Christian-Muslim Relations in East Asian History: An Interview with James Harry Morris

As part of interfaith week, we are interviewing a number of people connected with Practical Theology Hub about their work on interfaith dialogue. In this interview we ask our Editor-in-Chief, James Harry Morris, about his work on Christian-Muslim relations in China and Japan.

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Tell us about yourself.

My name is James Harry Morris and alongside serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Practical Theology Hub, I work as an assistant professor at Waseda University. For the past few years, I’ve been working on entitled “The History of Christian-Muslim Relations in China and Japan, 1549-1912” funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant Number: 20K12812) and I continue this work at Waseda.

China and Japan seem like unlikely geographies in which to explore Christian-Muslim relations, what brought you to this area of study?

As you may know historically China has had historically quite significant Muslim populations, so perhaps it isn’t so surprising that we find records of interactions between Christians and Muslims taking place there. Japan is a bit more unlikely since there have never been many Muslims – in the period I study we are only really talking about foreign visitors and a small handful of native converts. In any case, I got interested in the topic through my involvement in the Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History project conducted by the University of Birmingham and Brill. Really, it was all quite accidental.

Thank you for clarifying that. Does that mean. That there are quite a lot of records on Christian-Muslim relations in East Asia? 

Not really. Records of Christian-Muslim relations are very limited particularly in Japan. This is partially related to the sort of relationships that Christians and Muslims had and the unequal power relationships they found themselves in. It seems that during the 16th and 17th centuries, Muslims were mostly visiting Japan in the capacity of servants and slaves to Christian traders or sometimes as fellow traders aboard “shared” ships. Extensive records on these servants and slaves and their interactions with their Christian masters simply weren’t kept. Of course, these relationship were also primarily economic, which of course doesn’t mean that religion was absent, but  other matters were certainly at the forefront. This is particularly true after the Dutch became Japan’s principal European trade partner, since they were very successfully able to divorce religion and trade unlike their Portuguese and Spanish counterparts. In any case, there are a few things here and there, but nothing substantial. 

It’s also a numbers game. Ultimately Christian visitors were meeting more Muslims than non-Muslims. The centrality of “numbers” is also reflected in the fact that a lot more records, some of which are offer quite substantive accounts of inter-religious interactions, came out of China where as noted there were larger Muslim populations than Japan.

So what themes have characterised Christian-Muslim relations in East Asian history?

This will sound cliche, but as Europeans in a post-9/11 world we often see Christian-Muslim relations as something marred by conflict. Historical reality across the world is, of course, much more diverse and multiplicitous than our modern conceptions suggest. In China and Japan during the period of my studies (the 16th to the early 20th century), we find that Christian and Muslim coexistence was key. Christians and Muslims lived and worked alongside each other. Sometimes this coexistence happened on an unequal basis – I’ve already mentioned that Christians employed, enslaved, and traded alongside Muslims, for example – but we can also ascertain that Christians and Muslims united by their monotheism and their “Otherness” vis-à-vis the East Asian context. Thus we find that although they criticized their counterparts Christian writers praised Muslim innovations – the introduction of beef, for example – and learned from the lengthy experience of Muslims in East Asia. In fact, their direct interactions with Muslims in China radically reshaped European understandings of East Asian geography!

By using the word “coexistence” I don’t mean to imply that Christian-Muslim relations were wholly amicable – they could be conflictual (as was the case during the astronomical board controversies in China during the mid-17th century) or neutral. This diversity of interactions is attested to in later accounts, such as the Martyred missionaries of the China Inland Mission (1901) by Marshall Broomhall. This text, a collection of accounts on the events of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), portrays Muslims as both potential friends and enemies. One report printed therein records fears of a Muslim attack on the missionaries, whereas another records how God provided one of the missionaries with a “noble friend” – a Muslim who fed, hid and protected him from harm.

Perhaps you have already started to notice, but something that also needs to be noted is that religious questions were often secondary to Christian-Muslim interactions. Christian-Muslim interactions in China and Japan reflected the “real life” need to interact with each other on a “secular” level. This trend seems to begin reversing as we approach the 20^th century when missionaries and political actors, both Christian and Muslim, became much more active in East Asia.   

Fascinating! So what lessons does this carry for today?

I imagine there are multiple lessons that we can learn, but I think there are two basic truths we can highlight as starting points for Christian-Muslim dialogue today. First, Christians and Muslims have been interacting with each other for hundreds of years. Religion hasn’t necessarily taken a central place in these interactions – rather the lesson from China and Japan is that interaction between Christians and Muslims are diverse taking part in everyday life in shared geographical spaces. Second, it is important (particularly on the popular level) that we don’t reduce other discussions of Christian-Muslim relations to discussions of Christian-Muslim conflict – Christians and Muslims have praised each other, learned from each, and helped each other.

Finally, how do you plan to develop this research?

I have already extended this research in some interesting directions. For example, I published a paper last year looking at Uchimura Kanzō’s approach to interfaith issues. At Waseda University, I am hoping to extend the temporal focus of my studies to begin exploring Christian-Muslim relations in China and Japan until the mid-20^th century.

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You can see read James’s work on Christian-Muslim relations in the Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations and other forums.

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© Practical Theology Hub and James Harry Morris, 2022.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: “南蛮屏風-Arrival of the Europeans MET DP368004” from the Mary Griggs Burke Collection, Gift of the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, 2015 is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.