You can keep out the infidels; not the State
22 June 2007
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Chanced upon this nugget from Saeed Naqvi’s piece “Beijing Diary” in Outlook’s latest issue 25th Jun’07.
Describing an altercation between a policeman and “a young man with a wispy beard” in inside Xian’s great mosque built in 742 AD, Saeed writes,
“A uniformed policeman and a policewoman trailed me…Their entry prompted a young man with a wispy beard to stop the two as they werent Muslims. Matters reached a crescendo when an older man slapped the younger one and pushed him out, muttering something.
Our guides translation sounded like a Confucian aphorism: “You can keep out infidels; you cant keep out the state.“
I wonder whether he meant the “State”.
Share your thoughts below.