You can keep out the infidels; not the State

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 weren’t Muslims. Matters reached a crescendo when an older man slapped the younger one and pushed him out, muttering something.

Our guide’s translation sounded like a Confucian aphorism: “You can keep out infidels; you can’t keep out the state.“

I wonder whether he meant the “State”.