Vakkâs had been an envoy [from the Arabs to China], the great Hadith scholars would have recorded it ... because some of them would have understood that anything that happened in the era of our Prophet Muhammad would have to be written down, without ignoring the slightest detail. If an envoy had been dispatched to China like this, Hadith scholars should have recorded it.

However, it is very natural that the Chinese would not like to have their history denied like that. For a very long time, for whatever reason, each nation's [millet] confidence in its history has been almost a matter of faith, no nation has ever wanted to have it denied, let alone refuted. This is a very strange condition, and in my opinion, it is the evidence that human beings are blind.