Ethnographies of Islam in China 9780824886431

Citation preview

Ethnographies of Islam in China

• Ethnographies of Islam in China

•

Edited by Rachel Harris, Guangtian Ha, and Maria Jaschok

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2021 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21   6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harris, Rachel (Rachel A.), editor. | Ha, Guangtian, editor. | Jaschok, Maria, editor. Title: Ethnographies of Islam in China / edited by Rachel Harris, Guangtian Ha, Maria Jaschok. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020012154 (print) | LCCN 2020012155 (ebook) | ISBN 9780824883348 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780824886431 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824886448 (epub) | ISBN 9780824886455 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Muslims—China. | Islam—China. | Uighur (Turkic people)—China—Religion. | Hui (Chinese people)—China—Religion. | Islam and state—China. Classification: LCC DS731.M87 E84 2021 (print) | LCC DS731.M87 (ebook) | DDC 305.6/970951—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012154 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012155 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Cover photo: Worshippers at the shrine of Imam Aptah near Khotan. Courtesy of Rahile Dawut.

Contents

Introduction: The Uses of Ethnography

1

Rachel HARRIS, Guangtian HA, and Maria JASCHOK

PART I: FAULT LINES IN CHINA’S ISLAMIC REVIVAL

1. Imagining Transnational Communities: Conflicting Islamic Revival Movements in the People’s Republic of China

37

Alex STEWART

2. The Ban on Alcohol: Islamic Ethics, Secular Laws, and the Limits of Ethnoreligious Belonging in China

57

Ruslan YUSUPOV

3. Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture” among the Muslim Mongol Pastoralists of Inner Mongolia

74

Thomas WHITE

PART II: REPRESENTATION, CONSUMPTION, AND PROJECTS OF SELF-FASHIONING

4. Displaying Piety: Wedding Photography and Foreign Ceremonial Dresses in the Hui Community in Xi’an, China

95

Yang YANG

5. Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos: Piety, Tradition, and Self-Fashioning Rachel HARRIS and Rahile DAWUT

v

111

vi Contents 6. Marketing as Pedagogy: Halal E-commerce in Yunnan

131

Michael C. BROSE and SU Min

PART III: GENDER AND FAITH

7. Women’s Qur’anic Schools in China’s Little Mecca

155

Francesca ROSATI

8. Equality, Voice, and a Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook: Collaborative Ethnography and Hui Muslim Women’s Expressive History of Faith

180

Maria JASCHOK and SHUI Jingjun, with GE Caixia

9. The Gender of Sound: Media and Voice in Jahriyya Sufism

204

Guangtian HA

PART IV: MUSLIM MOBILITIES AND IMMOBILITIES

10. Translocal Encounters: Hui Mobility, Place-Making, and Religious Practices in Malaysia and Indonesia Today

225

HEW Wai Weng

11. Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

245

Elke SPIESSENS

12. “Force Majeure”: An Ethnography of the Canceled Tours of Uyghur Sufi Musicians

266

MU Qian, with Rachel HARRIS

13. “Travelers” in the City: Precariousness and the Urban Religious Economy of Uyghur Reformist Islam

284

Darren BYLER

Contributors

307

Index

313

Ethnographies of Islam in China

Introduction

The Uses of Ethnography Rachel HARRIS, Guangtian HA, and Maria JASCHOK

A

nyone taking the road south from Lanzhou toward Linxia in 2014 would be treated to a parade—practically a beauty ­pageant—of ­Islamic architecture. Mosque after mosque rose up out of the arid Gansu countryside, each one more extraordinary than the last: here a huge white dome, here a green, and there a gold one crowned with an enormous sickle. A single towering minaret might have been modeled on the Masjid an-Nabawi of Medina; another mosque adorned with six elegant minarets recalled Istanbul’s Sultan Ahmed. Central Asian ochre brickwork followed gleaming marble. An elegant Chinese temple–style roof perched on top of a six-story concrete edifice. The mosques dwarfed the small villages they served; sometimes two or even three mosques in contrasting architectural styles jostled for space in the same valley. Travelers in China are used to grand architectural statements, but these mosques were not the product of local government posturing. Outside their entrances stood blackboards that held long lists of donors and the amounts they had contributed. These buildings were conceived and funded by the ­communities of Hui Muslims who worshipped in them, and each one proudly, loudly proclaimed that community’s particular vision of ­Islam in China. As impressive masterpieces of local Islamic architecture, they bore witness both to a massive revival of Islam across ­China’s Hui Muslim communities over the past three decades and to the great diversity of ways in which this revival was manifested. Visitors to the town of Linxia (sometimes known as China’s Little Mecca) in this period could experience the same phenomenon aurally. The 1

2 Introduction

call to prayer arose in dense heterophony from a dizzying array of mosques belonging to the Qadiriyya, the Jahriyya, and the Khufiyya Sufi orders, as well as from those associated with the non-Sufi ­Ikhwani and Salafis. At the doorway of each mosque hung a board giving the exact times for the five daily prayers; but each board also gave a slightly different set of times, each one faithfully adhering to a different religious authority. In few other places in China was the strength and diversity of Islamic revival so eloquently and powerfully demonstrated; Linxia’s religious microcosm attested to the complex histories and new forces that had swept through Muslim communities across the country. The mosques on the road to Linxia in 2014 radiated a sense of confidence, but their hold on the landscape was precarious. A description by Nectar Gan of another road journey in the neighboring region of Ningxia, just a few years later, in 2018, provided a very different picture: Driving south from Yinchuan along the dusty plains of the Yellow River, the roadside is now littered with onion domes—green, gold and white—freshly removed from market buildings, hotels and parks. Secular buildings were the first target, but the government has also banned new “Arab style” mosques, and there are plans to convert some of the existing ones to look like Chinese temples.1

The demolition work this journalist witnessed was the product of a major shift in China’s state religious policy, signaled in a 2016 speech by President Xi Jinping that laid out the new principles underpinning religious belief in China: love of the motherland and the nation, safeguarding the unity of China, and supporting the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Religion must be thoroughly sinicized (zhongguo hua).2 Mosques were charged with promoting socialist core values and “Muslim patriotism” and resisting religious extremism; their rituals, culture, and architecture ought to embody Chinese characteristics.3 Farther west, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the situation was more severe. Here hundreds, possibly thousands, of community-built mosques—just like those on the road to Linxia—were demolished as part of what the authorities claimed was a campaign to eradicate religious extremism, separatism, and terrorism, but which outside observers described as a comprehensive effort to eradicate Uyghur faith, culture, and identity.4

Introduction

3

Figure 1. A newly built mosque on the road from Lanzhou to Linxia in 2014. Photo by Ruard Absaroka.

The strenuous efforts of the Chinese state to control and direct religious belief, and its particular focus on purging and reforming ­Islam, underscore the importance and urgency of fine-grained ethnographic studies of this rapidly shifting landscape. In this volume we draw on ethnographic method as key to understanding the lived ­experiences of Muslims in contemporary China. Working in different field sites across China, the authors explore the complex relationships between global forms of Islam and local values, interpersonal relationships and political contexts, and examine the ways in which China’s diverse Muslim communities have developed and cultivated their own understandings of what it means to be Muslim in contemporary China. The volume brings together a new generation of scholars engaged in the ethnographic study of Islam in China. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily during the 2010s, in sites from Yunnan to Inner Mongolia, from Henan to Xinjiang, it introduces new perspectives on the multifaceted nature of the Islamic revival in contemporary China. The authors in this volume draw on approaches in the anthropology of Islam (Asad 1986, 2007; Soares and Osella 2009; Marsden and Retsikas 2013), which have to date rarely addressed the study of ­China’s Muslims. Collectively, we consider how ideas and ideologies

4 Introduction

circulate and impact religious practices, and how flows of ideas and of people are diverted, obstructed, or facilitated by state institutions, international treaties, and government policies. We ­explore the forms of negotiation and contestation at play in the exercise of control over sacred authority and “correct” Islamic practices. The chapters argue for the need to pay close attention to local explanations and to interrogate the practical conditions under which new forms of faith and practice emerge; they take fully into account the intersecting factors of gender, power, and geography that complicate easy notions of “­Chinese Muslims.” The chapters present a complex mapping of I­ slamic revival that embraces geopolitics and transnational movements, halal diet and modern marketing, wedding dresses and social media, textual contestations and gender prescriptions. Taken together, these ethnographic studies make clear that Islamic revival in China is not a unified phenomenon but a complex, multilayered, and multi­ faceted process, which responds to local, national, and global contexts including, among other things, state intervention, individual leadership, and Islamic-centered interpretations of aspirational modernity. In this volume, we have done our best to provide as great a diversity of perspectives and field sites as possible. The book includes contributions from Hui, Han, European, and American scholars, working with Muslim communities across China and in diasporic communities in Europe and Malaysia. While the volume aims to provide a broad perspective on Islam in China, inevitably it cannot cover all the diverse Muslim communities residing within China’s borders. Of China’s fifty-five officially recognized minority peoples, ten groups are predominantly Sunni Muslim. With the welcome exception of Thomas White’s chapter on Muslim Mongols, all of our ­authors ­focus on China’s two largest Muslim groups: the Chinese-speaking Hui and the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs. Ten and a half million Hui Muslims live across diverse regions of China, in Yunnan, Henan, and Fujian, but primarily concentrated in the northwest, with another one hundred thousand (locally known as ­ Dungan) living in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Eleven million Uyghurs are concen­ trated in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and significant populations live across the border in Central Asian states. Other groups, including China’s 1.5 million K ­ azakhs and smaller numbers of Dongxiang, Kyrgyz, Salars, Tajiks, Tatars, Tibetan Muslims, and Uzbeks, are not represented in this collection and deserve further study.5

Introduction

5

The case studies discussed in the individual chapters also throw into sharp relief both the methodological challenges and the ethics and politics of conducting fieldwork among China’s diverse Muslim populations. Working on a “sensitive” topic like Islam in China, a topic on which the Chinese state routinely seeks to censor independent voices and impose its own narratives, and where rumors flourish in the absence of credible state media, “truth” becomes more than usually problematic, and ethnography—as the study of the lived experiences of everyday people—assumes particular importance. As ethnographers, we consider the relative power and distance of dominant narratives from lived realities and think carefully about the position of our writing in relation to these contending narratives. These studies provide a unique snapshot of the flowering of ­Islamic revival in China just before the current crackdown. While fieldwork in this period was certainly not easy, researchers were ­allowed levels of access that may not be possible in the foreseeable future, as Muslims in China have increasingly become subjected to draconian securitization measures. The mass incarcerations of Uyghurs since 2017 in Xinjiang’s now-notorious “reeducation camps” have been primarily justified by the Chinese authorities through the perceived need to “de-extremize” Uyghur Muslims, who are presumed to be collectively infected with the “virus” of radical Islam (­Roberts 2018). This undisguised political instrumentalization of ­Uyghurs’ Islamic affiliation by power holders, coupled with the observation that the different structural position of Hui Muslims within the PRC has so far exempted them from the same harsh treatment the Uyghurs have been subject to, render close ethnographic study of the experience of Muslims in contemporary China imperative. Working with Muslims in China Ethnographic knowledge is generated in interpersonal encounters between people with specific social locations. At the same time, ethnographic knowledge is not only personal; it aspires to something more. —James Spickard and J. Shawn Landres, “Introduction: Whither Ethnography? Transforming the Social-Scientific Study of Religion”

6 Introduction

At a 2017 conference in London, one speaker recalled Dru Gladney’s (2003) delineation of some of the unspoken rules of 1980s American anthropology: don’t work in China, don’t work on minorities, and don’t work on Muslims.6 It is instructive to note what has changed in the interim and what has not. Working with Muslims in China is still a problematic and risky undertaking: it often involves considerable difficulties in terms of access, official mistrust, the possibility of revoked visas, personal safety and the safety of one’s family, and—worst of all—the fear of repercussions for our collaborators. At the conference, the same speaker advocated the use of a research method known as “guerrilla interviewing” (Gold 1989). This produced some heated debate about the term “guerrilla” and its unfortunate resonance with the language of military campaigns. Some participants found the term problematic in a political environment where foreign as well as Chinese researchers with foreign connections are routinely suspected by local authorities of being spies or hostile agents. They asked, are we colluding in the militarization of our research by labeling ourselves guerrillas? What are the consequences for our interlocutors? What kind of collaborators does this make them? Gold’s explanation of his method, as “unchaperoned, spontaneous but structured participant observation and interviews as opportunities present themselves” (Gold 1989, 180), sounds innocuous enough. A research style characterized by the opportunistic and unforeseen rather than the carefully planned—for example, frequenting marketplaces, taking taxi rides, or having haircuts in order to strike up conversations—is an approach that many ethnographers have adopted by default, but under conditions of surveillance and securitization, the unforeseen and unknown risks to the people we encounter may outweigh the benefits of such engagement. The approaches to ethnographic method adopted in this volume are diverse. The majority of authors draw on established models, typically long-term participant observation and interviews, but others use more innovative methods, such as Yang Yang’s engagement with a bridal photography salon in Xi’an, and Harris and Dawut’s study of wedding videos. A model of ethnography as reciprocal practice and community engagement is provided by Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun, working in Henan on popular religious chants among Hui women. This research was built on long-standing relationships, which enabled the development of a consultative, participatory, and collaborative mode of work that allowed for continuity of research even

Introduction

7

during politically sensitive times. In other parts of China, such collaborative models face particular difficulties. Mu Qian takes his failure to organize international concert tours for a group of Uyghur Sufi musicians as the springboard for reflections on the situation of Uyghur Sufi adherents in Xinjiang today. Gladney (2004, xiii) notes that in contrast to South Asian scholarship, so far China has not produced a “subaltern” scholarly movement. Despite the growing scholarly literature introducing new perspectives, little has been written from the perspective of the minorities themselves. Fifteen years on, the political obstacles to such a movement are no less daunting, but minority scholars in China have begun to produce a significant body of work, as detailed below in our survey of the literature. The extraordinary challenges faced by U ­ yghur scholars at this time are reflected in the experience of our Uyghur collaborators. Xinjiang-based scholars were not given permission by their universities to attend the conference that seeded this volume, and overseas Uyghur contributors pulled out of the project, citing fears for the safety of their families in Xinjiang. The only Uyghur scholar to appear as a coauthor in this book, Professor Rahile Dawut of Xin­ jiang University, disappeared on her way to attend a Beijing conference in December 2017; as this book goes to press she is still held without charge in a Xinjiang reeducation camp.7 Rahile Dawut is a leading scholar of folklore and anthropology, highly regarded both internationally and within China. She has won a host of international awards and collaborations and is a leader on several major heritage projects within China. She is also an essentially moderate scholar whose principal goal is to study and sustain the expressive culture of the Uyghurs, and who always strives to stay within the ever-shifting political line on “sensitive” research in China. We deeply regret her incarceration, and we have an ongoing commitment to publicize her case and publicly call for her release in every possible forum. Islam in China: Histories of Naming One important contribution this volume makes is joining together the usually disparate groupings of scholars working with Hui Muslims and the Turkic-speaking Uyghur Muslims of China.8 A closer look at history reveals how artificial these contemporary divisions usually are. Those with passing familiarity with China may reasonably assume that we know clearly what we mean when we use the term

8 Introduction

“Hui” or “Uyghur”—that such ethnonyms map neatly onto the groups they profess to represent. On closer examination, however, this apparently innocuous assumption exposes some of the most intractable dilemmas researchers face in this burgeoning field. Prior to the mid-twentieth century the Chinese term hui was broadly used—especially by the state—to refer to all Muslims living in China; indeed, the Chinese term Hui was used to refer to all Muslims everywhere, and Islam was called “the teaching of the Hui.” It is equally important to note that Muslim speakers of other languages who lived within the Chinese sphere of influence had their own forms of self-identification. These might include musulman, alongside other local or clan markers of identity, such as kashgarlik or alban zhuz. The use of huizu and weiwu’erzu to designate, respectively, the ­Chinese-speaking Muslims and the Turkic-speaking inhabitants of Xinjiang’s oasis towns is a product of the nationality policies introduced in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. These policies gathered the diverse Chinese-speaking Muslim communities living across China into a single ethnic minority group labeled hui, and divided up the Turkic-speaking Muslims of China’s Northwest into the ethnic categories (Uyghur, Kazakh, Uzbek, etc.) already demarcated under the Soviet Union (Gladney 1991; Lipman 1997). However, there is solid historical evidence suggesting that the term hui was initially derived from uyghur (Li and Feng 1985, 233– 246). Subsequent developments of the two terms provide us with a fascinating lesson in the political history of pronunciation and transliteration. From the seventh century onward, uyghur was variously transliterated in Chinese as hui-he, hui-hu, and hui-hui and was used initially to refer to the Turkic Buddhist Uyghurs from Karakhoja and later adopted to designate Muslims from Central Asia and farther west. As the medieval era wore on, hui-hui began to be used more broadly to refer to all Muslims. In the twentieth century, an old transliteration, wei-wu-er, was given a new life and came to designate the modern Uyghur nationality, as distinct from the Hui nationality. This leads us to two observations. First, despite the differences in language, culture, and religious tradition, we will not be able to understand Islam in China if we neglect the historical links between the diverse Muslim peoples who live within its borders. Contemporary politics may have impelled some Muslims in China to anxiously redraw the lines of demarcation, in the hope of distinguishing themselves as “good Muslims” from the “bad” ones (cf. Mamdani 2004),

Introduction

9

but the more we understand of history, the more untenable such isolation would appear. Second, as much as we need to highlight the interrelations among Muslims in China, we should also understand that the far-flung networks they have woven over the past centuries far transcend the borders of empires and modern nation-states. A principal driver of this is the haj, the obligatory pilgrimage that all adult Muslims are expected to embark on at least once in their ­lifetime. Muslims in China are no exception to this practice (­Petersen 2016, 2017). Historically, extensive travels overland through Eurasia or via sea across the Indian Ocean, en route to Mecca, gave rise to intricate intersections enabling networks of circulation for diverse Islamic thoughts, liturgical practices, Sufi paths, and modern political ideas. Muslims from elsewhere traveled to China (such as ‘Abd Allah of the Qadiriya or Abdurresid Ibrahim from Russia) even into the twentieth century and had powerful impacts on the communities they visited. The story of Islam in China, in other words, is necessarily a tale of transnational networks and global mobility. The chapters in this volume document how these transregional networks are maintained and reimagined in the present times through, for example, the cosmopolitan production of wedding ­photos among the Hui in Xi’an (Yang Yang), or the migrations of Hui merchants from northwestern China to Southeast Asia (Hew Wai Weng). Approaches to the Study of Islam in China An enduring if still undertheorized transnational paradigm has long underpinned the study of Islam in China. In his pathbreaking ethno­ graphy of the Hui, Dru Gladney observed that there have been “three tides of Islam” in China, from possibly as early as the seventh century down to the early modern era. He situates his ethnography in the “fourth tide,” marked by the rise of a politically active Hui ethnonationalism in the 1980s (Gladney 1991, 36–63; see also 1998, 2004). In making these links between Islam in China and the broader Islamic world, Gladney acknowledges his debt to the work of Joseph Fletcher, who noted that “the history of the Muslims of China is not a history isolated from other Muslims” (Fletcher 1995, 11:3). Since the 1990s a divergence—more accurately an international division of academic labor—began to emerge between Western and Chinese-language sources. In the former, studies of the Hui tend to be heavily historical. Jonathan Lipman’s comprehensive Familiar

10 Introduction

Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (1997) laid the foundation for this historiographical approach, closely followed by Michael Dillon’s China’s Muslim Hui Community (1999). More recent studies have turned in the direction of intellectual history. Sachiko Murata’s Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light (2000) examines the efforts by Chinese Muslim intellectuals since the sixteenth century to combine Islam and Confucianism to produce a tenable system of Sino-Islamic thought. This project continues to fascinate scholars interested in transcultural communication, religious translation, and the diversity of Islamic thought and practice across Muslim societies (Ben-Dor Benite 2005; Frankel 2011; Lipman 2016; Petersen 2017; Tontini 2016). Historical studies of Uyghur Islam situate this tradition within the wider Central Asian context, with its complex interplay of Turkic and Iranian influences. Reflecting a different academic tradition from the approaches to Sino-Islamic thought delineated above, several key studies of Uyghur Islam are characterized by the productive combination of textual and ethnographic research. French scholars Thierry Zarcone (2001) and Alexandre Papas (2005) reveal the complex cross-border histories of Naqshbandi Sufi orders in the region. Ildikó Bellér-Hann’s (2008) historical anthropology of the Uyghur provides rich detail on everyday religious practice in the region in the early twentieth century, while Rian Thum’s The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (2014) traces the formation of a distinctively local religious identity through practices of pilgrimage and manuscript traditions of Islamic storytelling. David Brophy’s (2016) book reveals the influence of late Ottoman Jadidists and Soviet Muslim modernizers in the modern formation of the Uyghur nation. English-language ethnographic studies of Islam in China typically link their inquiry to broader theoretical or disciplinary concerns. Maris Gillette’s Between Mecca and Beijing (2000) examines practices of consumption, identity formation, and constructions of modernity among the Hui in Xi’an. Compared to Gladney’s ethnography, Gillette’s work is marked by a deeper commitment to longterm fieldwork in a specific site, providing a model for two more recent ethnographies: Matthew Erie’s (2016) book, which examines the varying applications and inflections of Islamic law among the Hui in Linxia, and Alexander Stewart’s (2016) study of the intricate politics, struggles, and contradictions that characterize Islamic revivalist movements in China’s Qinghai Province. Several recent

Introduction

11

ethnographic studies of Uyghur culture and society (Huang 2009; Smith ­Finley 2013; Steenberg 2013) also focus on the nature of Islamic revival in Xinjiang. Such studies on Uyghur Islam make an important contribution to the field of Islam in China, since their subject matter is typically too “sensitive” for researchers based in China to attempt. A series of recent edited volumes and special issues attempt to bring together ethnographic and historical approaches to Islam in China, among them Localization of Islam in China (Li Changkuan 2015) and Localization and Nationalization of Islam in China (Jin Yijiu 2017), which arise out of a major historical anthropology project at Chinese University Hong Kong. A special issue of the journal Cross-Currents edited by Matthew S. Erie and Allen Carlson (2014) includes five essays on “Islam in China / China in Islam,” three of them based on contemporary ethnographic fieldwork. Erie’s contribution deals with Linxia—the same field site as Rosati’s in this volume— but his subject is shari’a law and its relationship with state law. In the same collection, ethnographers Kevin Caffrey and Lesley Turnbull both conducted fieldwork in Yunnan. Like Yusupov in this volume, Turnbull focuses on the religious orientation of the Hui community in Shadian. The burgeoning field of Chinese-language ethnographic studies now provides a wealth of data on religious practices in Muslim communities across China. Much recent research is produced by younger scholars, and is available in master’s theses or PhD dissertations. Relatively few scholars are as yet exploring the epistemological limitations of conventional approaches, but these studies are often enriched by a close association between the researcher’s personal identity, sites of their fieldwork, and research interests. Ma Qiang’s rich ethnography of Hui Muslim migrants in Guangzhou (2006) is based on his PhD dissertation at a university in the same city; he wrote his second ethnography on Hui Islam in Xi’an (2011) under similar circumstances. Liang Jingyu’s ethnography of the Beijing Muslim neighborhood “Ox Street [Niujie]” (2006) is also based on her PhD dissertation submitted to the Central University of Nationalities in Beijing. Many Hui anthropologists have chosen to examine their hometowns; for example, Ma Dongping’s ethnography of Linxia (2010), or Ma X ­ uefeng’s two ethnographies of Hui Muslims in Yunnan (2013a, 2013b). In Xinjiang, ethnographic research on Uyghur religious traditions was pioneered by Rahile Dawut (Dawuti 2001) with her study

12 Introduction

of shrine pilgrimage. A younger generation of Uyghur ethnographers, many of them her students, have begun to produce a significant body of ethnographic studies (e.g., Kadir 2010; Anwar 2013; Mijit 2016) focused on distinctively Uyghur forms of religious practice, especially those related to Sufi traditions. While this focus on tradition and heritage continues to dominate the field, some Chinese Hui scholars are beginning to bring a more critical approach to their research, addressing, for example, issues of Muslim identity and digital media in the context of growing urbanization and internationalization of I­slam (Ma Xuefeng 2013b; Hu Meijuan 2014). Scholarship on issues surrounding Islam in China took a “gendercritical turn” (Jaschok and Shui 2013) in the late 1990s, with the appearance of a number of publications of critical relevance, both internationally (for example, Allès 2000; Gillette 2000; Jaschok and Shui 2000) but also increasingly in the Chinese language. In Chineselanguage studies, ethnographic approaches have come to assume particular prominence. Luo Guihua (2004), for example, maintains that a locally anchored sociological approach is vital to her study of the links between nationalism and religiosity among Hui Muslim women; this allows her to reflect on the diversity of women’s lived experiences. Anthropologists Wang Lan and Li Yuhong (2007) reflect on their research experiences, lamenting the absence of an appropriate methodology in their work on the patriarchal instrumentalization of religion in Chinese Muslim communities. This methodological deficiency is the more urgent, they argue, as the continued strengthening of Islamic injunctions in some communities run counter to the interests and welfare of women. Notable is the growing use of ethnography to probe areas such as impact of religion on women’s rights, interethnic marriage, changing courtship patterns, and domestic violence. These studies often conclude with recommendations for more effective policy enforcement and welfare provision (Ma Guifen 2011; Wang Xuemei 2014). Interesting work is being done on Hui Muslim women’s concepts of religious agency and their engagement with their own communities (Ma Guifen 2017; Zhou Xiaoyan 2012). This is familiar debating territory in international scholarship and contributes a particular Chinese angle to arguments made by scholars of Islam and feminism like Saba Mahmood (2005) that challenge Western feminist models of emancipation. Overall, there is much to be optimistic about in the field of Chinese-­ language scholarship. However, there are significant limitations to the

Introduction

13

field in terms of the shifting delineation of “sensitive” topics, and minority scholars may find that in the worsening political climate their legitimate academic scholarship or international scholarly links expose them to serious risks. For Uyghur scholars, the situation is now more critical than it has been since the Cultural Revolution, with the incarceration of numerous leading scholars and the erasure of their scholarly contributions.9 While the academic base is now certainly in place for the rise of that subaltern scholarly movement, sadly it seems unlikely to bear fruit in the current political climate. The Role of the State The chapters in this book are grouped into four themed sections, each addressing one important issue facing Muslim communities in contemporary China: (1) the changing nature of religious practice and religious faith; (2) Islamic consumption, commerce, and branding; (3) Islam and gender; and (4) Islamic mobilities. A constant theme running through the chapters is the role of the state. In this section we consider what the chapters in his volume, collectively, can tell us about the uneasy relationship between Muslims and the Chinese state. The post-9/11 period saw the beginning of the rhetoric of religious extremism and terrorism in China, and the Uyghurs have been the particular targets of this approach to Islam. In the aftermath of the interethnic violence in Ürümchi in July 2009, an ever-increasing number of everyday religious practices in Xinjiang were declared illegal, including prayer in public places, Islamic forms of dress, religious gatherings outside officially designated mosques, fasting, and religious instruction for children. Many of the incidents reported in Chinese media as terrorist-related in this period seem to have been sparked by the intrusive policing of religious practice within the private spaces of Uyghur homes. One repeated flashpoint was the practice of house-to-house checks on women’s veiling, where male relatives responded violently to police attempts to forcibly remove women’s veils (UHRP 2013). However, a small number of incidents during this period did appear to fit the state narrative of extremist terror: the Kunming train station knife attack in March 2014 that left twenty-nine dead, and the Ürümchi attack in May 2014, when two cars plowed through a busy marketplace, killing forty-three people. Following these incidents, the Xinjiang government ramped up its anti-religious extremism campaign, introducing mass detentions,

14 Introduction

executions, and extraordinary levels of surveillance and control (­Byler 2019). The campaign included various “education initiatives” designed to break the embodied habits of religious practice, such as collective beard-shaving and beer-drinking competitions, “lifting the veil” beauty contests, mass singing of “Red Songs,” and compulsory weekly dancing sessions for Uyghur villagers (Harris 2017). By 2018, the human rights situation had deteriorated sharply, with more than a million people detained for long periods in massive internment camps, officially dubbed “reeducation centers,” set up across the region (Zenz 2019). All this was shielded from the attention of the outside world by tight controls on travel and communication imposed on the Uyghurs, including restrictions on contacting relatives abroad. While the situation for Hui Muslims has been—up to the time of writing—less oppressive than for the Uyghurs, the closure or attempted closure of a number of mosques and attempts to introduce policies of “de-Islamicization” in other Hui areas have increased tension outside Xinjiang. There can be no doubt about the sense of anxiety within Hui communities as they observe and seek to distance themselves from the plight of their Uyghur neighbors. One tendency found throughout this volume is the way that Hui communities seek convergence between their religious reformism and current government policy. Francesca Rosati describes how Hui women in Linxia set up women’s Islamic schools with the intention of reviving and teaching “correct” Islamic practice to local women. They strove to achieve this goal through the acquisition of embodied practice, including textual recitation and ritual action. Rosati suggests that ritual purity becomes a strategy to ensure the survival of the group in an antagonistic political environment. In several chapters in this volume, we find Hui communities and individuals who maintain collective memories of past violence and are deeply aware of their own precarity and the ever-present possibility of a new flare-up of violence. Against this historical background, they strive to coexist peacefully within the Chinese state. What our case studies also show is that this is a difficult game to play, and that contradictions and pitfalls are rife. As Rosati notes, Linxia’s infrastructural development and the project of making it into a tourist attraction along the New Silk Road led to a restyling of the city’s landscape in a pseudo-Arabian architectural style that exalted the “folk” culture of local Muslim nationalities. On the other hand, the removal of Arabic script from Linxia’s street signs and civil buildings

Figure 2. “Resolutely Oppose Illegal Religious Activities; Consciously Maintain ­Social Stability and Ethnic Unity.” Poster on the wall of an Ürümchi residential building, 2015. Photo by Ruard Absaroka.

16 Introduction

suggested the Party’s growing alarm at the “Arabization” of China’s Northwest. Such contradictions suggest the delicate line that all Muslims in China must tread. Either as a deliberate policy of masking difference, or possibly through less deliberate processes of normalization and internalization, many contemporary Hui Muslims draw on government discourses and norms to translate Islamic ideals, just as historically they rendered these ideas in the language of Confucianism (Frankel 2011; Murata 2000). Rosati notes that teachers in Linxia’s women’s religious schools rarely spoke directly about politics, but they drew on the vocabulary of Chinese Communist Party propaganda to define their community of believers. The state slogan “Strive together, develop together” (Tuanjie fendou, gongtong fazhan) generally refers to national unity, but in the religious schools tuanjie and fendou referred to “Muslim solidarity” and “spiritual jihad”: moral qualities that can be attained through religious education. This education, they argued, could protect students from the moral chaos of the secularized Chinese society and the “unhealthy” (a gloss for haram) Westernization of society. These forms of convergence, practices— deliberate or otherwise—of reconciling Islam and Party ideologies or bending official language to convey a different message (e.g., from national solidarity to Muslim solidarity, or from “socialist core values” to “spiritual jihad”), are a recurring theme in chapters concerning Hui Muslims. Ruslan Yusupov’s study of the alcohol ban in the town of Sha­ dian in Yunnan provides a nuanced illustration of these themes. Sha­ dian suffered serious ethnoreligious violence during the Cultural Revolution, resulting in more than 1,400 Muslim deaths and the destruction of the town’s mosque and houses. By the 1990s its fortunes began to change as copper, lead, and zinc mines brought considerable wealth to the town. The Muslim community began to mobilize, building mosques and madrasas, providing scholarships for religious students and sending hundreds of people on the haj each year. As part of their efforts to establish the town as a center of ­Muslim ideals, they decided in 2008 to impose on the Han Chinese workers who had been brought in to build the new grand mosque a ban on drinking alcohol and eating pork inside homes they rented from Muslim landlords. Local officials supported the ban, arguing that it would raise public morality (suzhi) and encourage a harmonious society.

Introduction

17

From the perspective of Uyghur scholars, it seems richly ironic, indeed astonishing, that Hui Muslims in Shadian were able to impose this alcohol ban with full official support, not long before officials in Xinjiang began organizing public beer-drinking competitions as part of the campaign to “counter violent extremism.” Such juxtapositions dispel any lingering misapprehension that the Chinese state is monolithic: implementation of Party policy is always fragmented and variable, though there are also boundaries that cannot be overstepped. Shadian’s fortuitous presentation of Islamic ethical practice as a means to achieve Party policy was fleeting. Hui Muslims (as they are fully aware) are all too easily implicated in the troubles of their fellow Muslim Uyghurs. Following the Kunming knife attack of 2014, it was found that some of the Uyghur attackers had spent time in Sha­dian before the attack, and official policy swiftly changed. In addition, provocative photos of Muslims enforcing the ban circulated online, leading to a nationwide wave of Islamophobic hate speech. Part I: Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival The first section in this volume addresses the transnational networks and local forms of Islamic revival that have arisen in China since the 1980s. These chapters ask, to what extent, and in what ways, are revivalist movements in China linked to external forces or driven by local interests, affiliations, and histories? How do they impact on local communities, and how do they inflect community relations? How do the new revivalist communities respond to and negotiate state directives and concerns? The first thing to note about Islamic revival in China is the variety of revivalist movements that have been active, the varying ways in which they manifest at the local level as organized movements, informal groups, or individual initiatives, and the frequent overlap and lack of clarity in affiliation and the sources of their ideologies. This is due in large part to the hostility of the Chinese state toward religious revival, the resulting blocks on the free flow of information, and the semiunderground nature of many revival groups; we can also see, though, for example in Yusupov’s research, that official attitudes vary widely over time and space. If anything unites the revivalists, it is the fundamental attitude that traditional Muslims in China are collectively “backward,” “unorthodox,” and “sinicized.” Revivalist Muslims seek to reform themselves as well as others, primarily

18 Introduction

through attention to “correct” religious practices and a proper Muslim lifestyle, including regular prayer, fasting, and learning to recite the Qur’an in “standard” Arabic. This viewpoint is, of course, diametrically opposed to the recent state campaign to “sinicize” Islam. The Chinese Ikhwani (Yihewani) and Salafi movements, both founded by Chinese imams returning from Saudi Arabia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have played important roles in the contemporary revival. Adherents to each of these movements often regard the other with suspicion, yet the difference between them is often less a matter of doctrine and more a question of class and educational background. On the basis of fieldwork in China’s northwestern province of Qinghai, Alexander Stewart notes in this volume that the Yihewani is generally promoted by clerics who have studied in China and who preach in local dialects, while the Salafi’s key proponents are foreign-educated Muslim students and self-proclaimed cosmopolitan entrepreneurs. Another important set of players are the amateur preachers of the Tabligh-i Jama’at movement. They have not generally established their own mosques, but they preached extensively in rural areas, and often pursued charitable and educational community projects with the poorest and most marginalized social groups. Ruslan Yusupov describes how the Tabligh-i Jama’at movement in the town of Shadian in Yunnan initially earned the support of local authorities due to their successful work in countering heroin addiction in the town. Their ideal of Islamic practice is centered on South Asia, where the origins and the annual assembly of their movement are located. Muslim evangelists from South Asia brought the Tabligh-i Jama’at revitalization movement to China in the 1980s. They brought with them a model for spreading the movement’s evangelical fervor, and adherents across China began to undertake preaching tours of rural areas—in small groups or individually—that ranged from a few days to several months in length. Stewart, in this volume, describes how he accompanied a group of preachers on one of these tours around Qinghai. Among the Uyghurs too, revivalist forms of Islam were spread by both Tabligh-i Jama’at preachers—a movement that arrived in Xinjiang via Central Asia and became especially influential in southern Xinjiang—and by Salafis, some of them educated in Saudi-funded madrasas in Kyrgyzstan, while others having studied directly in Saudi Arabia. New ideas about Islam spread through cross-border trade and through social media; people shared sermons and religious songs

Introduction

19

and images on their phones, and discussed them in informal study groups in cafes and restaurants. Tabligh-i Jama’at preachers were active in communities in southern Xinjiang until the onset of the anti–religious extremism campaign, and it was especially common to find them preaching at weddings, where they would attract large audiences of young men, many of them eager for new kinds of knowledge about Islam (Steenberg 2013). As Stewart argues in this volume, the Salafi and Tabligh-i Jama’at movements grew rapidly in northwestern China, as they did in Xinjiang, because they allowed individuals greater agency in imagining the nature of the global umma, how to achieve a more authentic Islam, and what role one should play in society. Another important sphere for the spread of new religious ideas was social media. The religious material shared by Uyghurs on social media prior to the crackdown provides a window into the wide range of religious sensibilities encompassed by the revivalist turn, and the insistent debates concerning what constituted true Islam and how to be a good Muslim (Harris and Isa 2018). Accessing religious media in this way has become part of daily practice for Muslims across the world, part of an ethical and political project that promotes social responsibility, pious deportment, and devotional practice and “create[s] the sensory conditions of an emergent ethical and political lifeworld” (Hirschkind 2006, 8). These practices are not generally about direct forms of dissent or protest; rather, they entail and enable the creation of new kinds of publics. Arguably, it is this capacity that has caused the Chinese state such unease. For Uyghurs in this period, especially for the younger generation, the turn to new styles of religious piety suggested the failure of the secular nationalist project in the face of increasing state oppression, a reaching out to other struggling Muslim peoples around the globe and simultaneously a turning inward, a sense that the personal discipline of religious practice was now the only possible response to their experience of economic and political marginalization. Several of the chapters in this volume detail the debates, contradictions, and social conflicts that have arisen out of the rapidly changing religious terrain. Typically, a concern with orthopraxy is central to these debates, which often revolve around gendered rules about who is permitted to see what, who is allowed to speak or sing, and what forms of bodily expression are appropriate in which contexts. Thomas White focuses on conflicts between old and new forms of

20 Introduction

sociality in his chapter on the Muslim Mongols who inhabit the vast desert region of Alasha in western Inner Mongolia. White describes how the construction of a new mosque helped to establish connections with the wider Muslim community of Inner Mongolia. This led to conflicts over the continuation of traditional festivities, which were central to Mongol practices of hosting but involved various activities—smoking, drinking, toasting, and singing—which were necessary for having fun but now deemed inappropriate in the vicinity of the mosque. Harris and Dawut discuss the rise in popularity of “Islamic weddings” among Uyghurs in southern Xinjiang. Dancing and music were absent, clothing should be modest, and displays of wealth such as car processions, expensive gifts, and banquets were avoided. These “Islamic weddings” posed a fundamental challenge to traditional modes of Uyghur sociality and reciprocity, and the topic of whether a wedding should be held with or without music and dance was hotly debated throughout Uyghur society for several years, until the Xinjiang authorities decided the matter by imposing a “music tax” on families organizing weddings, thus effectively requiring them to employ musicians at the ceremony, upholding the preferred state narrative of the Uyghurs as a “singing and dancing minority.” Part II: Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning The chapters in the second section of this book focus on questions of representation, self-fashioning, and the production and consumption of new Chinese Islamic brands. Questions of representation are always prominent in studies of contemporary China, and these ethnographic studies probe beneath the metanarratives of the state, exploring the ways in which the everyday practices of Chinese Muslims become sites of enacted imaginaries, drawing on assembled references from China, the wider Islamic world, and transnational flows of popular culture. An influential trend in the anthropology of Islam considers a related set of questions, particularly the ways in which mediated sounds and images accessed by Muslims via social media impact the affective experience of faith (Hirschkind 2012), practices of self-fashioning (Mahmood 2005), and geographies of knowledge and experience. The chapters in this section explore the kinds of “self-fashioning” present in Chinese Muslim media: on commercial

Introduction

21

websites in Yunnan, in Uyghur wedding videos, and in Hui wedding photo albums in Xi’an. They ask what this self-fashioning says about changing religious imaginaries in these communities and reflect on the challenges inherent in this kind of ethnography. As Yang Yang argues, ethnography needs to be sensitive to the interplay between representations and lived realities. When a wedding album includes an image of a couple reading the Qur’an together, it requires the ethnographer to enter the bridal salons and engage with photographers and clients to perceive that the couple is actually holding a volume of blank pages bound in artificially aged leather. Ethnographers also need to understand the relationship between state representations, forms of self-fashioning, and commercial activities. In their chapter, Brose and Su discuss the commercial presentation of Muslim identities by the Salam (Sailiamu) Company in Yunnan, which promotes its halal produce under the banner “Quality comes from faith” (Pinzhi laizi xinyang). Their halal brand is proposed as an answer to China’s vexed problem of food safety: their halal (­qingzhen) food is pure and clean, free from contamination, and good for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Questions of representation and self-fashioning are always prominent in discussions of religious revival: not only the ever-­present issue of women’s veiling practices but also men’s styles of dress. As Stewart notes in this volume, you can tell a Salafi by the way they drape their scarf over their head. Ikhwani wear a turban with a strand hanging down, while Tabligh-i Jama’at wear South Asian shalwar kameez, presumed to be a symbol of religious authenticity. While in southern Xinjiang few people are familiar with the term “Tabligh-i Jama’at,” everyone recognizes the moniker “short trousers” (kalta ishtan) as a shorthand and none-too-respectful name for reformists. Piety is not only expressed through dress but is also reflected in modes of speech. Tabligh-i Jama’at adherents quickly learn to decorate their everyday speech with a set of Urdu and Arabic religious phrases. As one of Yusupov’s informants confided, “We didn’t really understand those words, but they sounded cool.” These foreign words embody a power beyond any direct meaning they may communicate, and they form part of the ethical sensorium. Styles of self-fashioning rarely take the form of direct appropriations of identifiable religious brands. Repeatedly in these chapters we find evidence that Islamic revival in China manifests as highly localized instances of “flexible assemblages” where reformist religious

22 Introduction

practices are pulled together in a subjective manner and then circulated among a collective. Yang Yang examines the process of making and framing a cosmopolitan bridal look in the Hui Quarter in Xi’an in order to map the symbolic geography of transnational Muslim connections between China, global fashion trends, and the global umma. When a bride dons a flattering and highly ornamented South Asian–style shalwar kameez, does she imagine herself as a princess in Disney’s Aladdin or a Bollywood star, or is she paying homage to an imagined Middle East as the center of religious authority and authenticity? In fact, all of these imaginaries are simultaneously at play. Modes of self-exoticization and symbols of piety are entwined; Orientalist representations of the Muslim world are reinterpreted through marketing mechanisms that transform the “exotic” into a look that simultaneously aspires to the moral example of sites of religious authority. Through these everyday practices of dressing up like Muslims from elsewhere, bridal salons in Xi’an become sites for enacting imaginaries of elsewhere based on assembled references from within and outside China. Part III: Ethnographies of Gender, Silence, and Faith The third section probes intersections of gender with religious and other forms of identity. A growing body of academic literature considers Islam and gender in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, but relatively little work has been done to map historical and contemporary trajectories of gender and its confluence with traditions of silence and situated notions of voice among China’s Hui Muslim communities. Richelle Schrock describes feminist ethnography as “a productive methodology and an invaluable tool for feminism, which continues to struggle with working through the differentials of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, religious belief, and other forms of difference women have from one another” (2013, 57–58). The critical selfawareness that is associated with feminist ethnography has encouraged experimentation and innovation, both epistemologically and methodologically, as a way of breaking through the binaries of traditional norms and structures (Visweswaran 1994). Arguably, feminism has helped to democratize thinking on cross-cultural methodologies, with critical attention to the minefields that beset the working relationships between the researcher and the researched in challenging

Introduction

23

cross-cultural environments. A number of contributors in this volume are acutely aware of the ideological pitfalls of transformative research, which can easily slip into rescue narratives not that distant from the missionary projects of the recent past. In an area as politically sensitive as Islam in China, researchers’ relationships are particularly prone to concern over the potential vulnerability of research partners, and the researchers’ impact, both immediate and long-term. Ethnographic practice allows for the nuanced probing of agency, sociality, and the range of options open to women engaging in everyday realities. It can provide a more holistic understanding of the multi­ faceted dimensions of human life, the interconnections and interplay of influences and institutions that create environments and communities from which individual and social identities emerge. The treatment of gender as intersectional speaks to geography, geopolitical configurations of local Islamic practices and Muslim cultures, the institutionalization of Islamic allegiance, translocal developments, and native translations of global trends. Ethnography as a tool for mapping of the Islamic landscape has enabled, as this volume shows, the beginning of a topography of diversely located, situated, and interdependent religious contexts. Gender ideology and practices infuse all of these contexts, whether directly or indirectly. The diversity of Muslim environments, which ethnography helps to uncover, points to the challenges such work involves; gender, as is the case with any other social category, imbricates multilayered structures that inscribe individual and collective identities in diverse and context-specific ways. A gender perspective troubles the very framing of this project on the contemporary revival of Islam. What is the nature of the impact of China’s Islamic revivals on gender hierarchies in diverse religious communities? Is the notion of Islamic revival even relevant to the experience, for example, of Hui Muslim women in central China? When Ge, an ahong from a women’s mosque in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan, relates the recent changes to the culture of women’s mosques, she refers to an intensification of emotion and mounting excitement through collective performance of much-beloved Islamic chants—a revivified love of performance that had only recently invited the contempt not only of men but also of many women who viewed these chants as tainted by the “dark age” of women’s backwardness and ignorance (Jaschok and Shui, with Ge, in this volume). However, whereas these traditions were denigrated and excluded from informants’ reminiscences, they

24 Introduction

did not disappear from women’s memories. When the state loosened its grip on organized Islamic life, words, tunes, and deeply held yearnings surged back into remembrance, into voice and other senses. While we note that revivalist movements in China are largely patriarchally inscribed, in central China’s Hui Muslim communities women have reconnected with an older gendered expressive culture: an oral tradition of religious learning through the recitation of Islamic chants. Theirs is a concerted challenge to muted or silenced practices, which uncovers a resonant history of women, contributing to a uniquely female resurgence of Islam. Ethnography is crucial in unpacking the reasons that this is so among Hui Muslims in central China but not so in certain Muslim communities in northwestern China, where Francesca Rosati conducts her fieldwork. Rosati’s study of the social topography of women’s Qur’anic schools, which lie outside formal state structures and male-driven mosque-based education, evokes the symbiotic influences of locally based religious practices, which simultaneously reinforce a particularly gendered piety. While women are playing an integral and proactive part in religious revival in these contexts, they are also circumscribed by their specific position in the patriarchal project, which marks through conduct and appearance the boundaries and identities of their communities (Jaschok and Man 2016). Gender scholarship has so far raised important questions about the silence of women in historical records. The prevalent view of silence is as a debilitating condition of ­women’s lives, exacerbated by scholarly neglect, which must be overcome if women are to assert their right to voice and authority. This silence reins in the Jahriyya Muslim women in Ha’s chapter, in which he notes both Jahriyya women informants’ reticence and men’s assertion of control over the researcher’s access to their female relatives. However, this notion of silence has come in for revisionist treatment. Aimee Carillo Rowe and Sheena Malhotra theorize silence as a “space of possibility . . . as a space of fluidity, non-linearity, and as a sacred, internal space that provides a refuge—especially for nondominant peoples” (2013, 2). Silence here is seen as an indispensable precursor to what comes after, a place where creative processes are grounded in, and shaped by, the contributions of charismatic individuals and a momentum driven by the collective will. As we explore the trajec­ tories from silence to voice and back, ethnography serves as a powerful method by which to probe the dynamic confluences of forces that constitute our sites of discovery and interpretation.

Introduction

25

Figure 3. A Qur’an class in Linxia in 2014. Photo by Rachel Harris.

Part IV: Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities The final section examines the implications of the increasing and sometimes enforced mobility of some Chinese Muslims, and the involuntary immobility of others due to state controls over borders and residence rights. What kinds of Chinese Muslims are able to travel and relocate? What paths do they trace? How do diasporic Chinese Muslims change their religious orientation in new contexts, and how does this feed back into China? These patterns of movement drive and shape the complex constellations of translocal Islamic revivals, and situate them within broader political and economic patterns of contact and trade. China’s Muslims are still—in official statements, in scholarship, and in everyday conversations—habitually positioned “on the margins,” occupying a peripheral position in relation to an imagined core of Chinese-ness, and equally occupying a peripheral position in relation to the global umma. Dru Gladney (2004) has already proposed an understanding of Chinese Muslims as an integral part of Chinese society. We move beyond this proposition to challenge the notion of Muslims in China as being peripheral to the Islamic world. As Elke Spiessens notes in this volume, what happens in China does not stay in China, and what happens outside China cannot be kept out. The

26 Introduction

study of Islam in China thus requires methodological cosmopolitanism. Situated within transnational flows of media, commerce, and people, China’s Muslims draw on, recombine, and resignify a dizzying array of Disney Orientalist tropes, Middle Eastern architecture, Saudi and Egyptian recitations, South Asian fashion, Korean soap operas, and Salafi sermons. Most participants in China’s Islamic revivals will probably never emigrate from China, but they can embody a sense of transnational identity by sharing what they consider to be commonly shared by Muslims all over the world. Transnational flows of people are central to the construction of Islam in China. Uyghur Muslims maintain cross-border links to established communities in Central Asia, but today they also prefer to study in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, seeking a direct encounter with “true” Islam at its source. As Spiessens observes, many of these religious students subsequently seek political asylum; fearing the consequences of returning to Xinjiang, they settle in diasporic communities in Turkey or Europe. On the other hand, the large numbers of Hui who settle in Malaysia—as Hew Wai Weng explains—are primarily motivated by a form of translocal pious entrepreneurialism. They make the decision to move to a majority Muslim society because there they feel a sense of cultural affinity. They are able to exploit the business opportunities that arise from the links they maintain between Malaysia and China. One thing that unites these Chinese Muslims is their shared view of the failure of Islamic education in China, and the loss of credibility of locally trained clerics, which impels many ­Muslims to look beyond China’s borders in their search for a renewal of faith. Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is also referenced in these chapters. Officially announced in 2014, the initiative was intended to develop new commercial networks and diplomatic influences across the entire Eurasia (Rolland 2017). It has precipitated an exponential increase in contacts with the Middle East and rapid growth in trade deals and infrastructure projects. China’s Muslims and their diasporas may be regarded as ideally placed to benefit from this initiative, but they are also hindered by official suspicions of their possible links to “foreign religious extremism.” Again, Hui Muslims have been better able to engage positively with the initiative, even if this has been primarily on the level of harnessing its language and imagery to serve their own ends. The Salaam (Sailiamu) Company in Yunnan, discussed by Brose and Su, features prominently on its website the

Introduction

27

rhetoric and imagery of the Silk Road (sichou zhilu), the ancient trade routes that serve as an imagined historical basis for China’s current expansionist aims. The Salaam website, however, gives the Silk Road a distinctly Islamic twist, imagining its progress via a series of iconic Islamic images, from the madrasas of Samarkand to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in the United Arab Emirates. As the rhetoric of the Belt and Road Initiative has grown in power, far from being able to mobilize along the new trade routes, Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang have been progressively immobilized by security and reeducation policies: the confiscation of passports, the requirement to carry “convenience cards” for travel outside their home counties, and, finally, mass incarceration. Mu Qian describes the experiences of a group of Uyghur Sufi musicians whose mobility was directly impeded by the Belt and Road Initiative. Having failed twice to obtain visas for the group to perform in Hong Kong and South Korea, he finally managed to obtain T ­ urkish visas and an invitation to perform at the Konya Mystic Music festival. But days before they were due to travel, they were told that a Belt and Road trade fair was being held in Xinjiang’s regional capital, Ürümchi, and no one from southern Xinjiang was permitted to enter the city. Such are the local experiences underpinning the glossy narratives of connectivity and trade. Talal Asad (2007) has argued that contemporary religious economies are the outcome of the intersection of global economic development and global religious revival. In his chapter on a Uyghur migrant community in Ürümchi, Darren Byler reads their engagement with revivalist Islam as a form of adaptation to their marginalized position, and a strategy for coping with an uncertain future in the face of massive development and Han immigration: a salvage form of “making do.” Uyghurs from the rural South have migrated to the regional capital in large numbers over the past twenty years, escaping from the consolidation of their land into big commercial farms, the increasing controls on religious freedoms—always tighter in rural areas than in cities—and rising rural poverty. The economic and political precariousness of life as displaced migrants has evidently pushed Uyghurs toward reformist Islam, and Islam has offered them a way of framing their struggle. For Uyghur migrants, Byler argues, social precariousness produces not an intentional form of politics but, rather, a “religious economy” that offers temporary social stability, a short-term resource against marginalization and displacement.

28 Introduction

As Byler eloquently laments, “We cannot save them; we can only stand beside them as allies and accomplices.” Particularly for the contributors working with Uyghur communities, the experience of the past few years has been a salutary lesson in the limitations faced by scholars who hope to “make a difference” for the people with whom they work. Even in this condition of powerlessness, however, we hold fast to the value of ethnography, with its ethics of engagement and commitment to storytelling from the margins of history, and to the importance of witnessing and lending voice to those who have been silenced. Notes 1. Nectar Gan, “How China Is Trying to Impose Islam with Chinese Characteristics in the Hui Muslim Heartland,” South China Morning Post, May 14, 2018, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2145939/how-china -trying-impose-islam-chinese-characteristics. 2. People’s Daily, “Xi Jinping: Comprehensively improve the level of ­religious work in the new situation”人民日报, “习近平:全面提高新形势下宗教工作水平,” April 24, 2016, http://cpc.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0424/c64094‑28299870.html. 3. Yang Faming, “Speech to the full session of the CPPCC, March 10, 2018: Rooted in the Fertile Soil of Chinese Civilization,” translated and annotated by Max Oidtmann, accessed April 6, 2018, https://www.academia.edu/36251227 /_Rooted_in_the_Fertile_Soil_of_Chinese_Civilization_Uphold_the_­Chinafication _of_Our_Countrys_Islam. 4. Lily Kuo, “Revealed: New Evidence of China’s Mission to Raze the Mosques of Xinjiang,” The Guardian, May 6, 2019, https://www.theguardian .com/world/2019/may/07/revealed-new-evidence-of-chinas-mission-to-raze-the -mosques-of-xinjiang; Smith Finley 2019. 5. For studies of China’s Kazakh communities, see Benson and Svanberg 1997; on the Salar, see Goodman 2008; for a history of Islam in Tibet, see A ­ kasoy, Burnett, and Yoeli-Tlalim 2016. 6. The conference “Ethnographies of Islam in China” was held at SOAS, University of London, in 2017, as part of the Leverhulme-funded “Sounding Islam in China” research project, which first brought together the contributors to this volume. 7. Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy, “Star Scholar Disappears as Crackdown Engulfs Western China,” New York Times, August 10, 2018, https://www .nytimes.com/2018/08/10/world/asia/china-xinjiang-rahile-dawut.html. 8. See also the Cross-Currents special issue on Islam in China: Carlson and Erie 2014.

Introduction

29

9. Uyghur Human Rights Project, “Detained and Disappeared: Intellectuals under Assault,” March 2019, https://docs.uhrp.org/pdf/Detained-and-­Disappeared -Intellectuals-Under-Assault-in-the-Uyghur-Homeland.pdf.

References Akasoy, Anna, Charles Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim. 2016. Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes. New York: Routledge. Allès, Elisabeth. 2000. Músulmans de Chine: Une anthropologie des Hui du Henan. Paris: EHESS. Anwar, Aynur [Ainiwa’er, Ayinu’er]. 2013. “Shache xian dangdai weiwu’erzu sufei zhuyi jiaotuan nvxintu (buwei) dike’er yishide renleixue diaocha yanjiu.” MA thesis, Xinjiang Normal University. Asad, Talal. 1986. “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Occasional Papers, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. ———. 2007. “Explaining the Global Religious Revival: The Egyptian Case.” In “Religion and Society: An Agenda for the 21st Century,” special issue, International Studies in Religion and Society 5, 101–121. Bellér-Hann, Ildikó. 2008. Community Matters in Xinjiang, 1880–1949: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur. China Studies 17. Leiden: Brill. Ben-Dor Benite, Zvi. 2005. The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benson, Linda, and Ingvar Svanberg. 1997. China’s Last Nomads: History and Culture of China’s Kazaks. New York: Routledge. Brophy, David. 2016. Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the RussiaChina Frontier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Byler, Darren. 2019. “Ghost World.” Logic, Issue 7. https://logicmag.io/china /ghost-world/. Dawuti, Reyila. 2001. Weiwuerzu Mazha Wenhua Yanjiu. Ürümchi: Xinjiang daxue chubanshe. Dillon, Michael. 1999. China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlement and Sects. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press. Erie, Matthew S. 2016. China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law. New York: Cambridge University Press. Erie, Matthew S., and Allen Carlson, eds. 2014. “Islam in China / China in Islam.” ­ eview 12. Special issue, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture R Fletcher, J. F. 1995. Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia. Aldershot, UK: Variorum. Frankel, James D. 2011. Rectifying God’s Name: Liu Zhi’s Confucian Translation of Monotheism and Islamic Law. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

30 Introduction Gillette, Maris Boyd. 2000. Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gladney, Dru C. 1991. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998. Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality. San Diego: Harcourt Brace College. ———. 2003. “Lessons (Un)Learned: Ten Reflections on Twenty Years of Fieldwork in the Peoples Republic of China.” Working papers, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. ———. 2004. Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gold, Thomas. 1989. “Guerilla Interviewing among the Getihu.” In Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic, edited by Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz, 175–192. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Goodman, David. 2008. “Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China.” In Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities, edited by Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack. Leiden: Brill. Harris, Rachel. 2017. “The New Battleground: Song-and-Dance in China’s Muslim Borderlands.” World of Music 6 (2): 35–56. Harris, Rachel, and Aziz Isa. 2018. “Islam by Smartphone: The Changing Shape of Uyghur Religiosity.” Central Asian Survey 38 (1): 61–80. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2012. “Experiments in Devotion Online: The YouTube Khuṭba.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44:5–21. Hu Meijuan. 2014. Shenti, kongjian yu xingbie: Xibei Huizu Musilin Nüxue Yanjiu. PhD diss., Lanzhou University. Huang, Cindy. 2009. “Muslim Women at a Crossroads: Gender and Development in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” PhD diss., UC Berkeley. Jaschok, Maria, and Man Ke. 2016. “Covering Body, Uncovering Identity: Chinese Muslim Women’s Vocabularies of Dress, Based on Fieldwork in Northwest and Central China.” Comparative Islamic Studies 9 (2). Jaschok, Maria, and Shui Jingjun. 2000. The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press. ———. 2013. “The Study of Islam, Women, and Gender in China—Taking a Gender-Critical Turn.” Asian Culture: A Journal of the Singapore Society of Asian Studies 37:1–14. Jin Yijiu. 2017. Localization and Nationalization of Islam in China. Leiden: Brill. Kadir, Aynur. 2010. “Ehmed Yessewiy she’irlirining Uyghur folklorida ­ishlitilishi.” Bulaq 2010 (6): 93–102.

Introduction

31

Li Chang-kuan. 2015. Localization of Islam in China. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. Li Xinghua and Feng Jinyuan. 1985. Zhongguo Yisilanjiao shi cankao ziliao xuanbian shangce (1911–1949). Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe. Liang Jingyu. 2006. Niujie: Yige chengshi Huizu shequ de bianqian. Beijing: Zhongyang Minzu Daxue Chubanshe. Lipman, Jonathan. 1997. Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 2016. Islamic Thought in China: Sino-Muslim Intellectual Evolution from the 17th to the 21st Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Luo Guihua. 2004. “Minzu shehuixue shiyexiade Huizu nüxing yanjiu.” Q ­ inghai Minzu Yanjiu 4:51–55. Ma Dongping. 2010. Chuantong yu shanbian: Hezhou Bafang Huizuren de shenghuo shijie. Lanzhou: Gansu Minzu Chubanshe. Ma Guifen. 2011. “Xibei Musilin Funü Jiehun guanzhi shenjiu.” Gansu Shehui Kexue 2011 (4). ———. 2017. Xibei Musilin funü shehui yu yanjiu—jiyu Gansusheng Huizu, Dongxiangzu funüde ge’an yanjiu. Beijing: Renmin. Ma Qiang. 2006. Liudong de jingshen shequ. Beijing: Zhongguo Shehuikexue Chubanshe. ———. 2011. Huifang neiwai: Chengshi xiandaihua jincheng zhongde Xi’an Yisilanjiao yanjiu. Beijing: Zhongguo Shehuikexue Chubanshe. Ma Xuefeng. 2013a. Cong jiaomen dao minzu: Xinan biandi yige s­ haoshushequn de minzushi. Beijing: Shehuikexue Wenxian Chubanshe. ———. 2013b. Migration, Internet and Reconstruction of Community: The Case of Kunming Muslim Society. Bangkok: Asian Resource Foundation. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon. Marsden, Magnus, and Konstantinos Retsikas. 2013. Articulating Islam: Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds. Dordecht: Springer. Mijit, Mukaddas. 2016. “Sufism and the Ceremony of Zikr in Ghulja.” In Music of Central Asia: An Introduction, edited by Theodore Levin, Saida Daukeyeva, and Elmira Köchümkulova, 304–310. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Murata, Sachiko. 2000. Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-Yü’s Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih’s Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm; with a New Translation of Jāmī’s Lawāʾiḥ from the Persian by William C. Chittick. Albany: State University of New York Press. Papas, Alexandre. 2005. Soufisme et politique entre Chine, Tibet et Turkestan: Étude sur les Khwajas Naqshbandis du Turkestan oriental. Paris: Jean Maisonneuve.

32 Introduction Petersen, Kristian. 2016. “The Multiple Meanings of Pilgrimage in Sino-Islamic Thought.” In Islamic Thought in China: Sino-Muslim Intellectual ­Evolution from the 17th to the 21st Century, edited by Jonathan Lipman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2017. Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, Sean R. 2018. “The Biopolitics of China’s ‘War on Terror’ and the Exclusion of the Uyghurs.” Critical Asian Studies 50 (2): 232–258. Rolland, Nadège. 2017. China’s Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative. Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research. Rowe, Aimee Carillo, and Sheena Malhotra. 2013. “Still the Silence: Feminist Reflections at the Edges of Sound.” In Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound, 1–22. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Schrock, D. Richelle. 2013. “The Methodological Imperatives of Feminist Ethnography.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 5:48–60. Smith Finley, Joanne. 2013. The Art of Symbolic Resistance: Uyghur Identities and Uyghur-Han Relations in Contemporary Xinjiang. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2019. “Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang: Has PRC Counter-terrorism Evolved into State Terror?” Central Asian Survey 38 (1): 1–26. Soares, Benjamin, and Filippo Osella. 2009. “Islam, Politics, Anthropology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (s1): S1–S23. Spickard, James, and J. Shawn Landres. 2002. “Introduction: Whither Ethnography? Transforming the Social-Scientific Study of Religion.” In Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion, edited by J. Spickard, J. S. Landres, and M. McGuire, 1–14. New York: New York University Press. Steenberg, Rune. 2013. “Uyghur Marriage in Kashgar: Muslim Marriage in China.” PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin. Stewart, Alexander. 2016. Chinese Muslims and the Global Ummah: Islamic Revival and Ethnic Identity among the Hui of Qinghai Province. New York: Routledge. Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tontini, Roberta. 2016. Muslim Sanzijing: Shifts and Continuities in the Definition of Islam in China. Leiden: Brill. UHRP (Uyghur Human Rights Project). 2013. China’s Iron-Fisted Repression of Uyghur Religious Freedom. Washington, DC: Uyghur Human Rights Project. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Introduction

33

Wang Lan and Li Yuhong. 2007. “Xibei shaoshu minzu funü yanjiu fangfa tanxi.” Ningxia Shehui Kexue 3:76–79. Wang Xuemei. 2014. “Dangdai Ningxia nongcun Huizu nuxing hunyin zhuangkuang de shizheng fenxi.” Huizu Yanjiu 4. Zarcone, Thierry. 2001. “The Sufi Networks in Southern Xinjiang during the Republican Regime (1911–1949): An Overview.” In Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia: Early Eighteenth to Late Twentieth Centuries, edited by Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Komatsu Hisao. London: Kegan Paul. Zenz, Adrian. 2019. “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them toward a Healthy Heart Attitude’: China’s Political Re-education Campaign in Xinjiang.” Central Asian Survey 38 (1): 102–128. Zhou Xiaoyan. 2012. “Yisilanjiao ‘shengchuan’ zhong de funüguan.” Huizu Yanjiu 4.

Chapter 1

Imagining Transnational Communities Conflicting Islamic Revival Movements in the People’s Republic of China Alex STEWART

T

he ancestors of China’s largest Muslim group, the Hui, are scattered all over the Muslim world (and China as well), so it should be no surprise that Chinese Islam features a similarly diverse array of historic influences and modern revival movements. Most Chinese Muslims today use terms of Persian origin to refer to imams and each of the daily prayers even though few of them speak any Farsi. This attests to the historical influence of Farsi speakers on Chinese Muslims, and some Saudis apparently fear that it is a sign of Shi’a infiltration into a near-exclusively Sunni community (al Sudairi 2016), although I never saw or heard of any evidence for this. Numerous Central Asian Sufis have left their mark by spreading their orders across China’s Northwest and into its interior (see Gladney 1999). The global Islamic revival of the late nineteenth century also made its way to China from Saudi Arabia when Chinese imams brought these ideas back to China, founding the Yihewani1 and then the Salafiyya movement. In the 1980s, Muslim evangelists from South Asia brought the Tabligh-i Jama’at revitalization movement to China (Metcalf 2003; Yusupov, this volume), and some Muslims scattered around China have begun to spread the movement’s evangelical fervor through China’s ten predominantly Muslim ethnic groups, and even to some non-Muslims, by embarking on autonomous preaching tours that range from three days to four months in length (Ma 2012; Stewart 2018). Each of these theological currents makes a claim to universal truth but also retains a symbolic connection to the land of its origin. Time, geographical distance, the influence of local Sufi holy 37

38

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

men, and the adoption of practices that many Muslims associate with Han Chinese religious practices (like burning incense) has eroded the foreign connotations of many Sufi orders. Through embracing Chinese nationalism during World War II, accepting the commemoration of ancestors’ death days, and renouncing political activism, the Yihewani has become distinct from other movements bearing the Ikhwan name (like the Muslim Brotherhood). Nevertheless, practitioners of more recently arrived Islamic modalities have maintained transnational connections through educational and economic connections and migrations. In engaging with theological debates and promoting various sectarian practices, Chinese Muslims are also negotiating a complex web of transnational connections in ways that tend to undermine some local allegiances. Scholars of Islam in China have long discussed how various strains of Sufism and revivalism entered China and came into conflict with Muslims already present in China, who came to be known as the Gedimu (from the Arabic qadim, “old”). In the last couple decades, studies of Islamic revival among the Hui (Chang 2012; Gladney 1999; Hillman 2004; Khalid 2011; McCarthy 2005; Turnbull 2014; Veselič 2013) have addressed the changing sectarian landscape and the challenges this represents to traditional authorities. These studies also tend to present a traditionalist-revivalist dichotomy that simplifies the differences and conflicts among the diverse modes of revival. (However, Chérif-Chebbi’s [2016] work represents a notable move away from this tendency.) In examining sectarian divisions in China’s “little Mecca” of Linxia, Gansu Province, Chang (2012) asserts that sectarian conflicts are driven more by competition for “socio-religious resources” than by theology. This may make sense from the perspective of the Gedimu imams on which Chang focuses, but it makes one wonder why anyone would join a marginalized minority like Salafiyya or a group like Tabligh-i Jama’at, which seems to have few resources of its own. Turnbull (2014) identifies a key conflict between Hui who identify Islam as an inherited ethnic trait and revivalists who emphasize the universality of the global Muslim community. Building on this work, this chapter will elaborate on how different revival movements promote and produce different versions of universal community. Gladney (1999) puts China’s Salafiyya movement and its conflict with the Yihewani in the context of historical waves of Islamic revival in China, and this chapter will elaborate on



Imagining Transnational Communities

39

how these and other differences in theology and individual cognitive practices reflect conflicting and overlapping transnational networks. None of the revivalists I met called themselves “born again Muslims” (回归的穆斯林) as Maja Veselič’s (2013) informants did, but an exclusive focus on discrete sects like Yihewani and Salafiyya ­threatens to ignore the numerous revivalists who disavow sectarian allegiances, whom I call “reaffirmed Muslims.” Such revivalists share with Salafis a goal of “learning to distinguish between ‘the customs’ of their parents and the ‘real’ Islam” (Veselič 2013, 102–103). However, they do not necessarily renounce the sect in which they were raised or join a formal sect or revival movement. This process of seeking out and promoting “authentic Islam” can allow Muslims to align themselves with an international community perceived as more modern, as ­Khalid’s (2011) interlocutors do through a Salafi education. However, it is also important to realize that there are several different modes of revival, visions of modernity, and associated transnational connections in play. Two rapidly growing and oft-conflicting revival movements among the Hui in today’s China are fond of citing a single hadith2 to justify their methods: “The best of you are those who learn the Qur’an and teach it” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 4739). Salafis contend that one must concentrate on learning the Qur’an before one can be worthy of teaching, but participants in the Tabligh-i Jama’at claim that even if one only knows one verse, it is his or her responsibility to teach it to others. Reaffirmed Hui may participate in or reject each of these movements, but they generally share a common ethos of constantly striving to both improve one’s own knowledge and share it as much as possible. This inclination leads many revivalists to engage in some form of da’wah, an Arabic word meaning “invitation” that can include evangelism, education, and various forms of community service. Salafis and Tablighis conduct da’wah differently, but in either case, teaching and learning is not necessarily done under the guidance of a trained imam. Chinese Salafis generally turn inward to study texts and develop one’s understanding of Islamic principles and practices, and they demand that any clerical pronouncements cited be grounded in clear references to the Qur’an and hadith. Tablighis immerse themselves in ritualized group study and oral performances designed to spread the movement while disciplin­ing the self. In their movement, everyone essentially serves as an imam.

40

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

The majority of Chinese Muslims I interviewed claimed that they and the vast majority of (largely poorly educated) rural Hui did not associate themselves with specific movements, generally followed the practices of their parents, and were skeptical of or hostile to “foreign innovations.” “Don’t split the religion” (不要分教门) was another common refrain. Many, if not most, reaffirmed Yihewani Muslims, who have recently embraced religious practice and study, do so within existing Chinese sects, usually the ones into which they were born. The history of sectarian tensions and violence in China’s Northwest, as well as the fact that sectarian divisions are specifically condemned in the Qur’an, contributes to neither Tablighis nor Salafis identifying themselves as a discrete “sect” (教派). Discussion of sectarian issues is specifically forbidden during Tabligh-i activities, and talking about sects is generally considered bad manners. China’s Muslims like to think of themselves as a united community. “Sects” Is a Dirty Word: Revival as a Nonsectarian Method Making the city’s only Salafi mosque a primary field site during my eleven months of research in 2012–2013 Xining made me subject to occasional censure, sometimes for expressing any sort of sectarian preference, but especially for favoring a tiny minority sect many of the city’s Yihewani majority regarded as heretical. Once, on a crowded bus as it wound through downtown Xining, I ran into an acquaintance who had converted to Islam. When he asked where I was going, I told him I was on my way to the mosque to perform prayer. He confusedly pointed to a mosque outside the closing doors, the second one we had passed since I boarded. I told him I was going to Shu Lin Xiang. He frowned and said, “They are all the same. Don’t split the religion” (都一样。不要分教门). The latter phrase was a common refrain, especially among participants of the nondenominational Tabligh-i Jama’at movement. However, on another occasion, a fellow passenger on a bus conveyed a sentiment that might be more prevalent. He sat down next to me, slapped my thigh, and told me he recognized me from Dongguan Mosque, the largest one in town, dominated by the Yihewani. When he asked where I was going, and I replied with the name of the city’s only Salafi Mosque, he looked at me in shock, said, “You believe in Saudi religion!” (你信沙特教!),



Imagining Transnational Communities

41

and moved to another seat on the other side of the bus. While some converts to Islam became enthusiastic adherents of Salafiyya, and many helped to spread their newfound faith through Tabligh-i Jama’at, many also denounced or downplayed the importance of sectarian divisions (see Stewart 2016a). While Hui revivalists commonly lament the lax practices and doctrinal ignorance of the Hui in general, most are reticent to wholly break with tradition by adopting new practices or sectarian identities. During my time in Xining, I often asked non-Chinese visitors from the Muslim world how Chinese Muslims differed from those in their homelands, and they often mentioned the virulence of sectarian divides. Likewise, the urban Hui revivalists I spoke to characterized sectarian divisions as a key flaw of Chinese Muslims. They repeatedly told me that I should study “real Muslims” in the Middle East, because Chinese Muslims were “not okay” (不行), “chaotic” (乱), “old-­fashioned” (落后), “unorthodox” (不正确), or “Hanicized” (汉化). Virtually every Muslim I talked to agreed that revival was necessary, but there was no consensus on the proper method. Defining sectarian division as a problem leads most Hui to advocate for reform and revitalization within existing sects instead of splitting off to form new ones. Even though Salafis differ from other Chinese Muslims in theology and prayer practices and oppose practices shared by most Chinese Muslims, they refer to their doctrine as constituting a “method” instead of a “sect” (教派). Nevertheless, many Muslims denounce Salafiyya, Tabligh-i Jama’at, and even the Yihewani as groups of troublemaking sectarian ideologues who import foreign ideas and sow division among the Chinese Muslim community. Muslims who originated from or regularly traveled to Yunnan or China’s interior provinces informed me that sectarian conflicts were most intense in the Northwest. Many trace these tensions to Ma Bufang’s enforcement of Yihewani orthodoxy throughout the area that now makes up modernday Qinghai, Ningxia, and Gansu, as well as divisive, public theological debates in 1930s Linxia that solidified the rift between Salafiyya and Yihewani, a rift between two similar sects that remains contentious today. The Yihewani accuse Salafis of mindlessly imitating foreigners, subscribing to terrorist ideology, needlessly dividing the Muslim community, and attributing physical form and location to Allah in a manner tantamount to idolatry (see Stewart 2016b). Some Yihewani, known to outsiders as the “hard sect” (硬派), even label Salafis

42

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

“unbelievers” and refuse to have any association with them. The hard sect’s blanket condemnation of Salafiyya also includes the government and religious establishment of Saudi Arabia, which means that adherents of the hard sect will make the pilgrimage to Mecca but refuse to pray behind the imams there. Thus, Salafis frequently mock them for arrogantly believing that they know better than the rest of the world’s Muslims. Different Chinese imams returning from Saudi Arabia founded the Yihewani and Salafi movements in China in the 1890s and 1930s, respectively, but the Yihewani eventually adopted some practices Salafis oppose like commemorating the anniversaries of loved ones’ deaths, and they became enmeshed in Chinese politics under the sponsorship of the Nationalist-allied warlord Ma Bufang. Salafis denounce these developments as cultural accretions and emphasize how their teachings’ key proponents have studied Islam in Muslim-majority nations. Of course, members of other sects study abroad as well, and they also use foreign connections as a source of prestige, even if one’s time abroad is short and dedicated mostly to building business contacts (as is often the case among Chinese Muslims, regardless of sect, see Hew Wai Wing, this volume).3 Xining’s leading imams of both Yihewani and Salafiyya draw authority from foreign diplomas. The Salafi imam has a diploma from Medina University and preaches in standard Mandarin, sprinkled with some Linxia dialect.4 The Yihewani imam studied at al-Azhar University in Egypt, but he preaches in the local dialect, and many accused him of Salafism when he translated into Chinese an article that allegedly contained Wahhabi ideas. Many Yihewani imams, particularly those in the hard sect, have studied only under Chinese imams in China and are suspicious of foreigneducated Muslims who often challenge some traditions of their ancestors. However, migrants to China’s Northwest, converts, and educated urbanites often view such attitudes as outdated and provincial, so they prefer Salafiyya, Tabligh-i Jama’at, and other revival movements that aspire to allegedly more transnationally uniform standards of orthodoxy. Even though its adherents often refuse to refer to it as a sect, Salafiyya tends to fit the mold of other Islamic sects in China in that it has mosques (and imams) devoted exclusively to its practices, which its adherents preferentially, if not exclusively, attend. In contrast, Tabligh-i Jama’at generally does not have designated mosques in China and includes both imams and participants from across the



Imagining Transnational Communities

43

sectarian spectrum. Instead of just downplaying the sectarian nature of their movement, Tablighis strictly proscribe discussion of sectarian and theological differences (along with politics, worldly concerns, and anything else that might cause acrimony among participants). Like Salafis, Tablighis apply a method of foreign origin to revive their vision of the original, authentic Islamic practice in all Muslims. But unlike Salafis who partially draw their legitimacy from the homeland of the prophet Muhammad, Tablighis emphasize the ubiquity of their movement, repeatedly mentioning that it is practiced the same way in every nation on Earth. Tablighis aspire to experience this universality during annual itjema in South Asia, which have become the largest gatherings of Muslims in the world, aside from the haj to Mecca. Despite its claim to universality, ardent participants in Tabligh-i Jama’at emphasize the necessity of particular practices and an unfamiliar mode of religiosity that alienates many Chinese Muslims. Many Salafis equate the movement with Sufism due to its emphasis on dhikr5 and Deobandi roots (see Ha, this volume, for discussion of women’s dhikr practices). Others associate Tablighis with Salafism because of their strict standards of behavior and association with foreign Muslims. Despite Tabligh-i Jama’at’s self-proclaimed nonsectarian nature, organizers and regular participants in the movement are easily recognizable by their distinctive practices, and participants in Xining sometimes showed signs of prejudice against Salafism. After I returned from a preaching journey with a group of Tablighis, I shared my experience with an imam I had just met, and he immediately insisted I come to his house for dinner. There I chatted with his son (who was wearing shalwar and kameez) about the movement and mentioned praying at the only Salafi mosque in Xining. He looked surprised and blurted out, “They believe Allah has a form!” (他们信 真主有形), a common Yihewani criticism of Salafi’s insistence on a literal reading of the Qur’an, which includes the belief that Allah has hands, face, feet, and so on (albeit incomprehensibly grandiose ones). Fresh from my Tablighi preaching journey, I was surprised at how quickly I ­produced the appropriate Tablighi response, saying that I attended many mosques and admonishing him, “Don’t split the religion” (不要分教门). My interlocutor nodded his agreement and changed the subject, and I quietly marveled at how effectively Tablighi norms and discourse had been inculcated in me during my threeday journey.

44

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

Embodied and Rationalized Practices Differences in China’s Islamic revival movements can be divided into issues of praxis and theology. Concern about the latter is primarily the purview of imams, students, and other mosque-educated Muslims, but proper behavior, prayer practices, and standards of appearance are of concern to most Muslims, regardless of educational level. While it is horribly impolite to discuss sectarian issues in most settings, one frequently conveys sectarian allegiance through modes of Islamic practice, physical comportment, and everyday speech and behaviors. Such embodied practices represent a sort of democratization of religious knowledge and authority that is common to all of these revival movements. Salafis seek to establish an independent understanding of the Qur’an in order to determine for oneself the proper standards enshrined in the Qur’an and hadith. Instead of carefully considering the evidence, Tablighis assiduously follow every sunnah6 the leaders of their movement have distilled from hadith in order to produce a more pious subjectivity (see Stewart 2018). Reaffirmed Yihewani adopt many of the same behaviors as Tablighis, but instead of just using these practices to display and internalize religiosity, they also emphasize the scientific and rational benefits of these practices. As educated urbanites, they generally feel the need to reconcile their religion with scientific rationality and be able to defend their faith to the Han, whom most Hui describe as uniformly atheist. Despite the apparent contrasts among these modalities, there is considerable overlap among them. Tablighis apply South Asian–style ascetic fervor, and Salafis favor Saudi scholasticism, but both of these movements as well as other nondenominational study groups and individual efforts to revive Islamic practices are increasingly popular among urban, and often college-educated, young Muslims who see Islam as a rational and cosmopolitan modern faith. While Tablighis advise wholesale adoption of every behavior sanctioned by hadith as a means of creating a more pious habitus,7 others seek to understand the rationale behind these behaviors. In a society still bearing the influence of Marxist atheism, reaffirmed Muslims relish pointing out the “scientific” nature of Islamic practices, including washing frequently, brushing one’s teeth, abstaining from alcohol, not eating to excess, rising early, and taking naps. A broad spectrum of Hui Muslims brought such things to my attention, but these practical benefits seemed especially inspiring to those who had



Imagining Transnational Communities

45

recently adopted pious behaviors. These behaviors were sanctioned before modern science had proven their beneficial nature, so many Muslims claim that other sunnah behaviors are also beneficial, even if we do not yet understand why. For both Tablighis and Salafis, such rationalizations are beside the point. Salafis see pious behaviors as a representation of one’s devotion and religious knowledge, whereas Tablighis adopt such practices and enjoin others to do so in order to cultivate an inward sense of piety. Participants in the Egyptian piety movement employ a similar strategy of consciously adopting pious habits in the hope of such habits becoming second nature (Mahmood 2005). Whereas Hirschkind’s (2001) Egyptian interlocutors cultivate proper listening practices to internalize the message of Islamic sermons, Tablighis’ preaching aims toward the same end, namely, relentlessly delivering sermons until they begin to embody their own words and reform themselves. Salafis are critical of Tablighis who strictly observe and promote such superficial practices without understanding the scriptural basis behind them. To Salafis, correct practices are meaningless without proper understanding. Even those who have little knowledge of the Qur’an attach profound significance to the minutiae of religious practice. I once horrified a Yihewani acquaintance when I casually warned him that the mosque in which we were about to pray was a Salafi one. He suggested that we go elsewhere, saying, “We are against santai” (我们反 对三抬), and insisting that Salafis did not pray correctly. But there was no time to go elsewhere. After the prayer, which he had performed in the Yihewani manner, he was puzzled as to why he had learned to oppose a style of prayer that he felt was 90 percent the same as the one with which he was familiar. We chatted with a young Salafi student who had come to question Yihewani orthodoxy through a similar experience (see Gladney 1999). Salafis claim that more authentic hadith support their method of prayer, but most Chinese Muslims continue to maintain the method in use since before many collections of hadith had been translated into Chinese. The differences in the performance of prayer are small, but it is abundantly clear and potentially quite embarrassing when someone is praying in a different style. In fact, the most common appellation for Salafis in China, santai, refers to the fact that they raise their hands three times (instead of just one) during each cycle of prayer (see Rosati, this volume). And the differences between Salafiyya and Yihewani are even more apparent when it comes to the

46

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

sunnah (supra-obligatory) prayers. Yihewani perform additional cycles of prayer independently immediately after obligatory prayers, but Salafis sit to recite dhikr before performing sunnah prayers. Thus, a person praying in the Yihewani style will be the only one standing in a Salafi mosque right after prayer, and a Salafi in an Yihewani mosque would be the only one sitting. However, Salafis performing prayer in a Yihewani mosque usually just leave after the obligatory prayers and avoid participating in a collective du’a, or supplicatory prayer, which they believe should only be performed individually as a part of witr, a supra-obligatory night prayer. It is quite impressive that my rather uneducated acquaintance had the gumption to go against the grain in the Salafi mosque, but his actions were typical of members of the dominant sect in Xining. Just as he drew a sense of confidence from membership in Xining’s dominant sect, Salafis and Tablighis see themselves as part of a thriving global community, so they are largely undeterred by local opposition to their movements. Salafis emphasize the need to separate authentic Islamic practices from mere cultural habits of the Hui people, which they regard as superficial practices that they feel have become fetishized. Many of them reject the white caps that are nearly ubiquitous among Chinese Muslim men, as well as garments of foreign origin like the shalwar and kameez favored by Tablighis, saying that these are regional customs not mentioned in the Qur’an or hadith. Similarly, Salafi women often eschew the blue or pink hats common in Gansu and Ningxia or the black headscarves common in Qinghai in favor of a variety of colorful hijabs they associate with Saudi Arabia (­Gillette 2004, 37). They critically consider all traditional Muslim behaviors to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to support them. Instead of adopting culturally specific garments, Salafis emphasize more general rules, like favoring close-shaven mustaches and unshaven beards and pants that do not extend past the ankles, and avoiding garments with human or animal figures (anything with eyes). These standards are common to all reaffirmed Muslims, many of whom tend to avoid styles they associate with old-­fashioned rural Muslims, like white hats and black velvet hijabs. Reaffirmed Muslims often emphasize the principles behind these standards, advocating general cleanliness and modesty in dress as scriptural requirements with tangible practical benefits. The contrasting attitudes toward physical appearances are apparent in different reactions to my long hair: Tablighis often were concerned that it did not



Imagining Transnational Communities

47

look sufficiently Islamic; Salafis were unconcerned as long as it was clean. Reaffirmed Muslims thought it was a great illustration of Islam’s appeal to all different sorts of people. Pursuing religious knowledge is a common goal of all revivalists, but means of doing so vary. All Muslim revivalists strive to perfect their Arabic recitation, but Salafis place special emphasis on understanding the meaning of the recited text. Yihewani Muslims are more likely to rely on imams for translation, and Tablighis tend to focus on a select few clear and commonly cited Quranic verses and hadith found in the movement’s literature. Reaffirmed Muslims often study English in addition to Arabic, and they sometimes combine these studies by watching videos of American converts to Islam preaching in English. Occasionally, Tablighis use Urdu or English to c­ ommunicate with foreigners making preaching trips through China. On a couple of occasions, I was enlisted to translate a South Asian T ­ ablighi’s sermon from English into Mandarin. Despite my rather awkward performance of the linguistic gymnastics required to translate an English sermon laden with Arabic terms into Mandarin, the format and content of the speech was familiar enough for the audience of locals and traveling preachers from around China to decipher. Indeed, this experience of universality is fundamental to the ethos of the movement and part of its appeal in modern, urban societies. Taking Revival down to the Countryside: Salafi and Tablighi Da’wah Regardless of their preferred modality, many Chinese revivalists feel an impetus, or even responsibility, to carry revival to rural populations, where material poverty and poor education are the norm. Both Tabligh-i Jama’at and Salafiyya include rural as well as urban Muslims among their participants; many Muslim migrants join these two movements in urban areas like Xining and bring them back to their rural hometowns. Of course, traveling through both rural and urban areas is central to Tablighi practices, but I also found a sort of missionary impulse among the Salafis. The “Every Ethnicity Muslim Home” (各族穆斯林之家) group, a Salafi-led but nonsectarian organization in Xining, regularly delivers food, clothing, and religious texts to poor, rural congregations. Tablighis and Salafis each claim that their method of da’wah advances the state’s rural development goals of encouraging education and “civilized” behavior, but such

48

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

missions exist in competition with state projects in that they promote a religiously defined notion of civilization and Arabic-language education, instead of materialistic science and atheism. Like most other subjects of the People’s Republic, Chinese Muslims generally avoid political activism and are wary of publicly expressing opinions that could be construed as critical of the Communist Party. Nonetheless, political connotations are to some degree inevitable as they publicly embody religiosity, build Islamic networks, and inherently critique the professed atheism of the party and much of the Han majority. In this section, I will contrast these two methods of da’wah and two of their major proponents in Xining in order to highlight important differences in how participants in each movement perceive the relationship between embodied practices and religious knowledge. Mr. Ming, head of Every Ethnicity Muslim Home, is fifty-five years old and sold used cars for forty years before dedicating himself to da’wah work full time. He fits the mold of a stereotypical car salesman: a fast talker, constantly rushing around, quick to laughter, and always ready with a handshake and a mischievous smile that suggests he has some scheme up his sleeve. These schemes include providing classes in Islam and Arabic for children; fixing up old radiators to heat these classrooms in the winter; hosting Muslim holiday celebrations for converts and other Muslims with no place to celebrate; bringing food, clothing, money, and religious textbooks to rural Muslims; driving Muslims home from the mosque in his beatup old car; and seeking to win converts to Islam. At one point, Ming boasted that he was responsible for forty conversions, proudly stating that Qinghai has more converts than anywhere in China. He is the driving force behind a tiny but ambitious operation that is entirely dependent on meager donations from local Muslims and volunteers, which include his brother, his son, and about a dozen recent converts. He generally sported a white hat, gray beard, and nondescript dark-gray clothing typical of middle-aged Hui men, rather than adopting more overtly Islamic dress like some other revivalists. I first met Yakub, one of the leading organizers of Tabligh-i Jama’at in Xining, outside a Yihewani mosque after prayer. He was wearing a shalwar kameez, typical of Tablighi participants, underneath a gray Western-style sport coat and beige Crocs. After a mutual friend introduced me as an American, he spoke to me in English and invited me back to his house for lunch, saying he had to make a



Imagining Transnational Communities

49

couple of stops first. We knocked on the doors of a couple of apartments until a Hui man answered one of them and invited us in. While we sat in the living room sipping tea, Yakub launched into a lecture about the need for Muslims to visit and encourage each other to maintain good religious practices. Oddly, he seemed to be talking to me as much as, if not more than, to our host. When we learned that he had not performed noon prayer, we left to allow him to do so. As we walked, Yakub stopped to talk to nearly every Muslim man we met on the street, asking each man’s name and inviting him to come study in his hotel prayer room after morning prayer. When we arrived at Yakub’s apartment—it was devoid of furniture except for a bookshelf and a low table for holding a Qur’an—I recognized his austere evangelism as Tabligh-i Jama’at. The language used by each man, the clothes he wears, and the method of interaction he employs conveys important differences in the movements he represents. Notably, neither man has received formal religious training in a mosque, Islamic school, or secular postsecondary school (see Rosati, this volume, for discussion of women’s Islamic schooling in contemporary China). Mr. Ming uses his improvisational style and personal charisma to build a network among local Muslims, but Yakub couches his own charisma in the standardized speech and practices of Tabligh-i Jama’at. Whereas Mr. Ming primarily speaks in a local dialect that is difficult for outsiders to decipher, Yakub speaks fluent Salar, standard Mandarin, good English, and some Arabic. He makes good use of these language skills in hosting and assisting traveling Tablighis from all over China and abroad, but he developed them for his secular careers in translation, real estate, and international trade. The class and education level of these two men are not necessarily representative of their movements. Both movements draw from all socioeconomic classes, and in general, there seemed to be many more multilingual international travelers among the Salafis than among the Tablighis, but the latter are often reticent to speak of such material things. Despite his rather humble appearances, Ming has traveled to Saudi Arabia multiple times, and he references the growth of Islam abroad in encouraging non-Muslims to convert and Muslims to persevere in their faith. While Ming employs a variety of ad hoc strategies to spread basic Islamic knowledge, Yakub and other Tablighis adhere to a standard form of communicative practice to embody their faith and encourage others to do the same.

50

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

Between 1995 and 2013, Mr. Ming organized between twenty and thirty-five classes each year to teach Arabic and religious knowledge to Muslim children who often learned little about religion from public schools or their parents. Classes met after school on weekdays and all day during national holidays, which many observant Muslims did not celebrate. The number of classes constantly varied because Ming struggled to find enough teachers and classroom space to keep up with demand. Volunteer teachers included housewives, teenagers who had studied in local mosques, and others who possessed basic knowledge of Arabic and Islam. Teaching religion to minors violates Chinese national religious policy, but virtually every mosque publicly posts notices to enroll children in classes during the Lunar New Year holiday. However, classes like Mr. Ming’s, which take place outside state-sanctioned religious institutions and are not led by licensed ahong,8 would be more likely to run afoul of government officials and are not supported by any mosque organization in any official capacity (see Rosati, this volume). Like Mr. Ming, Yakub coordinates the informal study of Islam. But instead of establishing regular class meetings, Yakub hosts and dispatches traveling groups that preach on the streets, on doorsteps, in private residences or hotel prayer rooms, and after prayer in some mosques friendly to the movement. Both emphasize memorization and recitation of the Qur’an, but Mr. Ming’s classes tend to recite key elements of faith in addition to Quranic verses, whereas Tablighis emphasize the repeated recitation of certain phrases that are said to gain specific rewards in the afterlife. Salafis often denounce Tablighis for demanding that all participants preach, regardless of their level of Islamic knowledge. Instead they emphasize the responsibility of all individuals to read and understand the Qur’an for themselves. Tablighis feel that the best way to achieve this understanding is to internalize the basic message of Islam through repeated oral performances. Participants of each method justify it by citing its popularity abroad and also its ability to attract the interest of an American anthropologist. Mr. Ming and his family struggle to build their organization while coping with meager support from local Muslims and onerous government hurdles. He complains that the local government is suspicious of the activities of Muslim organizations like his, and he says that no mosque wants to help him or allow his organization to use its facilities for fear of arousing the Communist Party’s displeasure.



Imagining Transnational Communities

51

Ming claims that the government permits Muslims to pray and study, but local party officials are wary of any other organized activities, even those dedicated to educating and alleviating poverty among rural Muslims. In 2013, Mr. Ming’s organization did not have a physical home—a lack of funding caused him to lose the modest office space his organization once occupied—but his goal is to have an actual home where converts can live, study, and pray together. His organization prints a single-page wall calendar with a picture of Dongguan Mosque and the words “Every Ethnicity Muslim Home welcomes you!” (各族穆斯林之家欢迎您) above a two-story house with a two-car garage, front porch, and lawn that are typical of ­middle-class, suburban housing developments in the U.S. This type of housing is nowhere to be seen in Xining, but such images are commonly used in Xining advertisements as symbols of prosperity and happiness. This materialistic imagery reflects many Salafis’ pragmatic means of engaging with the world, as well as Ming’s vision of his organization as a communal refuge for the study of Islam, a physical home for those spiritual sojourners who have found their spiritual home in Islam. Participants in Tabligh-i Jama’at conduct many activities outside state-recognized religious establishments, so it occupies a legal gray area in China and is not officially associated with any mosques. Rather than seek to occupy a permanent home like Ming’s organization, Tablighis are content to meet in hotel prayer rooms and private residences in Xining and other urban areas. Rural mosques, on the other hand, are subject to less surveillance and sometimes able to host more wandering Tablighis. On my three-day journey with the ­Tablighis, we slept together on a large platform bed in a simple room in the mosque, attempted to buy our own food, and even cleaned the mosque washing room and donated the remainder of the funds we had pooled for the trip to the mosque. The organizer giving the orientation speech before we departed specified that we should take public transportation and not sit together, so we would have the opportunity to preach to more people while en route. However, we were told that an acquaintance of one of the organizers was going toward our destination village anyway, so we ended up riding in a private car. And our transportation was similarly arranged on the way back to Xining. Likewise, we were supposed to buy groceries and cook our own food to avoid burdening our hosts, but different members of our host mosque treated us to sumptuous meals in their homes for

52

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

virtually every meal during our stay, despite our protestations and our attempts to buy some food for them. We constantly tried not to burden our hosts, but members of the mosque congregation saw our presence as an opportunity to gain blessings by taking care of those traveling in the service of Islam. On occasion, Mr. Ming leads junkets to the countryside, delivering encouragement to rural Muslims in the same way he drops in on his children’s classes. He also brings gifts of money, Islamic texts, donated food and clothing and sometimes small toys to congregations with whom he has relationships. Several converts accompany him on these trips, helping him to encourage the villagers and showing them that Islam is strong and growing. One day after I first met Mr. Ming, he picked me up at seven one morning to accompany two female converts to a village mosque a couple of hours southwest of the city. On the way, he casually introduced some Salafi critiques of other Muslim sects, but was careful to emphasize Muslim unity and not to be too harsh in his criticisms. When we arrived, he and the women each gave an inspirational speech to the congregation, which included numerous male and female boarding students and several Han Chinese who had converted to Islam. We also paid visits to several disabled Muslims, bringing them fancy washing pots and other gifts purchased in Xining. A later junket to a different village in Hua Long Hui Autonomous County would fill three entire minibuses packed with people and donated clothing. At the village mosque, the visitors dispensed food, Islamic texts, clothing, and cash to the locals gathered in the mosque courtyard. When I told Mr. Ming that such work could receive tax incentives and possibly even public funding in the United States, he responded with disbelief. While Ming’s motives were strictly religious and humanitarian, he was also aware that such projects conflicted with government-sanctioned ideas of virtue. Mr. Ming’s trip featured some degree of material redistribution from rich to poor, but the Tablighi method ignores or even opposes consideration of material concerns to concentrate solely on offering spiritual renewal through travel and preaching. Indeed, Tablighis claim that Allah will reward those who spread his message with material sustenance, so there is no need for humans to provide such things. Critics of this movement point out that many of those who can afford to embark on long and international preaching journeys do not understand the life of material deprivation many Chinese Muslims live and that they are doing working-class Muslims a disservice by



Imagining Transnational Communities

53

encouraging them to take time off from their jobs and families to travel and preach about Islam. The men who joined me on my short three-day trip were unskilled laborers of modest means, but the South Asians I met traveling through China and the Chinese Tablighis I met who had been or planned to go abroad were certainly much better off financially. Nevertheless, wealthy Muslims who hosted dozens of Tablighis for a meal and poor farmers from the countryside would eat together side by side on the floor, each called upon to deliver speeches and spare as much time as possible to serve Allah through the movement. Our journey with Every Ethnicity Muslim Home was also one of service, but the division between visiting urban guests and rural receivers of charity was much clearer. After the local children lined up to receive their gifts, their parents demanded that we go inside and eat before they did. Mr. Ming encouraged us to get to know each other on the bus journeys there and back, but he did not similarly encourage us to associate (or not associate) with the villagers. Mr. Ming presented converts (and a foreign anthropologist) as examples for rural Muslims to emulate, and sometimes converts gave speeches about their experiences, but this sort of exchange was onesided in that the villagers had no opportunity to ask questions or tell their own stories. However, no one asks questions at a Tablighi study session either. Tablighi study sessions require each person to speak so each person repeats and internalizes the message in their own way. Tabligh-i Jama’at is fundamentally a movement of self-cultivation through performance, whereas Salafis emphasize educating oneself first, and only then can one inspire others to learn for themselves. Thus, Mr. Ming focused on introducing people to Islam and giving them a good foundation in the basic tenets of faith, which he felt would lead them to discover Salafism on their own. Embodying Transnational Connections How much actual influence foreign Muslims have over the Salafiyya, Tabligh-i Jama’at, or other Islamic movements in China is a question beyond the scope of this chapter. While these revival movements draw inspiration and perhaps some funding from abroad, they are largely decentralized and espouse an ideology that tends to empower individuals at the expense of imams and religious institutions, foreign or domestic. Instead of merely maintaining adherence to an ancestral

54

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

faith, Hui revivalists experience an invigorating sense of purpose and independence in cultivating and spreading their faith. Different movements provide methodological guidelines, but whether revivalists choose Salafi-style independent study, embark on a Tablighi preaching tour, or simply rediscover Islamic practice without aligning with a specific movement, Islamic revival offers Chinese Muslims several avenues for a largely autonomous pursuit of religiosity. Imagining a global umma in the image of their movement or their own practices provides a sense of righteous community that justifies independence from and even critique of local traditions and familial expectations. Most participants in these revival movements will probably never leave China, but they can embody a sense of transnational identity by participating in the same movements, in what they at least imagine to be the same way, as Muslims all over the world. Notes 1. From the Arabic Ikhwan, or “brothers,” this term refers to a movement Ma Wanfu founded in China in 1893. Its name is derived from the same Arabic term as the Muslim Brotherhood and shares the historical influence of Wahhabism, but it has developed as a distinct movement that does not share the ­political activism or goals of the Muslim Brotherhood. 2. Hadith are the sayings and doings of the prophet Muhammad as recalled by his companions, a source of Islamic guidance second only to the Qur’an. 3. None of my interlocutors described their own experience in such terms, but they often denounced other Chinese Muslims for putting material concerns over the study of Islam. However, many teenagers and young men who were studying in mosques told me they were learning Arabic in hopes of continuing their studies abroad so that they could make business contacts. 4. A Linxia-educated Muslim once jokingly called this “Chinese Muslims’ Mandarin,” using the Chinese word for Mandarin that literally means “common tongue.” 5. This term means “remembrance of Allah,” and it can include the recitation of numerous Arabic phrases praising Allah. Most Muslims regard the silent recitation of some dhikr before or after prayers as sunnah, but some Sufi sects collectively chant aloud, sometimes even incorporating bodily movement, and Tablighis aspire to recite some phrases thousands of times while going about their daily lives. 6. Sunnah is an Arabic word for “habitual practice” that refers to the traditions of the Muslim community, which are intended to be based on the Qur’an as well as the words and deeds of Muhammad and his companions.



Imagining Transnational Communities

55

7. Bourdieu (1990) uses the term habitus to denote a set of behaviors and predispositions that is inherited and shaped by structures of culture and power. However, I find Saba Mahmood’s (2005) use of the Aristotelian notion of habitus more appropriate to Tabligh-i Jama’at and other revival movements because participants make a conscious and purposeful self-transformation by embodying virtuous behaviors in hopes that they will become internalized. 8. Ahong is the Chinese word for “imam,” which comes from the Farsi akhund, or “teacher.” Official Chinese religious policy requires all religious teachers and institutions offering religious services or instruction to be licensed by the state.

References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chang, Chung-Fu. 2012. “Diversity in Islamic Sectarian Antagonism—Revival of Modern Reformism and Its Rival Long Ahong in Linxia.” Paper presented at the Everyday Life of Islam: Focus on Islam in China conference. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University, April 27–28. Chérif-Chebbi, Leila. 2016. “Between ‘Abd al-Wahhab and Liu Zhi: Chinese Muslim Intellectuals at the Turn of the 21st Century.” In Islamic Thought in China, edited by Jonathan Lipman, 197–226. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gillette, Maris Boyd. 2004. “Fashion among Chinese Muslims.” ISIM Review 15 (2): 36–37. Gladney, Dru. 1999. “The Salafiyya Movement in Northwest China: Islamic Fundamentalism among the Muslim Chinese.” In Muslim Diversity: Local Islam in Global Contexts, edited by Leif Manger, 102–149. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press. Hillman, Ben. 2004. “The Rise of the Community in Rural China: Village Politics, Cultural Identity and Religious Revival in a Hui Hamlet.” China Journal 51:53–73. Hirschkind, Charles. 2001. “The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Egypt.” American Ethnologist 28 (3): 623–649. Khalid, Zainab. 2011. “Rise of the Veil: Islamic Modernity and the Hui Woman.” Independent Study Project Collection 1074:1–60. http://digitalcollections .edu/isp_collection/1074. Ma Qiang 马强. 2012. 泰卜里厄哲玛提研究述评 (Tabligh-i Jama’at research review). 世界宗教研 究 (World Religions Research). Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McCarthy, Susan. 2005. “If Allah Wills It: Integration, Isolation and Muslim Authenticity in Yunnan Province in China.” Religion, State, and Society 33 (2): 121–136.

56

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

Metcalf, Barbara. 2003. “Travelers’ Tales in the Tablighi Jama’at.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 588:136–148. Stewart, Alexander. 2016a. “Individual Agency through Imagining Transnational Community: Converting to Islam in Modern China.” Contemporary Islam 10:201–221. ———. 2016b. “Where Is Allah? Sectarian Debate, Ethnicity, and Transnational Identity among Salafis in Northwest China.” Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 1 (1): 12–27. ———. 2018. “Tabligh Jama’at in China: Sacred Self, Worldly Nation, Transnational Imaginary.” Modern Asian Studies 52 (4): 1194–1226. Sudairi, Mohammed Turki al. 2016. “Adhering to the Ways of Our Western Brothers: Tracing Saudi Influences on the Development of Hui Salafism in China.” Sociology of Islam 4:27–55. Turnbull, Lesley. 2014. “In Pursuit of Islamic ‘Authenticity’: Localizing Muslim Identity on China’s Peripheries.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 12:35–67. Veselič, Maja. 2013. “Good Muslims, Good Chinese: State Modernisation Policies, Globalisation of Religious Networks and the Changing Hui Ethnoreligious Identifications.” In Religions in Movement: The Local and the Global in Contemporary Faith Traditions, edited by Robert W. Hefner, John Hutchinson, Sara Mels, and Christiane Timmerman, 98–113. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 2

The Ban on Alcohol Islamic Ethics, Secular Laws, and the Limits of Ethnoreligious Belonging in China Ruslan YUSUPOV

宗教信仰自由不等于信仰宗教自由, 更不等于自由信仰宗教. (Freedom of religious belief is not equal to religious freedom, let alone believing freely in religion.) A Party cadre in Shadian

T

hey first banned alcohol, but now they say the ban is illegal. They themselves do not know the law with which they approach the religious phenomena,” lamented Younoos Lin, a manager in one of Shadian’s ten mosques. Just a small Chinese Muslim town in Yunnan Province, Shadian is famous among the national community, both Muslim and non-Muslim alike, for an Islamic ban imposed on the sale and consumption of alcohol. What is much less known about the ban, however, is that the Chinese government played a major, if not leading, role in its instantiation. By “they,” therefore, Younoos was referring to the Party officials, who were present at the meeting when the decision to ban alcohol was made. Not only did they officially argue for its compatibility with national modernization; they also provided a police car and assisted the work of the specially assembled alcohol ban committee. After six months of joint effort, the town was officially declared an “alcohol-free area” (wujiuqu) in August 2008. “Isn’t it enough,” asked Younoos as we headed to the mosque for a prayer, “to say that it was well within the framework of what the government calls ‘proper religious activity’ [hefa zongjiao huodong]?” The 2008 ban attracted little attention until 2013, when photos from the ban leaked into and began circulating in the rapidly

“

57

58

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

expanding online media platform spaces, thereby provoking controversy over its legitimacy.1 The online public claimed that Muslims had illegally taken away the choice to drink or not to drink alcohol, which was implied by constitutional law. The legality of the ban was further problematized following the violence of the March 1, 2014, Kunming Railway station knife attack, which the provincial government blamed on the religious revival in Shadian. Since state media reported that the perpetrators of attack were Uyghur separatists who had previously stayed in Shadian, the town was officially labeled a seat of ethnoreligious radicalism and extremism. When I arrived to do my fieldwork in August 2014, Shadian was undergoing a slew of controversial policies aimed at purging the local religious world of its alleged illegality. The online reaction to the ban as well as the official response to it are reflective of the recent ideological shifts in China. Determined to govern the country according to the rule of law, the current leadership increasingly perceives the very ethnoreligious difference previously recognized by it as illegal, thereby institutionalizing Islamophobia and prejudice toward ethnic minorities whose adherence to Islamic culture is understood to be the source of that difference. The widespread ­public anxiety over the so-called Islamization of China (zhongguo ­yisilanhua) is the direct consequence of this problematic shift. The term is a popular online hashtag and was also on the lips of officials in Shadian. Notably, if political contestations over “threatened” secular values in the West unfold around women’s headscarves, in China they accrete over qingzhen food. The term is a translation of the Islamic concept of halal, but it also marks ethnic boundaries between Chinese Muslim minorities and the Han majority. For instance, an onboard qingzhen-certified snack meal became the subject of a fierce online debate when one of the passengers of a domestic flight shared a picture of his meal on July 6, 2016, and asked: “Why is it that on a flight where many passengers are non-Muslims my right to select non-Muslim food is not observed?” This came after the nationwide controversy earlier in April about whether the State Council would pass a proposal to standardize the licensing of qingzhen food. Not only was the proposal turned down; its author was also removed from his post. The Party-state’s effort to draw clear boundaries between religion and the state, in a nation where ethnic diversity is a structural element, contributes to the popular sentiment that Islamic revival among Muslim minorities occurs independently of the secular state, a sentiment



Ban on Alcohol

59

that only calls for more governmental intervention. The most recent governmental battle against the “Saudi-ization” and “Arabization” of an otherwise “pristine” Chinese Islam seems to be the latest to show how this logic comes full circle. This article seeks to critically interrogate this claim through the controversy over the alcohol ban in Shadian. The prohibition of intoxicants in Islam is complicated, not least because it involves differences in definition as well as in the modalities of appropriate action, and its official authorization by the Chinese government adds another level of complexity. Therefore, my aim here is not to deliver yet another judgment about the ban’s legal status. Rather, I want to cast light on the mechanisms of power that compel us to see the ban only through the legal binaries. Bearing in mind that such concepts as the secular and the religious are interdependent and predicated on state power (Asad 1993, 2003), I am curious about the Chinese government’s interest in the appropriation of Islamic doctrine in Sha­ dian. Instead of putting the ban in relation to abstract language of rights devoid of context, I join the recent scholarship that links spectacular religious revival in China to the missionary-like activity of the state (Ashiwa and Wank 2009; Goossaert and Palmer 2011; Yang 2008) in order to contextualize the ban within the historically specific relationship between the municipal government and local Hui Muslims. Tracing how the former came to recognize interest in Islam of the latter as a tool to tame the ethnoreligious community it otherwise viewed as troublesome, I show that far from being a deviation from the secular rule, the ban was actually a direct outcome of it. I then focus on the motivations behind the ban as narrated by some Hui Muslims who supported it back in 2008. Following insights into the nature of religious practices as excavated by Mahmood (2005) and Hirschkind (2006), I suggest that for these Muslims the Quranic prohibition on alcohol meant to perform a kind of moral critique of local affairs, past and present. Last, I shift my attention to the operation of Chinese law in order to trace how the inconsistencies integral to its structure allow the government to first sanction the ban but then declare it illegal. To that end, I illustrate two competing types of legal authority—one the law itself, the other a Party official whose very figure prevails over the law he merely claims to uphold— that coexist in some tension in China. I conclude by offering one humble but important counterintuitive suggestion. It is not so much local expressions of Islam but the operation of the Chinese law itself

60

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

that produces the ethnoreligious tensions that the government then seeks to combat in the name of secular law. Secular Regimes and Religious Norms: Grounds of Commensurability I stayed in Shadian for two years, from August 2014 until 2016, and although I came to do my fieldwork after the ban was annulled by the government, I was still able to gain insight into what life was like in Shadian before the ban via interviews with local residents. In our discussions, many local Hui Muslims told me that not only were government officials present at the meeting where the plan to make Shadian “alcohol free” was announced, but they also actively participated in the discussions regarding the precise methods by which to make it so. For instance, they authorized the assembly of a special “alcohol-prohibiting team” (jinjiu xiaozu) and requested that the local police office be part of its campaigns for raising communal awareness. These campaigns included patrolling the town by car once a week and defining places on the streets where banners should be hung. They also allowed the team to do occasional visits to local food outlets that advertised themselves as qingzhen (halal) but sold beer, and they specified that the police officers should be present in order to ensure that such visits were “conducted in accordance with the law and no one’s rights were violated.” Thus, the rigor with which the government authorities were involved in implementing Quranic injunction regarding prohibition of alcohol took me by surprise. Yet how to explain it? In recent years, many scholars who trace the formation of secularism as a political principle show that this principle presupposes modern governments’ continuous regulation of the religious sphere in accord with those definitions of religion that make it amenable for state control (Asad 2003; Bhargava 2000; Connolly 1999). They argue that any inquiry into why some religious practices are valorized over others requires an understanding of the political context in which such practices are embedded. Following this critical perspective, many studies on religion in China have suggested that the Chinese state has always been fashioning religion. If, for instance, the Imperial government was preoccupied with the standardization of ritual, the Maoist regime held that religious practice is an archaic remnant of a feudalist past and anticipated that religion would be gradually gone with the



Ban on Alcohol

61

advance of socialism. Impatient to see this development, however, Mao decided to emancipate the Chinese masses from old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. The Cultural Revolution he initiated instigated violence on a national scale, but the revolutionary demands to dance propaganda songs in the mosque instead of praying, wear swine skin, and mimic the grunting of pigs in Shadian culminated in the country’s biggest documented incident of ethnoreligious violence, one that claimed the lives of more than fourteen hundred Muslims. The letter of redress that the Reform-era government issued for Sha­ dian did little to contain the widespread ethnic hatred that the decade of the Revolution gave rise to while prioritization of private tin mining and rolling out favorable tax exemption policies for the Shadian Hui subsequently brought with them a rampant heroin addiction pandemic. Afraid of another clash with local Muslims, the government was reluctant to intervene and the political label of “problematic ethnoreligious community” first attached to Shadian during the Cultural Revolution was becoming a way of local life. Things started to change when the first participants of the Tabligh-i Jama’at transnational pietistic reformation movement came to the town by the end the 1990s. Through the participation in the movement’s activities that Stewart focuses on in this volume, many local Hui Muslims of the marginalized Shadian including drug addicts were reintroduced to Islamic forms of life. According to the sketchy statistics of the movement, around one-third of Shadian’s fourteen thousand residents took part in Jama’at activities in 2014. Since they managed to officially register one of the local mosques where the Jama’at conducted its grassroots work as a “center of moral education” (daode xuexi zhongxin), Shadian has at times been visited by hundreds of Tabligh-i participants from all across China. Local Muslims’ cultivation of a moral self, and their engagement in practices of hospitality toward others stabilized communal relationships with the higher government. It was at this critical moment that local officials recognized the taming power that Islam had over the community. They were pleased with the transformative effect of the Jama’at activities to the extent that the municipal branch of the police force bestowed an award on one of its participants who was previously infamous across the province for heroin smuggling. Therefore, the ban on alcohol was not a random government decision but a further step in the authorization of this newly emerging image of an ethno­ religious minority. Indeed, a local police website advertised success of

62

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

the ban with statistical information that the number of alcoholrelated juvenile cases dropped to 4 compared to 131 reported in 2007, a year before the ban. The morally loaded “alcohol free” title of the town was the last addition to the collection of such legitimate recognitions as an “ethnic unity exemplary town” (minzu tuanjie shifanqu) and “exemplary hygienic town” (quanzhou weisheng zhen), which had already been bestowed on Shadian by the government. Another reason behind the political interest in the Islamic prohibition on alcohol comes from the nature of the national ethnic policy. Scholars working on Chinese ethnic culture and diversity acknowledge the fact that while China has always been inhabited by various cultural groups, recognition of their difference as an ethnic one was crucial for the formation of the modern Chinese state (Gladney 2003; Harrell 2001; Litzinger 2000; Schein 2000). The Hui were recognized as a separate ethnic minority on the basis of their Islamic culture, adherence to which made them different from the Han majority (Gladney 1991, 1998). During the Cultural Revolution, therefore, labeling Islamic culture as counterrevolutionary and superstitious amounted to a highly controversial claim that this designation applied to the entire Hui ethnic identity. And in 2007, when the prefectural government proposed to promote Shadian into a four-star “Hui ethnic minority cultural tourism town” (huizu wenhua lvyou xiaozhen), the link between religious and ethnic identity was one such legally legitimate way to create perceived difference. In this way, absence of alcohol within the administrative premises of the town was meant to make Shadian exotic for the gaze of domestic tourists. The government organ that was both involved in giving an award to the former drug dealer and in promoting the town as a site of cultural tourism was the “working team” (gongzuodui). Initially invented by Mao with the aim of circumventing administrative hierarchies and maintaining direct contact between the center and the local masses, the team is an organ within the People’s Liberation Army that consists of reliable cadres who are temporarily dispatched to the countryside to aid in the implementation of important national campaigns.2 Shadian first met the work team at the outset of the ­Cultural Revolution when they came to carry out the “smash the four olds” campaign. After the Shadian Incident, the work teams were tasked with overseeing the rehabilitation policies. Back in 2008, it was members of the working team who presided at the meeting where the decision to ban alcohol was made.



Ban on Alcohol

63

Against the backdrop of the public sentiment that Islamization in China happens at the expense of secular ideals backed by the state, my aim in this section was to illustrate that the Chinese government was directly involved in the imposition of Islamic prohibition. Far from being an autonomous revival of religious tradition, the case of the ban in Shadian is a vivid example of a contingent historicity of the deep entwinement and interdependence of the secular and the religious. Yet it is precisely the widespread assumption of the incommensurability of the Quranic prohibition with the legal framework of the state that ignited the online aversion toward the ban. To problematize this assumption, I now turn to local interpretations of the ban to give greater visibility to the kind of moral reasoning behind local M ­ uslims’ collaboration with the government on this issue. The Discursive Morality of the Ban In their discussion of piety movements in the Middle East, Mahmood (2005) and Hirschkind (2006) contend that Islamic norms are understood as virtues that help Muslims deal with and inhabit this world according to certain visions of morality. Their point is instructive, for it complicates our understanding of shari’a, not as a set of mechanistic rules that Muslims desire to instill but as ethical guidelines through which Muslims hone pious dispositions in order to inhabit this world meaningfully. I also take from their analysis that such endeavor simultaneously presents a form of social and cultural critique. Adopting this perspective, I would like to suggest that for local Muslims who supported the ban, Quranic injunctions regarding alcohol served as a moral discourse in which the incident’s violence, the government policies, and they themselves as individuals all played a significant role. This moral reasoning alongside the Islamic ideal concerning the forbidden substance, in which each of these intentionalities are embedded, complicates the hegemony of the legal language in comprehending the ban. Abdullah Ma, a practicing Muslim in his fifties and a holder of a managerial position in the local mining and smelting company, shared with me his vision of the ban: During the Shadian Incident, we suffered a lot, so the government apologized and allowed us to be the first to do private mining. I was not a knowledgeable Muslim at that time, but, given the freedom of religious

64

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

belief, I thought that religious education was important for Hui. So I donated a lot for construction of mosques and madrasas. In the 1990s, not everyone could go on the hajj, but I am proud that I could. My wife and I started to pray regularly and took [our faith] seriously after that. As everyone’s economic conditions and religiosity improved, we decided to build the biggest mosque in China. But the construction was done by the migrant workers from Sichuan province. They were nonMuslims, so they consumed pork and alcohol in the houses they rented from us. The Prophet said that a good Muslim acts when he sees something wrong happening,3 so it was our responsibility to show them that here we practice Islam and to ask them to respect our tradition.

Abdullah’s narrative was shared by many of those who got rich on tin mining. In this account, Islamic tradition and Chinese economic reform seem to share a single teleology of progress. Yet it is not fruitful to read him as arguing that there is indeed a simple causal relationship between amassing wealth and increasing religiosity, because it downplays a particular set of responsibilities that called him to use his wealth in a particular way. Note also that he and Muslims like him foregrounded an entirely new challenge faced by the community: the presence of non-Muslim migrant workers. For him, this challenge was a moral one for he is concerned not so much with these workers’ presence as with the set of ethical problems posited by their food habits. As Shadian flourished economically, it necessitated an influx of migrant workers. They constructed Hui public and private places, but they also consumed things considered unlawful in a Muslim community.4 For people like him, it was important to raise non-Muslim awareness of Hui religious customs through the ban. Thus, he did not aim to change the drinking habits of the Han people; rather, he wanted to protect the purity of a Hui place. His decision to ban alcohol was directed not toward redrawing boundaries of the legal but toward protecting those who had been granted freedom of religious belief. Compare his vision with the explanation given by Yousoof Lin, a truck driver in his forties and a Tabligh-i Jamaat participant: My father died during the Incident. Having no interest in receiving religious or public education, I went to the mountains to do my mining, but the money I earned poisoned me. Like many others, I was introduced to heroin. At first we thought it was just for fun, like gambling



Ban on Alcohol

65

and women, but we got stuck. For nine years of drug addiction, I remember all my days were the same. Then the da’wah came to town in the early 2000s and changed our lives. I began learning Islamic ethics [imani, yakini].5 Oh, Ruslan, I wish I had started learning earlier. However, Allah says that He does not change people until they are ready to change themselves.6 The ban on alcohol in Shadian enabled Muslims to ban it within themselves.

According to Yousoof, money from the mountains tore the community apart. Indeed, local people told me that in the late 1990s, drug addiction was at its peak, most of the addicts being uneducated youth who came from families who lost kin in the violence of the Shadian Incident. The police saw it as another sensitive ethnoreligious issue, so they preferred not to intervene. Social turmoil did not stop until the first practitioners of the Tabligh-i Jama’at da’wah movement came into town and gave men like Yousoof a sense of positive motion in their lives. As the religious situation in Shadian began to change, so did the communal attitude toward things forbidden in Islam. The very act of banning, therefore, was a local exercise of piety, a certain form of practice through which the community was able to test its own potentiality. Now, consider Ali Liu, an old and respected haji,7 who voices yet another perspective on the ban: Shadian is a place of martyrs; every patch of its earth has martyrs’ blood spilled on it. We can practice our religion freely because of the blessings [du’a’yi]8 of those who sacrificed their lives for Islam. Unlike then, today’s Shadian enjoys freedom of religion; but why do so many people still not engage in Islamic practice? People here in Shadian are busy constructing mosques, but what are they worth if nobody worships there? Our young people are lured to the modern lifestyle, they forget to honor the martyrs, and instead of following the Prophet, they emulate Han people’s habits. The image of Islam suffers [pohuai], and we must all take responsibility. The Prophet said that we as Muslims should command what is right and forbid what is reprehensible, so should not we raise awareness among the younger generation before it is too late for Islam in China?

Unlike Abdullah and Yousoof, Ali saw Islamic tradition not as reviving but as instead in a state of decline. He compared the bygone

66

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

times of the Incident, when Muslims wanted to practice Islam but could not, with the current atmosphere of religious freedom when Muslims have all the opportunities and yet lack intimacy with the religious tradition. He was concerned that Islam was becoming eroded by the norms and habits of the Han majority society. But it was the passivity and negligence of the younger generation in the face of this dissolution of tradition that terrified him most. Indeed, during my fieldwork, many people shared a common sentiment that Shadian was losing the younger generation to smoking, gambling, debauchery, and synthetic drugs. For people like Ali, the ban was an attempt to reclaim Islamic traditions from the claws of secular lifestyle by passing them on to the next generation. At first, the efforts of Muslim men like Abdullah, Yousoof, and Ali may be read as an instance of modern logic in which living a form of religious life becomes possible only after certain obstacles for the enactment of that religiosity are bracketed. Such a reading, however, is inaccurate, first because it reduces the ethical tradition to a set of religious rules, and second because it equates such enactment with modern law, which proceeds precisely with these binary assumptions of good/evil, legal/illegal, just/unjust. Against such reading, I want to suggest that the intentions of these Muslims make possible a conception of the ban that orients them toward the past, present, and the future of the community in a morally meaningful way. This becomes more apparent if we attend to the temporality of prevention for Abdullah, of potentiality for Yousoof, and of pedagogy for Ali, which are integral to their intentions. They force us to think of the ban not as a life without alcohol, but as a certain form of ethical struggle that sets the community in motion within the quest toward becoming both good Muslims and responsible Chinese citizens. Even though through these narratives the ban emerges as a certain form of social disruption, the things that it aims to disrupt are not the religious freedoms of Chinese people, let alone legal norms by which these people abide. Rather, the ban is an indigenous form of communication with the wider Chinese ­society and a way of dealing with the larger issues that affect the wider Chinese society as well as the Hui living within it. To read the intentions of Shadian Muslims as an attempt to impose legal boundaries based on religious law is to accept a set of modern normative assumptions about religiosity as a social institution existing separate from society.



Ban on Alcohol

67

This understanding of the ban also points to the artificiality of a legal standoff between the ban on alcohol and freedom of religious expression. First, note how Muslims like Abdullah, Yousoof, and Ali regard the government’s current leniency toward religious practice by contrasting it with the political context of the Shadian Incident. They recognize that the implacability of their fidelity to Islamic tradition and the government’s determination to vanquish this tradition reached a deadlock, which could only be broken by resorting to martyrdom. Also note that although they accept that freedom of religious belief was given to them by the current regime, it is what they do with it that becomes constitutive of that freedom. Such an economy of prohibition, far from being an enactment of archaic rules of the past, aims at securing conditions of possibility of their ethnoreligious difference in the Chinese society. Only by attending to the contextual role that the ban played in the lifeworld of this community can we begin to see that the ban was not making any legal claims but was a moral discourse that addressed local issues of historic and social concern. Yet, given that this was the situation at the time of the ban, then how to explain what happened in 2014 when the ban was revoked? What is the larger political context that allows the Chinese government to first authorize the ban and then declare it to be illegal? Since law was so integral both to the online hysteria and to the subsequent government decision, it is necessary to critically dissect its operation. In the next section I turn to the specificity of Chinese law, which can both empower and disempower such religious practices as the ban. Religion and Chinese Law Article 36 of the Chinese Constitution grants its citizens freedom of religious belief. However, the Chinese Constitution is not a supreme law, as the powers it provides are subject to Communist Party leadership. The case of religious freedom is illustrative of this institutional arrangement, as Article 36 is not supplemented by any legislative text outlining the way that courts should adjudicate religious cases. In 1982, the Party issued its famous Document 19, which acknowledged the “religious question” in China, its protracted nature, as well as its connection with other issues, such as questions of ethnicity, education, and charity. Extensive as it is, it did not (could not?) address the basic questions that government officials face on the ground: “What is a religion?” “What is a religious group?” “What is

68

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

a religious activity?” “What is its legitimate form?” Instead, in 1986 the Central Religious Affairs Bureau allowed local governments to issue their own religious regulations. The first of these was drafted in Guangzhou in 1991, and since then the practice of drawing up administrative regulations that are both reflective of, and bounded by local specificity, has become standard practice in regulating religious affairs in China. For instance, in Heilongjiang Province, which borders on Russia, the Orthodox Church has its official association even though Orthodox Christianity is not a nationally recognized religion. The regulation of Islam is also regionally variable, such that, for example, a Muslim man living in Gansu province has to shave his beard off once he enters the neighboring Xinjiang region because Xinjiang regulations state that growing beards is illegal. While one’s religiosity does not change with travel from one part of China to the other, the way such religiosity is administratively regulated does. At first glance this may seem to create an ambiguous legal environment in which inconsistencies between regional promulgations fill the abstract national law with much-needed flexibility. However, this uncertainty may not always work in favor of the locality, as these administrative regulations may always be amended in favor of the state’s secular power. The fact that the Party and its operations are equated to the law and have equal powers creates two corridors along which legal authority is channeled: legal texts and Party officials. The ban on alcohol in Shadian manifests this duality well. For Muslims who attended the meeting back in 2008, the legal status of the ban was unquestionable because the very presence of Party officials made any reference to legal texts or rights redundant. The working team as a representative of the state, the occasion of the meeting in the mosque, and various forms of support expressed by the team provided, to borrow Austin’s terms, felicitous conditions to make the ban legal (Austin 1971). However, a few years later when the provincial government framed the ban as an instance of “illegal religious activity,” it turned to another form of legal authority: the law. But how to undo what was already legal? First of all, the government reasoned with the conception of religion as a social institution with its own norms. During my fieldwork, many Muslims expressed to me the sense of dismay they felt when they could not answer the question that United Front Department officials repeatedly asked them: “According to which law did you ban alcohol?” The question here does not demand reference to



Ban on Alcohol

69

Chinese statutory law so much as it naturalizes a certain conceptualization of religion as similar to law. In this view, the ban is understood as a bare instantiation of shari’a. The inability of Muslims to reply to the question, then, is due to their hesitation to accept this implicit assumption about the ban. Second, the reduction of the ban into a religious rule stripped it of contextual specificity. This step was critical for it necessarily allows the government to dismantle legal power of the ban. Local Muslims were told that the ban was illegal because it violated the Constitution, which grants citizens the right to choose whether or not to drink alcohol. They were puzzled by this conclusion: “But the police also prohibit drinking before driving. Does that mean that it violates the Constitution too?” The absolutist pretension of the government assessment is predicated on the notion of “freedom of choice,” a quality of an individual that makes him or her a free subject of the state. Insofar as the consumption of alcohol is a choice made by an individual who is also a citizen of the state, it is understood as an act constitutive of Chinese citizenship. Any desecration of such choice is, then, violation of both the individual and the national. Bringing the ban into opposition with the Chinese constitution also establishes familiar oppositions, whereby the latter’s emancipatory, rational, and objective qualities are asserted through emphasis on the restrictive, dogmatic, and subjective characteristics of the former. Such categorical oppositions render the Chinese law and its Islamic opponent incommensurable with each other to the extent that places where they apply are imagined to be geographically different. It is no wonder, then, that in the online assault on the ban Shadian was frequently called “Shadianstan” to express the derogatory exclusion of it from the Chinese polity. “The ban,” the government argued further, “is also illegal due to its radical [jiduan] obstruction of “public order [richang chengxu].” According to the rule of law in China, religious people can enforce religious norms only within the premises of a religious institution. This is because such places are physically separated from the public sphere. Such assumptions about religious places within social spaces parallel normative conceptions about modern religiosity itself. Several scholars have noticed how such conceptions are rooted in Protestant hermeneutics, which regard “proper” religion primarily as a matter of private belief that is kept separate from the public sphere (Fernando 2014). Since the public/private divide is essential to the normative model of the nation-state where the rule of law specifies

70

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

the boundaries between the two (the one that the current leadership so vigorously aspires), Shadian Muslims were seen as committing an error by collapsing the two. It is also worth noting that the public order allegedly threatened by the ban and other religious activities in Shadian, by virtue of them being viewed as expressions of religious radicalism and extremism, is not a flat sum of diverse individuals but one suffused with various hierarchies of power, gender, class, and ethnicity, among others. Indeed, several contributors to this volume (especially Harris, Dawut, and Byler) focus on how Islam in China complicates the highly hierarchical Chinese public order. Recent critical analysis of legal traditions in nation-states shows that the doctrine that every citizen is equal before the law, and the belief in the neutrality of the public sphere, are always suffused with hierarchies and inequalities that reflect the interests and concerns of the majority of the population (Brown 2006; Mahmood 2016). For instance, commenting on the nature of policies to “maintain stability” in Xinjiang, Tom Cliff suggests that the actions of the government toward the Uyghur population were, in turn, defined by the actions of Uyghurs toward the Han population (Cliff 2016). The Chinese state remains blind to many Uyghur practices as long as they are not seen as threatening to the Han inhabitants of the region. This insight is instructive, for it reminds us that the discourse of law and public order in China is historically interlinked with presumed Han superiority and chauvinism. In Shadian, the illegality of the implementation of a religious norm by an ethnic Muslim minority on a public order defined by Han culture, comes not from disruption of ethnic equality, but because of the violation of permissible ethnic minority behavior. Therefore, in its effort to instill justice into the public order, the government brings about effects that are, paradoxically, quite the opposite from those that were intended. Far from emancipating the secular public from the illegal religious norms, it reifies existing ethnic hierarchies. The government objection to the ban following the Kunming Railway station attack led to confusion on the part of the community. During my fieldwork I saw how this change in the political context led local Muslims to assert that the ban did not conform to law but neither did it break the law, that is, it was reasonable (heli, buhefa, dan bu weifa). I hope that my analysis illustrates the modes of C ­ hinese legal structure that allow for this assertion. Rather than recapitulate



Ban on Alcohol

71

my points, therefore, let me conclude by offering some reflections on the kind of fieldwork methodology that has provided me with these insights into Chinese law. Although it varies from case to case, the basic premise of ethnographic fieldwork is to make sense of “their” practices in terms of “our” concepts. However, the academic rush to “assimilate” a given practice into Western terminology about indigenous ways of living necessarily refracts the indigenous ways of life in which such practice is embedded, because these particular practices do not make any claims to cross-cultural validity, while Western terminology does. Armed with Western knowledge about the religion of others, I first tried to understand the reality of a religious norm by talking to those members of the community who were cynical about it. However, it soon became apparent to me that the people I talked to already shared with me the assumption that the ban was illegal. I realized that my analytical labor should be directed to problematizing this assumption rather than consolidating it. In other words, my ethnographic question was no longer about the meaning of the ban; instead it was now about the way the ban powerfully intervened into and complicated dominant frames of reference that were otherwise taken for granted. This task was much more challenging, because it touched on the very sensibilities that our modern ways of living seek to protect, but only then did I start to see beyond the legal binaries that claimed authority over my informants and myself. Fieldwork, I realized, is an ethical experience as well as an ethnographic project. I hope that this article will provide insights into what one can gather once one becomes self-reflexive about the power relationships that go with the academic endeavor of working and translating between different traditions, practices, and concepts. This should mean not that we abandon our Western terminology altogether, but that should come as a recognition that the dominant academic epistemologies through which religious phenomena in the world today are analyzed share a certain trajectory with the development of a secular form of life that feeds on critiquing such phenomena. This recognition is especially important because it allows space for critical reflection on how the concepts we use reveal more about us than about the people we intend to study. At a time when such epistemologies organize and condense public and political knowledge of Islam, thereby necessitating certain interventions and transformations, it is more important than ever that we draw attention to these trajectories through our analysis.

72

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

Notes 1. Chinese Hui Muslims are notorious for seeking ways to uphold the Quranic prohibition on alcohol; see Gillette (2000) for an analysis of an unsuccessful attempt elsewhere. 2. See Perry (2019) for a sustained discussion of this political institution. 3. Here Abdullah refers to the Hadith of the Prophet, who said, “Whoever amongst you sees an evil, he must change it with his hand; if he is unable to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is unable to do so, then with his heart; and that is the weakest of Faith.” The hadith is taken from Riyad as-Salihin (The gardens of the righteous), a book that enjoys popularity among the religious study circles in Shadian. The Chinese version, Liyade Shengxunji, was translated from Arabic by Imam Ma Fengde. 4. During my fieldwork, I heard many Muslims complaining to me that the Han tenants still cooked pork and consumed alcohol in the flats they rented from Muslims. The tenancy contract has a clause specifying that “Shadian is a Muslim minority area, no pork and alcohol is allowed in the premises.” This clause was also present on the contract I signed when I rented an apartment. 5. Muslims whom I worked with draw on many words of Arabic and Urdu origin to explain their religious comportment. Here the word imani refers to the Arabic imaan, which may be translated as “faith.” Yakini refers to the Arabic term yaqeen, which means “having certainty in one’s affairs in everyday life.” Neither term has a written equivalent, but both are used widely in speech. 6. Yusuf refers to verse 11 of the Quranic Surah 13, which says: “For each one are successive [angels] before and behind him to protect him by the decree of Allah. Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. And when Allah intends for a people ill, there is no repelling in it. And there is not for them besides Him any patron.” I use the Qur’an translated and edited by Saheeh International Translation. 7. Haji refers to a person who has fulfilled the religious duty of making pilgrimage to Mecca. 8. Du’a’yi is a transliteration of the Arabic term du’a, which means a prayer or a supplication.

References Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ashiwa, Yoshiko, and David L. Wank. 2009. Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.



Ban on Alcohol

73

Austin, John L. 1971. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhargava, Rajeev, ed. 2000. Secularism and Its Critics. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Brown, Wendy. 2006. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cliff, Tom. 2016. Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Connolly, William E. 1999. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fernando, Mayanthi L. 2014. The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gillette, Maris B. 2000. Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gladney, Dru C. 1991. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University. ———. 1998. Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality. Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College. ———. 2003. Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group. Goossaert, Vincent, and David A. Palmer. 2011. The Religious Question in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harrell, Stevan. 2001. Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Litzinger, Ralph A. 2000. Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2016. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. An-Nawawi, Abu Zakariya Yahya Bin Sharaf. 1974. Gardens of the Righteous: Riyadh as-Salihin of Imam Nawawi. London: Curzon Press. Perry, Elizabeth. 2019. “Work Team.” In Afterlives of Chinese Communism, edited by Christian Sorace and Ivan Franceschini, 325–330. New York: Verso. Qur’an. 1997. Translated and edited by Saheeh International. Jeddah: Abul-Qasim. Schein, Louisa. 2000. Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. 2008. Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chapter 3

Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture” among the Muslim Mongol Pastoralists of Inner Mongolia Thomas WHITE

Y

ou notice Begtei mosque long before you arrive. Its white minarets draw the eye from across the Kööbür Plain,1 a vast area of dunes, saxaul shrubs, and scattered herds of sheep, goats, and camels, in northeastern Alasha League, the westernmost part of Inner Mongolia. Before its rebuilding (completed in 2013), the mosque consisted of nothing more than a few low earthen huts, whose building material did little to distinguish them from the surrounding landscape. On the walls of one of the new side buildings are hung large, professionally printed posters providing the names of the individuals and organizations that contributed to the rebuilding of the mosque. One of these posters is in Chinese, the other in Mongolian, for this mosque is one of only two that serve the roughly two-thousandstrong community of Muslim Mongols, as well as some local Hui. Funding for the rebuilding came from local Muslims (both Mongol and Hui), but also from Hui communities in other parts of Inner Mongolia, and even Ningxia. In the autumn of 2013, to mark the rebuilding of the mosque, a large celebration was held; I discuss that event toward the end of this chapter. There now exists an extensive anthropological literature on the Islamic revival in China, demonstrating how this revival has now spread beyond the heartlands of Chinese Islam to the multiethnic periphery of the country, particularly Yunnan, where some Muslims had formerly shared cultural and religious practices with other minority nationality groups (e.g., Hillman 2004; Mc­Carthy 2005; Caffrey 2014; Atwill 2018; Stewart, this volume). For example, before 2000 in Haba, northwestern Yunnan, 74



Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture”

75

“Islam was to all intents and purposes defunct,” with local Hui participating in “Tibetan Buddhist, Naxi Dongba and other animist practices” (McCarthy 2005, 126). After connections were established with an Arabic school in Shadian, eight hundred kilometers away, religious leaders and funding were sent to the remote community, resulting in the establishment of a large new mosque, and the adoption of markers of piety such as head coverings, leading the anthropologist to speak of a “reconversion” to Islam. Similar instances of “reconversion” were reported in other parts of the province (­McCarthy 2005, 126). The rebuilding of Begtei mosque, with funding from both local Muslims and those from other provinces, would appear to provide yet more evidence of the way in which transregional networks of Muslims in China (see Erie 2016, 315) have facilitated the revival of Islam among communities in peripheral regions. Yet to speak of a “reconversion” to Islam among the Muslim Mongols, if by that term we mean the abandonment of non-Islamic practices, would be misleading. While Kööbür might be remote and peripheral from the perspective of Chinese Islam, it has historically been home to several regionally important Tibetan Buddhist sites. In the Haruuna Mountains, which mark the northern edge of the ­Kööbür Plain, a small Buddhist temple has been rebuilt at the foot of a cliff that bears the miraculous image of a bull camel. The reconstruction of the Temple of the Bull Camel (Mn. Buuryn Süm) was instigated by prominent local Muslim Mongols, and the annual ritual held at the temple is attended largely by Muslim Mongols. One of those involved in the revival of rituals at this temple was Batbagan,2 the former party secretary of a nearby village (Mn. gatsaa), now in his sixties, whose family I came to know well during ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2015. In this chapter I try to provide some solutions to the following ethnographic puzzle: why have Muslim Mongols been involved in both the apparent revitalization of Islam in Kööbür (manifest in the reconstruction of Begtei mosque), and the revitalization of rituals at a Buddhist temple? I argue that this cannot be seen as merely the endurance of a long-standing tradition of religious eclecticism among this community, but must also be understood in the context of the Chinese state’s nationality (Ch. minzu) and cultural heritage policies. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter also seeks to give voice to the diversity of opinion among the Muslim Mongols. Ethnography provides a unique window onto the ways in

76

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

which concepts central to Chinese governmentality since 1949—“religion” (Ch. zongjiao), “culture,” and “nationality”—are deployed and contested in the course of everyday life. The Muslim Mongols of Alasha The origins of the Muslim Mongols remain unclear, subject to contestation among scholars, as well as members of the community. Most agree that their ancestors have been in Alasha since at least the mideighteenth century, when the prince of Alasha returned from fighting the Zunghar in what is now Xinjiang, bringing with him two hundred Turkic captives who were settled in the banner (see Ding 2006). Other scholars suggest that at least some of their ancestors were Islamicized Mongols from Turkestan (An 2009). According to a legend that has some currency among the Muslim Mongols, their ancestors were five grape sellers from Turkestan who were unable to return home from Alasha after they became bankrupt, whereupon they ­married local Mongol women, settled in the banner, and became Mongolized. My informants told me that several Uyghur traders who plied the caravan route between Xinjiang and Baotou in Inner Mongolia, which ran through northern Alasha, also settled among the Muslim Mongols up until the 1950s. Between 1862 and 1877, northwestern China was thrown into turmoil by what is known in China as the Hui Uprising (Ch. Huimin Qiyi). Chinese Muslim forces caused great damage within Alasha, plundering the livestock of local herders, and attacking Buddhist monasteries (Liang 2006, 205–226), as they took revenge on the Mongols for their loyalty to the Qing. The uprising led to the temporary expulsion of Chinese Muslims from Alasha, and left a legacy of interethnic suspicion. Nineteenth-century Mongolian literature responded to this unrest by portraying the Mongols, Manchu, and Chinese as united by Buddhism against the Muslims (Elverskog 2006, 139). Indeed, over the course of the Qing era, the association of the Mongols with Tibetan Buddhism was hardened. This is particularly the case in Alasha, owing to its comparative proximity to the Tibetan Plateau. Against this background, it is particularly remarkable that the Muslim Mongols were allowed in 1890 to build a mosque, known as Holboo mechid, on the Kööbür Plain. It seems likely that permission to build a mosque was granted because of the loyalty of the Muslim



Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture”

77

Mongols in fighting against their coreligionists (Yang 2004, 18). In 1920 permission was granted by the banner for another mosque to be built to the north of Holboo. This became known as Begtei mechid. It appears that in the late Qing and early Republican periods, some Chinese Muslims from Ningxia were also incorporated into the Muslim Mongols. After 1931, for example, over one thousand Chinese Muslims from Ningxia fled to Alasha to escape conscription by the Muslim warlord Ma Hongkui, and some of them married local Muslim Mongols (Ding 2006, 27). They joined Chinese Muslims who had already arrived in Alasha to work in the salt trade or as hired laborers for local Mongol pastoralists. Again, some of these were incorporated into the Muslim Mongol community (Ding 2006, 24). Today, Muslim Mongols belonging to the Ma and Yang lineages (Mn. obog) are widely recognized to have Chinese Muslim ancestry. In addition, there is a significant community of herders who are today classified as Hui who live in the vicinity of Begtei mosque, many of whom are the descendants of the large numbers of Chinese Muslims who worked in the caravan trade.3 In the 1950s, teams were twice dispatched to assess the nationality status of the Muslim Mongols of Alasha (Ding 2006, 39). Within the banner they were known as the “Mongol Hui” (Mn. Mongol Hotung; Ch. Menggu Huihui or Meng Hui), though to the Hui from Ningxia they were the “turban Hui” (Ch. Chantou Huihui), a term that suggested their Xinjiang connections.4 While the Hui had been granted their own nationality solely because they differed in religious terms from the Han (Gladney 1991), it was decided that religious difference alone did not provide enough grounds for the creation of a separate Muslim Mongol nationality, and they were instead classified as members of Mongol nationality.5 Their use of the Mongolian language and their pastoral “way of life” (Ch. shenghuo fangshi) were defining factors here. Their numbers were also deemed too small to merit the creation of a separate nationality (Ding 2006, 39).6 Today a variety of ethnonyms are used by the Muslim Mongols to refer to themselves. Older members of the community, in particular, will often use the term Hotung to distinguish themselves from surrounding Mongols, whom they refer to as Mongol. However, the use of this ethnonym in the public sphere was regularly disparaged, since it is the Mongolian equivalent of the Chinese Hui, referring to the nationality from which the Muslim Mongols were keen to ­distinguish themselves. Instead, the unwieldy term “members of the

78

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

Mongol nationality who believe in Islam” (Mn. Islam shütlegtei Mongol ündesten) was preferred. As this preference suggests, an effect of the Chinese state’s nationality classification has been to make the Muslim Mongols identify strongly with the Mongol nationality. This identification has been reinforced through the education system, as Muslim Mongols are educated with other Mongols in Mongolian-language schools (Yang 2004, 20). Islam and Care for the Dead Given this strong identification with the Mongol nationality, which is normally associated with Tibetan Buddhism rather than Islam, it is worth explaining why the Muslim Mongols continue to identify with Islam, to attend the mosque, and to donate substantial sums to its renovation. In this section I argue that one central reason for the survival of Islam among the Muslim Mongols is that it is the medium through which care for the dead is practiced. I also seek to show how the events at which the dead are prayed for provide occasions for the blurring of the boundary between the Muslim Mongols and the Hui, a boundary that at other times looms large in the social life of the Kööbür region. The Muslim Mongols assemble in their hundreds on the Kööbür Plain three times a year. Two of these events (Eid al-Adha and Eid alFitr)7 take place at Begtei mosque, while the third takes place during the summer at a burial ground known as Arsu, which lies to the northeast of Begtei, but where there is no mosque. Another burial ground lies next to Begtei mosque. This practice of burial distinguishes the Muslim Mongols from other Mongols in Alasha, who today cremate their dead, and who lack communal cemeteries. At one or more of these three annual events, extended families (both men and women) will gather to pray at the graves of their deceased close relatives.8 This involves an ahong9 (today these are almost all Hui) leading the relatives in prayer by the graveside. Each family will also normally sacrifice a sheep or goat at the event, often explaining that they do so to provide food for their dead relatives. These practices also take place at Begtei mosque when the Muslim Mongols assemble for Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr.10 The presence of deceased forebears at Begtei is often cited as a reason for supporting the mosque materially. When I asked Batbagan why he was providing a sheep for the celebration of the reconstruction of Begtei



Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture”

79

mosque in 2013, he told me that this was because Begtei was where his ancestors (Mn. deed) were. Praying for one’s dead at Begtei or Arsu inevitably involves contact with Hui, whether ahong or ordinary herders who live in the vicinity, whose dead are also buried in the cemetery next to Begtei mosque. At Eid al-Adha in 2013 I even talked to a Hui man who told me he had traveled up from Ningxia with his family “for a day out” (Ch. zhuan yi zhuan) and explained that he had donated to the reconstruction of the mosque. He told me that Muslims were “one family” (Ch. yige jia). The Hui anthropologist Ding Mingjun (2006), who attended one of these ceremonies at Begtei Mosque in 2003, argues that in Muslim Mongols’ relations with the Hui, it is their shared religion that predominates (Ch. wei qianti), rather than their different nationalities. In the latter part of this chapter I provide evidence which suggests that Ding’s claim is overstated. For now, however, I want to draw on my ethnography to demonstrate how ceremonies and Begtei can also provide occasions for the expression of cultural, as well as religious, commonality between the Muslim Mongols and the Hui. In the autumn of 2013 I traveled with Batbagan to Begtei, to attend the celebration of Eid al-Adha. We arrived on the evening before the ­celebration, and Batbagan decided that we would spend the night in the house of Guo Xingjian, a Hui camel herder who lived close to the mosque, and acted as its caretaker. Guo’s forebears are buried in the cemetery behind Begtei, along with other Hui and Muslim ­Mongol families. Guo speaks fluent Mongolian, and he and Batbagan chatted happily about camels for several hours. The next morning Batbagan and Guo said they would fast until they got to the mosque (Mn. matsagtai yabah), but they offered me some food. I said that I would go without too, but Guo said that this was unnecessary, telling me in Mongolian, “You’re not from the same root as us” (Mn. ta manus neg ündes bish). As we walked the short distance to the mosque, Batbagan and Guo discussed the Mongolian names for certain types of grasses. Batbagan told me that Guo Xingjian was such a skilled camel herder that he could recognize the hoofprints of his own camels in the sand. He said that Guo Xingjian was a “true Mongol herder” (Mn. jinhen Mongol malchin). Batbagan then mentioned that he had been asked to gather objects relating to the region’s pastoralist heritage for an exhibition that would be held at the celebration to mark the rebuilding of Begtei. He asked Guo if he still had any of the cushions

80

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

(Mn. zaas) that were traditionally placed between the camel and their load when they were used to transport goods. Guo said he thought he probably did. As we shall see, this conversation is remarkable in the context of contemporary ideas of cultural heritage in Alasha, which posit “camel culture” as the possession of the Mongol nationality. Alasha “Camel Culture” and the Sacred Landscape of the Haruuna Mountains The Haruuna Mountains are home to several important ­Buddhist sites. Around fifteen kilometers to the east of the Temple of the Bull Camel lies the Temple of the Red Pagoda (Mn. Ulaan Subragyn Süm), established at the foot of a phallic rock formation. East of this is the famous Monastery of the Caves (Mn. Aguin Süm), established at a cave where the Indian saint Padmasambhava (Mn. Lobonchinbo) is said to have crushed a demon (Mn. shülmüs) under a huge stone, still visible today. The Monastery of the Caves is linked “geo-spiritually” to both the Temple of the Red Pagoda (as the female to its male), and to the Temple of the Bull Camel. Padmasambhava is said to have ridden a bull camel (Mn. buur) on his way to destroy the demon in the cave; after Padmasambhava had destroyed the demon, the bull camel was transmogrified into a dark imprint on the sheer cliff face of a nearby mountain, where it remains to this day. The three temples are still thought of as making up a single “parish,” since they are all associated with the unreformed Nyingma or “Red Hat” sect of Tibetan Buddhism (Charleux 2002). However, in 1928 the county (Ch. xian) of Dengkou was carved out of the territory of Alasha, taking the Monastery of the Caves with it.11 Today it is still part of Dengkou County, now in Bayannuur Municipality, an overwhelmingly Han, agricultural administrative unit. State territorialization has had a significant effect on the religious landscape of the region. While they did occasionally attend the annual ritual at the Monastery of the Caves, Batbagan’s family did not contribute to it materially—by donating livestock, for example. When I asked why, Sarna, Batbagan’s wife, explained that “it’s not our place [Mn. manai gazar bish], it’s in Bayanuur.” Once merely a subsidiary of the Monastery of the Caves, the Temple of the Bull Camel has gained a new prominence due to its inclusion under the framework of “Alasha camel culture” (Mn. temeen soyol; Ch. luotuo wenhua). This discourse began to emerge in the



Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture”

81

early 2000s, as the local government in Alasha sought to exploit the developmental potential of culture, a trend that has occurred across China (Oakes 2006). Alasha had long been famous for its camels, even if their numbers had declined precipitously since the early 1990s, as a result of drought, as well as the state’s grassland management policies, mining, and the urbanization of herders (White 2016). Mongol intellectuals took advantage of the state’s enthusiasm for cultural heritage projects in order to defend the pastoralist traditions that are so central to Mongol identity (Khan 1996). These were now repackaged as “camel culture.”12 In 2002, “the camel husbandry customs [Ch. xisu] of the Mongol nationality—camel veneration, camel racing and the craft of camel tack” formed part of Alasha’s contribution to China’s national list of intangible cultural heritage (Huqun 2010). While camel racing and camel tack were uncontroversial, some work had to be done to justify the inclusion of “camel veneration” (Ch. ji tuo). Official documents seek to distinguish these rituals from “pure religious activities” (Ch. chun zongjiao huodong), in that they do not involve praying to a “higher power” (Ch. shangcang shenling) but are directed at the substance (Ch. shiti) of the camel itself (Huqun 2010, 21). Similar attempts to quarantine (celebrated) “culture” from (stigmatized) “religion” have been noted in other parts of China (e.g., Chao 1996). Such attempts must of course be seen in the context of the repeated efforts by twentieth-century Chinese governments to categorize and then expunge “superstition” (Ch. mixin) in their quest for modernization (Goossaert and Palmer 2011). The Kööbür region has emerged as a center of camel culture, owing to the historical role of its camels in the region’s caravan trade, to the presence of the Temple of the Bull Camel, and to the success of its camels in regional camel races. These races bring the Muslim Mongols of Kööbür into contact with non-Muslim Mongols from across Alasha. In 2004 a group of Mongol elites living in Bayanhot, the capital of Alasha, coordinated the reconstruction of a small temple at the foot of the famous cliff. These included the Muslim Mongol Altanuul, Sarna’s uncle, and a close associate of Batbagan’s. Before retirement, he had occupied a prominent position in the Alasha Left Banner People’s Political Consultative Conference (Ch. Zhengxie). Since then, organization of the annual ritual has rotated among local Muslim Mongol families, including Batbagan’s, though Altanuul continues to play an important role. This ritual centers on the

82

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

veneration of a sacred cairn (Mn. oboo) at the foot of the Bull Camel Mountain. Lamas from the Monastery of the Cave are invited to conduct the ritual, but they are not the hosts of the event. When I attended the ceremony in 2013, Altanuul, in his role as host, gave a speech to the assembled lamas and official guests, in which he boasted that the revived ceremonies, which included “cultural activities” (Ch. wenhua huodong) such as camel racing and wrestling, had “received attention” (Ch. guanzhu) from the media (Ch. xinwen jie) from across Inner Mongolia. Rumor had it that these “camel culture” events could also be personally lucrative, since the local government was generous in its support of them. In 2014 the local government, which saw the ritual as an opportunity to increase tourism in the region, took over its organization, branding it the Sacred Camel Veneration Folk Custom Cultural Activity (Ch. Shentuo Jisi Minsu Wenhua Huodong). I have suggested that the revival of rituals at the Buddhist Temple of the Bull Camel by some of the Muslim Mongols must be understood in the context of the state’s cultural heritage policies, while also being influenced by the stranding of the Monastery of the Caves outside the territory of contemporary Alasha, which has resulted in a vacuum of religious authority at the Temple of the Bull Camel. This development has created avenues for cultural entrepreneurs such as Altanuul and Batbagan to accrue symbolic (and potentially economic) capital. In the following section I discuss some of the diverging attitudes to participation in this ritual. Two Religions? Many Muslim Mongols with whom I spoke saw nothing wrong in taking part in rituals at Buddhist temples. Some of them even said that they had “two religions” (Mn. hoyor shashintai). According to Odonchimeg, a herder in her early thirties, “We Muslim Mongols also worship the Buddha [Mn. Burhan shütne].” Möndör, a Muslim Mongol herder in his fifties, told me, “Of course we worship the Buddha; otherwise we wouldn’t be Mongols!” Others did not claim to worship the Buddha but instead provided explanations that referred to Mongol ideas of fortune, vitality, and wealth, ideas that are not necessarily marked as Buddhist. Batbagan, who identified strongly as a Muslim, told me that the Muslim Mongols (including himself) went to Buddhist temples to “increase the vitality” (Mn. hii-mori sergeeh)



Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture”

83

of themselves and their livestock.13 This was particularly true of the Bull Camel Mountain, at the foot of which stands the Buddhist temple mentioned above. The mountain is thus regarded as an especially powerful place, and many in Alasha also hold it responsible for the flourishing (Mn. önör ösdeg) of camels in Alasha, and for the speed of the camels belonging to the local Muslim Mongols. Others, however, sought to play down the participation of the Muslim Mongols in Buddhist rituals. One elderly female herder told me how as a child she was taken by her father on the back of a camel to a nearby Buddhist monastery. She explained that they went there to see the masked dances (Mn. tsam) and naadam, and she stressed that they did not bow before the deities (Mn. mörgöl hiihgui) because “we Hotung don’t fit with Buddhism” (Mn. manai Hotung sharin shashin taarahgui). A similar argument, according to which the Muslim Mongols traditionally attended Buddhist monasteries only “to enjoy themselves” (Ch. cou renao) and witness the entertainment (Ch. yule huodong), was common among some of the more educated Muslim Mongols who lived in Bayanhot. The Muslim Mongol scholar Erdenebayar, who lives in ­Bayanhot, told me that the Muslim Mongols in the past only attended Buddhist monasteries because the “cultural life” (Ch. wenhua shenghuo) in rural areas used to be “very backward” (Ch. hen luohou). According to Erdenebayar, while there was indeed a long-standing tradition of attendance at Buddhist rituals on the part of the Muslim Mongols, the nature of their participation had changed dramatically in recent years. In the past, he said, such rituals were organized by the temple itself (Ch. miao shang de shi), not by ordinary people (Ch. ­laobaixing). Now, however, Muslim Mongols, notably Batbagan and Altanuul, were organizing these rituals themselves. One Muslim Mongol businessman, Soyol, who lived in Bayanhot, told me that he did not support the involvement of Muslim Mongols in the organization of these rituals, on the grounds that it was “like mixing rice and noodles together.” The imam of Begtei mosque, Bai Fuxing, voiced his objections to their participation with reference to state policy. He said that in China there were five distinct official religions, only one of which one could be affiliated to. We can thus see how these rituals are contested among the Muslim Mongols. Erdenebayar, Soyol, and Imam Bai all emphasized the institutionalized Buddhist nature of these rituals, rather than their status as part of “Alasha camel culture.”

84

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

The Bai Family: From Saviors to Strangers I had first met Imam Bai, now in his seventies, at an event to mark his departure on the haj in 2012. He is descended from a line of prominent religious leaders. According to him, his great-grandfather (Ch. tai yeye) had come to Alasha from war-torn Qinghai in the late nineteenth century, having been invited by the Muslim Mongols (here he used the term Chantou Huihui), in order to provide religious education, at a time when religious education was “in a bad way” (Ch. bu zenmeyang). He explained to me that his great-grandfather had “saved” (Ch. jiu le) the religion of the Muslim Mongols, while the Muslim Mongols had saved the lives of his impoverished ancestors. His father and grandfather also served as imams. Imam Bai speaks both Mongolian and Chinese fluently and has a habit of switching between the two, regardless of the language spoken by his interlocutor. He stresses that his father and uncles were born in the region, and are thus “Alasha people” (Ch. Alasha ren). Initially registered as members of the Mongol nationality, after the Cultural Revolution the imam’s family chose to register themselves as Dongxiang, a small Mongolic-speaking Muslim group that live mainly on the edges of the Tibetan plateau in Gansu and Qinghai (Gladney 1991, 35), on the grounds that this nationality is both Mongolian and Muslim. Even so, at times he appears to refer to himself as one of the Muslim Mongols. He spoke of “we Hotung” (Mn. manai Hotungchuud), which in the context clearly referred to the Muslim Mongols rather than the Hui. He wanted to “spread the word” (Mn. badruulah) about this “unusual nationality” (Mn. ­ontsgoi ündesten). He told me that there were currently ten Muslim nationalities in China, but that he wanted the state to recognize “we Turbaned Hui” (Mn-Ch. manai Chantou Huihui) as a separate nationality. “In the future, our nationality will be recognized,” he told me (Mn-Ch. hojim manai ündesten you ge diwei le). I found little support for such a move among the Muslim Mongols. Instead, the imam’s Dongxiang nationality, and his idiosyncratic use of ethnonyms, provoked a degree of unease. One prominent Muslim Mongol in Bayanhot, told me that the imam could not “represent” (Ch. daibiao) the Muslim Mongols, as he was Dongxiang rather than Mongol. While there was respect for his ability to coordinate the rebuilding of Begtei, there were concerns that this had involved him associating himself too closely with Hui from Ningxia. Objections



Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture”

85

were raised to his use of the term “Turbaned Hui” (Ch. Chantou Huihui) to refer to the Muslim Mongols, a term that was said to be used in derogation by the Ningxia Hui.14 Some also reported hearing him speak of “we Hui” (Ch. women Huihui), while others whispered that his family were not in fact Dongxiang at all, but instead Hui from Ningxia. Imam Bai often lamented the decline (Ch. jianruo) in religious knowledge among the Muslim Mongols, pointing to the attendance of many local Muslim Mongols at Buddhist temples. Until the 1950s, religious education had been provided at the two mosques, and there were ahong in many families. The Cultural Revolution caused great damage (Ch. sunshi) to religion in the region, and there were now very few Muslim Mongols who had received a religious education. According to Imam Bai, Islam had been revived successfully in neighboring areas, such as Dengkou County and Ningxia, but Kööbür was “backward” (Ch. luohou) and “remote” (Ch. pianpi). It thus relied on Hui from surrounding areas to provide the clerics who would ensure the survival of Islam. The problem was that these Hui, unlike Imam Bai, spoke no Mongolian, which limited the extent of their interaction with local Muslim Mongols. Having arrived in Kööbür from distant lands, the Bai family established a dynasty of respected religious leaders. As the Muslim Mongols increasingly came to identify with the Mongol nationality, however, the ethnic alterity of the Bai dynasty, now members of the Dongxiang nationality, began to erode their authority. And as Bai Fuxing in recent years has sought to foster connections between the Muslims of Kööbür and the Hui communities in other parts of Inner Mongolia, and in Ningxia, this alterity has been exacerbated, and his ability to ensure orthodoxy among the Muslim Mongols declined, despite his proficiency in Mongolian. In the final section of this chapter I provide an account of the celebration to mark the rebuilding of Begtei mosque, held in the autumn of 2013, showing how it tended to highlight the different nationalities of the Muslim Mongols and Hui, rather than their shared religion. The Begtei Naadam Several months before this celebration, Imam Bai announced that it would take the form of a naadam. He told me that he had decided to hold the naadam to “display” (Ch. biaoxian chu lai) the lives of “our

86

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

nationality” (Mn. manai ündesten), and “our former nomadic existence” (Mn-Ch. üngeresend manai nüüdel shenghuo) (here he presumably referred to the Muslim Mongols). Across the Mongol world, naadam (lit. games) have traditionally accompanied ceremonies held at oboo (ritual cairns) in the summer. Naadam typically involve the “three manly games” (Mn. eriin gurban naadam) of wrestling, archery, and horse racing, though various other sports have been added at different points in time. Having been safely stripped of their former cosmological associations, naadam were appropriated by socialist states across Inner Asia. They are now held in the summer throughout Inner Mongolia, where they are strongly associated with the Mongol nationality. In Alasha today the centerpiece of naadam is now camel racing, since persistent drought means that very few horses are now kept by herders in the region. In addition to camel races, the Begtei naadam would also include an exhibition of “ethnic items” (Ch. minzu yongpin) and “camel culture,” organized by Batbagan. This would include ropes made from camel hair, camel nose pegs (Mn. buil), and the pack cushions (Mn. zaas) that Batbagan had requested from the Hui herder, Guo Xingjian. Over the next couple of weeks, the Begtei event was a frequent topic of conversation in Batbagan’s house. Batbagan predicted that many people would not attend, because there would be no opportunity to “have fun” (Mn. naadah), as the event’s location meant that they would not be able to enjoy alcohol or cigarettes. These vehicles of sociality play a prominent role at the camel-racing events which the Muslim Mongol riders attend. Imam Bai had also suggested that only riders from Kööbür and their camels could take part in the races at the naadam. This was disappointing to the Muslim Mongol riders. In the words of Batbagan, “the more camels the better!” (Ch. yue duo yue hao kan). Sarna complained that it would not be a proper “celebration” (Mn. nair), since there would not be any singing, a sine qua non of any Mongol gathering. Batbagan’s daughter-in-law was scornful of the fact that, despite these crucial absences, the event was still billed as a naadam. She also complained that Imam Bai had been soliciting alms (Mn. badar) from local herders for the event. ­Batbagan said that he was giving a goat, but Mönkhbayar, his son, refused to do so, even though he received a “telling off” (Mn. haraah) from his father. He told me that he would have made a donation of livestock if the host (Mn. ezen) of the event had been a Mongol, but did not want to because, he said, Imam Bai was Hui. Mönkhbayar



Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture”

87

refused even to attend the event, saying it would be “full of Hui” (Mn. Huihui düüren). On the day before the naadam, Sarna, Batbagan and I were given a lift to Begtei by Batbagan’s nephew in his pickup. We arrived to find a stage set up in front of the front gates of the mosque, the background to which showed an idealized pastoral scene. The stage was flanked by two Mongolian ger (yurts), one of which was to contain Batbagan’s exhibition.15 On either side of the stage large speakers had been set up, and these were already blaring out Mongolian folk songs. I fell into conversation with a young Hui ahong whom I recognized from Eid, when he had asked me for tips on how to learn Mongolian. Now he told me that he was worried about the Mongolian music, fearing the impression it would make on ahong “from outside” (Ch. waidi). He told me that the mosque was a “sacred place” (Ch. shensheng de difang), where such activities were forbidden. After the introductory speeches, there followed a parade of the different Muslim nationalities of Kööbür. A Hui woman wearing a headscarf and a man in Mongolian costume provided a running commentary in Chinese and Mongolian. They explained that Kööbür contained various different nationalities (the Muslim Mongols [Ch.  xinyang yisilanjiao de Mengguzu], Hui, and Dongxiang) who “helped each other and were united” (Ch. xianghu bangzhu, xianghu tuanjie), echoing the official discourse of “the unity of nationalities” (Ch. minzu tuanjie) (Bulag 2002). This assertion of unity, however, went hand in hand with the display of state-approved difference, which was evident in the parade. The Muslim Mongols came first, dressed in Mongolian robes and offering blue scarves (Mn. hadag) in the direction of the officials on the stage. Their group also contained a few young men in Mongolian wrestling gear, followed by several people in Mongolian dress riding camels. They were followed by the Hui representatives, who were dressed in smart white shirts, waistcoats, and suit trousers and whose minzu identity was signified by their white caps alone. Bringing up the rear was a small group of around ten Dongxiang, who were dressed identically to the Hui. Whereas at Eid a few weeks earlier, sartorial distinctions between nationalities had been absent, now they came to the fore. This kind of representation of minzu differentiation through costumes, parades, and performances has been well documented by anthropologists (e.g., Schein 2000; Gladney 2004). In this context, the Hui are often defined negatively, since they lack the costumes and dances that are

88

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

used to distinguish other ethnic groups (Gladney 2004, 152). This lack became more evident when I went to see Batbagan’s exhibition of “ethnic items” in the Mongol ger next to the stage. A triangular tent (Mn. maihan) of the type used by caravan men also had been set up outside. Noticeably absent from Batbagan’s exhibition were any objects that might signify the Hui or Dongxiang nationalities, both of which had been represented during the parade. Indeed, some of these “ethnic items” (bits of camel tack) had been carried by Muslim Mongols as they paraded past the stage. Batbagan told me that the Hui had nothing to display, since they had “no culture of their own” (Mn. ööriin soyol baihgui). Mönkhbayar later remarked that the only thing they could display was their white hats (Mn. tsagaan malgai). This sentiment is frequently heard among Mongols in Alasha. The exhibition of “camel culture” in the Mongol ger solidified its associations with the Mongol nationality. There was no mention of the fact that the cushions had been borrowed from the Hui herder Guo Xingjian, who—dressed similarly to the other Hui—was apparently now no longer a “real Mongol herder.” The fact that the area around Begtei has long been home to a significant community of Hui pastoralists was thereby occluded, since “camel culture,” objectified in the form of ropes, saddles, and caravan cushions, was presented as the exclusive property of the Mongol nationality. Although shared religion might have “predominated” (Ch. wei qianti) (Ding 2006) at the celebration of Eid, at the naadam to mark the rebuilding of the mosque what came to the fore was the distinctions of nationality. Financially the Begtei naadam had certainly been a success. Attendees had been encouraged to donate (in addition to any donations they had made toward the reconstruction), and their contributions were written down methodically. Imam Bai told me that he had plans to use this money to establish an Islamic school at the mosque, to replace the one that had closed in the 1950s. This would allow young Muslim Mongols to be trained as ahong. Others, however, were skeptical. What family would encourage their child to pursue the impoverished life of a rural ahong, rather than become an official or trader in the bustling city of Bayanhot? Were Imam Bai’s plans for a school to come to fruition, the influence of currents of Islam from other parts of China might perhaps become more pronounced, as Imam Bai would no longer be in effect the sole conduit for Islamic knowledge. However, as this



Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture”

89

chapter has shown, they would have to reckon with the ongoing subjectifying effects of the state’s nationality policies, which have encouraged many of the Muslim Mongols to identify strongly with the Mongol nationality. The serendipity of history and geography has meant that the Muslim Mongol homeland of Kööbür, remote and peripheral from the perspective of Chinese Islam, overlaps with a sacred landscape with strong Tibetan Buddhist associations. The identification of the Mongols with Tibetan Buddhism, a legacy of Qing rule (Crossley 2006), remains strong, particularly in Alasha. In addition to Tibetan Buddhism, pastoralism remains a key marker of Mongol identity. I have argued that the congruence of the anxiety of Mongol intellectuals over its disappearance in Alasha, and the local government’s cultural development policies, have led to the emergence of “Alasha camel culture.” This includes “camel veneration rituals” that exist in contested relationship to Buddhism but have provided some local Muslim Mongols with a means of accruing prestige in a manner that would not be possible at the mosque. This mosque remains a focal point for the Muslim Mongols, since it is here that they come together, along with local Hui, to pray for their dead. However, the naadam held at Begtei in 2013 revealed the way “camel culture” can be used to shore up the ethnic distinction between the local Hui and the Muslim Mongols, despite their shared religion and common pastoral heritage. This event was supposed to instantiate a translocal community of Muslims, which had taken material form in the impressive new mosque, but it served to demonstrate the continued power of nationality as a means of organizing identity and alterity in contemporary China. Notes 1. My transliteration of this toponym reflects the local Alasha dialect of Mongolian. 2. All names are pseudonymous. 3. According to local officials, the administrative unit (Ch. zhen) that occupies the majority of the Kööbür region has a registered population of 4,125, of which roughly 60 percent are members of the Mongol nationality, while 26 percent are Han and 14 percent Hui. Figures are approximate because of migration to Bayanhot, the capital of Alasha League. 4. In the first half of the twentieth century, the term “Hui” or “Huihui” was used to refer to both Turkic- and Chinese-speaking Muslims; “turban Hui”

90

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

(Ch. Chantou Hui) was used generally to refer to the group now known as the Uyghur (Gladney 1991, 18; Ding 2006, 28). 5. Gladney (1991, 300) errs in claiming that the Muslim Mongols are classified as Hui. 6. This did not prevent other numerically small groups in Inner Mongolia, which had often been regarded as Mongol, such as the Orochen, Ewenki, and Daur, from being registered as separate nationalities (Bulag 2010, 172). 7. The Muslim Mongols refer to these as “the Great Prostration” (Mn. ih mörgöl) and “the Lesser Protration” (Mn. bag mörgöl), respectively. 8. I was told that people normally pray for parents (both father and mother), brothers and sisters, and aunts and uncles. 9. This word, from the Persian akhund, is used by Hui across China to refer to Islamic religious professionals and tends to be used more widely than “imam” (Ch. yimamu) (Lipman 1997, 48). 10. At Eid al-Adha an animal is also sacrificed for oneself and one’s (living) family. This animal is said to carry one to heaven after one’s death. Larger animals (e.g., cattle) are able to transport more people. 11. The creation of counties in Inner Mongolia was carried out in order to administer recent Han Chinese immigrants. It prompted much resistance from Mongols. 12. This is true even though since the 1980s, cashmere goats have been far more economically important for local herders. 13. Kii-mori is a complicated concept that might be roughly translated as “fortune” or “vitality.” Kii-mori flags are raised outside the homes of most Mongol herders, to increase the vitality of both humans and animals (see Humphrey and Hürelbaatar 2012). 14. It was compared to the Mongolian word Sogoo, which is used to refer to Han Chinese, especially those from Minqin County in Gansu. 15. Mongol ger have in general been replaced by brick houses in Kööbür, but they continue to function as an important signifier of the Mongol nationality in China.

References An, Mengke. 2009. Mengguzu Musilin (The Muslim Mongols). Beijing: Zhongguo Wenlian Chubanshe. Atwill, David G. 2018. Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1900 to 1960. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bulag, Uradyn E. 2002. The Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. ———. 2010. Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China’s Mongolian Frontier. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.



Religion, Nationality, and “Camel Culture”

91

Caffrey, Kevin. 2014. “The Case of the Disappearing Altar: Mysteries and ­Consequences of Revitalizing Chinese Muslims in Yunnan.” Cross-­Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 12:14–24. Chao, E. 1996. “Hegemony, Agency, and Re-presenting the Past: The Invention of Dongba Culture among the Naxi of Southwest China.” In Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, edited by M. Brown, 208–239. Berkeley: University of California Institute for East Asian Studies Center for Chinese Studies. Charleux, Isabelle. 2002. “Padmasambhava’s Travel to the North: The Pilgrimage to the Monastery of the Caves and the Old Schools of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia.” Central Asiatic Journal 46 (2): 168–232. Crossley, Pamela Kyle. 2006. “Making Mongols.” In Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China, edited by Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, 58–82. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ding, Mingjun. 2006. Zhongguo bianyuan Musilin zuqun de Renleixue kaocha (Anthropological investigations into the Muslim groups on China’s periphery). Yinchuan: Ningxia Renmin Chubanshe. Elverskog, J. 2006. Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism and the State in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Erie, Matthew S. 2016. “Sharity, Charity, and Minjian Autonomy in Muslim China: Gift Giving in a Plural World.” American Ethnologist 43 (2): 311–324. Gladney, Dru. 1991. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University. ———. 2004. Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities and Other Subaltern Subjects. London: Hurst & Company. Goossaert, Vincent, and David A. Palmer. 2011. The Religious Question in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hillman, Ben. 2004. “The Rise of the Community in Rural China: Village Politics, Cultural Identity and Religious Revival in a Hui Hamlet.” China Journal 51:53–73. Humphrey, Caroline, and Hürelbaatar Ujeed. 2012. “Fortune in the Wind: An Impersonal Subjectivity.” Social Analysis 56 (2): 152–167. Huqun. 2010. Shamo dayi (The beauty of the desert). Hohhot: Neimenggu Wenhua Chubanshe. Khan, Almaz. 1996. “Who Are the Mongols? State, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Representation in the PRC.” In Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, edited by M. Brown, 125–159. Berkeley: University of California Institute for East Asian Studies Center for Chinese Studies. Liang, L. X. 2006. Alashan Menggu Yanjiu (Research on the Alasha Mongolians). Beijing: Minzu Chubanshe. Lipman, Jonathan N. 1997. Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

92

Fault Lines in China’s Islamic Revival

McCarthy, Susan. 2005. “If Allah Wills It: Integration, Isolation and Muslim Authenticity in Yunnan Province in China.” Religion, State and Society 33 (2): 121–136. Oakes, Tim. 2006. “Cultural Strategies of Development: Implications for Village Governance in China.” Pacific Review 19 (1): 13–37. Schein, Louisa. 2000. Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. White, Thomas R. E. 2016. “Transforming China’s Desert: Camels, Pastoralists and the State in the Reconfiguration of Western Inner Mongolia.” PhD diss., University of Cambridge. Yang, Haiying. 2004. “Between Islam and the Mongols: The Qotung People in Inner Mongolia, China.” Inner Asia 6:5–22.

Chapter 4

Displaying Piety Wedding Photography and Foreign Ceremonial Dresses in the Hui Community in Xi’an, China Yang YANG

You should consider wearing the Malaysian and Pakistani wedding dresses for the ceremony. These days, everyone in the Hui Quarter wears these styles. These are specifically wedding outfits for Muslims [Musilin de Hunsha lifu]. —Interview 2016

M

rs. Wang addressed this remark to her younger sister, who would be getting married in a few months. At home, she showed me the hard-bound photo album of her wedding photos. Dressed in vividly colored dresses, Mrs. Wang and her husband looked nothing like themselves when they were in their everyday outfits. When flipping through the album and other digital copies of photos she received from the bridal salon on her tablet, I constantly exclaimed how stunning her bridal look was. Wang seemed to be rather pleased with my compliments and began telling me how well received her wedding photos were among her friends on WeChat. Her friends on social media found this unique style of wedding photos fascinating, and they were curious about where Wang had experienced this transformation into an exotic princess from the Disney animated movie A ­ laddin. This ethnographic vignette reflects a growing trend among Hui Muslim Chinese brides in Xi’an, specifically the recent adoption of wedding gowns inspired by styles with non-Chinese origins and considered appropriate for Muslims. Hui Muslims in Xi’an see wedding gowns from a wide range of countries including Malaysia, Pakistan, 95

96

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

India, and Indonesia as symbols of a higher form of Islamic ideals specifically associated with these places. These wedding dresses are vividly colored and ornate, and are decorated with embroidery and beads. Such features differentiate these so-called Muslim wedding dresses from the generic Western-style wedding gowns (xishi hunsha), and have come to dominate the landscape of wedding outfits in the Hui community in Xi’an (fig. 4). The changing scene in wedding dresses among the Hui Muslims has also gradually shifted perceptions of the proper bridal look, especially in wedding photography. Within the frame of wedding portraits, in front of backdrops created inside bridal studios or in outdoor locations like mosques, the Hui couples strike poses with objects including Middle Eastern–style water pitchers and copies of the Qur’an in accordance with the photographer’s instructions. These elements in combination are marketed as “ethnic” (minzu) and “exotic” (Yiyu) characteristics of the new forms of wedding photos. In this chapter, I use the process of making and framing a cosmopolitan bridal look in the Hui Quarter in Xi’an to examine the symbolic geography of transnational Muslim connections between China and the global umma. Specifically, I ask the following questions: To what extent do wedding dresses with designs from Southeast and South Asia allow the Hui women in Xi’an to realize their aspirations in becoming closer to pious ideals? In what ways are transnational symbols of piety manifest in wedding dresses and photos produced locally in the urban Hui community in Xi’an? To analyze the interplay between the local and the global in the transnational flow of Muslim fashion trends, I use the concept of transnational space to understand transnationality as being a multidimensional and multihabited set of experiences (Crang, Dwyer, and Jackson 2003; Bunnell 2007). Focusing on a wide range of actors and their diverse experiences with transnational connections provides a constructive approach to better understand how anchor points like Xi’an on Muslim networks may be equally important as places where sources of fashionable designs come from. Rather than only following role models from elsewhere, Xi’an, as one of the places that is lower on the hierarchical rank of religious authority transnationally, plays a crucial role in making symbolic religious authority from elsewhere relevant to local contexts. Multidimensional and multihabited transnationality thus provides an approach to unpacking the images of fashionable and cosmopolitan Hui brides as an assembled work collaborated on by both local and nonlocal actors in the Hui Quarter. This collaborative



Displaying Piety

97

Figure 4. The author poses for a photo in a Xi’an bridal salon. Photo owned by Yang Yang.

process takes place in the everyday practices to mediate between the local and the global, specifically in showing different possibilities of assembling the desired bridal look of the Hui in Xi’an. By analyzing the global and local interactions in reinterpreting global Muslim fashions locally in Xi’an, I suggest that the symbolic moral and pious meanings produced by Hui brides wearing Muslim dresses with non-Chinese origins for wedding photos and ceremonies were doing more than simply replicating symbols through consumption. Instead, transnational fashion symbols become relevant to the Hui in Xi’an through becoming part of their everyday practices. In this light, while these fashion symbols of wedding dresses are seemingly universal in implying modesty, the universality of the fashionable, modest, and pious transnational bridal look is anchored by the practices of individuals locally. More importantly, Hui Muslims in Xi’an choose to use wedding gowns to display Islamic aesthetics partly due to the Chinese government’s current crackdown on displaying foreign elements in Muslim practice. Architectural styles of mosques and sartorial practices of certain groups such as Uyghurs

98

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

become targets of governmental interventions to “sinicize” religion (Zongjiao zhongguohua). By contrast, wedding gowns become an alternative site to display piety because bridal fashion is not strictly codified as religious. Therefore, wedding dresses allow the expression of individuals’ faith in Islam to appear to be apolitical. Wedding Gowns, Photography, and the Bridal Salons in the Hui Quarter in Xi’an, China The fashion for Muslim wedding photos in Xi’an first emerged in the Hui Quarter. The Hui Quarter (known as the Huifang by the local Muslim residents) is a historic enclave in which the Hui Muslims and other Muslim minorities dwell. More than thirty thousand Hui Muslims reside in this area, which is approximately two square kilometers. Both local residents in Xi’an and tourists visit the site for affordable and flavorful halal food (Ma 2011). This place has thus developed a reputation as the Muslim food street (Huimin meishijie) among tourists and the locals alike. In addition to its reputation in food, the Hui Quarter is also known for being one of the earliest Muslim communities in China, in which ancient mosques built in the Chinese architectural style attract a steady stream of tourists. Local governments, at both district and municipal levels, have implemented urban development projects since the 1980s. The practice of patronizing specialized wedding photography among the Hui Muslims was not a completely novel phenomenon. Wedding photography, known as Hunsha sheying in Chinese, is prevalent in many countries in Asia including South Korea and Taiwan (cf. Adrian 2003). In Taiwan, as Adrian asserts, wedding photography visually presents the upward mobility of the couples through situating them in carefully crafted fantasy worlds that are linked to the West, especially Europe (2003). In the Hui Quarter, as Gillette has documented in her monograph on the Hui Quarter in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hui brides wore Western-style wedding gowns (hunsha) for their wedding ceremonies (2000). Similar to the market for bridal salons in Taipei, in the 1980s and the 1990s, bridal salons were then predominantly modeling brides after fantasies based on imaginaries of the West and predominantly European mythologies. This could be reflected in the names of bridal salons, including Mona Lisa (Mengnalisha) and Venus (Weinasi). Bridal salons owned by Hui in Xi’an did not emerge until a decade ago, when some entrepreneurial Hui



Displaying Piety

99

photographers discovered the potential profit generated from meeting the special requests of Muslim couples who wanted wedding photos that their older-generation family members would approve of. Prior to the emergence of Muslim bridal salons in the Hui Q ­ uarter, Muslim couples in Xi’an brought their own outfits to bridal salons, namely headscarves for women and white hats for men, and asked the salon to produce their portraits wearing these accessories for an additional charge. In these specially requested portraits, the soon-tobe brides often wore tunics and loose-cut trousers with plainly colored headscarves. While these photos were not primarily taken for displaying at the venue of wedding ceremonies, many young couples began to complain that these photos featuring a Muslim-style look were not aesthetically compatible with the other portraits. A preference for taking photos in fashionable dresses remained prevalent among the younger Hui couples. However, the preferred Westernstyle wedding gowns came under criticism from both imams and the older generation for their symbolic implications associated with Christianity. Other related criticisms primarily targeted the excessive exposure of the female body that was considered unlawful according to the Qur’an (Gillette 2000). Dressing Up Cosmopolitan Hui Brides A crucial component of the imagined cosmopolitan Muslim bridal look is a wedding gown for the bride that visually conveys both her worldliness and her virtue. Wedding dresses, as one of the key visual cues in conveying Muslim-ness, should address aesthetic concerns in featuring femininity of the bride without portraying her body in sexualized ways. Specifically, designs must not excessively reveal the limbs, neck, shoulders, or upper chest. Figure-hugging designs that expose the outline of the female body should not be adopted either due to their potentially sexual implications. Therefore, wedding dresses for Muslims approach modesty, specifically the notion of covering up from the head to ankle, by using different textures of fabrics and accessories to produce an elegant, draped style in fine material, in contrast to the loosely cut but baggy cotton tunics and trousers that many Hui women wear as their daily outfits. The everyday form of modesty, as young couples from the Hui Quarter suggested, looked too mundane to match the ideal bridal look (interview, 2016). This is echoed in understandings of the ideal bridal look in other parts of

100

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

Asia, where brides replicate celebrity styles as an ideal image (Adrian 2003). To frame such celebrity-like appeal on Muslim brides in wedding photos, entrepreneurial Hui photographers began to look for wedding dresses that would resonate with Muslim customers by reflecting Hui characteristics. However, they had few traditional Hui fashion models to draw on, and styles drawn from Chinese traditions were not deemed appropriate. The traditional Chinese cheongsam, or qipao, was especially problematic, as it excessively exposed the outline of the female body. The Hui entrepreneurs contemplated on the popularity of the Western wedding dresses with a Korean twist and concluded that these dresses were well received by customers for their association with a princess-like look that was often seen in exotic and distant lands featured in Disney and Hollywood movies. Engaging a similar logic, the Hui salon owners began looking for inspiration in styles from non-Chinese Muslim communities. Their points of reference often came via individual connections to non-Chinese Muslim communities and their own travel experiences. As one Hui photographer, Mr. Chen, told me, he initially got several formal ceremonial dresses from his Pakistani friends who were enrolled in graduate programs at local research institutes in Xi’an. These dresses served as templates to make new dresses in similar styles with some adjustments in cut to meet the needs of local customers in Xi’an. These adjustments, as Chen showed me in his studio, were primarily on the cut on the waist of the skirt and the length of the tops. The length of the top was slightly shorter than the original version brought back from Pakistan. Accordingly, the waistline of the skirt was elevated slightly higher to reshape the proportion of the female body. Visually, this adjustment would extend the proportion of the legs of the bride and make her look taller and more slender. Chen suggested that designers of haute couture brands including Dior and Burberry frequently used this technique in dresses and jackets. While the styles of Pakistani Lengha do not necessarily comply with the rule of not explicitly exposing the outline of the female body, especially the exaggerated waistline, it was considered appropriate as an alternative to Western-style wedding gowns. “At least your limbs are covered by the long skirt and sleeves,” said one customer (interview, 2016). While some designs and adjustments of dress ensembles raised issues of the female body outline, this seemed to be less of a concern for the soon-to-be and newly wedded couples who chose these dresses to construct a bridal look resembling Bollywood actresses. This is



Displaying Piety

101

achieved primarily in the attention paid to detailed embroideries and the glittering gold accessories utilized to finish the look. In this way, an imaginary Pakistan is evoked through bold colors, exaggerated jewelry, and detailed and ornate embroidery. The look is primarily based on Hui customers’ impressions of Pakistan as conveyed through the narratives of popular media, especially in Bollywood movies. The exotic appeal of the Pakistani bridal look in the Hui Quarter does not merely indicate a straightforward desire to comply with rules of being modest and avoid presenting the female body in a sexualized way. The modifications of these outfits in order to change the visual effect of the proportions of the body suggest an aesthetic choice that does not relate to being modest and Muslim. While many Hui in Xi’an did not have any direct connection with Muslim communities in Pakistan, dresses from Pakistan helped them to imagine a shared Muslim identity, and it highlighted their difference from the Han Chinese. However, for business owners of the bridal salons, it was not sufficient to simply market the visually modest designs of Pakistani dresses. The exotic appeal of these ornate dresses, branded as yiyu fengqing, needed to be conveyed as a vehicle for coming closer to the moral ideals of Muslim women in Pakistan. Among the other popular styles, the so-called Malaysian style is often known among the Hui Muslims in Xi’an as the Malai hunsha. This style of wedding dresses indicates a creative combination of the Western-style wedding gown and traditional ethnic dress in Malaysia. During my participant observation in one of the bigger Muslim bridal salons, the staff recommended that I wear a white Malaysian-style wedding dress due to its popularity among the younger brides. The set consisted of three parts. A white lace and net veil, a long-sleeved blouse, and an ankle-length skirt. There was an optional inner hijab that originally accompanied the veil. It was only used as part of the set upon the request of customers. Similar to the logic of not explicitly making the female body’s outline visible, the long inner hijab for the neck was optional because different customers had different understandings of covering up. Some did not mind the neck part, since their hair was completely tucked inside a smaller hairnet, which served as an inner hijab. This particular style of dressing the hair under the cover of a hairnet already marked a difference between the regular Chinese bridal look and this one for the Hui Muslims. During photo shooting sessions, if customers were concerned about the exposure of their neck, the photographers would use the veil, accessories,

102

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

and other objects in the pose in order to cover the neck. Given a large collection of wedding dresses curated by the staff of the bridal salon, more “conservative” alternatives were easily available for those who would not want to expose the neck. Therefore, the malai style signifies the capability of being fashionable, modern, and modest, with which local daily outfits of the Hui in Xi’an and designs from other countries cannot compete. Another important component of dressing up the Hui brides is to do the right makeup to emphasize “exotic” facial features, which are achieved primarily by brightening the skin tone and adding three-dimensionality to the face by using shade. Cosmetic products that aim to brighten the skin tone have been commonly seen in the beauty market in East Asia, in which Korean and Japanese products lead the trend. While being fair skinned has often been considered a legacy of colonial racial hierarchies, for Hui brides the quality of being fair skinned has been justified by their non-Chinese ancestry. When discussing why Hui brides should be fair skinned, a recently wedded Hui woman told me, “This is genetic. We [Hui] have got Arab and Persian ancestry to make us look different from you [Han Chinese]. Fair-skinned and more angular [liti]. You know, just like how foreigners generally look” (interview, 2016). This quote reflects Hui Muslims’ understanding of their Muslim identity as the “foreign-ness” of their ethnoreligious identity. “White” in this context signifies a form of “foreign-ness” that Han Chinese are subordinated to. However, this “biological” difference is achieved during the preparation process for photo shooting by applying whitening cream, light-toned foundation, and correction liquid to cover any imperfections on the face. As a result, the brides will have smooth and bright-toned skin when they are featured in photos. Another set of “biological” features ascribed to Hui Muslims is an angular face. This is created through makeup techniques that draw on the ways that shade is used in painting to accentuate and shape the chin, the nose, and the jaw. By using a slightly darker shade, the squareshaped chin that is commonly found in women in East Asia could be extended and shaped to appear more oval. Further shading could suggest the ideal shape of an “Arab or Persian” narrower and longer nose with a higher bridge. The shape of the jaw after makeup should look more oval from the front and more angular from the side. These changes can be achieved without the use of plastic surgery, by the meticulous use of shading and highlighting powder.



Displaying Piety

103

This type of product is mostly from Japan and South Korea. In other words, these features are produced through techniques and products that do not originate from Muslim-majority countries. It was particularly the Korean style that shaped the fair-skinned, bignosed Hui bride. Postures, Backdrops, and Objects Wedding dresses play a crucial role in visualizing the cosmopolitan characteristics of Hui Muslims, but dresses and makeup techniques are insufficient to make an ideal bridal look. Rather than simply ­capturing portraits of the customers, photographers use objects, postures, and backdrops to frame the ways that the ideal marriage looks like for their customers. Similar to wedding photography for the wider market in Asia, mobility, in the form of worldliness and fantasies, is signified through the combination of non-Chinese-style wedding dresses and premade backdrops in indoor shooting. Backdrops serve as the stage on which perfect looking brides perform their roles based on different location-based fantasies. Some printed backdrops feature gardens and ballrooms that resemble mansions and castles in Europe. These backdrops are often used to match with outfits with a more modern design. Customers in Malaysian wedding dresses often stand in front of a backdrop with a garden-like setting printed on it. Some Hui photographers explained that the Western-inspired Malaysian wedding dresses should be matched with similar kinds of settings that signify modernity. This particular form of European-looking modernity is thus considered appropriate to combine with the Malaysian-style wedding dress because of Hui ­Muslims’ imaginations of Malaysia, and especially of Kuala Lumpur as a world-class city. This comparison is made with Xi’an, a city that does not currently aspire to a modern look, having instead adopted an urban development plan to restore the quaint image of Xi’an as the imperial capital of the Tang dynasty. The backdrop of Malaysia’s Petronas Towers is used as a quintessential symbol of urban modernity, and Hui customers of the salons like to compare Chinese cities like Xi’an and find them insufficiently modern in comparison with Malaysian cities (interview, 2016). In addition to the European and hypermodern backdrops, there are also backgrounds that feature more obviously Islamic aesthetics as part of the worldliness created through wedding portraits. These

104

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

backdrops are commonly matched with the vividly colored and traditional-looking dresses, including the Pakistani bridal Lengha. For example, a bride in a red Pakistani wedding dress would pose sitting in front of a backdrop of an ornate hall decorated in geometric shapes. This combination, as both photographers and customers implied, reminded them of palaces of the distant ancient Kingdom of Arabia. Some referred to “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” from The Arabian Nights, as well as adaptations by European and American cinema including the Disney animation Aladdin. This visual presentation of an imagined Arabia in the backdrop is a crucial component of the “exotic appeal” of the Hui bridal look. In comparison with other place-based backdrops in bridal salons outside the Hui Quarter, places referenced in backdrops to show cosmopolitanism are primarily world-class cities, including New York, Paris, London, and Hong Kong. Landmarks from these places are also featured as part of the photos, in which the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben are two of the most popular symbols. Hui salons go one step further: their cosmopolitan references point to different places and different times. Rather than only featuring images of contemporary modern cities, Hui wedding photos also have the imagined ancient Arabian empire to show the couples’ worldliness; they are able to travel to different places and times thanks to their Muslim identity. Additionally, in order to make their customers look like pious and moral Muslims, Hui photographers often use objects to make the customers strike poses in specific ways. Among the commonly used objects, thick volumes of books are often used as a visual cue to represent the Qur’an. One Muslim photographer in the Hui Quarter, Mr. Chen, said that for couple portraits, rather than having the bride and the groom pose in intimate ways like hugging and kissing, he often lets them pose in a way that suggests that they are participating in an activity together. Common scenes drawing on this logic include having the bride hold a water pitcher about to pour water for the groom to wash his hands. Another common scene is the couple sitting next to each other reading a thick volume together. The books used by photographers have an ornate hard cover that resembles worn leather, but often they do not have any text printed inside. In some cases, the book is merely an empty and lightweight paper box that is molded into the shape of a closed book. This kind of object is often used in film shoots and theatrical settings.



Displaying Piety

105

When framing faithfulness in either single or couple portraits with a book, Chen often instructed his customers to focus their gaze on the book. This was intended to create a scene that represented an ideal moment in the daily life of Hui Muslims. Through his portrait of a couple studying the Qur’an together, Chen wanted to imply that the bride and the groom were bound together in marriage due to their shared interest in pursuing religious knowledge rather than only romance. A faithful Muslim should be a diligent and disciplined lifelong learner. By showing the couple sharing a copy of the Qur’an in a photo, Chen suggested that the viewer would understand this marriage as a journey these two young Muslims had embarked on together to pursue the pure and true forms of Islam. Furthermore, Chen often told his customers to refrain from smiling. Chen explained that reading the Qur’an should be a holy and serious experience. Looking into the camera or smiling purposely would not be seen as respectful and appropriate to the pose. “Allah prefers attentive and humble learners who appreciate the joy of pursuing true knowledge,” he said (interview, 2016). Chen summarized his long commentaries on featuring Qur’an reading and hence knowledge learning with the Chinese translation of a quote from hadith: to “seek knowledge even in China” (Utlub il ‘ilma wa law fis-Sin). This concluding remark also allowed Chen to make a case for why holding a thick book volume visually conveyed the sense of morality in Muslim communities within China and beyond. Yet this choice was not applicable to every customer. Occasionally there were non-Muslim customers who were interested in getting portraits in exotic ceremonial dresses, simply for the sake of having a novel photo-shooting experience. For them, Chen and his colleagues did not arrange postures associated with religious postures and items. When I requested having a photo taken holding the Qur’an, I was indirectly rejected with the reason that items and postures needed to be matched with individuals’ appeal and the costumes they chose to wear. I was wearing an Indian sari when we discussed the use of the Qur’an as part of the photo shoot. Thus, it was suggested, the sari as a foreign cultural dress from a non-Muslim group was better matched with peacock feathers and veils in order to produce a mysterious feminine appeal. The selective application of certain items for Muslim customers only revealed practices of boundary making between Muslims and non-Muslims in photography. Differences between Muslims and non-Muslims are indicated in the ways in

106

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

which their portraits appear to the audience. Therefore, the exotic appeal is more than a constellation of Chinese and non-Chinese references to construct a glamorous look. The exotic appeal for non-­ Muslim customers only indicates combining Orientalist interpretations of femininity in dress, makeup, posture, and backdrop. In comparison, for the Muslim customers, while their bridal looks convey similarly Orientalist interpretations of South and Southeast Asian Muslims, their embodiment of the exotic look provides an alternative space for them to express their faith in a performative way. In wedding portraits, wearing hijab and posing with objects that indicate religious practices are often considered expressive of the ethnic characteristics of the Hui. In this way they avoid attention from local government authorities and skirt any problems that might come from being seen practicing Islam outside the legally and officially designated venues, including the mosques. Discussion The process of producing a cosmopolitan and fashionable bridal look in bridal salons in Xi’an sheds light on a set of issues that concern the roles of the market, everyday practices, and the interplay between the local and the global in the assembled Muslim bridal look. Specifically, multiple interpretations of the “elsewhere”—hence the “exotic appeal” of Hui brides—reflect the complex ways in which symbols related to higher forms of religious authority and Muslim role models become reinvented locally based on the local interests of Hui Muslims. This integration of global narratives and local practices in the everyday life of the Hui is premised on how the market economy becomes a vehicle to realize the aspirations of Hui Muslims in becoming more like their role models in Southeast and South Asia. One way to access these connections to their moral ideals is to selectively appropriate Muslim fashion styles imported from these places of authority. Exotic wedding dresses, makeup styles, backdrops, and poses all contribute to the sense of being elsewhere. Dressing up in this way to achieve an exotic appeal seemingly repeats the ways in which the Orient was constructed as an “imaginative geography” in the European colonial imagination (Said 1978). This particular construction of geographical space, specifically the modern Muslim ideal in Malaysia and an imagined ancient Arabia framed by Hui Muslims in Xi’an, goes



Displaying Piety

107

beyond the physical boundaries that confine the territory of these countries and areas. Dressing in these place-labeled styles in fact reinforces stereotypical images of the Muslim world in local narratives in Xi’an. But this process of reproducing Orientalist images within wedding photos is not just premised on European fantasies. Rather, it is a local discourse that is deeply embedded in contemporary transnational exchanges of practices and materials (­Gregory 2012). Dressing up like Muslims from elsewhere becomes a site of enacting imaginaries of elsewhere based on assembled references from within and outside China. This internationalization of Orientalist representations of the Muslim world has been reinterpreted through its involvement in marketization. This mechanism turns the “exotic” into part of a look that aspires to the moral example of sites of religious authority. This approach to the market echoes Rudnyckyj’s (2009) discussion of the conversion of religious rituals into convenient sources for the operation of the market economy in Indonesia. Methods of training pious and moral Muslims simultaneously work as a mechanism for training businesspeople who comply with the rules of market. The concept of “market Islam” is relevant to the emerging niche market of Muslim wedding photography and bridal salons in Xi’an. Hui Muslims in Xi’an engage the rationales of the market economy to make the demand for pious wedding photos into a way of generating profit. While the services provided in bridal salons aim at cultivating Hui Muslims as consumer subjects, the practices and narratives associated with consuming “Muslim-ness” and the “exotic” also contribute to the making of moral Hui subjects by framing them in the role of pious Muslims from elsewhere. The underlying logic of making virtue and value commensurable in Muslim fashions, as Jones has suggested in the emerging Muslim fashion scenes in Indonesia (2010), perpetuates the agitation of the Hui in understanding meanings of being “Hui.” “Hui-ness” implies a wide spectrum of meanings, ranging from ethnic marker to Muslim piety (Turnbull 2014). Hui couples, as consumer subjects, choose their preferred sources of religious authority in conjunction with their consumer decisions. In this way, we can see that within the Islamic revival in China, forms of revival can vary significantly between different aspects of Muslims’ lives. For instance, in this volume, Ruslan Yusupov’s analysis of the ban on alcohol consumption (see chapter 2) highlights reviving Islam in the context of consumption and economic development. The connections

108

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

between Islamic revival and economic development, especially economic networks, manifest in not only local but also transnational contexts (see Brose and Su; Hew). Not only the Hui but also other Muslim minorities like the Uyghur engage consumption in the context of weddings to articulate meanings of Islamic piety in China and transnational contexts (see Harris and Dawut). In relation to imaginations of different places, the practices and experiences of Hui Muslims shed light on processes of catching up with standards of global cities in Asia from the perspectives of ordinary urban dwellers. In their efforts to make their brides resemble role models in Southeast and South Asian Muslim communities, Hui in Xi’an engage the logic and practices of modeling worlds (Roy and Ong 2011). Modeling means engaging successful examples of urban development from elsewhere (labeled, for example, “garden,” “sustainable,” or “world class”) in local activities in the hope of reproducing their effects. Similar approaches of modeling can also be found in the Hui Muslims’ participation in developing local halal industry (Brose and Su) and in engaging the transnational religious community to develop new forms of religiosity locally (Stewart, this volume). While Roy and Ong primarily situate this notion in the context of urban policy making, it is also relevant to individuals who are involved in the process of reproducing successful models from elsewhere. For the Hui in Xi’an, their participation in wearing exotic wedding dresses and posing in front of backdrops that represent places of higher Islamic learning can be seen as individualized forms of modeling. Their aspiration to turn their own community into a space of piety and authenticity leads them to consume the “exotic appeal” in the hope of making Xi’an closer to the Muslim modernity of Malaysia and the authenticity of an imagined Arabia. Similar strategies for achieving higher forms of Islam through the visual can also be seen in Malaysia, where architectural styles are used as visual cues referencing the religious ideals the Malaysian Muslims look up to (Moser 2012). Thus, the imagining of Malaysia by Hui Muslims in Xi’an is not necessarily only a one-way process of learning from Malaysia. Rather, Hui Muslims have turned Xi’an into an anchor point within which the transnational imagination of the global umma is constantly produced and reproduced. Individual locations like Xi’an might not be prioritized on the hierarchy of global Muslim networks, but its role in integrating the global and the local should not be underestimated.



Displaying Piety

109

In this chapter, I have analyzed the process of producing a fashionable and cosmopolitan bridal look that is tailored toward the needs of the Hui in Xi’an. I unpacked the bridal look by examining its crucial components: the dresses, makeup, backdrops, poses, and photo editing that constitute the “Hui” characteristics framed in wedding portraits. I showed how the authority of references used in producing a proper Muslim bridal look comes into being. These references, rather than being a single source of information that is bound to one place located outside China, are assembled as a constellation of local interests, individual experiences with non-Chinese Muslim communities, and place-based imaginaries of Muslim-majority countries. While Islamic revival in China has led to an influx of “universal” and “globally circulated” symbols of piety and authenticity, these symbols have become relevant to the Hui in Xi’an through the daily practices of those who participate in producing the ideal bridal look and embodying these images through the performance of their roles in photo shoots and at wedding ceremonies. These individuals, and their daily encounters, do not simply mirror at the local level the influences of the global Islamic revival; they actively contribute to the making of the imagination of the global Muslim community. References Adrian, Bonnie. 2003. Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry. Oakland: University of California Press. Bunnell, Tim. 2007. “Post‐maritime Transnationalization: Malay Seafarers in Liverpool.” Global Networks 7 (4): 412–429. Crang, Philip, Claire Dwyer, and Peter Jackson. 2003. “Transnationalism and the Spaces of Commodity Culture.” Progress in Human Geography 27:438–456. Gillette, Maris Boyd. 2000. Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gregory, Derek. 2012. “Dis/Ordering the Orient: Scopic Regimes and Modern War.” In Orientalism and War, edited by Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanksi, 151–176. New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, Carla. 2010. “Images of Desire: Creating Virtue and Value in an Indonesian Islamic Lifestyle Magazine.” Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies 6 (3): 91–117. Ma, Qiang. 2011. Inside and Outside of the Hui Muslim Quarter: Islamic Encounters and Modernization in the City of Xi’an. Beijing: Chinese Social Science Publishing House.

110

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

Moser, Sarah. 2012. “Circulating Visions of ‘High Islam’: The Adoption of ­Fantasy Middle Eastern Architecture in Constructing Malaysian National Identity.” Urban Studies 49 (13): 2913–2935. Roy, Anaya, and Aihwa Ong, eds. 2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. London: John Wiley & Sons. Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2009. “Market Islam in Indonesia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (s1): S183–S201. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Turnbull, Leslie. 2014. “In Pursuit of Islamic ‘Authenticity’: Localizing Muslim Identity on China’s Peripheries.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 3 (2): 482–517.

Chapter 5

Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos Piety, Tradition, and Self-Fashioning Rachel HARRIS and Rahile DAWUT

T

his chapter is based on a mini–research project on Uyghur wedding videos, part of the larger “Sounding Islam in China” ­project, which explored changes in religious ideology and practice across China primarily through the medium of sound.1 It was conceived and carried out in 2014–2016, a period when the crackdown on what the Chinese government termed “religious extremism” was beginning to tighten its grip on all aspects of life for Uyghurs in Xinjiang. In order to stay within the boundaries of acceptable ­ research in China, the authors endeavored to find the least “sensitive” topic they could that might still cast some light on changing religious sensibilities and practices in this period. Despite these efforts to accommodate our research to the shifting government line, Rahile Dawut was detained without charge in December 2017, and she remains incarcerated as this volume goes to press. The final write-up and any mistakes are thus the sole responsibility of Rachel Harris. The editors of this volume have decided to publish this chapter as a coauthored piece although Rahile Dawut has not been able to see the final edit, as we felt it important to continue to give her voice a platform on the international stage. Although this chapter arises from a minor aspect of her research, we believe that it now has extra value because of the way that it demonstrates the exemplary moderation of her scholarship, and her efforts to demonstrate the breadth and nuance of religious and social change among Uyghurs in Xinjiang in the period leading up to the policies of mass securitization and incarceration. 111

112

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

Wedding videos provide a rich field for studying changing attitudes to religious belief and practice. Weddings are key sites for the production of community and the display of family prestige, contexts where Islam is deeply embedded in social life. Studying weddings through their video productions is studying social practice that is cut loose from the immediate bodily and contextualized experience. This entails a set of methodological challenges but also potential insights: the ways people portray their own lives and practices may challenge both state narratives and ethnographic narratives. Wedding videos are not straightforward records of events. They are intended for particular audiences; typically they are for watching with friends and relatives. They serve as a record of social bonds forged through the reciprocal rituals of the wedding celebration, as a repository for family memories, and as a powerful statement of family identity. In this chapter we discuss specific examples of wedding videos without identifying the families or the production companies involved in the creation of these videos. Interviews have also been anonymized to protect the identity of our informants. A small team of research assistants based in Xinjiang conducted an interview with a producer of wedding videos, held discussion groups on the topic of changing wedding customs, and sourced a selection of wedding videos produced between 1996 and 2016. This material was supplemented by a survey of videos posted on YouTube. Uyghur wedding videos provide vital perspectives on forms of religious revival and new styles of religious expression among Uyghurs in Xinjiang, because the development of the expressive potential of this media form has risen hand in hand with the rise of new forms of religious piety within Uyghur communities. As other chapters in this volume demonstrate (notably Yang Yang’s chapter on wedding photography among the Hui of Xi’an), there are many similarities in the articulation of representation, consumption, and religious piety within different Muslim communities across China. In this chapter we pose a set of related questions, namely: what role do these media forms play in the making of religious experience, authority, and community? How do practices of consumption and media engagement sustain, expand, and potentially transform conventional understandings of religiosity (Hirschkind 2006, 2012; Schulz 2006)? What kinds of “self-fashioning” are evident in Uyghur wedding videos (Port 2006; Abraham 2010), and what did this self-fashioning say about the shifting religious imagination in



Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos

113

this region in the period leading up to the wholesale criminalization of Uyghur Islam in Xinjiang? What Makes a Uyghur Wedding Video? Wedding videos first became popular among Uyghur families in the early 1990s. Early productions were simple affairs, transferred directly to VHS; no editing was possible. Their primary function was to register the faces of the wedding guests and show the gifts they had given; they included extended shots panning across the faces of awkwardly seated guests, and they zoomed in on the ritual presentation of gifts. It was a focus shared in videos from across the spectrum of wealth and class, across the urban/rural divide, and a constant from the earliest to the most recent videos. A 2012 example, made in rural Keriye in the far southeast of the Xinjiang region and preserved on VCD, shows a group of formally dressed older village women in headscarves and padded jackets, some with the iconic tiny hats of Keriye pinned on top of their headscarves. They kneel around the edges of a dimly lit carpeted guest room in a family home while the mother of the bride arranges a fan of crisp hundred-yuan notes on a plate balanced on a suitcase in the middle of the room. Another video, made at a high-end urban wedding party in a large and lavishly decorated Ürümchi wedding venue in 2016, zooms in for shots of friends and relatives of the newlyweds (the bride was dressed in a low-cut white bridal gown, the groom in a dark suit), as they fasten expensive watches onto their wrists and present the bride with sets of jewelry.2 In her seminal historical anthropology of the Uyghurs, Ildikó Bellér-Hann (2008) argues that Uyghur social relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were shaped at all levels of society by the principles of reciprocity and community, and these principles were fundamental to life-cycle and religious rituals. They continue to form a central part of contemporary Uyghur wedding ­videos, underscoring the role of these media items in documenting and celebrating the social bonds formed and solidified through practices of guesting and gifting. It is the interweaving of these core functions with changing styles of self-fashioning, influenced by new forms of religiosity and new media trends that make Uyghur wedding videos both fascinating and revealing documents for analysis. By the mid-1990s, VCDs had become the dominant form of technology for distributing Uyghur wedding videos. This period saw

114

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

the early development of the wedding video as a media production, with all the aspects of styling that this entailed. It was marked by the rise of celebratory Uyghur pop songs used as soundtracks, usually completely replacing the diegetic sound. As with Uyghur music videos of the period, they drew on a bank of stock images and glorious, newly available special effects, including images twirling in and sliding out of the frame, cascades of hearts or stars, infinitely multiplying images of the happy couple, or family photos inserted over iconic scenes of the region’s desert or mountain scenery. By the 2000s, wedding videos had become big business, and many dedicated wedding video companies had sprung up around the region. These companies could draw on large banks of audio tracks and video footage, including Uyghur pop songs and endless shots of Xinjiang scenery. They also drew on religious media emanating from the Middle East: audio recordings of Qur’anic recitation and images of Saudi mosques. In this period, wedding videos often used a generic opening sequence, beginning with the company advert, signaling clearly that this was a commercial film product. They proceeded with a succession of images of local places, which captured parallel notions of pristine nature and glossy modernity: mountains and pasturelands, airplanes and wind farms, new highways and skyscrapers. A procession of cars moving along the town streets—a display of wealth and prestige—was an essential element. Folkloric depictions of the region became increasingly prominent, as the growing tourist industry gave rise to an endless repetition of aestheticized images that became icons of the Xinjiang region. Footage of the state song-and-dance troupes performing in wellknown touristic sites featured prominently in the videos, just as it did in media and tourist representations of the region. Video firms based in different cities drew on local sets of stock footage to produce a montage of local imagery. They set them to synthesized renditions of popular wedding songs (Toy Mubarek! Mubarek Bolsun!) and celebratory kettledrum and shawm (naghra-sunay) music: a style traditionally used in the wedding context, normally performed on the street outside the wedding banquet venue or played from the back of a lorry as part of the wedding procession. The other type of mediated sounds and images becoming increasingly important were types of religious media imported from the Middle East. By the 2000s, these too became an essential component of wedding videos. In videos from this period we often find a sudden



Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos

115

jolt, as the pop-song track and cityscape are cut suddenly short and the video abruptly transitions to a sequence of sounds and images signaling religious piety: Qur’anic recitation overlaying images of the Grand Mosque in Medina, or pilgrims circling the Kaaba in Mecca. Sometimes the town’s local mosque is also highlighted in these v­ ideos, especially where the local community had supported the construction of a particularly large and impressive new mosque through individual contributions. These new sounds and images were indicative of the new religious sensibilities that were taking hold in the region. They demonstrated the hold that the Middle East (particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia) had taken in the popular imagination as the source of “true Islam,” to which increasing numbers of Uyghurs were beginning to believe they should return. In this early period, diverse and contrasting elements within Uyghur wedding videos were unsynthesized and uneasily juxtaposed. Over the following decade, wedding video editing and production processes became technologically increasingly sophisticated and consumers, especially in urban areas, became more media savvy, thus allowing the development of more sophisticated and individualized styles of self-fashioning. Being the Star of Your Own TV Show In more recent Uyghur wedding videos, TV assumes a central position. Not only are wedding celebrations dominated by cameras, but a constantly recurring trope within the videos is of people watching TV, evoking the possibility of endlessly scaled repetitions of people watching themselves watching themselves. This phenomenon spans the rural/urban divide, from sequences of wedding guests in a village in eastern Qumul (Hami) watching song-and-dance performances on TV to a high-end Ürümchi wedding video that include a manufactured sepia-tinged scene of the friends of the bride and groom watching the video, within the video. At a wedding we attended in 2016, held among the Uyghur diaspora at a large dedicated wedding venue in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the live feed from the cameras was simultaneously relayed on a large screen just behind the action. The ubiquitous presence of cameras at the ceremony, and the subsequent appearance of the event on the TV screen, offer people powerful mimetic experiences, and the fantasy of being stars for the day. While the images and sounds of the Islamic world

116

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

continued to exert a powerful attraction, they were interleaved with other forms of globally circulating fashions. One influential model that began to appear in urban Uyghur wedding videos in the 2010s was the East Asian soap opera format. This styling filtered into Xinjiang via Beijing from Korea, the leading trendsetter for music videos and soap operas across East Asia and beyond. The Korean model produced wedding videos that were ­carefully constructed to imitate TV productions. Video companies carefully selected venues and instructed the couples and their families on what to wear, how to act, and even what emotions to show in order to achieve the desired “soap” style. In Xinjiang, this was a style that only the most high-end Uyghur productions aspired to, and it was a feature of the most sinicized and cosmopolitan productions. One wedding video produced by a Beijing company for an Ürümchibased family (published on YouTube in 2015) reproduced this style expertly, juxtaposing familiar tropes of Uyghur national identity (professional costumed song-and-dance performance, bread baking in a clay oven) with sequences showing the family preparing themselves for the ceremony. Their wealth and modernity were discreetly displayed through a series of multiangle panning shots, carefully edited together with a sophisticated array of background instrumental music designed to set the mood of each scene. A snippet of Middle Eastern oud signified the exotic and the Islamic in this sequence. American rock guitar underlaid a flashback sequence of a proposal made in a European-style bar. Unusually, this family could be heard speaking in the video, and very unusually it included Chinese voices. Xinjiang’s large Han Chinese population and its sinicized urban landscape were conspicuous by their complete absence from every other wedding video we watched, a phenomenon also observable in Uyghur films and music videos. In this and some other contemporary urban wedding videos, parts of the sequence followed the bride in lengthy preparations of her clothes, hair, makeup, and nails, assisted by a group of friends and professional stylists. These sequences borrow from “the making of” form of TV documentary, in which the camera takes viewers behind the scenes of a theater show or onto a film set. As Mattijs van de Port (2006) argues, these mimetic tendencies should not be surprising. The media technologies used in wedding videos have been developed and used in other settings and arenas. When they enter this new field they come with specific histories, and they bring with them



Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos

117

the formats and styles developed elsewhere. This is also part of the process of self-fashioning. Wedding videos borrow notions of prestige and splendor from the sphere of popular media, and they frame wedding ceremonies as televisual realities, exploiting the style and format of TV programs. Media formats and styles are more than the mere “packaging” of a narrative. Through constant exposure, people become thoroughly accustomed to certain styles and certain formats, so that these styles shape people’s sense of what is convincing or credible, cool or outdated, desirable or distasteful. Wedding videos address and stimulate new communities of style and taste. They mirror worlds that are aspired to, and offer opportunities to people to become mirrors themselves by participating in and displaying those aspects of style in their own videos. These forms of styling became progressively more sophisticated and individualized in the 2010s. A new innovation in Uyghur wedding videos, which appeared around 2013–2014, was the practice of opening them with a tailor-made five-minute fast-moving sequence set to music that encapsulated and styled the whole wedding. Our interviewee, a professional wedding video producer we have called Alim, explained: “Around two years ago we started shooting a fiveminute MV [music video] for the bride and the groom. I would say we learned this MV thing from the Han Chinese. We film an MV before the wedding for around four to five thousand yuan. Then we add it to the beginning of the wedding video.” In 2015–2016, this practice was restricted to the most expensive video productions. For less-well-off families, a fraction of this cost (around five hundred yuan) would be sufficient to pay for a full wedding video, lasting at least two hours, minimally edited, with the company’s standard opening sequence appended to the front. For this substantial fee, wealthy couples were able to fashion themselves in the style of their favorite pop singers. These high-end wedding MV sequences drew closely on established music video styles, and they appropriated globally circulating sounds. Wedding MVs—as high-end, fashionable, and expensive products—were often distinctly cosmopolitan, referencing a range of globalized “romantic” popular musical styles from classic midtwentieth-century Arab popular songs to Argentinian tango. One 2015 music video sequence in a wedding video from Kashgar borrowed liberally from tropes of European period drama squeezed up against references to the world of Hindi film. Accompanied by a

118

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

nostalgic Uyghur pop ballad, the camera circles around a moodily lit headshot of the groom, who peers wistfully upward, cut with fleeting glimpses of the bride appearing in various outfits (in ways closely resembling Yang Yang’s account in this volume of a bridal photography salon in Xi’an); now dressed in white crinoline and silhouetted against a bow window, now dressed in South Asian– style sequined red shalwar kameez, posed before a classic Kashgarstyle carved wooden door. Style, in Birgit Meyer’s formulation, is a shared practice of signification based on creative recycling and repetition, which is central to performing identity. Style, like discourse, imposes its own regulations and constraints on its users. What links people to a certain style, she argues, is less about that style’s capacity to make true statements about the world and more about the mood it generates: “Style, by putting things in a certain way, speaks to, as well as evokes, emotions. Employing an ensemble of recurring key terms and conventions, style makes people feel at home in, as well as confident with, a particular discourse” (Meyer 2004, 95; see also 2015, 103–107). Style and forms of self-fashioning are typically linked to the modes of perception and appraisal that people have cultivated as modern media consumers. In the period up to 2016, Uyghurs in Xinjiang drew on and synthesized a wide range of styles in their wedding video productions. The influence of Chinese mass media was strong—Chinese soaps, styles of music video, and the ways that Xinjiang was depicted as a tourist destination—but they were also influenced by other globally circulating styles of film and TV, including global symbols of Muslim piety. These are the styles, fashions, and expressive registers that are circulated via transnational media and that link Muslim believers around the world. These practices of consumption and media engagement sustain, expand, and transform conventional understandings of religiosity. As Faegheh Shirazi argues, these practices are not necessarily a marker of adherence to religious piety, but they are part of a search for identity and security in a global environment increasingly hostile to Muslims (Shirazi 2016). They assume particular importance among Muslims living as minorities in nonMuslim societies, who use them to mark their difference from mainstream secular society and to connect to a wider global Islamic community. Among Uyghurs, as among the Hui, they are thoroughly integrated with other globally circulating styles, which may be far removed from the Muslim world.



Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos

119

Shifting Styles in Wedding Ritual Weddings provide opportunities for display and self-fashioning but they are also, of course, religious rituals and important sites for the performance of embodied religious practice. The rise of the professional wedding host in urban Uyghur weddings provides an interesting example of the development of new styles of performing religious experience. The blessing—a prayer for the couple that takes place within the evening wedding party—became a crucial part of high-end wedding videos in the 2010s. In fashionable urban weddings in the 2010s, its ideal realization required a performer with the ability to provoke authentic emotional responses from the close family, ready to be caught in close-up by the circling cameras. In interview, Alim expressed his frustration with what he regarded as the lack of the necessary performative qualities among older family members: These days it’s hard to find elders who know the Qur’an and can also come to the stage to make a beautiful blessing. Most of them end with an Arabic prayer or they just say “Amin,” raise their palms and stand there for a bit, then end it with “Allahu Akbar.” They’re quite unable to give a moving and meaningful blessing in a loud voice. Nobody can give a moving blessing like Shirzat.

Shirzat was a professional wedding host who was much in demand in Ürümchi in this period, prized for his ability to create atmosphere and provoke tears. In a 2016 Ürümchi wedding video, he stands behind a keyboard in the midst of a ballroom, casually dressed, playing a simple progression of chords. As the close family line up behind the bride and groom, who are dressed (respectively) in white bridal gown and dark suit, he sings in a voice brimming with sincerity, “My greetings, beloved mother! My greetings, dear father!” The bride and groom bow on each sung “greeting,” and a crowd of cameramen rush in for a close-up of the face of the bride’s mother, which is quivering on the edge of tears. This focus on the emotional expression of mothers is, of course, a stock trope of film and soap operas worldwide, and it is particularly prominent in the Uyghur film and TV industry. These carefully produced moments crystallize and display particular styles of ritual experience, which are rooted in embodied and emotional styling. Shirzat’s new-style blessing exemplified the professionalization of a point in the wedding ritual usually reserved

120

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

for the expression of family bonds by family elders. The new style deemphasized the ritual role of older male relatives and moved the focus to an aestheticized eliciting of displays of emotion. In their conversations, our discussion group of young Uyghurs gave diverse views on this shift in practice in middle-class urban weddings. Some expressed a more religiously oriented unease that a professional singer, who might be the kind of person who drank alcohol (i.e., not a pious Muslim), could be allowed to perform this important religious duty. Others clearly felt at ease with the new style and mocked the efforts of family elders to give the blessing, with their tendency to end their prayer with an “Amen” or, worse, “Allahu Akbar”! Examples of change in the wedding ritual like this suggest that modes of religiosity, as with other aspects of daily life, are embedded in shifting senses of style and fashion that are driven by encounters with transnationally circulating media forms and styles, which seem on the surface to be quite distant from the religious sphere. Foreign Extremism and National Traditions Alongside their role as a site of globally circulating expressions of style, wedding videos provide a site where negotiations about the nature of Uyghur Islam were played out. We can read in wedding videos many examples of the debates and embodied conflicts about Uyghur Islam in this period. They reveal a discursive field where new styles of belief and notions of tradition were under constant negotiation. Although it is rendered barely visible in wedding video productions, the state is a constant and powerful presence in these negotiations. Among Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Party policy and Islamic faith are both integral parts of people’s lives. A speech made by a slightly eccentric guest and captured in a rural wedding video made in eastern Qumul (Hami) illustrates the ways in which Uyghurs internalize and integrate these twin poles of life, which are so often depicted as opposing and irreconcilable. The wedding guest addresses the bride, saying: “According to our government’s policy you should have two children . . . I wish that you will have one boy and one girl. . . . Your son should grow up to be like the leader of all the Muslims of the world, the Prophet Muhammad.” In this 2004 video, the assembled guests respond to these felicitous words by tucking money into the band of the speaker’s hat. A few years later, such overt expressions of religious faith would be deemed inappropriate for



Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos

121

inclusion in a wedding video, a dangerous sign of religious extremism. By 2016 all overt references to Islam and even to Arab culture were being edited out of wedding videos. Alim told us: If we add foreign music, then it’s nice. Uyghur music is not really that appropriate. Youngsters about to get married, they really love the MVs we make. Now we’ve started adding Turkish, Uzbek, and English songs in other parts of the film as well. But in the version for elders, we add Uyghur music. A few years ago we sometimes added Arab music if our customers demanded it . . . but now we don’t use Arab music anymore.

This last sentence is an oblique reference to the “anti–religious extremism” campaign in Xinjiang, which began to gather force in 2013. By 2016 this campaign had come to dominate life in the region to such an extent that even the use of an Arab pop song in a wedding video might be sufficient to label a family as religious extremists and condemn them to a period of detention in one of the many internment camps, officially known as “reeducation centers,” which were then springing up around the region.3 Fearful of having their wedding videos checked in police searches and being found to reveal extremist tendencies, families and production companies carefully monitored their content, and images of Mecca and the sounds of the recited Qur’an disappeared from Uyghur wedding videos. ­Although the increasingly tight controls on religious expression effectively filtered out overt references to the wider Islamic world in Uyghur wedding videos after 2013, the sensibilities and styles of consumption and production underpinning Muslim piety continued to be influential in more recent productions. The anti-extremism campaign impacted not only on video production but also on the shape of the wedding celebrations. One aspect of change that illustrates this shift was the degree of prominence given to the nikah: the religious heart of the wedding ritual conducted by the imam. Alim commented: “Some people who employ us don’t want to use too much of the nikah on the video. That’s also related to practical issues. Especially people who come from southern Xinjiang to make their video, or people who are going to send copies to the South, they are now demanding less nikah and less of other religious components.” How did this core aspect of marriage ritual become too “sensitive” to include in wedding videos? By the mid-2000s, the imam’s sermon at the nikah had become an important site for

122

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

the dissemination of new religious ideas among Uyghur society. Particularly in the poorer areas of southern towns, large groups of young men would crowd into the wedding venue to listen to often-lengthy sermons on the importance of daily prayer and a pious lifestyle delivered by “unofficial imams”: religious preachers who had studied Islam abroad, not formally approved or employed within the state system.4 The practice of using weddings as a site for religious instruction had already become widespread in other parts of Central Asia as early as the 1990s. In southern Kyrgyzstan a new Islamic-style wedding (sunnati/ibodat toi) became common at this time, one that eschewed evening parties, music, and alcohol, maintained strict gender segregation, and kept the bride hidden from public view during the wedding. An Islamic preacher, typically from outside the local community, would be invited to the wedding to deliver a religious message that called the guests to observe more closely the way of Islam. Julie McBrien (2006) traces the debates that arose within local communities in Kyrgyzstan over this new style of wedding, and the tensions they revealed between local notions of “religion” and “national culture.” In Xinjiang, the state responded to similar developments in Uyghur weddings with deep alarm, and the “antiextremism” campaign soon forced these preachers out of sight. In Uyghur weddings before 2016, the nikah also became a site where tensions between the desire to adhere to notions of “correct” Islamic practice and the desire to preserve national traditions were played out. The practice of feeding a piece of bread dipped in salt or salt water to the bride and groom during the nikah is recorded in early twentieth-century sources on wedding customs in Kashgar (­ Bellér-Hann 2008, 242). The practice reflected the high respect accorded to these basic foodstuffs in Uyghur tradition. Eating the same salt symbolized a promise to stay together, and the salt was thought to serve as a witness to the ceremony (Steenberg 2013, 261). In recent years, however, the practice was criticized by some Uyghurs as a deviation from correct religious practice. A student in our discussion group commented: In Karamay, we don’t eat bread dipped in salt anymore. In Karamay, the religious atmosphere among people has changed over time. Now it’s more common for people to gather together and read the Qur’an. According to them, there is no such thing as eating salt-dipped bread in the Qur’an, so doing that is not allowed. Salt used to be a highly



Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos

123

regarded thing among the Uyghurs, and the reason for eating salt was to strengthen the nikah. But now, it’s not like that anymore.

And yet in some wedding videos the eating of salt-dipped bread was deliberately highlighted: a conscious performative statement in support of “national traditions.” The “bilingual” wedding video discussed above provides an example of an educated and influential family making a self-conscious style statement about this tradition, with an extended close-up shot of the groom’s father popping a piece of bread into his son’s laughing mouth. Another site of tension in which the authorities became deeply embroiled was the question of music and dancing at weddings. At the National People’s Congress in March 2014, Dilnar Abdulla, deputy chair of the Chinese Dancers Association, gave a speech claiming that religious extremists in Xinjiang were “not permitting people to sing and dance at weddings.” This, she explained, was a “major assault on our traditional culture.”5 This speech, pitting “foreign extremism” against “authentic Uyghur traditions,” signaled an extraordinary set of government measures implemented especially in the southern part of the region, to encourage the performance of music at weddings. In Kashgar, families were required to pay a “music performance deposit” ahead of a wedding, which they could retrieve only if they could demonstrate they had invited musicians to play at the wedding.6 In his study of changing wedding customs in Kashgar in the period 2010–2012, Rune Steenberg notes the rise in popularity of what he terms “piously oriented weddings” (islamche toy, sünniy toy). These islamche toy were simple, sober gatherings in which the religious ceremonies were central and guesting and gift giving were kept to a minimum. Dancing and music were absent or very limited, clothing conformed to standards of modesty, and displays of wealth such as car processions, expensive gifts, and banquets were avoided. Even the customary gifts of food and snacks given to the guests as they leave were often omitted. As Steenberg notes, “One of the criticisms voiced against these weddings is that they turn joyful weddings into something more like a funeral” (Steenberg 2013, 250). Alim commented: A few years ago there were also weddings called Islamic weddings. In these weddings, people didn’t play music or dance. They didn’t go to a

124

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

big restaurant either. They just went to a local restaurant to have a simple meal and then took the bride and that was it. Usually, the process of this kind of wedding was very simple, and there was very little celebration. The bride would be veiled. Now, there are no longer weddings like this.

Such “Islamic weddings” were unlikely to be subjects of wedding videos, which, as we have seen, form an integral part of the display of wealth and embrace of mediated popular culture that overtly pious Muslims might be expected to reject. It is, however, possible to find many traces of religious reformist sensibilities within recent wedding videos. The performance of piety at Uyghur weddings involved gendered rules about who should see what and when, who was allowed to speak or sing when, what sounds were appropriate, and what forms of bodily expression were appropriate. This was especially visible where different norms collide. A particularly public context for dancing in weddings is the moment when the groom’s party arrives at the venue where the celebration will be held. Another member of our focus group explained: In Aqsu, we call it the “wedding furrow” [toy qoshti]. The groom’s side will call to say, “We’re heading off!” The bride’s side will prepare wedding candies and have several people go out to greet them. Especially relatives with a good reputation would definitely go out. When the groom’s relatives arrive, they don’t directly enter the restaurant. They stand about a hundred meters away and play music, and the young people start dancing. The two sides will get closer to each other through dancing. After the two sides are mixed up, then the elders will walk around, hand out the wedding candies, and greet each other, and then they can enter the restaurant with the music playing. In Aqsu, nobody would be surprised by dancing and singing on the streets at a wedding.

The necessity for weddings to include or eschew celebratory aspects such as music and dance came to be an important fault line in debates over correct religious practice and how to live a good Muslim lifestyle during this period. Given the emphasis placed on “song and dance” in Chinese state representations of Uyghurs, it should come as no surprise that this aspect of the new-style pious weddings was singled



Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos

125

out for criticism in state media. As this account by another member of the focus group makes clear, public displays of singing and dancing are deeply enmeshed in Uyghur practices of reciprocal gifting and the forging of social bonds: In Turpan, when the groom went to the bride’s neighborhood to collect the bride, the relatives and neighbors of the bride would all come out, and they set tables in front of the house with all kinds of snacks and fruits. They would hold up a two- to three-meter-long cloth and block the road with it. We call that the “wedding blockade” [toy tosush]. Then the groom’s friends would have to get out and dance in front of the wedding car, and eat the food prepared for them on the table. Everybody who participated in setting up the table would receive a small gift. Doing this is about showing the neighborhood’s respect for the new couple. If the bride’s parents have good relationships with their neighbors, then a lot of people would help set up the tables and prepare the stops.

Steenberg also notes the onset of tensions surrounding singing and dancing at weddings. He recounts a story, told during a long-distance bus journey by a young man whose marriage plans had nearly been ruined when the bride’s family walked out of the wedding venue because he and his friends started to dance. For the bride’s family, dancing had no place in a proper Muslim wedding. For the groom, dancing and music were essential components in a “real Uyghur” (milliy, ethnic) wedding. Following the telling of this story, a discussion broke out between passengers on the bus over whether a wedding should be held with or without music and dance. Steenberg notes that this was “a hotly debated topic in Kashgar among almost all social groups, save government workers” (Steenberg 2013, 249). A 2016 wedding video from the southern town of Khotan provides a fascinating text through which we can observe the embodied negotiations that surrounded dancing in small-town Xinjiang in this period. In this video, a jarring episode occurs as the bride and her friends arrive in their car at the banquet venue. The sounds of a drum-and-shawm band greet the guests as they get out of their cars. A group of men in suits and embroidered hats mill around the road, and one man decides to persuade the chief bridesmaid out of her car. The woman emerges, modestly dressed in a full-length floral dress and headscarf. “Let’s play!” he calls. Apparently embarrassed, she

126

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

makes a token effort to dance, holding her hand in front of her face in an attempt to shield her identity from the prying camera. Sensing a dip in the celebratory mood, more of the men come forward to dance and utter celebratory shouts. The woman escapes back to the safety of her car. The groom arrives, and the men grab him bodily and try to force him to dance. He is not at all interested and gesticulates angrily at them. The video cuts abruptly to a still of a flower bouquet. In moments like this we can observe the way that ideological debates trickle down into popular consciousness and inform everyday actions. Forms of bodily practice have been a key focus of analysis in discussion of the Islamic revival in the Middle East (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006). As Johan Rasanayagam (2006) argues, in contexts where governments maintain tight control over religious expression, lived experience is often privileged over debate as a site for moral reasoning, and in Xinjiang, debates over correct religious practice and tradition were often played out through embodied conflicts. As is common across the world, women found themselves at the sharp end of changing ethical standards, and dance was a particular site of tension. In the ethical milieu in Khotan in this period, for a woman to be caught on camera dancing in the street was to expose herself to public shaming.7 The video catches her at a moment of tension: how should she negotiate the conflicting demands of identity politics, tradition, and changing religious norms? Halal and Traditional Wedding Videos It is instructive to compare the Uyghur situation with the recent history of wedding celebrations in Egypt during the rise of the Islamic revival movement and into the “post-Islamist” period. In Egypt, observers have described a process whereby the new pious sensibilities were gradually absorbed into mainstream practice; a synthesis of new and traditional styles of celebration, and a gradual moderation in religious sensibilities. In Karin van Nieuwkerk’s (2013) account, Islamic weddings in Egypt began in the 1980s as sober parties consisting of a short religious ceremony attended exclusively by male guests, after which the male and female guests divided into two separate venues for a simple dinner. In the early 1990s the Muslim B ­ rothers sought to widen their appeal among the Egyptian population, a move that necessitated compromises on their more austere edicts. During the 1990s, the wide gap that existed between “Islamic” weddings and



Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos

127

“normal” weddings decreased. The growing number of pious and well-to-do Muslims stimulated the creation of an extensive religious market and a wide range of customers, both within and outside the Islamist circles, looking for forms of wedding entertainment that were both halal and festive. In Xinjiang, by 2015, we can see the beginnings of a similar process of absorption and synthesis. The new “Islamic weddings” posed a challenge to modes of Uyghur sociality in fundamental ways. Central to these were the role played by weddings in the “reciprocal sociality” that Ildikó Bellér-­Hann (2008) situates at the heart of Uyghur tradition. As Steenberg (2013, 260) notes, the logic of reciprocal obligation was challenged by the new pious weddings and the ideology behind them. Stripped of the practice of gifting that underpinned social bonds, the core meaning of weddings underwent a fundamental shift. The traditional demands of reciprocity made it difficult to adhere to the modest imperatives of these new weddings if this model was not generally accepted and followed within the social circles of the families involved. Inevitably there were many instances of clashes between families over the proper way to proceed. In some recent Uyghur wedding videos we can see processes of absorption and synthesis at work that mirror the historical developments which Karin van Nieuwkerk observed in Egypt a decade earlier. These videos are opportunities to demonstrate family prestige—of which piety forms an important part—and they integrate Uyghur tradition and Islamic piety in ways that belie the entrenched opposition set up by Chinese media. In the opening sequence of a 2015 wedding video, dynamic views of the Kashgar streets combine the Islamic (the call to prayer given from a local Kashgar mosque), the folkloric (craftsmen hammering metal), and “halal” music (which took the form of excerpts from the canonical Uyghur Twelve Muqam repertoire sung by an all-male group of voices). The wedding was held in a large and beautiful traditional Kashgar courtyard house. We see taps used for ritual washing before prayer, large numbers of guests arriving, evidence of traditional but not excessive hospitality—bowls of tea and mutton rice polo that the guests eat in the traditional way, with their fingers while seated on carpets around a large tablecloth—then an emotional shot of the bride’s mother kissing her daughter and placing a wedding veil over her head, and finally a lengthy nikah ceremony attended by male family members and friends and dominated by the

128

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

imam’s sermon. During the ceremony, the bride is revealed sitting outside an open window, her bowed head completely covered by a traditional Kashgar-style embroidered veil, flanked by older female family members. Videos like this demonstrate a carefully crafted display of a style of wedding that is at once lavish and pious, insistent on a rigorous level of gender segregation but highlighting forms of hospitality and reciprocity, at once deeply halal and deeply traditional. Such videos suggest the possibility of bridging the trenchant opposition set up between religious revival and Uyghur tradition. They drew on visual tropes of local identity constructed in tourist promotions and on national TV. They used musical forms developed by the state performance troupes, and the sentimental fashioning of mothers familiar from films and TV, and they integrated them into new forms of selffashioning that were entirely congruent with Islamic revivalist modes of pious comportment. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, wedding videos are not straightforward records of events. In a region where the state places so much emphasis on representations, and where state policies intervene so closely in aspects of daily life and practices of self-fashioning, media items like this need to be interpreted with particular care and studied in tandem with other methods of accessing people’s experience of changing religious norms. In this collaborative research project we have tried to do this through a combination of interviews and discussion groups and reviewing Uyghur wedding videos made in different parts of the region over a period of twenty years, highlighting aspects of social and religious change from across the region and at different levels of society during this time span. Through the changing style statements made by Uyghur wedding videos over the past twenty years, we can see how they draw on particular transnational flows of consumption and media engagement. We can see a shift in ways of framing religious experience, authority, and community, and the tensions between different models of being religious and being Uyghur. Processes of self-fashioning in Uyghur wedding videos evidence and sometimes deliberately assert different standpoints within the debates on piety, identity, and tradition, but most importantly they offer the possibility of integration and synthesis in a context which has been so erroneously drawn as one of violent polarization.



Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos

129

Notes 1. SOAS, “Sounding Islam in China: A Multi-sited Ethnographic Study,” accessed July 14, 2019, http://www.soundislamchina.org. 2. On contemporary debates in Uyghur society concerning gifting practices and the excessive display of wealth, see Darren Byler and Aynur Kadir, “Ms Munira’s Wedding Gifts,” Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, August 26, 2016, https://livingotherwise.com/2016/08/26/ms-muniras-wedding-gifts-trolling -uyghur-elite-society/. 3. See UHRP 2013; Rob Schmitz, “Wary of Unrest among Uighur Minority, China Locks Down Xinjiang Region,” Morning Edition, NPR, September 26, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/09/26/553463964/wary-of-unrest -among-uighur-minority-china-locks-down-xinjiang-province. 4. Our thanks to Rune Steenberg for sharing his observations of this practice in Kashgar in 2010–2013. 5. Dilnar Abdulla, “Speech delivered at the National People’s Congress,” Xinhuanet, March 2014, accessed July 21, 2017, http://news.xinhuanet.com /2014‑03/04/c_119603801.htm. 6. “Qeshqerde toy merikilirini naxsha-ussul bilen ötküzüshke kapaletlik qilish zakalet puli élinmaqtiken,” Radio Free Asia Uyghur Service, March 11, 2015; http://www.rfa.org/uyghur/xewerler/kishilik-hoquq/qeshqer-toy-11032015233742 .html. 7. Compare the discussions of recitation by Hui Muslim women in Jaschok and in Ha Guangtian in this volume, and the controversies surrounding the women’s voices, especially in public arenas.

References Abraham, Janaki. 2010. “Wedding Videos in North Kerala: Technologies, Rituals, and Ideas about Love and Conjugality.” Visual Anthropology Review 26 (2): 116–127. Bellér-Hann, Ildikó. 2008. Community Matters in Xinjiang 1880–1949: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur. China Studies 17. Leiden: Brill. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2012. “Experiments in Devotion Online: The YouTube Khuṭba.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44:5–21. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McBrien, Julie. 2006. “Listening to the Wedding Speaker: Discussing Religion and Culture in Southern Kyrgyzstan.” Central Asian Survey 25 (3): 341–357.

130

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

Meyer, Birgit. 2004. “‘Praise the Lord . . . ’: Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere.” American Ethnologist 31 (1): 92–110. ———. 2015. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nieuwkerk, Karin van. 2013. Performing Piety: Singers and Actors in Egypt’s Islamic Revival. Austin: University of Texas Press. Port, Mattijs van de. 2006. “Visualizing the Sacred: Video Technology, ‘Televisual’ Style, and the Religious Imagination in Bahian Candomblé.” ­American Ethnologist 33 (3): 444–461. Rasanayagam, Johan. 2006. “Introduction.” Central Asian Survey 25 (3): 219–233. Schulz, Dorothea E. 2006. “Promises of (Im)Mediate Salvation: Islam, Broadcast Media, and the Remaking of Religious Experience in Mali.” American Ethnologist 33 (2): 210–229. Shirazi, Faegheh. 2016. Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety. Austin: University of Texas Press. Steenberg, Rune Reyhé. 2013. “Uyghur Marriage in Kashgar: Muslim Marriage in China.” PhD diss., Freien Universität Berlin. UHRP (Uyghur Human Rights Project). 2013. China’s Iron-Fisted Repression of Uyghur Religious Freedom. Washington, DC: Uyghur Human Rights Project.

Chapter 6

Marketing as Pedagogy Halal E-commerce in Yunnan Michael C. BROSE and SU Min

A

lmost a quarter of the world’s population are now Muslims, and they spent $1.9 trillion across various consumer sectors in 2015, a figure projected to grow to $3 trillion by 2021. Official census figures show about 26 million Muslims in China, a small percentage of the total population, but they appear to be following a similar spending trend, especially in halal food. Research shows that China’s Muslim population contributed around $10 billion to total food sales in China in 2014—mostly, presumably, on halal food—and that their consumption of halal food is projected to grow by at least 11 percent by 2020 (Dubai Islamic Economy Development Centre 2016). This trend is confirmed anecdotally by the proliferation of halal restaurants in Chinese cities and towns, and the appearance of halal food items in urban supermarkets. It is also interesting to see trade fairs devoted to halal products occurring with some regularity in certain regions of China. These trade fairs are usually staged in spacious, new exhibition halls in provincial capitals, with government backing, where domestic producers show their goods side by side with companies from Muslim-majority countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, and Malaysia. These trade fairs emphasize both the import and the export of a wide range of halal goods that include but go well beyond food items according to developing consumer demand for things like halal cosmetics clothing and jewelry. For example, Yang’s chapter in this volume illustrates the growing importance of Muslim fashion as part of this new economic sector. Likewise, Harris and Dawut (chapter 5) chart the rise of Muslim consumerism among the 131

132

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

Uyghurs in northwestern China. These networks of goods supply a growing demand for halal goods from consumers around the world; among these consumers China’s own Muslim population constitute a significant proportion. The growing call for halal products around the world, and certainly in China, is also the result of the rapidly expanding e-commerce sector. This phenomenon is especially wellknown in China from the emergence of Alibaba and is part of a recent demographic shift from rural to urban living and a new middle class with expendable income. E-commerce platforms have also received support more recently as one part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. These changes in China’s domestic economy are now well documented, but we are only just beginning to understand their importance and impact on such issues as rural underdevelopment, ethnic minority, and religious issues, and China’s highly varied regional structural economic patterns. Illustrating how halal goods are produced, marketed, and consumed may provide a unique and convenient way to understand these larger changes occurring in China. Food production, marketing and consumption patterns, and networks provide a good way to understand identity issues since food, like all material objects that are shared or exchanged, has a distinct social life. The circulation of food items marks, creates, and maintains social and cultural identity (Appadurai 1986, 3–63). Halal food in China provides us with a particularly effective way to assess the role of food in identity marking and formation because it is tied so directly to Muslim life and social practice. But even the limited topic of halal food covers a lot of ground, and our research addresses only one aspect, halal food e-commerce marketing, and in one part of China, the southwestern province of Yunnan. These caveats are important to state, since China’s food economy is a large and complex system, and that complexity necessarily expands when we factor in regional and ethnic distinctions. We want to understand how the growing halal food economy creates and sustains the identity and the social and economic power of one group of Muslims, namely the local Hui Muslim Chinese. Our case study also shows how religious and cultural traditions in China interact with official food regulations that the state imposes on all producers. In this regard, Yusupov’s chapter in this book, research conducted in another part of Yunnan, the small town of Shadian, provides a striking example of the interaction between the secular and the religious spheres that complement our own findings. His case study illustrates how local state authorities



Marketing as Pedagogy

133

weave religious ethics and secular law together to regulate one particular landscape of consumption and food regulation that is also home to many Hui Muslim Chinese. Our research investigates one aspect of the e-commerce activities of a new corporation founded by local Hui entrepreneurs in Yunnan to market halal food products called the Salaam Group. As we describe, the Salaam Group has incorporated several different strategies into its business model; we focus here on only one of these, the group’s linked cultural and educational activities. These activities undertaken or sponsored by this corporation reveal especially vividly how culture and education support and complement the twin goals of making a profit by selling products while promoting greater understanding of Chinese Muslim ethnic identity and religion. The Yunnan Salaam Group (Sailiamu Jituan) is a new corporate enterprise that includes commercial and cultural activities, each with its own website.1 The business side is focused primarily on e-commerce marketing of halal food products produced mainly but not exclusively in their home province, Yunnan. The Salaam Group also identifies itself as a “cultural unit” (wenhua danwei) that sponsors a host of activities, such as local Yunnan ethnic minority celebrations, hosting Chinese calligraphy sessions for the public, having their employees participate in local and regional cultural events, running a traditional Chinese-style teahouse that is open to the public, and providing essays on historic and cultural topics. The Salaam Group has developed these two sides of its corporate identity in some interesting ways in the past couple of years. Their physical presence in the provincial capital has evolved from a showroom of halal food products to their current iteration running a traditional-style Chinese teahouse in an important historic building, and their halal food commercial activities and educational activities are conducted solely in their online space. The Salaam Group provides an intriguing example from the rather remote province of Yunnan of an effective business model that commodifies Islam as a brand and uses that marketing strategy to carry out a pedagogical mission in concert with commerce. The group succeeds by targeting the growing urban-based middle-class Chinese consumer group, especially Muslim consumers, who may view purchasing online halal products as a type of piety as well as satisfying desire (Shirazi 2016). We are especially interested in the ways the Salaam Group imbricates their twin goals of teaching and selling into their business model through a multitude of practices that

134

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

include corporate naming, the kinds of visual and textual messages delivered on their commercial webpage, and the various cultural and community activities they sponsor. Why Yunnan? Hui Muslim Chinese are traditionally associated with northwestern China, and especially the Hui Autonomous Region, Ningxia, rather than the Southwest. But Yunnan’s very existence as a province of China is bound up closely with Muslims, and that history continues to shape the social and economic geography of the province today. Before the mid-thirteenth century, the area now occupied by Yunnan Province was controlled by two successive independent states, and the region was a true frontier zone between imperial China and Southeast Asia. The Mongols swept into the area in the 1250s, conquering the last independent state there, Dali, as a jumping-off point to their real goal: conquering southern Song China. Many of the troops that were garrisoned across the old Dali State were Muslims from Central Asia, and they were settled in permanent settlements along key transportation routes. Once the Mongols had completed the conquest, they assigned a Muslim civilian administrator to rule the newly pacified area for the Mongols. That man, Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din, was from Samarkand, and his descendants continued to rule there through the entire period of Mongol rule. Most of Yunnan’s important contemporary Hui Muslim Chinese clans and communities trace their heritage to that period (Brose 2015, 135–155). The founders of the Salaam Group are Hui from small villages in one of these historic communities, Weishan County, in rural western Yunnan.2 That county is perhaps best-known in international tourist circles for the city Dali, seat of the last independent state before the Mongol conquest. The Hui Chinese Muslim community across Yunnan knows Weishan because it is home to several historic mosques in small villages southwest of Dali, whose inhabitants are famous for their pious and vigorous lifestyle. As we shall see in this case study, those Muslims also produce several halal food products that are now marketed by the Salaam Group. Ethnography of the Salaam Group Our inquiry here into the Salaam Group’s segmented marketing strategies that commodify Islam to target prospective Muslim consumers



Marketing as Pedagogy

135

stem from an interesting description of the corporation’s business methods that was provided to us by a manager of the corporation in one of the interviews we conducted in 2015 and 2017. We had asked our informant to tell us how the Salaam Group obtained halal certification for its food products. He replied: “As for halal food products, [for us] the next step [in forming our Group] was to decide on an overall brand effect; we use the two-character phrase qingzhen [the Chinese rendering of the Arabic term “halal”] as a brand.” He continued to describe corporate branding strategies by revealing that the group had decided to use their corporate name “Salaam” as the only brand on every product they sold. In his view this was simply a more efficient means to market goods from a variety of producers, since all of the specific names of food producers and the brand names they had given their products would end up simply confusing potential customers. Applying the name “Salaam” would also satisfy their customers about the halal nature of their products: For example, many of the factories that we get food products from, they produce many different items. [When we work with a producer] we will only select one or two products that they produce, and we then apply our name as the brand. This helps to ensure a uniform market for all of the products we sell. (Interview with Salaam Group director, Kunming, 2017)

The Arabic word “Salaam,” as discussed below, is a term that specifically connotes Muslim society and is undoubtedly understood by Muslims and non-Muslims alike as a reference to Islam and its religious standards and expectations. Our informant could not have been clearer about the fact that this corporation intentionally uses these terms as brands for their marketing and sales purposes. The Salaam Group’s marketing strategy, especially in its online commercial website, goes beyond simply commodifying Islam or halal to sell their products. They also believe they have a duty to perform an educational mission. The Salaam Group founders are members of the Hui Chinese Muslim ethnic minority group, and they are from a rural part of Yunnan, which has been one of the poorest and most remote provinces in China. They have a self-appointed mission to educate consumers about Islam generally, and about their Muslim community in particular, as a way to bring benefit back to their home community and to their fellow Hui in Yunnan. They use their

136

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

corporate assets, especially their commercial website, as a platform to undertake that educational mission. Essays, news articles, and reports about the group’s cultural activities all explicate positive messages about Islam and Hui Muslim identity. The various food products the group sells, all advertised on that same website, reinforce the Islamic identity of the Salaam Group because they are certified as halal. The research findings presented in this article came from two lengthy interviews the authors carried out with key corporate personnel in summer 2015 and fall 2017, and extensive visual and textual analysis of the corporation’s commercial and business websites. Such work is part of a larger survey the authors are conducting on the history and current economic status of the Yunnan Hui Muslim ­ ­community. The first interview with Salaam Group members was conducted at the group’s now-closed commercial headquarters in the provincial capital’s old Muslim district, Shuncheng Street. We followed that up with a second interview in 2017 in their new corporate headquarters in a historic building in the city. The two locations are an important part of the story of Salaam Group’s history and current goals. The first interview took place in a building on Shuncheng Street, the old historic Hui quarter in Kunming’s city center. In that quarter used to live the heart of the city’s Muslim population, centered around the province’s oldest mosque. Shuncheng Street was originally a traditional quarter, with one- and two-story wood buildings, which contained businesses and residences in a labyrinth of narrow winding alleyways that radiated out from the old mosque. Most of the quarter was razed in 2012 when the city government began a major urban renewal project. All the homes and traditional buildings in the district have been demolished except the mosque itself, the buildings lining one alley leading directly to the mosque, and an adjacent Muslim middle school. The old buildings were replaced by multistory buildings with luxury consumer goods stores on the ground level and expensive apartments above. The lane leading to the historic Shuncheng Mosque is still busy with Muslim businesses and restaurants. In 2015, at the time of our first interview with the Salaam Group managers, they had rented one of these buildings for its group headquarters and showroom, using it to display examples of some halal food products they sell. In 2015 the Salaam Group’s corporate office space was mainly dedicated to their sole brick-and-mortar store, whose purpose was



Marketing as Pedagogy

137

really to advertise goods that they sold online. But they were already starting to cultivate their reputation as cultural promoters, since they had a dedicated “culture space” on the second floor of that same building, right next to their corporate offices. The “culture center” consisted of a large room dominated by a group of tables outfitted for classes that taught traditional Chinese calligraphy, and surrounded on all sides by shelves with expensive artistic wares such as silver filigree jewelry and wares, ceramics, paintings and calligraphy, and a small bar where traditional Chinese tea was served and sold. All of the luxury goods that were displayed were produced by ­Yunnan Muslim craftsmen, and they were evidently also for sale (they all had price tags). Most of these items were marked in the range of several hundred to several thousand renminbi, obviously only for the serious collector. By the time we returned for a second interview with the group’s leaders in 2017, the Shuncheng Street office and store had been closed, and the group had moved its headquarters into a lovingly restored historic three-story courtyard house. The new location reveals a great deal about the Salaam Group’s current desire to be identified as a cultural unit and promoter of eco-friendly causes, and only indirectly as an e-commerce marketing enterprise. The Salaam Group’s new home in central Kunming is the restored residence of one of modern Yunnan’s most famous military figures, the general Cai E (1882–1916). Cai was not a Yunnan native, but he played an important role in keeping this far southwestern province part of China, since he was the military governor of the province from 1911 to 1913, two chaotic and crucial years when the new Republic of China was emerging from the ashes of the old imperial state. Cai became a national-level hero after his tenure as governor, when he led a regional rebellion in 1915 to preserve the new republic against the revanchist Yuan Shikai, who sought to restore the imperial system. The building the Salaam Group now occupies eventually became Cai’s home and headquarters while he lived in Yunnan, and it is listed as a provincial-level important historic site. According to our informant, the local city and provincial government poured a huge amount of funds into restoring Cai’s old home to its original glory. No expense was spared in the restoration; all of the original timber framework in the three-story structure was restored, and the inner courtyard is now protected by a large roof. All of the rooms thus now open onto a

138

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

pleasant, well-lit dry interior space, accessible by balconies on all three floors that ring the inner courtyard. The differences in the Salaam Group’s first corporate headquarters on Shuncheng Street and its new home in Cai E’s former mansion illustrate perfectly the evolution of this corporation’s public identity from that of mainly a purveyor of halal food goods to cultural sponsors and responsible members of society, with Islamic characteristics. The signs posted at the entrance tell you that this is Cai E’s residence and now the home of the Salaam Group, affirmed by a smaller sign that indicates this building is a historically important site. Just inside the entrance is the reservation desk for the traditional Chinese teahouse that occupies the entire first floor, replete with business cards advertising the Salaam Group Teahouse. A set of large aquarium tanks line the entire back wall of that floor. The Salaam Group manager whom we interviewed took pains to point out various fish in the tanks, explaining that they were all native species to Yunnan, many now endangered. He explained that the Salaam Group is working to preserve these endangered and native fish species and spends a lot of money supporting that operation. Rooms on the ­second floor that surround the inner courtyard are all banquet and tearooms of various sizes. The Salaam Group’s corporate office space and meeting rooms are all on the third floor. The only visible sign of any commercial activity involving halal food products is a placard next to the reception desk just inside the door that lists the Salaam Group’s business and commercial websites and the fact that they sell halal food products online. We interviewed Salaam Group management on two separate occasions, in their original corporate headquarters in summer 2015, and then in their new headquarters in fall 2017. Each interview lasted several hours, and each interview included the managing director at the time and at least one assistant. Our research methods combine the complementary expertise of the two authors; Brose’s training as a historian enables us to bring deep knowledge of the history of Muslims in Yunnan to provide important background to the interviews we conducted as planned and directed by Su, as a trained anthropologist. Access to the Salaam Group managing personnel and to other Hui involved in the halal food industry was made possible by the fact that Su is a Hui Muslim and knows many of the interviewees personally. Our first interview in 2015 was wide-ranging and did not adhere to a strictly defined set of questions, because this was our first



Marketing as Pedagogy

139

opportunity to interview anyone associated with the Salaam Group, and we wished to obtain a view of the corporation from the interviewees’ perspectives. Discussion ranged from the history of the company to its corporate structure, to its goals and marketing ­ ­methods at the time, and the interview lasted almost five hours. The second interview, conducted in 2017 at the group’s new h ­ eadquarters, focused more specifically on the relationship of the company to its local food producers, its activities related to halal certification, its ties to local Yunnan communities, and the views of the managers on the evolution of the corporation since our first interview. Space limitations preclude an exhaustive presentation of all of our findings as a result of those two lengthy interviews. We will briefly recount a few salient factors in the Salaam Group’s business model and identity, but focus our following remarks on the nexus of marketing and religious piety, one of the most intriguing elements that emerged from the interviews and our study of the Salaam Group’s online platforms. The Salaam Group The Salaam Group (C. sailiamu 赛俩目集团) was founded in 2009 by a small group of Hui entrepreneurs from a historic Muslim village in rural Weishan County in the far western part of Yunnan Province. This area is historically important as the site of the traditional north– south trade and transit routes (known as the Tea and Horse Trade Routes, chama gudao), which Chinese Muslim traders have plied for centuries. Weishan is home to two different official ethnic minority groups in Yunnan, the Hui and the Yi. While Weishan is well-known for its historic village architecture, it is also afflicted with persistent poverty because, like most of Yunnan, it has been ignored by national investment schemes to improve economic conditions. Unlike China’s eastern coastal provinces, Yunnan has not been blessed with a growing new middle class or investment by new industries. Thus, places like Weishan, while iconic for tourists because of their old architecture (including historic mosques), are among the poorest parts of China. The men who started the Salaam Group wanted to bring some economic development to their home villages and communities. The multivalent ethnic identity of Weishan has also carried through in the Salaam Group. While the founder and initial investors in the Salaam Group were all Muslims, the corporation has gone out of its way to sponsor Yi cultural events and provide opportunities to

140

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

the Yi residents of Weishan, and to educate and promote greater understandings of ethnic minorities. For example, the Salaam Group cosponsored an annual Torch Festival celebration (huoba jie火把节), an important Yi cultural event, for all Weishan people who have moved to the provincial capital Kunming for work and education. Other examples of the Salaam Group’s activities that mingle faith-based marketing, charitable public works, and business include an ecological garden they proposed to build in Weishan. It will consist of five sections spread out over 310 acres, which will include a cattle-breeding area, a planting area, a slaughterhouse, a tourism service district, and a halal food-processing zone. The project is called the “Planting, Breeding, Processing and Tourism” model (zongzhi, peizhong, shipin jiagong, luyou), and the sponsors plan to invest 200 million renminbi. The online description of the project’s rationale is also interesting because it specifically invokes food safety concerns in China. According to plan the group will build everything in accordance with strict environmental and Islamic halal standards. The same standards will apply to all food processing methods in order to produce food that is ecologically sound and fresh, while also providing substantial economic benefits to the local community in Weishan, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation. These benefits will redound to the community based on the group’s ability to turn a profit selling halal food products. If the recent market projections are at all accurate, they are in the right place at the right time. Halal in China As noted above, the Chinese term used for halal is a two-character phrase, qingzhen (清真), which translates as “pure and true.” As if to acknowledge the fact that the Chinese term does not really capture the original Arabic meaning of “permissible,” most signs on Muslim businesses and stamps on packaging of Chinese halal products also normally include the Arabic script rendering of halal alongside the Chinese term. Halal rules originate in Islamic legal doctrines concerning purity and pollution and are based on Qur’anic passages that relate God’s revelations to Muhammad about dietary restrictions imposed to avoid impurity. For Muslim consumers in China, halal status often includes physical attributes of cleanliness, but it also extends beyond that, to the very nature of certain animals. Thus, for example, some Chinese Muslims see pigs as unclean because of their



Marketing as Pedagogy

141

nature (Gillette 2000, 118–126). The label “halal” originally applied only to food, and Islamic tenets group all foods into four categories, of which meat is the most strictly regulated. Stringent rules apply to all meats designated halal, including the kinds of animals and the methods of slaughter and preparation. Forbidden (haram) foods include pork and the meat from any animal that was found dead or was slaughtered in an improper manner. The halal designation is now also applied to many other consumer items, such as clothing and cosmetics, although that is beyond the scope of this chapter. Echoing the original application of halal restrictions to comestibles, most of the halal items marketed by the Salaam Group are food products: meat, grains, oils, tea, fresh fruits and vegetables, traditional Chinese herbs, packaged snack foods, gift boxes, and so on. But reflecting the growing interest by Muslim consumers in other kinds of consumer products, including luxury goods, the Salaam Group also sells expensive Islamic luxury items such as silver handicrafts, calligraphy, and paintings produced by Hui artists and craftsmen. Interestingly, these items as marketed by the Salaam Group are not usually marked with the halal logo; instead their Islamic identity is marked by the use of Arabic script quotations from the Qur’an or by the advertised fact of their origin with Hui craftsmen. The Salaam Group also supports a variety of other cultural and educational events, most of them in the provincial capital, that are by or for local Chinese Muslim or other ethnic minority groups who live in Yunnan. Photos and short descriptions of those events are displayed on the Salaam Group’s commercial webpage under the category “Salaam Group News.” As it turns out, the Salaam Group is now emerging as a benefactor to preserve local history, seen most directly in the traditional teahouse they operate in Cai’s historic mansion in old central Kunming. Marketing and Identity Marketing strategies play an important role in identity affirmation, and this is nowhere more true than in food marketing. Xu Wu has aptly demonstrated the close relationship between identity and marketing in his study on marketing strategies of ethnic foods produced by rural communities in other parts of southwestern China (Wu 2016). Here rural farmers and producers chose to ignore ethnic categories in their marketing strategies, favoring instead more neutral terms such

142

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

as “farmer’s joy” (nongjiale). Interestingly, despite those efforts the origin of the foods often gave away their ethnic identity. Wu argued that those negative associations were not overcome by the use of neutral attributes or descriptors because Chinese consumers often assume that ethnic food is inherently dirty or untrustworthy. Wu’s argument in fact underlines the salient attributes of “pure” and “clean” food associated with halal food products in China today. Unlike in Wu’s case, however, here the attribute “halal” is promoted as a positive characteristic that will attract prospective consumers who are afraid of impure food in the wake of the many serious scandals involving production and marketing of tainted food products in China in the last several years. China has seen a dramatic demographic shift over the last three decades: in 1980 only 19 percent of its population lived in urban areas, but by 2015 over 55 percent of its population was urbanized (World Bank and Development Research Center of the State Council 2014). This urban migration has certainly affected grocery buying. Many Chinese still prefer to buy their food from local fresh markets, making daily or weekly visits (Latham, Thompson, and Klein 2006). Traditional fresh markets make it easy for Muslims in China to obtain halal foods directly from the producers, who are often their neighbors. Such traditional shopping habits are no longer possible for people who have moved into China’s large urban centers, where supermarkets and packaged foods are now increasingly the norm. As more urban consumers join the new Chinese middle class, even those patterns of physically shopping for food in brick-and-mortar supermarkets is changing. Back in 2015 the Institute of Grocery Distribution predicted that the Chinese online grocery market, then already the world’s largest, would grow to $180 billion by 2020.3 The Salaam Group’s marketing strategies are an interesting example of how the huge growth in the branding and marketing of commodity products targeting Muslim consumers around the world have also been adopted, even in areas like Yunnan that are not normally regarded as predominantly Muslim regions (see Shirazi 2016 for other cases of Islamic faith-based marketing). The Salaam Group is a tightly integrated network composed of food producers, brick-and-mortar and online stores, a catering management company selling halal takeout and fast food, and a cultural unit, the teahouse. The core of their business is marketing and selling halal food commodities. While they are located in Yunnan and



Marketing as Pedagogy

143

feature many halal food producers from that province, they are not focused exclusively on Yunnan products. In fact, our 2017 interview yielded the information that they were working increasingly with food producers in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwestern China. Thus, their real focus is to benefit the Hui at large as much as province-specific producers. The Salaam Group’s branding efforts to target Muslim consumers begins with their corporate name. “Salaam” is an Arabic word that means “peace” and in Muslim societies is most often used as a greeting (as-salamu alaykum). To anyone who reads Chinese signs, even non-Muslims, the Chinese transliteration provides an obvious link to Islamic culture and Muslims. The Yunnan corporation’s use of this phrase as a business name is also by no means unique; salaam has been incorporated into business names around the world, everything from clothing manufacturers to department stores, banks, television stations, hotels, and even air charter companies, in addition to food producers and restaurants. Our impression as a result of our interviews and research is that the Yunnan Group’s dedication to upholding Islamic standards in their business is more than a simple marketing gimmick, since they have gone out of their way to instill Islamic values into every part of their activities, not just the food products they sell. For example, when the group’s founders opened their store in Shuncheng District, they invited several imams from their hometown, Weishan, as well as from important mosques in Kunming, to recite the Qur’an before the ribbon-cutting ceremony. We were also assured that Muslims had been hired to oversee all the aspects of meat production and that all meat sold by the Salaam Group was processed by hand. Muslim food is very strict in terms of slaughtering and food processing. There are, however, counterfeit and shoddy products. Those are not genuinely halal and are unhygienic. Halal food must be made strictly in accordance with Islamic requirements. . . . Our store first focuses on domestic halal food. We have our own express delivery department and provide home delivery service. And it is free for people in Kunming. It is very competitive in the e-commerce field. We, however, only provide halal and devote our mind to true and pure food with quality. This is special actually [sic]. First, sometimes you can only find water-injected beef, [but] it is not true halal. Second, fresh meat is often made into frozen food, but many people don’t like

144

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

frozen meat. In addition, it is not convenient for some old people who prefer fresh meat to go out to the market. Our service can really help. . . . Trust, halal, and meaning are key concepts [for the business]. For this group, halal can’t be on the surface. Workmanship, such as the whole production process like choosing ingredients, the ritual of slaughtering, and being equally honest with everyone should also be emphasized. (Interview, Mr. Zhu, manager of Salaam Group’s Shuncheng store, June 2015)

It was also interesting to note the repeated emphasis that the business managers laid in our interviews on the importance the company places on providing education about Islam and Hui customs to their online customers. They insisted that we clearly understood the fact that they were working with a new business model that integrates cultural activities and education into selling products and that they view each half of that business model as equally important and necessary to their ultimate commercial success. E-commerce and Ethnic Minorities It is clear that the Salaam Group has built their e-commerce platform to take part in the recent explosion of online grocery shopping in China. The corporate managers would also like to eventually sell their products to Muslims outside China, but at the time of our 2017 interview, they did not feel ready to do that. They had yet to receive online orders from customers outside China and had not yet had their commercial page translated into English or other Western languages. If the group’s managers have their way, these improvements to their business will come. In the meantime, the group is fully committed to making income that, at least in part, is already being invested back into their home community in Weishan. They disclosed that the group had set up a profit-sharing scheme with producers in Weishan, but we were unable to determine what percentage of gross or net sales proceeds were returned to local producers. The Salaam Group also saw its planned halal industrial park in Weishan as another avenue to benefit that community. This plan is an example of a new model of rural development that the Chinese state is encouraging across China, one in which local governments



Marketing as Pedagogy

145

encourage and support e-commerce sales of local products as a way to stimulate rural development. This phenomenon, known as the “Taobao village” (Sampi Marketing 2017), has seen growing popularity in rural areas as a way for local governments to bypass limited investments by the provincial or national government. The Salaam Group’s e-commerce business model has great potential to reach customers outside China especially now, since the national government has launched the Belt and Road Initiative. Some of the images on the group’s website invoke the ancient Silk Road (images of camels carrying heavy loads across sand dunes). But more importantly, Kunming has been designated a key hub in the future Belt and Road transport network, and they are already partnering with China’s fastest-growing air shipping company, Shunfeng Airlines, headquartered in Shenzhen.4 Educating and Selling on the Web Since the Salaam Group’s main business is selling halal food products online, they maintain two active websites that support that mission, a commercial site and a corporate site. The corporate website promotes the Salaam Group’s dedication to Islamic values, but it is not the site of the group’s business, marketing halal food products. All merchandise is displayed on and only available through the group’s commercial website, and our analysis of the group’s intersection of commercial, educational, and religious interests all comes from a close reading of that website, which is complemented by the participant interviews already described. The commercial site (http://www .sailiangmu.com) is attractively laid out in vertical and horizontal planes, with a vertical and a horizontal row of links that frame the visual centerpiece of the home page, two alternating banners with visually appealing background images and colors, and text in Chinese and English that features the word “faith.”5 The displays of products and content pages are accessible via the links in the vertical and horizontal rows but do not clutter the main webpage because they are arranged along the edges of the visible page, and produced in a smaller font than the banners in the middle of the page. The two circulating banners on the Salaam Group’s commercial website declare their dedication to ethical, environmental, and Islamic standards in words and images. For example, their main commercial webpage contains the Chinese text “We take responsibility for our

146

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

Muslim friends: devotion to good health, ecology, green, and halal” (我们很用心为穆斯林的朋友负责—专注健康生态绿色清真), below which appears, in English boldfaced text, “Quality Comes from Faith.” These are visible in white type over a green background of a silhouette of a large mosque. The prospective customer’s eye is only then drawn to the links to various products listed by category in vertical and horizontal bars surrounding this central floating image. Finally, all of this is superimposed over a background image of a blue sky with wispy white clouds and yet another silhouette of a mosque. The second banner uses a similar set of motifs drawn from nature and traditional Islamic symbols, but here emphasizing the attribute of “Faith” (信仰) in large Chinese handwritten script and English words set over a yellow sky with falling green leaves. The Salaam Group’s list of products is contained one level below this main page, accessible via the links listed vertically down the left side of the main webpage under the heading “Categories of Items.” This is a very well-organized feature of this commercial webpage since it provides a convenient list of food categories for the shopper. The list begins with “snack foods” (休闲食品), then proceeds down through “biscuits, cakes, and pastries (饼干糕点),” “fresh fruits and vegetables” (生鲜果蔬), “grain, oil, and dry goods” (粮油干货), “tea and other beverages” (茶水饮料), “traditional Chinese foods” (传统 滋补), “place-specific food items” (一区一品), and “gift boxes” (精品 礼盒).6 A similar list of pull-down menus is arrayed in the links laid out horizontally across the top of the page above the large central banners, and most of these direct the visitor to the operations side of the enterprise. The first five links, moving from left to right and progressively away from the vertical list of product categories, are a return to “home” that cycles the shopper back to a complete list of products for sale, then to something called “shop street” (店铺街) that features a particular halal product, next to a link with a list of limited-time special deals and bulk packages, and finally to a shopper’s points reward mall. The content of all of these pages can be found on most e-commerce websites, enticing prospective customers with the descriptions of featured products, or specials on sale or bulk items. They even have a system of shopping points to reward return customers. The last link on that horizontal line, “Essays and information” (文章资讯), is to the site describing the Salaam Group’s educational mission about Islam and ethnic minority issues.



Marketing as Pedagogy

147

The “Essays and information” site consists of nine separate subsections, and skimming through the list of topics of the subsections provides an interesting window into the twin interests of the Salaam Group to run a successful business using an e-commerce platform and to advocate for Hui and Islamic cultural values. Some subsections describe specific commercial details such as the group’s system of online payments, their delivery methods, and so on. Other subsections provide links to short news stories about the group, including reports of specific sales and cultural activities in which the group and its employees have been involved or have sponsored. The subsection with the bulk of textual materials provides links to essays that describe the history of the Hui ethnic group, China’s policies regarding ethnic minority groups, major tenets of Islam, and descriptions of important Muslim holidays and the culture of halal.7 This section of the group’s website is nicely designed with alternating visual images and text. The content clearly demonstrates the business’s intention to educate their consumers but with an eye to effective marketing of products; the lengthy educational content is displayed not on the main page, but two layers down. Brief descriptions of the page’s hyperlinks will suffice to illustrate the educational mission that is imbricated firmly into the Salaam Group’s business model. The first link to educational materials is located at the top of this page, titled “Assembled Today” (今日聚焦, also called “Focus” in English). Clicking on this link brings the viewer to a drop-down list of two main topics, “Hui Written and Spoken Language Customs” and “Hui Recreational Customs.” The first lines of several essays are listed below each of these topics, and clicking on any line brings the reader to the complete essay. The essays are all attributed to the Salaam Group, not to specific individual authors. All of them are relatively short, around one thousand characters, and written in an easily accessible style that reads like an encyclopedia entry. For example, the essay “Hui Written and Spoken Language Customs” charts the history of the “Hui language” back to the first appearance of Arab Muslims in China in the Tang dynasty and then argues that Hui culture and people came into China mainly with the Mongol conquest and the Yuan dynasty. Other essays describe various aspects of Muslim life that non-Muslims may not know about or understand. For example, one essay listed all major Muslim holidays and celebrations, with brief explanations of why Muslims observed them.

148

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

Returning to the issue of halal certification, there is a noticeable absence of any description of the certification processes that the Salaam Group uses for any of the items they list on their commercial site. This is surprising, given that they provide detailed information on many other aspects of their business model, as already described. We decided to follow up on this topic in our interviews, since halal certification processes are becoming increasingly important as markers of products sold in markets around the world that claim to be halal. In the 2017 interview we devoted a lot of time to discussing halal certification processes. Our informant described the group’s approach to assessing whether a product met halal standards: The Salaam Group provides the halal label on the products that it markets, but it relies on the word of the individual producers for that status. Currently each producer uses the imam in their own community to inspect the factory and the people involved in producing the food item. The local imam checks all of those conditions and then declares that the food product is halal. Then the Salaam Group can affix the seal “halal” onto the packages of the food product ourselves before we sell it. (Interview with Salaam Group manager, Kunming, 2017)

The manager’s description of how the Salaam Group assesses the halal character of its products is in keeping with the highly localized nature of halal certification processes across China. There is currently no single national- or provincial-level body that provides certification for Chinese halal products. National, provincial, and local government certification bureaus appear to compete among themselves and with private trade and industry associations for customers. Adding a further layer of complication to Chinese producers who want to tap into the growing international Muslim consumer group, Chinese halal certification is not accepted outside China. To meet this challenge, some Chinese producers are seeking help from Southeast Asian certifying bodies (such as JAKIM, the Malaysian national-level halal certification authority). More of these agreements are being signed each year, and some of them are financially supported by local governments who want to help their constituents tap into the new halal markets opening up with the Belt and Road Initiative. At the time of our interviews the Salaam Group did not intend to pursue international markets, so this kind of certification was not a major concern for them.



Marketing as Pedagogy

149

We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit the Salaam Group headquarters twice over two years, since it has allowed us to view the evolution of this new corporation firsthand, and with the perspective of extended interviews granted us on both occasions by the group’s key management team. Part of our success can be attributed to the fact that both of us are legitimate scholars who are interested in obtaining an objective assessment of the company. It also undoubtedly helped that Su was Hui and that both of us knew the history of Yunnan, the Hui community in Yunnan, and the major tenets of Islam. We made clear in every interview that we intended to publish our findings in scholarly publications, and all of our informants were glad to know this goal. They expressed a desire that our publications will help to promote their business and further the understanding of the greater Chinese Hui community. The Salaam Group managers we interviewed in the two separate interviews all clearly understand the value of having Islam-specific attributes such as their corporate name and the term “halal” as brands. In this they are no different from many other marketing groups and producers around the world who want to sell their products to the growing Muslim market. Where the Salaam Group differs from most other enterprises is in their cultural and educational mission, which runs in conjunction with their sales operations. As we have demonstrated, the Salaam Group has evolved into a corporation that is not simply about profit-making but also tries to educate people about the culture and religion of the Hui and to teach them to be good citizens. There is no doubt that the Salaam Group is Muslim. At the same time, the corporation has gone out of its way to cultivate a reputation and presence as stewards and managers of a Chinese ­cultural heritage site with links to the founding of the nation and rich in traditional Chinese elite cultural values and more contemporary concerns about native species protection. Aside from the company’s name, one has to look hard to find references to Hui and Islamic culture in their new teahouse in central Kunming. The Salaam Group’s Muslim identity is on full display in their online commercial presence. Since their purpose is to sell halal food products, that message does not detract from their commercial goals. That message is amplified in the pedagogical side of their commercial website, which exists nicely inserted into their main commercial webpage. The intended audience of these pedagogical materials clearly is Chinese consumers: only a few pithy words in the opening banners

150

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

(such as the prominently displayed calligraphic rendering of the English word “faith”) are written in English; everything else, including all of the essays, is in Chinese. Interviews with Salaam Group management underscore what is readily apparent in this website and the corporation’s various cultural activities. The group does not see their educational and cultural activities as separate from their for-profit business. Each of these sectors informs and supports the other. The Salaam Group’s social context and their business model are, in fact, strikingly similar to the model followed by other nonreligious ethically focused for-profit companies that are marketing their products as “Fair Trade” or “Green” and whose business goals are direct profit from First World sales back to the original producers in developing countries, or to promote environmentally friendly consumption. It is actually difficult to disaggregate the Salaam Group’s dedication to promoting acceptance and understanding of Islamic values and their own Hui ethnic group’s history from their socially responsible agenda to invest in their home community of Weishan. This is not surprising, given that ethnic minority groups have usually benefited less from the past decades of rapid growth. Discussing their business motives in the interviews we ­conducted, it became clear that the Salaam Group’s leaders also think it is important to educate the public about the Hui, especially after 9/11, when Muslim communities began to be demonized in state propaganda for links, real or imagined, to domestic separatist or terrorist groups. The essays and information provided about Islamic life, customs, and Hui history and society provide positive images of a religion that has been in China for centuries, that does not pose any threat to anyone, and that actually produces pure food that consumers in China all desire, especially in the wake of recent scandals. One thing is certain: demand for halal food products will only continue to rise if predictions of global growth of Muslim consumers is accurate. While this trend may have become more complicated and uncertain within China as we write this, the expanding number of halal trade fairs occurring with regularity around the world seems to provide solid evidence that it is already happening. New corporations like the Salaam Group are rewriting the rules of international business to blur the lines between profit and piety. It will be interesting for China watchers to observe the impact of these kinds of businesses on popular perceptions of Islam and the Hui in China.



Marketing as Pedagogy

151

Notes 1. The name of this corporation embeds both the Islamic underpinnings of its founders and the corporate or conglomerate nature of the business. The threecharacter phrase is the commonly understood rendering of the Arabic greeting “Salaam” into Chinese, while the term jituan is the Chinese term for a corporate conglomerate or group with several different sections of business. I last accessed the Salaam Group’s websites on June 13, 2018, and they are currently unavailable outside China for reasons yet to be determined. 2. For example, see the tourist website Yunnan Adventure Travel, accessed June 13, 2018, http://www.yunnanadventure.com/attractions/Weishan-County_655 .html. 3. “China Dominates Global Online Grocery Markets,” Institute of G ­ rocery Distribution, July 2, 2015, https://retailanalysis.igd.com/news/news-article/t/china -dominates-global-online-grocery-markets/i/10016. 4. See the Shunfeng Airlines website, accessed June 13, 2018, http://www .sf-airlines.com/sfa/zh/index.html. 5. I last successfully accessed the group’s websites on June 13, 2018. Since that date they have become inaccessible outside China. 6. Shunfeng Airlines is rapidly growing into one of the most important domestic cargo shippers in China. They have an active website in Chinese and English and boast of their high level of service and access to key entry points in China for the One Belt, One Road initiative. See the Shunfeng Airlines website, accessed June 12, 2018, http://www.sf-airlines.com/sfa/en/index.html. 7. The ten sections of this page are titled, starting at the top of the page, “Assembled Today,” “Shopping Mall dynamics,” “Group Hotspots,” “Hui ­Ethnic Minority Faith,” “Group News,” “Hui Ethnic Minority Culture,” “Food Culture,” “Industry Focus,” “Technology Focus,” and “E-commerce Dynamics.”

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brose, Michael C. 2015. “Yunnan’s Muslim Heritage.” In China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier over Two Millennia, edited by James A. Anderson and John K. Whitmore, 135–155. Leiden: Brill. Dubai Islamic Economy Development Centre. 2016. “State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2016/17.” Thomson Reuters. Accessed January 4, 2020. https://ceif.iba.edu.pk/pdf/ThomsonReuters-stateoftheGlobalIslamicEconomy Report201617.pdf. Gillette, Maris B. 2000. Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

152

Representation, Consumption, and Projects of Self-Fashioning

Latham, Kevin, Stuart Thompson, and Jakob Klein, eds. 2006. Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China. London: Routledge. Sampi Marketing. 2017. “Taobao Villages: How Ecommerce Helps China’s Rural Economy.” August 16. https://sampi.co/taobao-villages-china-rural -ecommerce/. Shirazi, Faegheh. 2016. Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety. Austin: University of Texas Press. World Bank and Development Research Center of the State Council, the People’s Republic of China. 2014. Urban China: Toward Efficient, Inclusive, and Sustainable Urbanization. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://openknowledge .worldbank.org/handle/10986/18865. Wu, Xu. 2016. “Ethnic Foods as Unprepared Materials and as Cuisines in a Culture-Based Development Project in Southwest China.” Asian Ethnology 75 (2): 419–439.

Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

Chapter 7

Women’s Qur’anic Schools in China’s Little Mecca Francesca ROSATI

Religious education was the only option my parents would allow me, and the only opportunity for me to reach a Muslim majority country after the prep-years at the local school. —SM, Qur’anic school graduate, October 26, 2017

We are very thankful to our government for allowing us to elevate our “ethnic character” [minzu suzhi] through education. —HTG, Qur’anic school teacher, January 16, 2016

T

oday’s Linxia City (Linxia Huizu Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu Province) incorporates one of the major Islamic centers along China’s “Qur’an belt,”1 which came to be known as “China’s Little Mecca” for standing out as the crossroads of different Islamic groupings that emerged throughout Chinese history.2 In the wake of the early 1980s religious revival that followed the Cultural Revolution,3 and the growing exposure of China’s Muslim communities to the Muslim world through pilgrimages, study trips, and business exchanges, a large number of Chinese Muslim women got enthusiastically involved in Islamic education as never before in the history of Linxia.4 Being the most uneducated among the believers, they became eager to benefit from the reIslamization process enacted by local Islamic groupings, thus making Linxia City a unique social setting for the analysis of the relationship between women’s Islamic piety and the Communist 155

156

Gender and Faith

Party of China (CPC) policies on Muslim minorities’ religious education. Supported by an eleven-year fieldwork study I carried out between 2006 and 2017, this chapter provides an overview of the diversity of women’s Qur’anic schools in Linxia City. It aims to shed light on how, by actively engaging in promoting Islamic education through the Qur’anic schools, Chinese Muslim women came to partake in the multiple “discursive” processes and practices (Asad 1986) of their Islamic communities and achieve awareness and control over their personal, social, and economic force, within the constraints set by the Party-state. Women and Islamic Education in Little Mecca Following Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies and constitutional recognition of minority nationality rights from the 1980s onward, women’s Qur’anic schools flourished all over Linxia, spurred on by the city’s gradual transition from a semirural to an urbanized society on the edge of China’s postsocialist market economy.5 At first affiliated to a mosque, and then also decentralized from it (Allès 2003, 21–29), women’s Qur’anic schools expanded into networks managed by women only but funded by supportive male religious leaders and communities. As was also the case in some Islamic-majority societies, the proliferation of women’s Qur’anic schools in post-Maoist China was a “response to the unsettling influences of modernity” (Bano 2010, 15). However, although spurred on by modernity and economic growth, women’s Islamic education in Linxia has traditionally been regarded not as a choice complementary to secular education, but as the only option available to any pious6 woman who could not or did not want to attend public schools due to poor literacy, limited economic resources, and fear of secularization. To understand how the women’s Qur’anic schools I researched operate, it is important to understand the social fabric of Linxia, or “Little Mecca.” Located 140 kilometers southwest of the Gansu provincial capital, Lanzhou, in the Daxia River valley, and extended over an area of 88.6 square kilometers, Linxia (formerly known as Hezhou) is the capital of the Linxia Huizu Autonomous Prefecture, and home to almost 250,000 people.7 Today, 50 percent of the city’s residents (mostly Han, with a smaller percentage of Tuzu and Tibetans; Erie



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

157

2016, 90) are Muslim ethnic minorities. The latter include the Dong­ xiang (5.01 percent), Bonan, Salar (less than 1 percent), and the Hui (45.3 percent; see Zhonggong Linxiazhou wei tongzhanbu 中共临夏 州委统战部 et al. 2010, 5, 28, 33, 35, 37), who are mostly engaged in the textile and halal food industries (Bird 2017, chap. 7). Although in China Islam is mainly perceived to be a cultural feature of ten ethnic groups, in Linxia—as in China’s Northwest in general—Muslims’ religious identity actually outstrips the categorization into which Muslims have been divided according to the Party’s “ethnic classification” project (minzu shibie, 民族识别) implemented in the 1950s.8 More specifically in Linxia, “being a Muslim” is traditionally defined through a set of practices and beliefs shared with members of one of the Islamic groupings that emerged in China between the late seventh and the twentieth centuries: namely, the Gedimu 格底目 (the “old” [ones]), the twentieth-century modernist-reformist movements Yihewani 伊赫瓦尼 and Sailaifeiye 赛莱非耶, and the Xidaotang 西道 堂—all referred to as Jiaopai 教派 (religious teachings)—and the Sufi orders Khufiyya, Jahriyya, Qubrawiyya, and Qadiriyya, which came to be known as Menhuan 门宦 (corporate saintly lineages) (Ma Tong 1993; Lipman 1997, 71n32).9 Though inspired by encounters with other denominations and different madhabs in Central Asia and the Middle East, Jiaopai and Menhuan have undergone a deep process of localization and split into a myriad of branches and sub-branches that mainly ascribe to Hanafi Sunnism. As illustrated by the seminal works of Ma Tong, Chao Chiu-di, and Matthew Erie, in Linxia throughout the centuries Jiaopai and Menhuan have relied on competing interpretations of the shari’a and religious practices—such as different times of starting and breaking Ramadan, funerary and marriage ritual practices, and so on—as intergroup boundaries (Ma Tong 1993; Chao 2012; Erie 2016). Likewise, my fieldwork highlighted that differences in the schools’ curricula, textual production, and circulation, and in the embodiment of the ritual performance, are also repositories of competing orthopraxies. As much as Islamic identities are rooted into the social topography of “Little Mecca,” women’s Qur’anic schools’ diverse didactic paradigms and scopes also reflect the religious diversity of local mosque-centered communities, known as zhema’erti 哲玛尔提.10 Historically, the first cluster of Muslim neighborhoods in Linxia developed around “old Bafang” (lao bafang老八坊), that is, “the eight

158

Gender and Faith

mosque-centered communities district,” which is home to the city’s oldest mosques, likely dating back to as early as the Yuan dynasty (Chao 2012, 78). Today, old Bafang corresponds to the southern suburbs outside the city walls, where the majority of the Muslim population lives (Erie 2016, 90). A zhema’erti binds together people (Ch. gaomu 高目, Ar. qawm) who share the same denominational affiliation, attend the same mosque, and were born, educated, and socialized in the same area. A lane or a district can encompass several zhema’erties, each of them affiliated to a specific branch or sub-branch of one of the aforementioned Islamic groupings.11 Driven by a strong “sectarian” spirit, these groupings require their affiliates’ exclusive membership, acquired either by birth, marriage, or personal conversion. Under few circumstances many individual Muslims acknowledge more than one denomination/ community, although they can occasionally pray in mosques other than their own. Through the pious endowments (awqāf) managed by the mosque and the independent voluntary donations of believers (Ch. nietie 乜帖, Ar. ṣadaqāt) (Erie 2016, 276–287), a mosque community may fund the setting up of its own women’s Qur’anic school, which may, in turn, cosponsor or supervise other schools in smaller sister communities in Linxia City or in the homonymous county. To this day, there are no statistics concerning the number of students enrolled at female Qur’anic schools in Linxia City. However, my fieldwork highlighted that the schools’ religious curricula and placement outside the state public lay education system make them unappealing to the growing number of prospective urban Muslim secondary students, who aspire to attend university and work in the secular society. To them, religious education is a duty to catch up on during extracurricular courses at the mosque (jiaqi ban 假期班, lit. “holiday-break classes”), whereas to the pious Muslim women I encountered the Qur’anic schools represent a space for socializing while practicing Islam and possibly finding a job—most likely in a women’s school or in a community kindergarten—through the schools’ own networks.12 As for the students, they are mostly ethnic Muslims (only a handful of pupils are Han converts). On the one hand, there are young unmarried full-time students (from the age of sixteen to twenty and older) who wish to attend an Islamic university abroad or work as teachers, interpreters, or businesswomen. On the other, there are more mature illiterate mothers and grandmothers (from twenty-four



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

159

Figure 5. Two students reading the Qur’an, in a women’s school in Linxia City. Photo by Francesca Rosati.

to ninety years of age), whose sole aim is to learn to recite the Qur’an to catch up with a religious duty they couldn’t fulfill when they were busy with family and housekeeping chores.13 Compared to their male coreligionists who study at mosques (manla 满拉, Ar. mollā, “scholar”), attenders of female Qur’anic schools do not become religious clerics, as do many pupils in women’s mosques that flourished in Henan, many of whom act as nü ahong 女阿訇 after graduation (Jaschok and Shui 2000). During the seven fieldwork studies I carried out between 2006 and 2017, I conducted a census of women’s Qur’anic schools to compensate for the lack of any data in the literature previously produced on this subject matter. In total, I have surveyed sixty-nine institutions set up in the urban and suburban areas of Linxia City.14 One of the earliest and most important women’s Qur’anic schools of Linxia City is the Zhong’a Nüxiao 中阿女校 (Chinese-­Arabic Girls’ School)—a mosque-independent institution founded by Ma Zhixin 马志信in the late 1970s as a branch of the homonymous boys’ school Zhong’a Nanxiao.15 After a long process of institutionalization that

160

Gender and Faith

culminated in 2008, the Zhong’a Nüxiao became a state-sponsored minority school and had its name changed to Linxia Waiguoyu ­Xuexiao Fenxiao 临夏外国学校分校 (Linxia Foreign Language School—Branch School, hereafter LWXF).16 To this day, many of its graduates are hired as teachers by Women’s Qur’anic schools in many parts of China. With the exception of the LWXF, women’s schools are generally affiliated with a mosque. Among these, thirty-two were founded by members of Gedimu and Menhuan (mainly Qadiriyya and Hufiyya) communities; twenty-four were set up by Yihewani affiliates, while three were supported by Sailaifeiye mosques and one by the only extant Xidaotang mosque in Linxia City.17 I also surveyed eight premises with no direct affiliation to a specific mosque, although the Muslims that had established them—either in traditional single-story houses or in brand-new skyscraper apartments—were mostly affiliated to various “streams” of the Yihewani and Sailaifeiye teachings.18 Many local elderly Muslims I interviewed recalled that before the Cultural Revolution, almost every mosque in Little Mecca had its own “women’s classes.” However, due to the massive shutting down of most religious activities and sites in Linxia between 1966 and 1976, it is impossible to ascertain the number of mosques that supported female Islamic education before the Cultural Revolution. Most of the schools I have surveyed were in fact set up between the 1980s and the 1990s, when Islam began to revive following Deng’s approval of the 1982 constitutional amendment “The Basic Viewpoint and Policy of Religious Questions during Our Country’s Socialist Period” (shortened as “Document Nineteen”; see U.S. Congress 2005). Imparting and spreading Islamic education to laypeople was particularly relevant to the modernist Yihewani imams who sought to reconcile Chinese Muslims with the Islamic world, by increasing their command of the Arabic language hand in hand with their scriptural knowledge (Cieciura 2015), although Menhuan had also set up courses for women even prior to the 1980s (Gao 1991). Originally, the schools’ curricula included the teaching of the fundamentals of the Arabic language to enable students to recite a selection of Qur’anic surāt, the hadith, as well as the basics of Islamic doctrine and theology.19 Subsequently, their programs expanded and differentiated as the schools grew in number, thus widening the curricular and age-rate



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

161

gap between laonian ban 老年班 (lit. “middle-aged women’s classes”) and “girls’ schools” (nüxiao 女校). Gedimu and Sufi Menhuan, which include some of the oldest Islamic communities in China and are therefore known as Laojiao 老 教 (lit. “the Old Teachings”), mostly set up schools for semiliterate adults from Linxia for just a few hours a day, whereas the younger members of their communities are encouraged to attend one-month long, intensive classes during their holiday breaks. Conversely, the Yihewani and Sailaifeiye denominations—known as Xinjiao 新教 (lit. “the New Teachings”) due to their relatively recent appearance in China (from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth)—also teach adult classes but place greater emphasis on four-year Chinese Arabic (zhong’a 中阿) religious “boarding schools” open to girls, many of whom come from neighboring villages or even from other provinces.20 Officially, the enrollment of underage pupils in religious institutions contravenes state law on the ground that this takes youngsters away from high school education. Nonetheless, up until very recently, Qur’anic girls’ schools in Linxia have been tolerated by the state given their long-established status in their local communities, whose members advocate their constitutional right as ethnic minorities living in autonomous administrative regions to “independently develop education [by] setting up various kinds of schools” (emphasis mine),21 as long as they do not “interfere [ganyu 干预] in controversial matters over the Qur’an and religious doctrine” or “engage [canyu参与] in illegal religious activities” (Zhonggong Linxia zhouwei tongzhanbu 中共临夏州委统战部 and Linxiazhou zongjiao shiwuju 临夏州宗教 事务局 2015). Playing along with the Party’s rules, women’s Qur’anic schools set themselves up as spaces of religious practice that welcome teachers and students from every Islamic grouping. An internal Zhema’erti disagreement about supporting women’s education, or the group’s inability to afford to set up schools, may determine a Qur’anic school’s diversity in terms of its staff and students’ denominational affiliations. Moreover, the fact that Laojiao mosques do not sponsor long-term programs may also drive younger members of their communities to Xinjiao schools. During my inquiries, I happened to meet self-professed Gedimu affiliates who worked at Yihewani schools, and Yihewani teachers hired by Sailaifeiye institutions who stressed their nondiscriminatory

162

Gender and Faith

policies by often quoting the motto qiutong, cunyi 求同存异, “seek common ground while reserving differences.”22 However, a school’s specific denominational background is made explicit during classes, since—as one of my interviewees pointed out—“it is the jiaofa 教法 [teaching method and content] that makes the difference!” (interview, January 25, 2016). Generally speaking, almost all of my interviewees acknowledged that the multidenominational composition of the schools might indeed engender group-boundary strategies, or, vice versa, encourage cross-boundary proselytizing. As one of my interviewees, Ma Sophya—the principal of a well-known Sailaifeiye school in Linxia— once stated: “Despite coming from a Gedimu family, I felt more at ease studying at Sailaifeiye schools. Eventually, I decided to become Xinjiao” (interview, September 2, 2016). At the opposite of Sophya stands Li Ayshah, a Qadirī Sufi school principal, who told me proudly: “My friends are all members of Laojiao [i.e., Sufi and Gedimu] communities” (wo de pengyou dou shi laojiao de 我的朋友都是老教的; interview, February 11, 2016). Sometimes a school’s cultural capital might be used by members of other teachings to the advantage of their own grouping, as in the case of Wang Zubeida, who after graduating from middle school and spending more than a year and half in Pakistan chose to enroll in a Sailaifeiye school. Once graduated, Zubeida was hired by the most prominent Laojiao Qur’anic school in Linxia City. When asked why a devout Laojiao (Sufi order affiliate) should choose to study in a Xinjiao institution, she answered: “They teach the best standard Arabic there, and now I can help my students improve their Qur’anic pronunciation” (interview, December 10, 2008).23 Mastering renowned recitation (qira’at) techniques and accessing strong Arabic-training programs make Xinjiao schools more appealing to young students. The recent rise in the average female marital age from sixteen years to twenty-three, the increasing demand by the bachelor’s family for a wife to be educated, as well as the prospect of better career opportunities, or learning experiences abroad, are all factors at play in a young woman’s choice to enroll in a school that offers better Arabictraining programs. On the one hand, strategically downplaying or changing one’s denominational affiliation may reveal a woman’s desire to improve her social status. Studying may pave the way for her to “marry well” and find work through the moral network of the Qur’anic schools (Matsumoto and Shimbo 2011), while keeping



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

163

away from the moral chaos and “unhealthy” (bu jiankang 不健康) “occidentalization” (xifanghua 西方化) of the secular Chinese society.24 On the other hand, the ability to attract students from different zhema’erties to their schools proves the efficacy of Linxia’s Islamic groupings’ missionary and marketing strategy, thus providing an arena of confrontation other than the mosque for charismatic and economic supremacy. For a school to survive, the number of students is crucial. What in fact begun as volunteer work in the early 1980s, has now generally become a relatively well-paid teaching profession (four hundred to two thousand renminbi per month depending on the school’s economic strength), which represents a big step forward to women, whose career options were reduced to none just as recently as a few decades ago, but also a challenge for the school and its community. Thus, appealing to a great number of students is both a religious obligation toward Allah and a financial necessity. However, to attract students with different denominational backgrounds brings to the surface the dynamics of attraction versus repulsion within the Qur’anic school. Regarding this last aspect, my field research reflected a tendency similar to that highlighted by Chao in her study on intermarriages between members of different denominations in Linxia. As indicated by Chao, associations between Gedimu and Yihewani affiliates are more frequent compared to those of other groupings (Chao 2012, 195–224). Similarly, cases of “internal conversions” occur more frequently among Gedimus attending Yihewani schools (with fewer such Yihewani “conversions”), whereas the presence of Menhuan students in Xinjiao schools is very rare. The level of “arabization” of some schools plays a big role in the divide. King Abdullah’s implementation of a pro-China trade policy since 2000 has brought many preachers from Saudi Arabia to the PRC (Al-Sudairi 2010, 2015) and encouraged the circulation of texts on Muslim women’s ritual and social conduct by renowned Salafī sheikhs, such as al-Qarnī, al-Fawzān, and al-Albanī. In Linxia, some of these works have been translated by teachers of renowned Yihewani and Sailaifeiye schools and have become part of their curricula.25 Usually Laojiao affiliates consider these books misleading, whereas most Sai­ laifeiyye teachers regard the religious commentaries written in the Perso-Arabic script known as xiaojing—which are highly used in Laojiao schools (as well as in some Yihewani laonian ban)—as “backward” (luohou 落后) and inaccurate. Textual incompatibilities—which

164

Gender and Faith

imply differences in memorizing, pronouncing, and reiterating words—are crucial factors in defining a school’s diverse model of Muslimness and vision of Islamic practice. Moreover, given that in Islam vocal and bodily performances work in unison, different ritual gestures do also become important drivers of denominational religious identity. Besides the classroom, Qur’anic schools provide women a space for praying outside their homes. That was an important step forward for Muslim women in Linxia, who are not allowed to pray at the mosque’s main prayer hall (bushang si 不上寺) except when granted temporary access during religious festivities, or when the school is under maintenance or renewal. In the school’s prayer hall, a denomination’s ritual performance is visually asserted through body postures. In particular, the fact that Sailaifeiye affiliates raise their hands three times instead of one during the performance of the ṣalāt (a motion they retained from the Hanbalī madhab followed by Salafis abroad, and that caused them to be referred to derogatorily as santai 三抬 (“three times hand raisers”) represents a powerful boundary marker. Similarly, the praying style of Chinese Sufi-Menhuan affiliates, expressed through various bodily motions that testify to the unity of God, causes scandal among Yihewani and Sailaifeiye Muslims, who consider these practices mere ­cultural accretions. My fieldwork highlighted that at Xinjiao girls’ schools, classes such as gulanban 古兰班 (Qur’anic recitation), libaike 礼拜课 (prayer performance), and meideke 美德课 (moral excellence) require teachers to tirelessly monitor and correct the students’ reciting and praying performances. Moreover, through the production of reports and feedback, the school community and the students’ families are all engaged in the pupil’s process of learning to embody modesty. Particularly, during libaike, which often take place in the prayer hall itself, the teacher performs postures and movements for the students’ benefit. During Ramadan she even leads the prayer, thus testifying to the legitimacy of women acting as imam (leader) of a congregational prayer if the congregation consists of women alone, despite the discontent of some local religious clerics and parents.26 Textual exclusivity and ritual differences thus unveil local Islamic groupings’ different attitudes toward women’s agency, on the one hand, and highlights how through the very act of mastering religious knowledge in the classroom and performing it in the prayer hall, women are ensured an active role in the denominations’ interaction, creating heterogeneous



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

165

narratives of belonging, on the other. Thanks to this diversity, students can strategically select the curricular option that best fits their life and career goals. As one can see by the growing number of female graduates who choose to study in Muslim majority countries or seek work in Yiwu and Canton’s wholesale markets as interpreters or businesswomen, Islamic education has enabled women to question the traditional values of Linxia’s society, according to which women are subject to the moral authority of fathers and religious leaders, and women’s social role is limited to the realm of the household.27 Although teachers and graduates of women’s Qur’anic schools may be still stigmatized for choosing to leave the household and wanting to help their female coreligionist to have better life prospects, nonetheless, their role as educators, commentators, and even translators has allowed them to have an unprecedented impact on their communities’ patriarchal mindset with regard to Muslim women’s social mobility and visibility. Muslim Women and the State in Little Mecca Besides challenging family and community patriarchal values, pious Muslim women in Linxia are also confronted with another kind of

Figure 6. Women’s prayer hall, Laohua Mosque, Linxia City. Photo by Francesca Rosati.

166

Gender and Faith

male-centered structural authority, the Han male-dominated Partystate and its “totalistic appropriation of the domain of law” (­Hallaq 2009, 451). Albeit not explicitly relating to ethnoreligious issues in terms of gender, the CPC constrains and informs Muslim women’s religious agency as members of ethnoreligious minorities who operate within the domain of “private” (民办 minban) Islamic education. Unlike the period that stretched from the collapse of the Qing empire to the advent of the republic (1900s–1930s)—when schooling girls in both secular and religious topics became an important goal of Muslim intellectuals’ “new educational model” (新式教育 xinshi jiaoyu) and a crucial part of Muslims’ contribution to the nationbuilding of the Zhonghua minzu (中华民族)28—beginning with the Maoist era (1950s), religious education progressively disappeared from the state’s school system (Mackerras 1999, 23–54) and fell exclusively into the hands of private local citizens. Even in the statesponsored Hui vocational schools—including the Linxia Vocational Technical College, founded in 1980—religious subjects are forbidden during classes, which include Muslim pupils of both sexes, regardless of Islam’s concerns about gender segregation.29 To the pious female students I came across during my research, the thirst for knowledge was strongly driven by a need of fulfilling both a personal spiritual reassurance and societal expectations. Several women I met during my fieldwork stated that they studied the faith (jiaomen 教门) in this world (jinshi 今世) so that once dead they will be able to stand before Allah in the hereafter (houshi 后世) with no shame, whereas some others feared that if they became “too educated,” they would not be able to find a husband (jiabuquchu 嫁不出 去). Juggling the traditional roles of housewives and mothers while being increasingly exposed to the “modern” feminine ideal of the well-(but-not-too-well-)educated and religiously aware Muslimah might still compel practicing Chinese Muslim women to keep away from enrolling in public schools. In the CPC’s eyes, however, Muslims’ (particularly youngsters’) enrollment in religious schools is one factor accounting for Gansu’s low lay literacy rate. In fact, even though the illiteracy level in the province decreased steadily between 2010 and 2015—with primary school enrollment reaching 99.83 percent in 2015 and the number of female undergraduate and graduate students in local universities surpassing that of male students (Cao Huhua 2010, 99–117; Li Yanxu et



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

167

al. 2018)—the region is home to one of the less educated segments of the Chinese population, and still one of the less developed.30 Following on Jiang Zemin’s Western Region Great Development Plan (Xibu da kaifa 西部大开发) introduced in 1999, Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road/One Belt, One Road (yidai yilu 一带一路) initiative launched in 2013 aims at modernizing China’s Northwest (that is, the “belt” that connects China to the West) partly by increasing local minorities’ lay school enrollment rates and redrawing the margins of agency of their minban institutions.31 Moreover, although Islam is recognized by the Party-state to be a crucial feature of Chinese Muslim minorities’ ethnic identity (Gong Xuezeng 龚学增 2010), by reinforcing local ritual traditions or importing Middle Eastern models of education and conduct, women’s schools endorse a wide sets of transnational Islamic ideals of aesthetics, sociality, and progress—from moral injunctions and dress codes to cultural choices—that are perceived to be potentially overlapping “the Party-state’s sovereignty” (Erie 2016, 185) and harmful to its legitimacy. Besides investing billions of renminbi to fund infrastructure projects in the region (see Daniel and Ryan 2017), Xi’s developmental project for the Northwest intends to redraw the margins of China’s multicultural diversity by the CPC (sometimes through highly controversial procedures, such is the case with Xinjiang). As the latest removal of Arabic script from street signs and civil buildings in Linxia shows,32 the aesthetic “Arabization” of China’s Northwest are perceived to be the sign of a developed sense of “supranational belonging” (Barabantseva 2007) that is perceived to be interfering with the Party’s latest civilizing project. One that aims at dragging peripheral people closer to the Han-dominated “center” through the promotion of a more compliant and accommodating form of Islam, often referred to as “the middle way” (zhongdao 中道) (Rosati 2017, 227). Following President Xi Jinping’s call for the “Chinafication” (zhongguohua 中国化) of religious and cultural minorities, and Prime Minister Li Keqiang’s reference to Linxia33 as one of the “sensitive” Muslim areas alongside Xinjiang and Ningxia in terms of their exposure to Islamic extremism, the authorities have been systematically enacting new ad hoc measures of surveillance of local Islamic practices. Since 2017, existing mosques must be rebuilt respecting the features and material of traditional Chinese architecture, while the use of Qur’anic quotes in mosque compounds has

168

Gender and Faith

been restricted.34 In addition, recently the Party has encouraged and commissioned studies that enhance the deep relationship between Islam and Confucianism, and the former’s “localization” in its encounter with Chinese civilization, so as to promote the image of Islam in China as a “moderate” and essentially historically “sinicized” religious tradition. In twenty-first-century China, Muslim minorities are being called on to harmonize differences and partake in Xi Jinping’s “China dream” (Zhongguo meng 中国梦). The notion of “ethnic solidarity” (minzu tuanjie 民族团结)—often referred to in Xi’s public speeches— calls for an empathic bond (jiang xinbixin 将心比心) between China’s fifty-six nationalities, bringing them together as one family (Rosati 2019, 28–33). While the Chinese Muslim intellectuals of the early republican period ascribed loyalty to the nation as part of their faith (Matsumoto 2006, 132), Xi Jinping has expanded the political vision of post-Mao leaders on the adaptation of Islam to socialism. Through a series of measures ranging from the folklorization of many Islamic sites in China to develop ethnic tourism—such as the Zhonghua Hui Culture Park in Yongning county, Ningxia (Previato 2019), or Bafang Thirteen Lanes and Eight Districts in Linxia—to the reinforcement of the nationwide apparatus of state-sponsored associations that train religious bureaucrats and “rectify” local discourses (Palmer 2009, 17–30; Erie 2014, 88–117), the Party is progressively appropriating the public domain of the moral and the sacred. Surprisingly, despite the existence of a structured corpus of administrative divisions in charge of imams’ training, mosque administration, and Islamic education, none of them formally oversees women’s Qur’anic schools, and each mosque’s imam and religious committee are left to take care of the selection of the women’s school’s staff and teaching material.35 Certainly, this provides margins of action for Muslim women to act as their own managers within the school compound under the benevolent support of the imams. Nonetheless, this relaxed atmosphere is often disrupted by authorities’ inquiries and incursions. In May 2016, a video featuring a little girl wearing a black headscarf and reciting the Qur’an at a kindergarten in Linxia circulated online and caused a great deal of discontent among Han netizens, indignant about children being brainwashed and forced into “uncivilized” religious practices (Cao Siqi and Yang Xi 2016). As a consequence, the Education Department of Gansu province banned all religious activities in minority schools, and



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

169

forbade unauthorized religious gatherings. Some women’s schools ended the academic year early and stopped enrolling students for their upcoming intensive summer courses. Fear of censorship and being stigmatized as disaffected citizens might explain why even though the state administration of religious affairs does not explicitly address women’s Qur’anic schools, the ­Party’s discourse is nonetheless reiterated during school assemblies and course opening ceremonies. Locally, the Party’s rhetoric on ethnic solidarity, usually reproduced on street posters and propaganda graffiti, is echoed in principals’ and teachers’ grateful statements about the government’s support for improving the cultural and economic conditions of China’s minorities. Recurring dicta such as “Love the country, love the religion,” “Safeguard ethnic solidarity,” and “Do not become divided,” although paraphrasing well-known hadith and Qur’anic passages,36 are indeed reminiscent of President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on “social harmony and ethnic solidarity.”37 During the classes I was invited to audit in the course of my fieldwork, the teachers seldom spoke about nationalistic topics, yet they used the same vocabulary that occurs in state propaganda to define their community of believers. For instance, at religious sites such as the women’s schools, the CPC’s slogan “Strive together, pro­ gress together” refers instead to the moral qualities of “Muslim solidarity” and spiritual jihad attainable through the learning process.38 This suggests that as much as the Party inscribes its discourse in the scriptures (Erie 2016), Little Mecca’s women’s schools act on the dominant “public transcript” (Scott 1990, 19) by appropriating the terminology that best suits their educational agenda. These “semantic shifts” provide Muslim women with reference points to reaffirm their right to practice religion and make scriptural knowledge a source of moral resilience and charismatic as well as economic empowerment. That being said, the Party’s pursued marginalization of religious education, together with the growing lay literacy rate of Muslims and increased educational opportunities might seriously restrain women’s Qur’anic schools’ social function as religious sites. Particularly since the Nineteenth National Congress of the CPC (Shijiuda 十九大), held in Beijing on October 18–24, 2017, as well as Xi’s downgrading of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the State Administration for Religious Affairs under the United Front Work Department in 2018 (Leibold 2019), the CPC has set new l­ imits on minority students’ access to religious education, such as restricting

170

Gender and Faith

students’ mobility from other provinces to Linxia and secularizing the curriculum of the LWXF. This turn of events not only caused a dramatic decrease of the school’s enrollment rate (from more than nine hundred students in 2016 to only four hundred in 2017; interview, October 2, 2017), but also infringed on the teaching quality of mosques’ Qur’anic schools, which often hire graduates from the LWXF given their high level of religious teaching expertise and longterm training in foreign Muslim universities. Predicting the future direction of the CPC’s policies toward Women’s Qur’anic schools in Linxia is fraught with difficulties. The latest reports I had from the field (January 24, 2019) described a situation in which classes for middle-aged adult women (laonianban) were still allowed to operate, whereas the girls’ schools had been temporarily shut down. The Party’s latest clampdown on religion notwithstanding, it is unlikely that Muslim women’s religious awareness will be significantly hindered, given the tireless effort Muslim men and women have been putting into educating younger generations of girls in the past thirty years. Furthermore, discouraging Muslim youngsters to access religious schools before the age of eighteen and implementing the nineyear compulsory lay education among minorities would likely have the effect of producing better-educated Muslim women who will be conscious instructors at the service of their families and communities. As for whether in the near future women’s Islamic education will be entirely internalized or find new forms of expression through a redrawing of the Qur’anic schools’ programs, the answer should rest on the interaction between the CPC’s central normative policies and local individuals and groups (Cao Nanlai 2018, 1–10), whether common believers, school principals and teachers, religious leaders, Islamic association representatives, or Muslim Party cadres. More importantly, the preservation of Women’s Qur’anic schools will depend on local Islamic groups’ ability to adapt to the Party’s Chinafication of the religious discourse without sacrificing the space that Muslim women have attained to assert their spiritual needs and social status within their communities in the recent century-­ old history of Little Mecca.



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

171

Notes 1. The so-called Qur’an Belt (gulandai 古兰带) refers to the densely populated Muslim areas that stretch throughout Xinjiang, Qinghai, Ningxia, and Gansu provinces. See Israeli and Gardner-Rush (2000, 451); Chao (2012, 73). 2. For a historical overview of this eponym and of Linxia City, see Erie (2016, 86–129). 3. See the introduction and chapter 1 in this book. 4. Female Islamic education in China is neither a product of modernity nor a phenomenon circumscribed to China’s Northwest. Rather, it is a long-lived coalescence of local Islamic traditions that some scholars date back as early as the late Ming dynasty (late seventeenth century) (Shui Jingjun 1996, 51–59; BenDor Benite 2005, 97; Allès 1999, 215–236; Jaschok and Shui 2000). As for Linxia, given the paucity of literary sources on the subject, it is hard to establish to what extent women’s Islamic education had spread prior to the early Republican period. Marshall Broomhall mentions in his 1910 work on Islam in China, the presence of “Moslem” schools for girls, and even of women “acting as mullahs” in Gansu. This seems to suggest that at the beginning of the twentieth century, schooling women in religious matters was not uncommon among northwestern Muslims (Broomhall 1910, 243). 5. For an overview of Linxia’s economic development, see Gansu Development Yearbook Editorial Board (2018, 130–132). 6. Here the term “pious” refers to women who chose to devote their lives to the study of Islam and operate within the religious networks of the Qur’anic schools. 7. Lin Juting 林俊婷, Linxiashi nongye gaikuang 临夏市农业概况 (Agricultural survey in Linxia City), Gansu nongye xinxiwang 甘肃农业信息网, accessed November 10, 2017, http://nync.gansu.gov.cn/apps/site/site/issue/nygk/qsnygk /lxz/2014/03/25/1395715453267.html. 8. On the ethnogenesis of Muslim minorities in China, see Gladney (1991). 9. For a historical overview of the Islamic groupings in China, see Gladney (1991, 36–63). The Chinese characters for the names of these groupings vary according to different publications. The reference text adopted here is He Kejian 何克俭 and Yang Wanbao 杨万宝 (2002). 10. From the Arabic word jama’at, meaning “congregation” or “­assembly”; same as jiaofang 教坊. 11. A zhema’erti 哲玛尔提 may comprise a few hundred affiliates up to several thousands. In today’s Linxia, the biggest mosque-centered community numbers more than twenty thousand members (interview, June 20, 2016). 12. Another phenomenon that emerged during the re-Islamization project that occurred in Linxia in the 1990s–2000s was the setting up of “Islamic” kindergartens. In Linxia (at least until 2016), five private kindergartens that host the highest number of Muslim kids have been opened and managed by Yihewani (3),

172

Gender and Faith

Sailaifeiye (1), and Gedimu (1) Muslims. Nowadays, working in a kindergarten is an option taken by many graduates of women’s Qur’anic schools. 13. Many of the adult women I interviewed started to study at a school after they got a daughter-in-law (Linxia dial. xifur 媳妇儿) who took charge of chores and errands. 14. For an overview of some mosque-affiliated women’s Qur’anic schools in today’s Linxia City, see Jian Bo 江波 and Wang Yangling 王杨苓 (1996, 82–87); Erie (2016, 189–196); Allès, Cherif, and Halfon (2001,15–47). 15. On Ma Zhixin 马志信 see Al-Sudairi (2016, 27–58). 16. Kao Suxia 靠素霞, Ma Xiulan 马秀兰, and Ma Yuemei 马月梅, (2010, 40). In the past, several works have focused on the LWXF (Linxia Foreign Language Women’s School). For space reasons this chapter cannot report on this school in detail, but see Matsumoto (2003); Ma Qiang 马强 (2003). 17. The only extant laoninaban supported by the Xidaotang mosque in Linxia was opened in the late 2000s and is considered locally to be a Laojiao type of school. For a historical ethnography of the Xidaotang mosque in Linxia, see Hille (2011). 18. The phenomenon of unregistered schools in Linxia is quite widespread, but given their status, it is not possible to know their actual number. 19. For a more detailed bibliography of the basic curricula of women’s Qur’anic schools in Linxia, see Rosati (2009, 53–55, 71–73, 79–80). 20. More precisely, the Yihewani is referred to locally as xinjiao (lit. the “New Teachings”), whereas the Sailaifeiye is called xin xingjiao 新兴教 (the “­Rising Teaching”), because it is the most recent in Linxia. Nonetheless it is important to bear in mind that these labels fluctuate and take on a different meaning according to different historical periods and social settings. During the seventeenth century Laojiao referred to the Gedimu, and Xinjiao to the rising Khufiyya Sufi order spread by Ma Laichi 马来迟 (1681–1766). Several decades later Xinjiao became the name for the newly arrived Sufi Jahriyya teaching, brought to China by Ma Mingxin 马明心 (1718–1781), as opposed to the L ­ aojiao Khufiyya Sufis. 21. See, in particular, Article 37 of the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Regional National Autonomy, Ministry of Commerce People’s Republic of China (May 31, 1984), http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/lawsdata /chineselaw/200211/20021100050258.html. 22. Qiutong, cunyi, was the motto of Ma Zhixin 马志信 (1927–1993, founder of the LWXF. It is an idiomatic expression utilized by Zhou Enlai 周恩来 in 1955 during the Bandung conference. The phrase was inspired by the traditional Chinese concept of harmony, which is also behind the Party’s rhetoric of social harmony and national solidarity. Li Weishan 李為善, “Zhou Enlai de qiutong cunyi sixiang yu shijian” 周恩來的球同存異思想與實踐, Renmin wang 人民网, accessed June 10, 2018, http://cpc.people.com.cn/BIG5/69112/75843 /75873/5174446.html. Most likely, though, Ma Zhixin took this saying from



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

173

Chen Keli 陈克礼 (1923–1970), a famous imam and Muslim intellectual who died during the Cultural Revolution. 23. For reasons of privacy the names of my interviewees are fictitious. 24. During my fieldwork, my interviewees often referred to the idea that “xifanghua 西方化 equals moral corruption.” Following on from Gillette’s analysis of the commemoration of the Dungan Revolt (1862–1874) among contemporary Xi’an Muslims, I interpret Linxia’s Muslims’ open critique of the West as a rationalization of “local contemporary experiences,” and frustration regarding the state’s censorship of religious practice. See Gillette (2008). 25. One of the most widespread teaching materials circulating in today’s women’s Qur’anic schools, Musilin funü pinge 穆斯林妇女品格, was translated by Kao Suxia 靠素霞 (2013), the deputy principal of the Linxia Foreign Language Women’s School, from the 1994 book Šaḵṣiyya al-mar’at al-muslimah (The character of the Muslim woman), by the well-known Syrian scholar Muhammad Ali al-Hāshimī. Another booklet about the role of sunnah in Islam by Ibn Fawzan, a Salafi activist who has proselytized in China’s Northwest since the late 1990s, has been translated into Chinese by a member of a renowned Sailaifeiye female school in Linxia (interview, September 2, 2016). 26. A woman is permitted to lead by the Hanafī madhahb (school of Islamic law), although it is considered a “dislikeable” (makruh) act. Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that a woman who leads the prayer stands in the front row with her back to the crowd only during women’s congregational prayers, and not during the jumu’a, the Friday prayer.. Whether a woman can be imam (leader) of a jama’ah (congregation, assembly) is the subject of much debate among Islamic schools. Hanbalis, Hanafis, and Shafi’is allow this, although many Muslims today—particularly in the Arab world—do not approve of it. 27. According to Kao Suxia 靠素霞, Ma Xiulan 马秀兰, and Ma Yuemei 马 月梅 (2010, 126–138), between the 1990s and 2009, 12 percent of the 838 graduates of the LWXF chose to study abroad, whereas 2.3 percent worked as interpreters in retail companies or as private entrepreneurs. To my knowledge, this is the only extant reliable record of figures on female postgraduate students’ career choices, albeit partial, as it fails to report about 34 percent of graduates. 28. On schooling Muslim women in northwestern China in the early Republican era, see Masumi Matsumoto and Shimbo (2011, 88–89); Jaschok and Shui (2000, 94–97); and Jaschok and Shui (2011, 78–86). 29. Around the end of my last fieldwork study, female teachers were still permitted to wear veils at work. The school also provided a prayer room. Since 2017, it seems that the government has discouraged women who work in government offices from wearing the veil at the workplace. Students at LWXF are also forbidden to wear the veil. 30. Shu Han, “Illiteracy Rate in China in 2017, by Region,” Statista, February 5, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/278568/illiteracy-rate-in-china -by-region/; Babones (2018).

174

Gender and Faith

31. Gansu sheng minzu zongjiao shiwuju weiyuanhui 甘肃省民族宗教事务 委员会, Gansu: Quanmian tuijin minzujiaoyu gongzuo 甘肃: 全面推进民族教育 工作 (Gansu: Comprehensively Promote Ethnic Education), Zhongminzu 中国民 族 (China’s nationalities), March 2, 2017, http://www.56-china.com.cn/show -case-1197.html. 32. The news has often been reported on the internet in quite a sarcastic tone, testifying to a growing anti-Islamic fixation among Chinese netizens, such as this one: Xiachong yubing 夏虫语冰, “Wei Linxia dianzan! Linzia ba alaboyuzi chandiaole” 为临夏点赞! 临夏把阿拉伯语字铲掉了 (Kudos to Linxia! Linxia had its Arabic scripts scraped off), Tiexuewang, accessed August 3, 2018, http:// bbs.tiexue.net/post2_12462083_1.html. The post is no longer online. 33. Statement made during the 2016 National Religious Work Meeting, held in Beijing. See Zhongyuan, “Xi Jinping zongjiao huiyi yu zhongguo da xibei yisilanhua” 习近平宗教会议与中国大西北伊斯兰化 (Xi Jinping’s religious work meeting and the Islamization of China’s Northwest), DW News, April 26, 2016, https://blog.dwnews.com/post-888556.html. 34. Min Junqing 敏俊卿, “Qingzhensi jianzhu fengge yantaohui zai Xi’an zhao kai” 清真寺建筑风格研讨会在西安召开 (Symposium on Mosque architectural style held in Xi’an), April 8, 2017, http://www.chinaislam.net.cn/cms/news /xhxw/201704/08‑10904.html. 35. Nor do the new guidelines on religious regulations edited by the Bureau of Religious Affairs, approved August 26, 2017, make any reference to women’s Qur’anic schools. Li Keqiang 李克强, “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan di liubaliu hao: Zongjiao Shiwu Tiaoli” 中华人民共和国国务院令第686号–宗教事 务条例 (Religious affairs regulations), 中华人民共和国中央人民政府, September 7, 2017, http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2017‑09/07/content_5223282.htm#. 36. Such as Surat al-Ra’d (“Truly God alters not what is in a people until they alter what is in themselves,” Qur. 13–28) and Surat al-’Imrān (“And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided,” Qur. 3–103). 37. First Meeting of the recently renamed “Central” United Front Work, held in May 2015, Cui Xiaosu崔小粟, Tongzhan gongzuo huiyi cong quanguo shenggecheng zhongyangyifangle naxie xinhao ne? 統戰工作會議’從 “全國” 升 格成 “中央” 釋放了哪些信號?(United Front Work conference: From “national” to “central.” What does this upgrade imply?), Zhonguo gongchandang xinwenwang 中国共产党新闻网, May 21, 2015, http://cpc.people.com.cn/xuexi/BIG5 /n/2015/0521/c385474‑27032587.html. 38. See, for instance, how the subjects of ethnicity and Islam are treated in the introductory teaching manual Musilin jichu zhishi chuxue shiyingben 穆斯林 基础知识初学适应本 (2011).



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

175

References Allès, Élisabeth. 1999. “Des oulémas femmes: Le cas des mosquées féminines en Chine.”  Revue d’études du monde musulman méditerranéen, nos. 85–86 :215–236. ———. 2003. “L’einseignement confessionel musulman de Chine.” Perspectives Chinoises 74:21–29. Allès, Élisabeth, with L. Cherif and C. H. Halfon. 2001. “L’islam chinois, unité et fragmentation.” Archives en sciences sociales des religions 115:15–47. Asad, Talal. 1986. “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Occasional Papers Series, 1–23. Washington, DC: Georgetown University, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Babones, Salvatore. 2018. “China’s 2017 GDP per Capita and GDP Growth by Province.” Forbes, February 12, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/salvatore babones/2018/02/12/china-quietly-releases-2017-provincial-gdp-figures /#3bd48f1a20dc. Bano, Masooda. 2010. “A Response to Modernity: Why Muslim Females Opt for Madrasah Education in Pakistan.” Working paper, DFID Religions and Development Research Consortium, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. Barabantseva, Elena. 2007. “Development as Exclusion: Ethnic Minorities in China’s Western Development Project.” BICC Working Paper Series, October 7, 2007. www.bicc.ac.uk/files/2012/06/07-Barabantseva.pdf. Ben-Dor Benite, Zvi. 2005. The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bird, Joshua. 2017. Economic Development in China’s Northwest: Entrepreneurship and Identity along China’s Multi-ethnic Borderlands. London: Routledge. Kindle. Broomhall, Marshall. 1910. Islam in China, a Neglected Problem. London: Morgan & Scott for China Inland Mission. Cao Huhua. 2010. “Access to Education for Girls in Minority Region of Gansu: A Geographic Perspective.” In Regional Minorities and Development in Asia, edited by Huhua Cao and Elizabeth Morrell, 99–117. London: Routledge. Cao Nanlai. 2018. “Chinese Religions on the Edge: Shifting Religion-State Dynamics.” China Review 18 (4): 1–10. Cao Siqi and Yang Xi. 2016. “Gansu Condemns Koran Recitation in Kindergarten.” Global Times, May 6, 2016, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/981669 .shtml. Chao Chiu-Ti 趙秋蒂. 2012. Linxia zongpai: Zhongguo musilin de zongpai minzuxue 臨夏宗派-中國穆斯林的宗派民族學 (Linxia denominations: An ethnography of Islamic denomination in China). Taipei: Chengchi University Press.

176

Gender and Faith

Cieciura, Wlodzimierz. 2015. “Bringing China and Islam Closer: The First Chinese Azharites.” Middle East Institute, April 28, 2015, http://www.mei.edu /content/map/bringing-china-and-islam-closer-first-chinese-azharites. Daniel, Orestes G., and Ryan Mick. 2018. “Belt and Road Initiative: Business Opportunities and Challenges for European SMEs.” EURObiz, March 2018, http://ccilc.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/EUSMEBeltandRoad.pdf. Erie, Matthew, S. 2014. “Defining Shari’a in China: State, Ahong, and the Postsecular Turn.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 12 :88–117. ———. 2016. China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gansu Development Yearbook Editorial Board 2018. “临夏回族自治州 Linxia Huizu Zizhizhou” (Linxia Huizu Autonomous Prefecture). In Gansu Development Yearbook 2018, edited by Liu Guanghua 刘光华. Beijing: China Statistics Press. Accessed June 12, 2019, http://www.gstj.gov.cn/tjnj/2018 /indexeh.htm. Gao Zhanfu 高占. 1991. “Minguo shiqi de gansu huizu jiaoyu 民国时期的甘肃 回教教 育” (Republican-era education of the Hui in Gansu). Xibei minzu yaniu 西北民族研究 (Northwestern Journal of Ethnology) 1:193–205. Gillette, Maris Boyd. 2008. “Violence, the State, and a Chinese Muslim Ritual Remembrance.” Journal of Asian Studies 67:1011–1037. Gladney, Dru C. 1991. Muslim Chinese, Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic of China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gong Xuezeng 龚学增. 2010. Dangdai Zhongguo minzu zongjiao wenti 当代中 国宗教问题. Beijing: Central Party School Publishing House. Hallaq, Wael B. 2009. Sharīʻa: Theory, Practice, Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hāshimī, Muhammad A. al-. 1994. Šaḵṣiyya al-mar’at al-muslimah (The character of the Muslim woman). Beirut: Dar-albashaer al-aslamyt. He Kejian 何克俭 and Yang Wanbao 杨万宝. 2002. Huizu Musilin changyongyu shouce 回族穆斯林常用语手册 (Phrasebook of Huizu’s commonly used expressions). Yingchuan: Ningxia Renmin Press. Hille, Marie-Paule. 2011. “Entre allégeance et résistance, faire sa place à Linxia, ‘La petite Mecque chinoise.’” In Du civil au politique: Ethnographies du vivre ensemble, edited by M. Berger, D. Cefaï, and C. Gayet-Viaud, 133– 166. Brussels: PIE, Peter Lang. Israeli, Raphael, and Adam Gardner-Rush. 2000. “Sectarian Islam and SinoMuslim Identity in China.” Muslim World 90:439–458. Jaschok, Maria, and Shui Jingjun. 2000. The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press. ———. 2011. Women, Religion, and Space in China: Islamic Mosques and Daoist Temples, Catholic Convents and Chinese Virgins. New York: ­ Routledge.



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

177

Jian Bo 江波 and Wang Yangling王杨苓. 1996. Musilin nüxue yanji—zaifang linxia musilin nüxiao de diaocha baogao 穆斯林女学研究-再访临夏穆斯林 女校的调查报告 (An additional survey on Muslim Women’ schools in Linxia). Gansu minzu yanjiu甘肃民族研究 2:82–87. Kao Suxia 靠素霞. 2013. Musilin funü pinge 穆斯林妇女品格 (The moral character of the Muslim woman). Lanzhou: Gansu minzu chubanshe. Kao Suxia 靠素霞 with Ma Xiulan马秀兰 and Ma Yuemei马月梅. 2010. (YB) Lanzhou: Gansu chubanshe-Linxia Waiguoyu xuexiao fenxiao 临夏外国语 学校分校 (Yearbook of the LWXF). Linxia City: Linxia Waiguoyu xuexiao fenxiao. Leibold, James. 2019. “The Spectre of Insecurity: The CCP’s Mass Internment Strategy in Xinjiang.” China Leadership Monitor, March 1, 2019, https:// www.prcleader.org/leibold?fbclid=IwAR1_2iOWeAvcyV5n5N8j7ajffJMpig CRX6BXDEqS7iO3QjvRIy2dl0bPKxg. Li Yanxu. 2018. People’s Republic of China Economic Geography Analysis of Gansu Province. Analytical Report in Support of Project Design of Gansu Revitalization and Innovation Project. World Bank Group, December 2018, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/173411553605180846/pdf /Analytical-Report-in-Support-of-Project-Design-of-Gansu-Revitalization -and-Innovation-Project.pdf. Lin Juting 林俊婷. 2017. Linxiashi nongye gaikuang 临夏市农业概况 (Agricultural survey in Linxia City). Gansu nongye xinxiwang 甘肃农业信息网, accessed November 10, 2017, http://nync.gansu.gov.cn/apps/site/site/issue /nygk/qsnygk/lxz/2014/03/25/1395715453267.html. Lipman, Jonathan. 1997. Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ma Qiang 马强. 2003. “Funü jiaoyu yu wenhua zijue: Linxia zhong’a nüxiao ge’an diaoyan” 妇女教育与文化自觉—临夏中阿女校个案调研 (Women’s education and cultural awareness. A study on the Linxia Zhong’a Nüxiao). Zhongguo musilin 中国穆斯林1, accessed December 2, 2007. http://www .islambook.net/xueshu/list.asp?id=1951. Ma Tong 马通. 1993. Zhongguo yisilanjiao jiaopai yu menhuan zhidu 中国伊斯 兰教教派与门宦制度 (The system of Jiaopai and Menhuan in Chinese Islam). Yingchuan: Ningxia Renmin Chubanshe. Mackerras, Colin. 1999. “Religion and Education of China’s Minorities.” In China’s National Minority Education: Culture, Schooling, and Development, edited by G. A. Postiglione, 23–54. New York: Falmer Press. Matsumoto, Masumi. 2003. “Zhongguo xibei yisilan nüzi jiaoyu: Yi linxia zhong’a nüxue he weizhou zhong’a nüxue weili” 中国西北伊斯兰女子教 育—以临夏中阿女学和维州中阿女学为例 (Girls’ education in Northwestern Chinese Islam: The case of the Linxia Zhong’A Nüxiao and Weizhou Zhong’A Nüxiao). Huizu Yanjiu 回族研究 4:111–115.

178

Gender and Faith

———. 2006. “Rationalizing Patriotism among Muslim Chinese: The Impact of the Middle East on the Yuehua Journal.” In Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic World: Transmission, Transformation, and Communication, edited by S. A. Dudoignon, Hisao Komatsu, and Yasushi Kosugi, 117–142. New York: Routledge. Matsumoto, Masumi, with Shimbo Atsuko. 2011. “Islamic Education in China: Triple Discrimination and the Challenge of Hui Women’s Madrasas.” In The Moral Economy of Madrasa: Islam and Education Today, edited by K. Sakurai and F. Adelkhah, 88–89. New York: Routledge. Musilin jichu zhishi Chuxue shiyingben 穆斯林基础知识初学适应本 (Beginners’ practical manual of Islamic elementary knowledge). 2011. Xuexiban fuwu zuxianbian. Palmer, David. 2009. “China’s Religious Danwei: Institutionalizing Religion in the People’s Republic.” China Perspective 4:17–30. Previato, Tommaso. 2019. “Le minoranze musulmane nel quadro delle relazioni sino-arabe: Vecchi e nuovi processi di inclusione.” Sinosfere, April 10, 2019, https://sinosfere.com/2019/04/10/tommaso-previato-le-minoranze-musulmane -nel-quadro-delle-relazioni-sino-arabe-vecchi-e-nuovi-processi-di-inclusione/. Rosati, Francesca. 2009. “Musilin funü zongjiao yishi de zijue yu shehui hudong: Yi Linxia nüxiao weili” 穆斯林婦女宗教意識與社會互動—以臨夏女校為例 (Muslim women’s religious awareness and social interaction: The case of Women’s Qur’anic schools in Linxia). MA thesis, National Cheng-chi University. ———. 2017. L’Islam in Cina dalle origini alla Repubblica popolare. Roma: L’Asino d’Oro. ———. 2019. “Islam con ‘caratteristiche cinesi’: L’amministrazione della fede e i musulmani nella Repubblica Popolare dell’era Xi Jinping.” Orizzonte Cina 10 (1): 28–33. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shui Jingjun 水镜君. 1996. “Qiantan Nüxue, Nüsi de xinqi yu fazhan” 浅谈女 学、女寺的兴起 与发展 (A brief talk on the origin and development of Women’s schools and women’s mosques). Huizu yanjiu 回族研究 1:51–59. Sudairi, M. T. Al-. 2010. “Looking East: The Saudis Are Hedging Their Bets.” The Economist, December 9, 2010, https://www.economist.com/node /17680668. ———. 2015. “The New Eastern Frontier of the Da’wah: The Rise of a China-­ Oriented Missionary Impulse in Saudi Arabia.” Unpublished draft paper for the conference Chinese Muslim (Hui) Diaspora, December 3–4, 2015, CUHK, http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rih/csic/document/Academic_conference_2.pdf. ———. 2016. “Adhering to the Ways of Our Western Brothers Tracing Saudi Influences on the Development of Hui Salafism in China.” Sociology of Islam 4:27–58.



Women’s Qur’anic Schools in Little Mecca

179

U.S. Congress. 2005. “Congressional-Executive Commission on China, China’s New Regulations on Religious Affairs: A Paradigm Shift?” Roundtable before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 109th C ­ ongress, 1st session, March 14, 2005. http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS60798. Xiachong yubing 夏虫语冰. Wei Linxia dianzan! Linzia ba alaboyuzi chandiaole 为临夏点赞！临夏把阿拉伯语字铲掉了 (Kudos to Linxia! Linxia had its Arabic scripts scraped off), accessed August 3, 2018. http://bbs.tiexue.net /post2_12462083_1.html. Zhonggong Linxia zhouwei tongzhanbu 中共临夏州委统战部 and Linxiazhou zongjiao shiwuju 临夏州宗教事务局. 2015. Linxiazhou zongjiao zhengce fagui wenjian xuanbian 临夏州宗教政策法规文件选编 (Selection of religious policies and regulations in Linxia Prefecture, 2015–2020). 63. Zhonggong Linxiazhou wei tongzhanbu, 中共临夏州委统战部, Linxiazhou minzu shiwu weiyuanhui 临夏州民族事务委员会, Linxiazhou zongjiao shiwu ju 临夏州宗教事务局, and Linxiazhou jiaoyuju 临夏州教育局. 2010. 临夏回族自治州民族团结进步教育读本 Linxia huizu zizhizhou minzu tuanjie jingpu jiaoyu duben (Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture Ethnic Unity and Progress Education Reader). Lanzhou: Gansu chubanshe. Zhongyuan. 2016. “Xi Jinping zongjiao huiyi yu zhongguo da xibei yisilanhua” 习近平宗教会议与中国大西北伊斯兰化 (Xi Jinping’s religious work meeting and the Islamization of China’s Northwest). April 26, 2016, https:// blog.dwnews.com/post-888556.html.

A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

Chapter 8

Equality, Voice, and a Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook Collaborative Ethnography and Hui Muslim Women’s Expressive History of Faith Maria JASCHOK and SHUI Jingjun, with GE Caixia

I

t was in the long process of ongoing ethnography-based research on gender issues, issues surrounding global values of Islam, and their translation into local expressions associated with faith-centered women’s communities in central China that we came to appreciate the significance of the relational nature of our research collaboration, and its potential for facilitation of approaches sensitive to the many elusive aspects that characterize much of women’s history. An enduring history of gender segregation sustained and encoded by Islamic /Confucian injunctions opened up gendered spaces for women to deepen faith and become mainstays of Islamic faith and life. Although initially they were of a temporary and ad hoc nature, gradually spaces of education diversified their purpose and became permanent schools and mosques, where women congregated to be guided, to be taught, to listen, and to join in collective chants and recitation. It is the history of collaboration across country, faith, and generation as it is the history of the making of Muslim women’s songbook, impelled by yearning for publicly acknowledged rights to coexist in social equality and mutual respect. In line with the theme of our volume, we ask (Jaschok): What insights have our long years of collaborative ethnographic research brought to understanding other ways of self-­realization, both as individual and communal acts of identity formation? What role has collaborative ethnography played in enabling new insights and local change? Second (Ge), we retrace the process by which we undertook the process of collaboration and its impact. How do Muslim women build on their past and prepare for the future? Finally (Shui), we ask 180



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

181

how has a tradition of oral teaching become a part of women’s memory archive, and (Shui/Jaschok) how does it inform the current discourse within Hui Muslim Chinese c­ ommunities on equality, silence, and female voice? Equality, Silence, and Female Voices We believe that the ethnography of religion must recognize the personal aspects of its knowledge, that is, the fact that ethnographic knowledge is generated in interpersonal encounters between people with specific social locations. At the same time, ethnographic knowledge is not only personal; it aspires to something more. —James Spickard and J. Shawn Landres, “Introduction: Whither Ethnography? Transforming the Social-Scientific Study of Religion”

The prime challenge facing ethnographers of religion, Spickard and Landres contend, must be observation of a delicate balance between the personal and that which goes beyond the personal. In postcolonial ethnography, the ethnographer no longer lays claim to the superior gaze of objectivity, a lens that freezes the observed into timeless, unchanging stasis. Instead, the ethnographer is asking for permission to live with the community she is studying. The process of ethnography becomes one of reciprocal mutuality; neither side is seen as privileged, imbued with superior knowledge or insight. The ethnographer becomes humanized, downsized, realizing that she, like her informants, must engage with the quest for meaning and morality. Instead of “explaining,” we must seek to understand (Spickard 2002, 243; see also Yang in this volume). Moreover, the Western feminist researcher as a participant in the research project has to be aware of Western feminism’s deeply held assumption that underlies theorization of the emancipatory act as a coming-to-voice, an extrication from an enforced and patriarchal coding of women’s silence, a silence so intimately implicated in women’s religious piety (Jaschok 2014). Truth as a regulatory ideal matters, but it is also a truth tempered in the process of discovery of new knowledge, of revelations that come from listening, from asking questions, and from the light these questions shine on wider structures of power. Importantly, Spickard and Landres maintain, we should fasten on an ideal of truth complemented by the ideal of equality—in other words, a postcolonial epistemology that acknowledges the equal worth of

182

Gender and Faith

observer and observed. The symbiotic link of knowledge/power is thus a compromised, discredited link. The pursuit of truth is framed by understanding that no single society is superior in knowledge. Ethnographers cannot allege that they know more than natives, though they can claim to know differently. Here, too, equality is a matter of faith, for a proof would depend on an omniscience that cannot exist. At most, we can say that all societies are equal in their not-knowing and that therefore any claimant to holding of an absolute truth must face the challenge from other histories of meaning (Spickard 2002). Foregrounding equality as a regulatory ideal has enormous implications for ethnography. No longer is there the presumption of a native view in need of interpretation; what comes to matter is the dialogue in which all sides, all worldviews, come to the fore—a cross-cultural journey, says Isabelle Gunning, that enables the researcher to see other women, their worlds, and their sense of self through their construction of meaning and choices (Gunning 1992). At the core of postcolonial ethnography is thus dialogue, the opening up to change by the ethnographer herself. If ethnography has the prime responsibility of representation of others’ lives, we are faced with the challenge posed by Kamala Visweswaran, how to problematize ethnographic methodology reflexively and, critically, how to exercise a self-reflexivity that reaches out to other forms of feminism without appropriating their contingent, distinct uniqueness (Visweswaran 1997; Spivak, Landry, and MacLean 1996). Principled exercise of equality, says Visweswaran, is predicated on readiness for dialogue that transcends the researcher’s comfort zone of familiar conceptions and familiar ways of doing. Such a commitment, Spickard and Landres agree, is not universal, nor can it be imposed, as was the case in imperial anthropology and the missionary endeavors of earlier times. But it is a commitment worth making. A commitment to “truth” enables silence to understand the world more completely; a commitment to “equality” empowers ethnographers to take their subjects more seriously (Spickard 2002, 251). Thus ethnography, while remaining a “particularizing” science, must have as its purpose the quest for truth in particulars of life, making the ideal of equality an ideal that frames our interpretation of an enduring, dynamic history of female-­ gendered spiritual and material culture in central China’s Hui ­Muslim communities.



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

183

A Reconstruction of the History of Muslim Women’s Expressive Cultural Traditions In reconstructing a history of women’s self-expression in central ­China’s Muslim culture, we note a number of distinguishing features. Ge Caixia Ahong and Shui Jingjun assign foremost prominence to gender complementarity or xingbie hezuo (gender cooperation, 性别 合作), which facilitated a significant tradition of gender-segregated religious spaces with varied oral traditions, many of which are carried on to the present day. Institutional autonomy (existing in a spectrum from nominal to full autonomy) and increasingly assertive voices of proactive, charismatic leading female religious figures contribute to the current resurgence of Islam in the face of internal and external challenges. It is against this background that unique expressive cultural traditions evolved, particular among Hui Muslim women in central China. The early stage (late seventeenth century) was marked by Islamic/Confucian injunctions and enduring encoding of the idealized conduct of paradigmatic Muslim womanhood. These injunctions constrained women, but they also made women indispensable collaborators in the educational project of Islamic revival (late Ming and early Qing dynasties, late seventeenth century). It was then that the intellectual and institutional foundation for women’s education, thus the beginning of women’s own culture, came into existence (Jaschok and Shui 2000). However, given male domination of all spheres of Islamic life, the voices of women were influenced and disciplined by deeply ingrained structures of patriarchal values and conduct. At the heart of education remained the construction of primary identities of Muslim women as good wives, good mothers, and good Muslims. The concept of xiuti (shame 羞体), which inscribed the female body with marks of shame and mandatory concealment from the public/male gaze, also barred women from speaking in public and mixed company (see also Ha in this volume).1 Widely internalized, the concept of xiuti retains its influence on women to this day. The second stage (eighteenth to twentieth centuries) saw the institutionalization of women’s religious education, which resulted eventually, in its most autonomous form, in female-led women’s mosques, the construction of a canon of female education, and innovative forms of education for mostly illiterate women through uses of oral transmissions of religious learning, prominently in the form of

184

Gender and Faith

zanzhu 赞主, zansheng 赞圣, and jingge 经歌 (chants of religious belief, importantly in praise of Allah, in praise of the Prophet, and chants of general Islamic content, reflecting the joys and sufferings of women as well as offering pedagogical uses).2 Texts, languages, and forms of self-expression characteristic of women’s expressive culture importantly featured the use of Arabic and Persian as scholastic and scriptural languages and of Chinese as oral language. This development informed the rendition of woerci (sermons, khutba), the development of formal Islamic female education, and traditions of Qur’anic recitations as well as performance of songs of praise, zanzhu (chants in praise of Allah), zansheng (chants in praise of the Prophet), and jingge (traditional chants with Islamic content). Oral tradition occupies a crucial place, as few women were literate at that time. Thus arose the jingge culture, a richly diverse culture of orally transmitted chants that uses mainstream social discourses to express religious belief and preserve cultural memory. In this era, jingge were written by men and were primarily disseminated among Muslim women and specifically women’s mosque congregations (Jaschok and Shui 2005). The third, and present, stage features performances of both traditional and new zansheng, a term these days used more generally than jingge, an illustration of a resurgent gendered religiosity that infuses the expressive culture of women’s mosques in central China as part of, as well as contrastive to, an Islamic revival led largely by men (see other chapters in this volume). Less a revival than an intensification of religious piety that had never deserted women even through repressive times, so informants maintain, innovative and inspirational women ahong find new opportunities for a deepening of committed religious identity of their female congregations through tried practices of collective prayer and evocative chants. It is the sacred responsibility of ahong to dadong (energize, 打动) worshippers, to use the expression of an influential woman ahong so as to bring women in their charge to ever greater heights of felt spiritual intensity. We have evidence of greater readiness by younger women ahong to defend their dissenting interpretations of the Qur’an and hadith in the face of patriarchal opposition to women’s assumption of religious authority, willing to query received rulings on morality and conduct. The development of social media plays a crucial role as well as the external environment of an evolving international Islam where authority is increasingly contested, multiply constructed, and situated. Such



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

185

developments enable women to influence approaches to preservation and reconstruction of Islamic culture in central China for a richer array of self-expression. The tradition of collective chanting, with its multiple purposes, thus serves an additional purpose: to invoke a legitimate context for collective (often public) self-expression through connection with historical practices from the pedagogical and devotional culture of women’s mosques. That past confers legitimacy rather than shameful association with female illiteracy and ignorance, the reason given for women’s initial reluctance to “remember” jingge. Historically a tool of instruction for all ignorant believers, oral traditions of learning subsequently came to characterize the culture of women’s mosques, in particular, when in the early twentieth century they were bypassed by educational reforms that swept up men’s mosques as part of the wider modernization that took place in educational institutions in Republican-era China (Jaschok and Shui 2005). This history of mosque education, with its contrastive evolutions of gender-based curricula and pedagogies—a stark binary of Arabic scriptural learning and literacy for men and continued uses of Farsi texts and instruction through oral learning for women—forms the background for Hui Muslim women’s evaluation of their place in the evolution of Islam in China.3 Chant One: Women’s Joy and Consolation The Prophet shines on us like a bright moon. When the mu’addin [or muezzin] calls to prayer, we come to pray, praising Allah. Ah! Prophet Muhammad, sent to us by Allah, you brought us the blessed words of Allah. Ah! Prophet of noble virtues, you are the saviour of all humanity Allah’s sole messenger! Take our hands! Kiss our hands! May Allah bless you, oh Prophet! May Allah show you mercy, enjoying eternal peace! Arabic-language popular jingge (经歌), “The Moon Shines Brightly on Us,” translation based on Chinese translation (明月照耀我们)4

Ge Caixia Ahong explains why the chant is so popular. It is one of the earlier new jingge transmitted to us, she says. Compared to the mournful tunes of old, this chant empowers women. It has spread its influence far, received by women with great pleasure. Whatever the

186

Gender and Faith

event, performance of this jingge is women’s favored choice. Shui Jingjun observes that tunes of traditional jingge, influenced in bygone eras by regional and urban popular musical cultures, among a variety of folk musical traditions, tended to be slow and somber, with little variation. So-called new jingge, on the other hand, show a more marked influence from contemporary popular music, featuring a strong, upbeat tempo. Expressive of a wide range of emotions, they are thus more easily accepted and are performed with infectious enthusiasm. “The Moon Shines Brightly on Us” is an illustration of such a jingge powered by a dynamic, positive, and inspiring tune. One of the early more-modern forms of jingge, it speaks of the reciters’ joyous faith in Allah and the Prophet and of their happiness that women too in the Muslim communities of central China are entitled to make their way to the mosque to pray and thus that they form an integral part of the great umma of believers. That the moon shines on both alike, men and women, is held to express the Prophet’s enlightened attitude toward women’s claim for equal access to a spiritual life, to sources of consolation and the prospect of salvation in the afterlife. The gendered association of ordained sorrow and suffering with women’s fate, expressed in the searing lyrics of many a minjian (popular, 民间) jingge of old, has been replaced by celebration of more enlightened treatment of women. As Guo Ahong from Kaifeng explained, chanting women’s traditional mournful laments, so-called ku hua (lit. “flowers weeping,” 哭花), makes all who listen shed tears as they are reminded of the days of women’s misery. But the days of weeping women have gone, so Guo Ahong repeats, as women are now equal before the law and before Allah, able to follow their aspiration for a good life for themselves and their families, both on earth and in the afterlife. Cross-Cultural Encounters: A Songbook for Future Generations Our record of the making of the SongBook (from Ge 2017) is one of a long process of collaborative creativity with specific dates and times pinpointing initial, explorative conversations over necessary resources and scale of political and communal local support for the creation of a songbook of selected jingge and zansheng. It was to be a celebration of a tradition of Islamic practices of prayer, eulogies, and celebration



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

187

that survived, mostly unrecorded, into the twenty-first century. However, crucially, long-term relationships from an active network of ahong and Islamic practitioners, believers, and researchers formed the indispensable channel for conversations that began in Hong Kong, in March 2016, and continued in Henan and in various influential women’s mosques. These relationships are part of dynamic, separate yet intersecting spheres of diverse sites of institutional belonging and shared religious practices. Over time, these multiple organizational spaces of Muslim women’s socioreligious membership underwent changes both internal to their culture and also externally, with opportunities given and taken by women ahong to capitalize on widening local spaces of social interaction for more assertive voices and unprecedented participation in mainstream society. This process has been at work alongside purposeful and eager reconnection with women’s own unique traditions and history. Thus, though the change is gradual, we are witnessing an expansion of women’s sites of collective worship: from the inwardly oriented sites of earlier years into translocal spaces of networks of mutual support and solidarity. This development forms a context for the ties that formed over time between women’s religious communities, on the whole mosquecentered, and the researchers associated with the SongBook project, who engaged with their communities’ histories. In the case of Shui Jingjun, there were additional connections through birth and faith; in the case of Jaschok, mutual trust and confidence had developed over many years of research and publication woven by now into an ongoing local history of Muslim women and their mosques. Enduring relationships brought about shifts in our ways of doing research, creating the imperative for voices to be heard across the conventional researcher-informant divide. A mode of collaboration evolved instead to allow, to use the language of Spickard and Landres, for the quest for truth to be complemented by emphatic acknowledgment of the importance of equality in our interaction (2002). Thus, a multivocal narrative by diverse members of local Muslim communities facilitated an account and a record of oral traditions that tell the longsubmerged history of women and gendered experience of lived faith. Interpretations of the rich diversity of genres of chants, from within different eras of Chinese women’s history of status and rights and from within different understanding of the power of faith in women’s lives and in their well-being, became conversations among project participants, which widened the space for communal

188

Gender and Faith

experience, according to Ge Caixia Ahong. She says that this work also deepened everyone’s joy, as centuries of women’s belief transmuted from concealed acts of worship into communal (sometimes public) acts of speaking and recitation. Making a Songbook (经歌小册子); Chronicle of a Collaboration At an academic conference held in March 2016 in Hong Kong, Maria Jaschok, Shui Jingjun, and Ba Dongmei decided on the making of a songbook to salvage, preserve, and transmit chants as far as the present state of research and informants’ memories would allow for. Within a short time, a workshop brought together female ahong and Muslims, women and some men, interested in pooling their knowledge and social contacts and networks to help bring about this unprecedented initiative. Organizing a Workshop, Beginning the Task of Collecting

In mid-March 2016, Shui Jingjun, Ba Dongmei, and Ge Caixia Ahong met to discuss concrete plans for the project and to make preparations for a small-scale workshop. Its aim was to introduce to workshop participants the international interest in women’s mosques and female ahong, give a background to the cultural values of a rich diversity of Islamic chants loved by Muslim women over many generations, and outline the purpose of collecting these chants. The practical workshop component was to guide women willing to participate in the project in how best to implement the task of collecting and compiling old and newer chants. The responsibility for communicating with women ahong and women with memory of the culture of learning and chanting of jingge as well as for organizing the workshop rested on the influential religious practitioner and former ahong Ba Dongmei and the well-known and popular Ge Caixia Ahong. From mid-March to the end of the month, channels of communication were set up by female ahong and others; in this task, the popular WeChat social media platform became an important conduit of information and news.5 Ba Dongmei and Ge Ahong disseminated news of the workshop, rallying interested parties to participate on a voluntary basis. The release of the unprecedented news of a



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

189

project in which all willing and able Muslims were invited to participate, and the promise of recovery of long-lost women’s oral traditions, received a universally positive and enthusiastic response. Originally planned for a group of twenty volunteers, the workshop expanded to accommodate forty enthusiastic participants. The Workshop

On March 23, 2016, a prominent (men’s) mosque in the old Hui quarter of Zhengzhou opened its gates to eager workshop participants. Provision of a large venue for the occasion signified support for the project across gender identity and mosque membership. Approximately forty female ahong and Muslims attended, and some brought with them information on the state of local knowledge of jingge and zansheng, and on progress made in gathering information as to possible contacts for personal memory of jingge as well as for contextual knowledge. Ba Dongmei and Ge Ahong hosted the workshop. Shui Jingjun commenced the event with an introduction to the history of jingge and the significance of the proposed work to women’s contribution to Islamic religiosity. Following discussions on methods of collecting and compiling contextual information, several respected women ahong gave their emphatic support for the project. Ba Dongmei and Ge Ahong called on women ahong and influential Muslim women present at the event to share their views on the value and purpose of this project and suggest ideas for mobilization of members of the extensive Muslim network in the province and beyond. All participants were unanimous in their agreement that the project was of great “educational and historical value” and deserved full support. The workshop ended with the organization of eight working groups, representing distinct geographical areas; each group elected its own leader. The work, it was decided, was to be completed by early May (in the end, the complexity of the work to be done extended the timeline), and all materials collected would be passed on to the two women who were most strongly identified with the revival of an old expressive tradition of female religious piety, Ba Dongmei and Ge Caixia Ahong.6

190

Gender and Faith

Dialogue and Changes to the Design of the Project

Shui Jingjun, Ba Dongmei, and Ge Ahong have been bound by a long history of friendship and many years of collaboration in numerous joint activities on behalf of local Muslim communities, and Shui Jingjun and Maria Jaschok are widely known as researchers of Hui Muslim history. This solid relational foundation formed the basis for mutual trust and support that enabled the relatively speedy progress of the project; importantly, these relationships included allies from all public spheres, including government, ensuring that the process of work was, on the whole, unencumbered by interventions from local authorities. The project itself, however, with its many workshops, consultations, and meetings, can be said to have added to, and enriched, previously distant relationships. Dialogues and wide-­ranging discussions surrounding the SongBook project opened new areas of knowledge, prompting reawakening of memories where no memory was thought to have survived the vicissitudes of China’s repressive campaigns. Many were inspired to participate for the first time in their lives in a project derived from within their community’s unrecorded memories, propelled by the community and serving the purpose of making known women’s share in sustaining Islamic faith in their home country. The researchers respected the views of ahong and of many an elderly woman Muslim on how to achieve project objectives most effectively, and the outcome of all these lively, fruitful discussions was a work plan that gained everyone’s support. The design of the project thus changed from the initial idea of only collecting Chinese-language zansheng and jingge chants to include also Arabic- and Persian-language chants. The project’s level of difficulty and complexity increased exponentially, and the time needed to collect, compile, and edit was extended to reflect growing ambition. Moreover, everyone agreed that the zansheng chants both belong to the realm of religious meditation and occupy a highly regarded function in the religious lives of women. Hence, these should be included as an important part of the collection. In this way, the SongBook would not only possess historical value but should also be relevant to contemporary women’s needs. Chant Two: Bailati (Barat白拉提), zansheng (Praising the Prophet赞圣) There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the friend of Allah. There is no God who should be worshipped but Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s most intimate friend.



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

191

There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger. Redemption has come, redemption has come, and our lives can start afresh, we are escaping from the fires of hell, blessed be She-er Banai [Sha’baan, the eighth month in the Islamic calendar]! Bu Yue [Rajab, the seventh month in the Islamic calendar] comes before Sha’baan, followed by Ramadan. We are thankful for the numerous mercies from Allah, best wishes for an auspicious Sha’baan. Allah’s Prophet, Allah’s friend—only Muhammad is Allah’s ­messenger. Help me escape from this world! You are busy serving Allah! Your kindness will be noted, blessed be the month of Sha’baan. Allah’s Prophet, Allah’s friend—Muhammad is his messenger. There is no messenger but Muhammad. Zansheng translated into Chinese, from Arabic/Persian7

According to Ge Ahong, Hui people regard the act of collective chanting as a joyous and popular expression of worship. Exceptionally, as the language of recitation is on the whole confined to Arabic, this zansheng contains an admixture of Persian terms. And on the occasion of Sha-baan, all Muslims join in the collective recitation of this chant. While Persian recitation has in recent years been of limited importance, as long as these traditional chants constitute a part of the Muslim legacy of worship, some Persian expressions will be retained through continued transmission. Women’s performance of this specific zansheng represents an important acknowledgment of their share in the successful indigenization of Islam, Ge Ahong asserts, and of their role in retaining local memory of ancestral voices and practices. The Process of Collecting Information

The task of collecting and compiling information was mainly overseen by Ge Ahong and Ba Dongmei. With the help of supportive ahong, they brought together Muslim women from the most traditional areas and gathered the chants of their childhood, those they had learned from older generations as well as those that they personally held in high esteem. Within weeks, Ge Ahong and Ba ­Dongmei received helpful information and offers of interviews and recordings

192

Gender and Faith

from a number of ahong. Handwritten and typed accounts of local educational teaching practices in women’s mosques and the extent of jingge traditions started to arrive in Zhengzhou, and the collection of written materials concluded around the end of July. In mid-May, recording of chants passed down by the many generations of female ahong and ordinary Muslim women had begun in earnest. Before the start of interviewing and recording, project members spent considerable time on consultations over the choice of chants most resonating with their congregations and enjoying most prominence. This activity attracted yet more offers of support. To increase the quality of recording, Ge Ahong also traveled to the northern parts of Henan to learn from local oral history projects, sharing the outcome of her visit with eager fellow researchers at home. The task of recording took approximately two months, from mid-May to the end of July, and was accompanied by considerable improvement in the quality and depth of the recordings. Approximately two hundred chants were collected (including Chinese, Arabic, and Persian chants). The enthusiastic participation of female ahong and Muslims turned the process of collecting information into a community event led by female ahong and actively supported by growing numbers of women. Because the number of participants was large, this activity of collecting and compiling chants had a broad impact on participating Muslim communities. Besides female ahong and members of mosque management committees, some male ahong and Muslims from all walks of life also provided information or expressed their support for the project. In August and October 2016, as part of the process of filming a documentary about jingge and zansheng chants,8 project members— including Ge Ahong, Ba Dongmei, Shui Jingjun, Shui Lulu, and Maria Jaschok—went to Qinyang, Kaifeng, Nanyang, and Zhengzhou (沁 阳, 开封, 南阳, and 郑州) to conduct interviews. Wherever they went, project participants would talk about the information gathered and about their experience of engaging in such a recovery of long-lost traditions. Slowly, the impact of this great project on local Muslim women communities became ever more apparent. For example, in Kaifeng’s Dongda Women’s Mosque (东大寺女寺), Guo Jingfang Ahong (郭景芳阿訇) and kindergarten teacher Hu Yufeng (胡玉凤) mobilized large women congregations to practice for formal performance of newly collected chants. This activity sparked the interest of members of the older generations of ahong, prompting them to recall



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

193

the chants they had learned in their home mosques when young. And increasingly there were requests for performance of chants outside the context of worship. In southern Henan, in Nanyang, the number of Muslim women studying and performing zansheng drew the attention of many religious leaders. Selection and Editorial Process

Because of the multiple languages involved, the process of recording, selecting, annotating, and editing the zansheng and jingge proved complicated. The role played by ahong became thus particularly crucial. Following various consultations, Ge Ahong and Ba Dongmei took charge of editing the collected chants. A guiding principle for the decision to appoint ahong as leading editors, according to Shui Jingjun, was the desirability to make leading women religious engaged stakeholders in this unprecedented collective project and to solidify and sustain ties of solidarity and collaboration beyond the project. Division of labor, moreover, helped to ensure the best possible outcome. For example, the duty of uploading data was given over to those who displayed certain technical skills, with women ahong and members of their congregations helping whenever they could. Ge Ahong took special responsibility for editing Arabic- and Persianlanguage chants, and to avoid errors, consultation with other ahong became a daily routine. The obscure origins of many jingge, however, made mistakes inevitable. The first draft came out in November 2016, and Ge Caixia Ahong turned to Shui Jingjun and many other women ahong for advice. WeChat messages and, secondarily, emails became a frequent communication tool between scholars of Islam and ahong. Mai ­Fenlian Ahong (买芬连) in Jiyuan set up a dedicated chat room, which ultimately consisted of nineteen people, all involved in annotating zansheng and jingge. All draft versions were subjected to ­constant scrutiny and, when necessary, subsequently modified. Mai Ahong then joined Ge Ahong and Ba Dongmei as a third chief editor. Another ahong, Mai Muguo Ahong (买木果), set up an eightywoman-strong Weixin network of ahong in Henan, joined by women teachers as well. The challenge faced by all in recording and interpreting accurately transmitted chants from bygone eras, created a profusion of editorial opinions, but this difficult process also cemented a collective sense of belonging.

194

Gender and Faith

Unable to afford the more expensive printing companies who would have been able to cope with the challenges of printing Arabic and Persian terms, Shui Jingjun suggested that handwritten Arabic might be the solution. It would also have the added benefit of allowing women ahong to practice their Arabic, thus rekindling everyone’s enthusiasm to improve rusty and dormant skills. Ge Ahong sent out open calls via WeChat to recruit women with Arabic literacy and received an unexpected avalanche of replies. This action however not only received support but also provoked opposition from members of the Muslim community, male and female. The project participants’ capacity for a difficult work of translation was called into question, as well as women’s general standard of written Arabic and Persian. Such criticisms, however, pushed the ahong to work still harder, communicate more frequently, and seek advice from supportive scholars. The consensus of participants made for a clear priority of accuracy of writing over hasty publication. By June 2017, Shui Jingjun had reviewed and proofread the third draft of the manuscript. At the same time, those who hand-copied chants in Arabic and Persian languages continued to improve the fluency of their calligraphy, spurred on by constructive support from local religious practitioners, expert linguists, and Islamic scholars. Yet throughout the trials and tribulations of the long process that went into the making of the SongBook, when participants’ passions were frequently aroused by mutual appraisal and a friendly but intense competitive spirit, there was never any doubt as to the richness of religious and historical knowledge and thus the significance of the SongBook and its legacy for future generations of Chinese Muslims. The Influence of the Project on the Muslim Community Many women ahong participated directly in the long process of c­ ollecting, editing, and revising the materials. Some gave support by collecting needed information and participating in gathering of data; others helped with the revision of early drafts and offered appraisals whereas a number of women offered prayer. Those of means gave financial support for the printing of early copies of the manuscript. Few were left untouched by the project, and many were drawn to participate in whatever way they could by the sheer excitement that emanated from news of the unprecedented undertaking. The entire Muslim community came to take ownership of this labor of love.



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

195

Figure 7. Makers of the SongBook. Photo by Maria Jaschok.

The excitement intensified as new and popular chants were added to the segment of traditional jingge; in the eyes of many, this raised the practical value of this anthology for future users. Even before the book appeared in print, demand had come to be so overwhelming that copies were made of draft versions by ahong impatient to put the SongBook to educational use. Many female ahong and Muslims came to realize the significance of the project for their teaching and religious instruction. More than that, a widely shared pride in women’s astounding history of education and enduring faith has been creating a bond of shared identity that is becoming manifest in women’s sense of purpose and their role in Islam at home and abroad. Religious leaders like Ge Ahong and Ba Dongmei express their newly found conviction that Muslim women in central China’s region would continue to make ever-greater contributions to the development of a more diverse and tolerant Islam and to multiculturalism everywhere. The active spirit, insights, cooperation, and idealism of all participants safeguarded the development and fruitful outcome of the project. Although the initiative came from the researchers, women ahong

196

Gender and Faith

played an important role in mobilizing ordinary women, in collecting, annotating, and editing many an obscure chant. This has made the SongBook, the collective product of their ability and spirit of cooperation, a true achievement. As one ahong told Ge Ahong in early 2017, “This is the first work of such a scope and scale accomplished jointly by women ahong. When the SongBook goes into print, we shall call for a massive celebration.” (See also Rosati in this volume.) Chant Three: Takbir, Praising the Prophet 大赞词, zansheng 赞圣 You are the red-hot sun, you are the bright moon, you are the light of lights, you are the light before us, you are the incomparable treasure, you are the bright light in our hearts! Oh Prophet! We wish you peace, messenger of Allah! We wish you peace, oh Beloved! We wish you peace, may Allah’s mercy be with you! Oh Beloved! Much praised, a man of the East and the West, ­Redeemed! A man respected! Guiding us toward the East and the West. We beseech Allah to have mercy on the Prophet; we beseech Allah to have mercy on Muhammad; we beseech Allah to have mercy and grant Him peace Zansheng, translated into Chinese from Arabic

Ge Ahong chose this chant because it enjoys such wide popularity. The opportunity to perform this zansheng in the Chinese language has increased its popularity further, spreading its influence. The words of the takbir even in different local contexts manifest relatively little divergence. Shui Jingjun confirms the popularity of this chant, both in the Arabic and Chinese versions. It is beloved right across Muslim communities in central China. At this point, Ge Ahong emphasizes, we must be mindful of the fact that women’s love of jingge and ­zansheng comes out of a deep reservoir of faith, making the act of communal chanting an act of worship. The significance of this zan­ sheng lies once more in women’s ownership of a resurgent tradition of collective worship. This zansheng, however, also celebrates women’s direct communication with God and the Prophet, without the intermediary agency of men as mandatory in other Islamic contexts.



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

197

Figure 8. Pages from Henan Muslim women’s SongBook of recovered Islamic chants. Photo by Maria Jaschok.

Listening as “Experience-Near” Event The selection of three chants in their varied linguistic, cultural, and popular origins illustrates the challenges that awaited the researchers, necessitating collaboration with participants in different sites, necessitated consultations regarding methodology and editing processes, necessitating correspondence with scholars and knowledgeable older informants, whether via snail mail, telephone, email, or social media, such as WeChat. The tasks of transcribing, translating, and interpreting brought about virtual and actual working parties. And, importantly, women ahong from diverse mosques in central China networked with each other, cooperated on given issues, and put to use their skills of teamwork. Islamic chants, traditional and new, have enriched and provided a soundscape for the resurgence of faith and piety among Hui Muslims in central China, bringing women’s history into a contemporary idiom of religious expression. Through consultation, discussion, conversations, meetings, and internet communication, leading ahong and

198

Gender and Faith

ordinary Muslim women have made the SongBook a lasting record of the richness of women’s history, a resonant legacy for the use of future generations of believers. As jingge and zansheng chants collated in a first Muslim women’s songbook tell us, these chants are intimately linked with the material and spiritual life that shaped women’s religiosity, in turn infused by the learning of leading women who brought scriptural texts into daily lives and contemporary relevance. They allow women to understand both the fundamentals of Islam and sustained devotion and belonging through collective performances. Repetitive acts of collective chanting deepened and strengthened faith, providing its participants with emotional consolation and the promise of eternal salvation. As Spickard and Landres point out, while the social nature of a fieldworker’s production of knowledge might be obvious, the “cooperative and collaborative” nature of many a conventional study remains hidden from the reader’s understanding. For us, such subterfuge would have had serious ethical implications; in addition, the failure to bring relationships with other researchers and individuals and communities at the local level into the screen of methodological exposition would have compromised the very task we set ourselves: to understand the intersection of gender, silence, and religiosity in time and place. Time is significant in ethnographic relations: time spent together, in silence and in conversation; time to observe and to hear and listen. Listening, in order to become what Martin Gerard Forsey calls ethnography as “experience-near” event (Forsey 2010; also see ­Erlmann 2004; Nesbitt 2002), is demanding of the listeners a most unequivocal immersion. Within a wider anthropological discourse about researcher positionality as insider or outsider to the community studied, and about the impact of positionality on research questions and findings, this conventional binary, as we argue elsewhere, has been giving way to a continuous dialogue between insider/outsider collaborators, blurring dividing lines of objectivity, allegiance, belonging, and identity (Jaschok and Shui 2013). This is all the more important where research is conducted in a field of political tension and sensitive negotiation between state hegemony over a tightly controlled mainstream culture and marginal groups’ quest for the survival of their faith. Martin Stringer contrasts the terminology employed respectively by dominant and subordinated groups, arguing that dominant groups employ language of “culture” to construct an overarching notion of homogeneity. “Faith,” on the other hand, identifies for the dominated group the distinguishing mark of



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

199

their collective identity, requiring protection from an overpowering host society (in Arweck and Stringer 2002; see also Byler, this volume). The project collaboration’s relational scope and resonance with a resurgent Islam in the region, particularly with female-led institutions, have transformed an academic undertaking into a collective movement. And it has brought together women (and men) across generations, jiaopai (Islamic sects, 教派), mosque memberships, education, class, and religious practice. Deeply embedded in the local histories of mosque institutions and inscribed in the personal narratives of women whose religious knowledge came from the emotional depths and pedagogical riches of an oral tradition for largely illiterate believers, the effort and learning invested in the project has become a source of shared pride. Only through the many women (and men) who ultimately have come to constitute our diverse community of researchers/collaborators/supporters could we form the creative and safe space to help uncover multitudes of women’s “forgotten” histories, repressed stories, inner workings of religious institutional life, and collective memories: bodies of accumulated knowledge chanted and listened to across the passage of time and generational experiences. Only thus could we come to explore silence in its gendered and religious aspects as a “space of possibility,” or, in the words of Aimee Carillo Rowe and Sheena Malhotra, “as a space of fluidity, non-linearity, and as a sacred, internal space that provides a refuge—especially for nondominant peoples. Silence is a process that allows one to go within before one has to speak or act” (2013, 2). We argue that this processual silence as it moves continuously between interiority and speech/action—its religious foundation accounting for the fluid, nonlinear motion that ever connects the inner to outer life—is at its core relational (Carillo Rowe and Malhotra 2013). Susan Sontag, probing the artist’s relationship with society through the exercise of silence, remarks how it thus still remains “a highly social gesture” (Sontag 2001, 6), as when in a zone of silence “one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence.” Thus, Sontag continues, “silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue” (Sontag 2001, 11). Women’s history of silence and segregation might be seen as dialectically engaged with an environment which, while maintaining an ideological counternarrative to women’s religious

200

Gender and Faith

faith and agency, also contains in a relational symbiosis of (women’s) silence and (men’s) speech the possibility of change. Women stood in danger of social and cultural silence, but in their more recent engagement with patriarchal authority, emboldened by increasing confidence in their worldly and spiritual abilities, they have felt and responded to the urge to speak and have found themselves asserting the right to their language (Parpart and Parashar 2019). Shui talks of “the unique qualities of voice—the charm of quietness” where there is no action, no instrumental accompaniment to disturb the potency of silence and its rich reservoir of collective and personal expressions of faith. “Such a form of representation encourages audiences to think about the relations between quietness and freedom,” Shui asserts, “although it has originated in a religious tradition where, traditionally, Muslims have not been encouraged or allowed to take part in entertaining activities or performances. Quietness represents Muslims’ desire for purity, dignity, and inner power; it symbolises the joy of life, the yearning for transcendence, and a resilient spirit.”9 In a situation where silence is imposed on an audience, paraphrasing Sontag, whatever the intention that lies in such an imposition, such silence can never be assumed as merely signifying stunted and passive victimhood, understood to inscribe indelibly those at the receiving end of cultural or, as here, gender injunctions. The ability of female ahong to move between contexts, transforming consciousness and subjectivities to contribute to a creative heterogeneity of the umma (Sigona et al. 2015), makes their role “a role of power and vulnerability.” Borrowing from the language of Peggy Levitt and Sally Merry, they are becoming vernacularizers, conveying “ideas from one context to another, adapting and reframing them from the way they attach to a source context to one that resonates with the new location” (Levitt and Merry 2009, 449; see also Jaschok and Shui 2013). It is thus that an expressive culture, female-led and most strongly associated with central China’s women’s mosques, is emerging from age-old traditions from women’s unrecorded because seemingly irreparably silenced past. In connecting and engaging with women elsewhere, particularly in other Muslim contexts well beyond national borders, this past, once a source of social stigma, is increasingly a source of conscious pride, transforming the collective experience of resurgence of a female-­ gendered soundscape into a proud assertion of the uniqueness of Chinese Hui Muslim women’s voice and identity, which come out of a tradition of gendered silence both reclaimed and subverted.



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

201

Notes 1. “Nȕrende shengyin shi xiuti” (The voice of women is shameful to behold 女人的声音是羞体). 2. Jingge is a traditional term used to refer to chants that were much influenced by mainstream social discourse and served collective expressions of religious faith and, ultimately, preservation of cultural memory; jingge came to be replaced in terms of use and popularity by zansheng (chants of praise).The popularity and widespread impact of jingge were rooted in their incorporation into cherished customs and conventions rather than in mandatory requirement. For example, a custom popular in some Muslim communities was tiao jingge, in which a bride would be expected to recite selected jingge on the occasion of her wedding night. 3. The three chants featured in the chapter were chosen by the influential Ge Caixiao Ahong during the month of Ramadan in 2017. Acknowledgment is due to Wen Hua for his contribution to the translation of the chants. He became an important participant in a collaborative effort of translation involving Shui Jingjun and Maria Jaschok. 4. Selected by Ge Ahong as representing what is currently popular among women mosque congregations in Henan province, during Ramadan 2017. “The Moon shines brightly on us” is an Arabic chant, recited in Arabic and translated by ahong into Chinese to make the content accessible to all. Our English translation is based on the Chinese text adopted by Ge Ahong. 5. WeChat (Weixin) is a mobile text and voice messaging communication service widely used across all sections of the Chinese population. 6. Here are the project leaders by area: Jiyuan 济源: Mai Fenlian 买粉莲, Arabic-language instructor; Nanyang 南阳: Hai Wenzhi 海文芝 Ahong; Kaifeng 开封: Guo Jingfang 郭景芳 Ahong; Xinxiang 新乡: Huang Yuling 黄玉玲 Ahong; Qinyan 沁阳: Guo Jinjin 郭金金 Ahong; Bo’ai 博爱: Bai Hongmei 拜红梅 Ahong; Xingyang 荥阳: Ma Yufen 马玉芬, chair of Management Committee; Zhengzhou 郑州: Bai Yanling 拜艳玲、Ge Caixia 葛彩霞 Ahong. 7. The night of Bailati, or Barat, celebrated on the fourteenth day of Sha’baan as a quest for redemption, is an important occasion also for Uyghur women’s groups to meet and recite khetme. I thank Rachel Harris for this information. 8. As part of the process of documentation, a documentary film primarily based on the visual materials from many years of fieldwork (2008–2010, 2015–2016), was also produced. Photographs of the zansheng competition organized by Kaifeng Islamic Association were provided by Guo Baoguang, Kaifeng City Islamic Association. The chants in this documentary are either live recordings or performed by female ahong and others (with the exception of the Arabic song entitled “Ummi” (Mother), which was downloaded from the internet). Filming took place in both urban and rural areas: men’s mosques and women’s mosques located in Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, Nanyang, Qinyang,

202

Gender and Faith

Xingyang, Sangpo village in Mengzhou, all in Henan Province. The entire documentary is based on the support of local volunteers eager to record their own traditions, explicitly made to be available to national and international audiences. 9. Following fieldwork in the summer of 2017, the process of writing up involved frequent email exchanges between Shui Jingjun and Maria Jaschok. Shui’s words cited in the text come from her letters to Jaschok and have formed part of ongoing personal conversations and wider debates centered on religious agency and the agentive potency of silence.

References Arweck, Elisabeth, and Martin D. Stringer. 2002. Theorizing Faith: The Insider/ Outsider Problem in the Study of Ritual. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham Press. Carillo Rowe, Aimee, and Sheena Malhotra. 2013. “Still the Silence: Feminist Reflections at the Edges of Sound.” In Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound, edited by Sheena Malhotra and Aimee Carillo Rowe, 1–22. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Erlmann, Veit. 2004. “But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound and the Senses.” In Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, edited by V. Erlmann, 1–20. Oxford: Berg. Forsey, Martin Gerard. 2010. “Ethnography as Participant Listening.” Ethnography 11 (4): 558–572. Ge Caixiao Ahong 葛彩霞. 2017. Zhongyuan muselin funü zansheng jingge huibian: Bianji licheng 中原穆斯林妇女赞圣经歌汇编》编辑历程 (Making a central China Hui Muslim women’s songbook of Islamic chants: The story of a journey). Unpublished ms. Gunning, Isabelle R. 1992. “Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries.” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 23 (2): 198–248. Jaschok, Maria. 2014. “Sound and Silence in Chinese Women’s Mosques—Identity, Faith and Equality.” Performing Islam 3 (1–2): 59–82. Jaschok, Maria, and Shui Jingjun. 2000. The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press. ———. 2005. “Gender, Religion and Little Traditions: Henanese Women Singing Minguo.” In Women in China. The Republican Period in Historical Perspective, edited by M. Leutner and N. Spakowski, 242–281. Berliner ChinaStudien 44. Münster: LIT Verlag. ———. 2013. “The Study of Islam, Women, and Gender in China—Taking a Gender-Critical Turn.” Asian Culture: A Journal of the Singapore Society of Asian Studies 37:1–14.



A Chinese Hui Muslim Women’s Songbook

203

Levitt, Peggy, and Sally Merry. 2009. “Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global Women’s Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States.” global networks: a journal of transnational affairs 9 (4): 441–461. Nesbitt, Eleanor. 2002. “Quaker Ethnographers: A Reflexive Approach in Theorizing Faith.” In Insider/Outsider: Problems in the Study of Ritual, edited by E. Arweck and M. Stringer, 133–154. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham Press. Parpart, Jane L., and Swati Parashar, eds. 2019. Rethinking Silence, Voice, and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains. New York: Routledge. Sigona, Nando, Alan Gamlen, Guilia Liberatore, and Hélène Neveu Kringelbach. 2015. Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging. Oxford, UK: Oxford Diasporas Programme, Oxford Department of International Development. Sontag, Susan. 2001. Styles of Radical Will. London: Random House. Spickard, James. 2002. “On the Epistemology of Post-colonial Ethnography.” In Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion, edited by J. Spickard, J. S. Landres, and M. McGuire, 237–252. New York: New York University Press. Spickard, James, and J. Shawn Landres. 2002. “Introduction: Whither Ethnography? Transforming the Social-Scientific Study of Religion.” In Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion, edited by J. Spickard, J. S. Landres, and M. McGuire, 1–16. New York: New York University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Donna Landry, and Gerald M. MacLean. 1996. The Spivak Reader: Selected Works. New York: Routledge. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1997. “Histories of Feminist Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 26:591–621.

Gender of Sound

Chapter 9

The Gender of Sound Media and Voice in Jahriyya Sufism Guangtian HA

F

or God’s sake, shut it and go cook!” a violent yell thundered with masculine assertion; like lightning it tore through the dense vocal fabric woven by the Jahriyya women’s melodious chanting. Immediately I felt embarrassed, for it was I who had asked the women to recite for me. And I had done this in a most inappropriate manner: I had requested that they perform for me a piece of dhikr (remembrance of God) normally chanted only after the dawn prayer. They had graciously agreed; the excitement transpired instantly in the group, which comprised no more than twenty women, most of them in their sixties. “We have trained hard!” one exclaimed briskly; ­others were visibly more reserved. Yet soon they surrendered to a communal joy. After a brief lethargy the women were audibly emboldened; the voices began to gather impressive momentum. Gradually coalescing into a concerted harmony, they sounded animated and spiritual, before the man’s voice, like a sharp blade, cut abruptly into its acoustic texture. For months I had heard from the Jahriyya in northwestern China that here, in the village of Xiaozhai in China’s southwestern Yunnan province, women assembled daily for collective recitation. Such female congregation was admittedly rare and controversial. “It was rather interesting [youyisi]” was the comment I received from a male imam in Ningxia, his light sarcasm barely concealed. “Normally pious women would not recite in groups,” a Jahriyya woman in her late sixties once remarked to me, “and yet I know some who do.” On questioning she pointed to the women in Xiaozhai. She had never visited Yunnan, “but women should recite silently [qiaoqiao di nian], and on their own.”

“

204



Gender of Sound

205

Figure 9. Jahriyya women in Xiaozhai, Yunnan, reciting Mukhammas, August 2015. Photo by Guangtian Ha.

This chapter examines how in a world dominated by male ritual voice women fashioned and sustained their own vocal presence. The name “Jahriyya” means “The Loud Ones” in Arabic, yet not all followers of Jahriyya are allowed to be equally “loud.” Gender constitutes an almost insurmountable impediment for many female disciples. For a Sufi order that purports to rely chiefly on voice to define its identity, the exclusion of women’s voices from formal rituals is all the more injurious to its female members. However, I should note up front that the Jahriyya women are not prohibited from pursuing Sufi training. Male Jahriyya masters frequently impart personal guidance and esoteric instruction to female followers, and personal cultivation—for example, secret incantations or specific disciplines of the body—has never been refused women among the Jahriyya. Nevertheless, women’s voices, despite being permitted in the context of religious education, are seldom let into formal ritual settings. Women cannot lead public prayers (this the Jahriyya have in common with most Muslim societies in the world), nor can they participate in public rituals of recitation as active reciters. With a few notable exceptions that are the subject matter of this chapter, they are also not allowed to organize their own congregation when they recite—they do this, if at all, at their own risk.

206

Gender and Faith

This is not to say that women receive no respect and deference when such is due. Mothers are loved, daughters adored; even to nonkinswomen many Jahriyya men would appear humble and considerate. If many Jahriyya women do face discrimination now and again, the reason is less to do with Jahriyya or Islam than the entrenched misogyny the Jahriyya men share with many other Muslim and nonMuslim men in China. The specific restriction imposed on women’s voices is not necessarily indicative of the general status of women among the Jahriyya. Local variations certainly abound; and what “women’s status” means is woefully ill defined across different contexts even in the same society. A ban enforced on women’s ritual recitation does not mean that, in everyday life or even in negotiations that determine when and how a ritual is to take place, women’s views necessarily do not carry any weight. Instead of arguing that the marginalization of women’s voices is reflective of a general peripheralization of all Jahriyya women under all circumstances, this chapter’s aim is more delimited: it seeks to examine the specific contradictions manifest in the exclusion of women’s voices from formal ritual contexts. As such this chapter joins the preceding one, by Jaschok, Ge, and Shui, in challenging the unhelpful assumption that Muslim Hui women in China seldom organize congregations of their own to carry on distinctly female traditions of Islamic recitation. While there is no doubt that in women’s training specifically as reciters and in their Islamic education in general men often play a significant role as mentors (see Rosati, this volume), assimilating women’s practice into men’s work only overstates the often-temporary role of the men involved in this extended process. Among the Jahriyya, the contradictions intrinsic to the exclusion of women’s voices become manifest especially with the introduction of new sound technologies in the 1990s. Both sound recording and real-time acoustic amplification expose what used to lie hidden in the Jahriyya ritual soundscape. Women’s ambiguous spatial position in the mosque and in Sufi spaces, reflective of their lack of voice in the ritual context, now begins to be sounded out in the mediatized Jahriyya soundscape. This chapter shows that two potentially profound shifts took place as a result of the introduction of new sound technologies: first, the wide availability of sound recordings since the 1990s has enabled women to learn either on their own or as a group the recitations previously denied them. MP3 players and CDs quickly took the place of cassette recorders; before long, clunky desktops



Gender of Sound

207

were succeeded by portable smartphones. Women can listen as well as recite. They can passively emulate the male voices, or they can record their own chants and proudly put them in circulation. While women’s voices continue to be excluded from formal rituals in this period, they have begun to (re)assert their acoustic presence in the Jahriyya world—some, indeed, with impressive persistence. Sound technologies have not only rendered male recordings available to women but have also enabled live broadcasting during group prayers and collective rituals. Male voices pass through first the wired and then the wireless microphones; these voices are magnified by an electric amplifier, their volume and timbre is adjusted by a soundboard (which is often poorly configured), and they are relayed via speakers to women confined to their separate spaces. Amplified voices expand the range of the ritual, yet the noises generated by a low-end sound system also risk undermining the ritual efficacy of these very voices. For the first time in the history of Jahriyya, an unprecedented number of women are included in the expanded acoustic field where men’s ritual chanting can be heard, though this inclusion is in turn circumscribed by a different and technologized form of exclusion. This chapter examines this dialectic of inclusion and exclusion pertaining specifically to the use of sound technologies among the Jahriyya. It is perhaps not coincidental that new media technologies have so far led to the intensification of old religious contradictions, or the appearance of new ones. At both the doctrinal and the ritual level (cf. Harris and Dawut, this volume) new media technologies have proved to be both a blessing and a curse, a doubleedged sword that offers new opportunities and creates new problems in equal measure. Learning to Recite Among Hui Muslims there is no Islamic legal consensus over the place of women’s voices. Although a long tradition of establishing women’s mosques exists among the Hui (Jaschok and Shui 2000; ­Jaschok and Shui 2014; see also Jaschok, Shui, and Ge, this volume) have also shown more recently that women’s voices, for some conservative male Hui clerics, still constitute a part of xiuti, women’s “shameful body,” which must be concealed. Despite such male resistance, however, in Henan, where Jaschok and Shui did their fieldwork, we still find at the time of writing a rich and vibrant tradition

208

Gender and Faith

of women’s jingge, a collection of Islamic chants that include Qur’anic passages, prophetic panegyrics, and more popular songs of religious mores and ethics. A somewhat more rigid view of women’s voice prevails among the Jahriyya. No Jahriyya men I interviewed held the opinion that women should not learn to recite Mukhammas, Madā’iḥ, or Awrād, the three liturgical texts taken to define the Jahriyya. Many women are encouraged to engage in intensive studies of these texts, though help from male clerics is not always available as promised. The point of dispute is not so much whether women should recite as where and how they should do so. Sijiuma, a devout Jahriyya disciple and daughter of a renowned male cleric, often told me with no further explanation (such discursive brevity marks nearly all my interviews with women on this subject) that women were supposed to recite “silently” or “furtively” (qiaoqiao di nian). They should not “assemble” (ju zai yiqi); rather, they should lower their voices and recite privately at home. About those women who do recite collectively in exuberant voices, Sijiuma did not have much to say; she laughed it off as an exotic innovation, while in her eyes was a lighthearted criticism tinged with a glint of interest. If a Jahriyya woman wants to learn to recite any of the classical texts, she would have to join a women-only class. Such classes, despite being perfunctorily condoned by male clerics, are few and far between. It depends on whether the local ahong has time—he often does not—and even if he does, he may be obliged by the more pressing need to teach men. Yet the local ahong’s is only one of the schedules an enthusiastic Jahriyya woman has to cope with if she wants to keep up with her studies. A male ahong who used to teach women’s classes in a mosque in Wuzhong once related to me his own experience: the class he taught had to be sandwiched between nine and eleven each morning. Before nine the women had to make breakfast, send the children to school, and take out the rubbish. They would not be free for study well until after 8:30 a.m. And the class must end earlier than 11 a.m., just to leave adequate time for the women to walk home and cook for the little devils on their lunch break from school. Afternoon was out of the question, as many women had to shop for groceries, and some had to take a nap to prepare themselves for ever more chores in the evening. Even less time was left to those who still had to work a small plot of land in spring and summer. Agricultural labor today is largely a woman’s business, since most



Gender of Sound

209

men, all but for the old and the feeble, have become migrant workers in nearby cities. The little return from the land is too trivial to retain the male laborers. While some Jahriyya women are indeed taught by male clerics, such tutelage is invariably susceptible to ill repute because of the mixed-gender context. An ahong in his late forties once confided to me his own adventure in teaching women-only classes. “I asked every woman to leave immediately after the class; no one was allowed to remain behind, not even those with questions,” he said adamantly. On my insistent query, he mentioned that there had been “rumors” of illicit sexual affairs between some male ahongs and their female students. Whether these tales are based on fragments of facts or mere figments of the heteronormative male imagination (women seldom related such stories to me) is perhaps beside the point. The anxiety is real, and efforts are made assiduously by many male clerics to steer clear of any potential suspicion. While gender segregation is not enforced and women are generally allowed to study with a male cleric, such encounters may also trigger besmirching gossip from which perhaps no one can emerge completely unscathed. Such slander further discourages male clerics from taking women on as their students. It also means that whenever and wherever possible, Jahriyya women would probably prefer to study with a woman teacher. One such teacher is Fatimah, whom I met on my fieldwork in Xiaozhai. Probably in her late sixties, she wrote her own textbook and designed her own courses. She used Chinese to transcribe Arabic words, and she herself paid the expenses incurred from printing study materials for her students. She had managed to gather a loyal following over the years. A student of hers who excelled at leading prayers spoke to me passionately about how much she had learned from Fatimah and how responsible she was as an instructor. “Yet some people just think she wants to make a name of herself,” she scoffed. “They tried to push her out; but she persisted and stayed on.” It is not clear whether those who found in Fatimah a formidable foe were men or women, or perhaps gender was here beside the point. But few would deny that were she a man she would probably have faced much less resistance and resentment. Fatimah could not expect much in the way of help from the male congregation. No financial aid was given to her; the women were almost entirely on their own. Since women are never allowed to join the men in chanting, and are thus hindered from practicing their vocal skills in a male-only

210

Gender and Faith

congregation, they are considerably more reliant on new media technologies. While some women do manage—with much effort for sure—to learn the recitation by attentive listening outside a men’s prayer hall, most women either live too far from the mosque or are too preoccupied with their chores to come by. Furthermore, men’s regular participation in collective prayers, unencumbered by irksome household chores, stems in large part from the simple fact that women have—dutifully or reluctantly—borne the brunt of household responsibilities. Coming home after the dusk prayer, his craving for gossip momentarily satiated, the man can reasonably expect a hot meal ready on the dining table, with tea freshly brewed minutes before his arrival. Some of these women do pray, of course, but in order to balance religious obligation and family duty, they often have to pray at home. If in Islam women are allowed to pray at home rather than enjoined to pray in a mosque (hence, so the argument goes, women are given more latitude than men), here women somehow are ­compelled to pray at home because they cannot eke out the requisite time for them to perform the service in a mosque. To be physically proximate to a mosque and thus able to listen live to facilitate one’s learning is a luxury only some women can afford. I once met a widow from Xiji in southern Ningxia who came to Wuzhong for a short visit. She stayed in her younger brother’s house, which happened to be only five minutes’ walk from where I lived; graciously, she agreed to record for me her own recitation. To my astonishment and great delight, despite the wear of age her voice still beamed with a remarkable vitality normally associated with youth. She was unable to recite a full stanza from Mukhammas or any other Jahriyya liturgy in its entirety. “I’m still learning,” she blushed as she broke off in the middle of a session and informed me that that was how far her current study had reached. “She learned just by listening to the voices coming out of the mosque,” her brother said with pride, evidently unaware of the irony. Purity and Danger in the Soundscape Cheap recording technologies offered by smartphone applications have generated profound shifts in the configuration of gender among the Jahriyya. In Brian Larkin’s study of radio in Nigeria, one objection raised by the local Islamic authorities to the popularization of new sound technologies revolved around whether the mediatized



Gender of Sound

211

sound was a reproduction or an extension of the actual human voice. Some framed it thus: “If the broadcast was an extension of a person, then a male voice coming into the domestic arena contravened the Islamic separation of the sexes—they [the Muslim men] did not want their wives listening to the voices of unrelated men” (Larkin 2008, 55). Though sex segregation does exist under certain delimited circumstances, neither television nor radio has been subject to such controversy among the Jahriyya. Men’s voices, either in general or in specificically religious contexts, are seldom barred from entering women’s private spaces. On the other hand, however, most Jahriyya—especially men—believe that women’s voices should be barred from participation in any collective recitation. Women are not allowed to pray in front of men or among them; they are to occupy the rear end of the prayer hall. Instead of having their own female imam, they must follow the male voice that leads the entire congregation. The congregation is mixed, but men and women do not mingle; they each keep to their designated quarter. That women have to be consigned to the rear of the hall and kept out of (male) sight is due to the prevailing view that the very presence of women, no matter what they say or do, is in itself a seduction (cf. Jaschok 2014; Jaschok and Shui 2000, 211–236): since men have unruly sexual desires, women have to be “protected” from the rapacious male gaze. However, such protection is implemented by banishing women rather than men to the marginal position; the responsibility for perceived male decadence, therefore, has to be borne by women. This very logic applies to the ban imposed on women’s voice in ritual recitation. While it may have been easier to partition space and confine women’s bodies to specified corners, it proves a great deal more difficult to ensure that their voices have been properly silenced. A drop of women’s voice, according to some Jahriyya men, would ruin the entire bowl of soup—the soup here presumably being the male collective recitation. Yet it is considerably more difficult to police the ritual soundscape than its landscape, as practically no one can tell any modicum of female voice from the dense vocal fabric composed of the male voices. A woman sitting at the back, securely isolated from the reciting men and conveniently out of sight, could have opened her mouth and sounded her voice at any point in the course of a ritual, and no one would have noticed. The ritual could be sabotaged even without the male reciters becoming aware of it. In contrast to the fear that male strangers’ voices may penetrate the

212

Gender and Faith

intimate female sphere, which should by all means be guarded from such intrusion—as in the controversies surrounding radio services in Nigeria—among the Jahriyya it is the opposite that has provoked male anxieties: here it is the male space that is under constant and serious threat from the recalcitrant female voices; complete exclusion almost infallibly fails. To be sure, that the dominant male voice is constantly under threat does not mean that Jahriyya women would necessarily take their chances. Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) warned almost thirty years ago of the “romance of resistance” that inflicted certain strains of critical feminist thought and practice. She suggested that we use resistance as a “diagnostic of power,” meaning that rather than assuming female resistance as external to and opposing structures of (male) domination, we ought to treat it as indicative of the shifting configurations of power (Abu-Lughod 1990, 42). Women’s resistance, therefore, is not exterior to the workings of power, and it cannot thus be assumed as such. Saba Mahmood subsequently developed this argument into a more general argument—hence one potentially more susceptible to male appropriation (Ha 2017)—that female agency can be acquired as much by differentially inhabiting patriarchal norms as by directly challenging them (Mahmood 2005). Such words of caution need be taken seriously. While a small number of Jahriyya women I interviewed did express a desire to participate in male-only collective recitation, the thought that they could use their voice to sabotage the ritual never entered their minds. Many in fact did not object to their secondary position as long as they could be given a voice. The introduction of sound technologies has yet to trigger a dramatic shift in this respect, though it has added a rather unexpected twist. Once I saw a small group of Jahriyya students at Hong Le Fu listening to a recording on a smartphone. They passed the headphones round, and those listening in grinned, chuckled, or smirked mischievously; those awaiting their turn looked on curiously. I was offered the privilege to jump the queue, and to my great surprise, streaming into my ear from the headphone was a crisp and clear female voice. “Isn’t that beautiful!” one of the students marveled. “I know some women who can recite just as well,” another interjected. “I used to teach our local ahong’s wife to read Mukhammas every time I went home; she was an excellent student.” The recording, I later learned, was downloaded from QQ (a Chinese app for instant messaging). No one seemed to know the identity of the woman reciter



Gender of Sound

213

we were listening to, nor where the recording was made and who uploaded it in the first place. The recitation was recorded in private; its quiet background bespoke a tranquil solitude. Its unwavering voice stared straight in the face of the listener; the sense of directness was riveting. Some students admired the vocal virtuosity of the unknown reciter, while others, laughing and bantering, also found a certain pleasure—even a slightly erotic one—in being able to listen so closely and intimately to the voice of a woman. Being heard is one thing; in what way one is so heard is another. New recording technologies have no doubt generated new possibilities for women to be heard, yet the opportunities also cause new perils. This is the androcentric regime of female nudity in Western classical oil painting reproduced in the acoustic register (Berger 1972, 45–64). Nevertheless, many Jahriyya women are enthusiastic supporters of mediatization; some are in fact keener than men on having their recitations recorded and archived. The Gender of Media The articulation of voice and gender is most manifest in the live amplification of male voices in collective rituals. To understand this, we need first to describe how new voice technologies have fitted into the Jahriyya ritual space. A public Jahriyya ritual is often gauged by two limited modes of listening. At one extreme is the “deep” listening that requires directed intention and unfailing devotion (cf. Becker 2004). It enlists the whole body and is aimed at a trained comportment that attunes the listener to the recitation. Such attentive listening, however, is rare in most collective rituals I participated in. It is considered the ideal to the same extent that it seldom exists in reality. I did witness spirited bodily motions and intense emotions now and again; on one occasion I saw and had the unusual fortune of being allowed to video-record a weeping Jahriyya reciter in the course of chanting the gripping Dazan (lit. “the grand praise”) from Madā’iḥ, a collection of Sufi panegyric poetry dedicated to the Prophet Muhammad. Yet such charged moments, though existent in every public ritual, are far from being common. On the contrary, both in the prayer hall and outside it many participants are often casually at ease with themselves. They are not listening to as much as overhearing the recitation. They have traveled from far afield to join the ritual, yet this participation does not necessarily summon them to a constricted state

214

Gender and Faith

of rigorous listening. Men chat away and pay no attention well until the final moment of supplication; women outside the prayer hall exchange news and gossip with their sisters; children run around, weaving through the crowd and chasing one another in games of hide-and-seek. At times a stern male voice yells through the microphone, trying (often in vain) to quiet down the crowd, the man eventually resolving to reassert the cliché that most ordinary Jahriyya are just not that pious anymore. But let it be clear that this more relaxed mode of listening does not necessarily indicate a lack of devotion. Those who thus listen have nonetheless made the demanding effort to visit the tombs; they have happily eschewed the comfort of home and traveled long distances to participate in the ritual. Those who are “impious” may well have saved themselves the trouble by not coming in the first place. This amounts to saying that for most ordinary participants in a public recitation, the matter is less how they listen than the fact that they are physically there to listen. To gen (follow) a ritual means to enfold oneself into its sound, to be encompassed by the voices, even as such voices are treated as a sort of background music. Such listening does not necessarily require that one enter irrevocably into an altered state of consciousness. Insofar as one can hear the recitation, one is already following its lead and gathering its blessings. After all, most ordinary followers are there merely to gen; they are not the performers and do not have to put themselves under strain. For most lay disciples the recitation is an aural phenomenon, its physical perimeter a function of the physicality of its sound. This very fact fuels the enthusiasm for introducing loudspeakers into the Jahriyya ritual soundscape; new sound technologies are seen merely to augment what should have been augmented. The use of loudspeakers among contemporary Muslims has drawn much attention from anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. Anne Rasmussen’s interest in the sound of Islam (2010) was initially inspired by the electrically amplified call to prayer and Qur’anic recitation in Indonesia. Ten years prior to her study, Tong Soon Lee (1999) showed how the shifts in urban landscape and residential pattern in Singapore gave rise to more ethnically diverse communities where the politics of broadcasted Islamic sounds provoked new controversies: “In the new context, sound production from traditional practices was sometimes regarded as ‘intrusive’ to members not involved in those events” (Lee 1999, 89). Such complaints are perhaps ubiquitous in



Gender of Sound

215

any urban environment where Muslims live among non-Muslims; for the latter, the sound of the call to prayer and the holy Qur’an may be an irritating nuisance. Isaac Weiner (2014) shows, for instance, how the dispute over the amplified adhān (call to prayer) in Hamtramck, Michigan, drew on often-competing interpretations of secularism and pluralism; in such controversies what counts as “urban noise” is subject to rigorous debates. Muslim Americans and Polish Catholic Americans argued over what sounds should be allowed into the public sphere and how—this amid heightened anxieties among the latter that their already precarious position was again threatened by an acoustic assault from the Muslims. In living among mediatized Islamic sounds some non-Muslims have learned to cultivate what Brian Larkin (2014) recently termed “techniques of inattention.” This is particularly vital in places where sounds continue to encode memories of ethnoreligious clashes; listening “too attentively” may invoke reminiscences of violence and lead to new bouts of interethnic violence. A certain mode of shallow listening, and a refusal to engage, in this case works to facilitate rather than undermine interethnic peace. Needless to say, this is a fragile balance that does not guarantee sustainability. Under certain conditions some Muslims may prefer not to be listened to at all; attentive listening by state agents, for instance, may be particularly foreboding (Eisenberg 2013, 200–201). However, these observations speak only partially to the Jahriyya soundscape. Although I have seen Jahriyya mosques broadcast calls to prayer, Qur’anic recitation, or Islamic sermons in rural towns (never in an urban environment), such practices are in fact discouraged by the Jahriyya authorities. Military clashes with the imperial government and political persecution suffered at the hands of the current regime have rendered many a Jahriyya instinctively cautious in their dealings with mediatized public sound. In some places the ancient tradition of having someone beat a wooden block (bangzi) while walking through the neighborhood to alert people to the dawn prayer and suḥūr (the predawn meal during Ramadan) is still practiced; such practice of subdued sounds allegedly arose from the need for disguise under conditions of political suppression. Surely the Jahriyya do use public broadcasting to expand the coverage of their ritual voice; the difference lies rather in how they do this and who the intended listeners are. Hong Le Fu, the chief Jahriyya lodge in Wuzhong where I did my fieldwork, used to have only one low-end loudspeaker, mounted

216

Gender and Faith

on the tilted roof of the prayer hall. On a weekly basis it broadcasted barely intelligible sermons prior to the Friday Jumu’ah prayer. I could hardly hear the sermon even from my own apartment, which was only a two-minute walk from the compound. New loudspeakers were not installed until months into my fieldwork, and these new speakers, if they were on at all, were completely useless in carrying the voices beyond the walls of the compound itself. As numerous Jahriyya clerics claimed, the purpose of the loudspeakers was neither to call people to prayer nor to preach Islam to non-Muslims, least of all to elicit attention with evocative sounds. Rather, these loudspeakers were meant primarily to enlarge the auditory coverage of the recitation and reinforce its acoustic appeal within the architectural space of the compound. The amplification was directed inward rather than outward; it was designed not to draw others in as much as to consolidate a more cogent collective self. This Jahriyya self is constitutively gendered. Though women are seldom barred from the prayer hall, their presence is not recommended. Though some women see no reason to keep away from the ritual space dominated by men, many more choose to remain outside even when space is still available within the hall. On innumerable occasions I witnessed older Jahriyya women voluntarily kneel down close to the doorstep; they stayed so very close that their refusal to cross the doorway to enter the prayer hall became all the more conspicuous, to the point where a feminist anthropologist might (mis) take it as a satirical protest instead of a display of devotion. “Only a genuinely pious woman would act like this,” a Jahriyya lady in her seventies once told me, with those around her offering nods of agreement. The implied message was that those who did enter the prayer hall were obviously not as pious. While an abundance of men can also be seen outside the prayer hall, few of them are happy to remain in such a marginal position. The Jahriyya men do not enjoy being left out; they usually swarm into the hall once it begins to admit participants, until even standing room is exhausted. Those who cannot squeeze in greatly resent their exclusion; they jump at the sight of even a tiny spot in the overcrowded hall and are lightning quick to shove others aside. Though, strictly speaking, there is no spatial segregation of sex—both men and women can be seen inside as well as outside the prayer hall during any given ritual—there is still a clearly gendered division of ritual space. The physical space outside the prayer hall yet still within earshot of the male voices is a



Gender of Sound

217

quintessentially female space. Many Jahriyya women occupy this marginal position where the male voice is about to vanish but not yet; they can hear it but not quite. The introduction of sound amplification exposes precisely this structural ambiguity of the female position. To clarify why this is so, we need to reenter the prayer hall and examine yet again the uneasy fit between the recitation therein and the new technologies of voice. The female space, as we shall see, is not exterior to the male world as much as it is a symptomatic representation of the latter’s intrinsic incoherence. The female position offers a special vantage point for us to identify what the voicing males would rather keep silent. At Hong Le Fu there are moments—surprisingly frequent— when a serene ritual is interrupted by something so out of place one would never expect it in such settings. A vulgar song that accuses one’s “bitch” (niang er men) of overspending and draining the family finances may arise from a smartphone whose owner is prostrating during a prayer; or a tantalizing female voice may stream out from another phone and somberly confide her loneliness, which soon mutates into an invitation. The ubiquity of phones and the curious fact that many of them are not turned on silent mode (or completely off for that matter) render every ritual, big or small, littered with popular songs. What one has heard looped ad nauseam in the local shops may be reproduced in the prayer hall just when everyone is silently reciting the Qur’an. The frequency and regularity of such irritating intrusion may lead one to suspect that there is some concerted effort to sabotage the ritual. Warnings are posted outside the prayer hall, and verbally issued by the Jahriyya authority, yet few seem to take them to heart. For a brief period at Hong Le Fu the clerics in charge tried to block all phone reception by installing electronic signal jammers. For some unknown technical reasons, however, it never worked, and no alternative solution had been proposed ever since. Almost every Jahriyya follower I interviewed lamented about the lack of devotion shown by such irksome lapses, yet the phones continued to ring noisily during prayers and recitations. The lurking presence of phones becomes all the more insidious when the ritual voice goes through an electric amplifier. The recitation of Madā’iḥ is particularly subject to such disturbance, partly because of the specific textual and performative structure of this liturgy. Each of the Madā’iḥ’s sixteen sections is composed of three separate parts: rawei (the prosaic text), beiti, and zhewabu (both of

218

Gender and Faith

which are poetic compositions that build on the rawei’s narrative). While the word rawei is derived from the Arabic term riwāya, meaning “report” or “narrative,” beiti is derived from the Arabic word bait, “verse.” Zhewabu means “reply” or “answer” and is derived from the Arabic term jawāb. Both beiti and zhewabu are recited in groups, often by two separate groups engaged in a duo, while only one reciter chants the rawei. The order of the recitation is of vital import: the rawei reciter first reads out the relevant prosaic passage, after which the beiti chorus raise their voices to recite the poetic panegyric. The “reply,” zhewabu, follows closely upon beiti. A choral dialogue thus ensues before falling silent and ushering in the next prosaic passage chanted by the rawei reciter. The lone voice of rawei contrasts with the silence of the rest of the congregation, who are soon to take over beiti and zhewabu. When microphones were introduced into the ritual space—first wired but soon wireless as the latter became affordable—the lone rawei reciter was the first person to benefit from the convenience they offered; the voices of the chorus are only fed into the microphones obliquely. The uneven distribution of esteem in the congregation is thus heightened and aurally conveyed to a wider audience. Only the voice of the rawei reciter is clearly audible to those outside the prayer hall; the voices of the poetic chorus, on the other hand, are still largely trapped within the physical space of the hall. The spatial division between the inside and the outside—a gendered division, as we have seen—is then auditorily magnified. When the rawei reciter has a beautiful and pleasant voice, few would object to this particular arrangement of microphones, yet things seldom evolve as wished for. One of the major reciters in the Hong Le Fu area, Huansi, did not possess an agreeable voice. On the contrary: he could barely follow the melody without routinely falling off-key. He had a low and husky voice; his recitation was a dull droning that maddened many a Jahriyya disciple. Rather than uplifting, his voice was frequently draining, and one could hardly make out either the words or the melody of his Madā’iḥ. It sounded like a jumble of inarticulate mumbling whose monotony by no means matched what one normally expects of a Madā’iḥ ritual. But no one dared challenge him. His status, as most Jahriyya I spoke to took care to point out, had been earned by his father’s good deeds. When his father, an eminent Jahriyya cleric, died in the late 1990s and some Jahriyya wondered who would take his place, the leader reputedly



Gender of Sound

219

replied with a rhetorical question: “Does he not have a son?” Huansi’s voice might be abysmal, but his position was unquestionable even in the face of his clear incompetence. The new wireless microphones only exacerbated the strain on his lack of musical talent, for his proximity to the device only magnified what he would probably have preferred concealed or at least de-emphasized. Previously he might have been able in part to hide his dreadful voice within the chorus and expect the latter to carry him through and mitigate his inadequacy; now even this last straw was denied him by the wireless microphone. He pinned it to the lapel of his jacket just below the collarbone; his monotonous grumble became all the more audible and almost completely drowned out the voice of the chorus. Worse yet, the amplifier was configured in such a way as to stress the low frequency range of Huansi’s voice. This had the unfortunate consequence of exposing the most awful part of his voice. A Jahriyya ahong once joked in private: “Can we just seize the microphone from him?” The remark triggered a round of laughter, though the complaint was a genuine expression of the dissatisfaction shared by all present. The phones, whether smart or not so much, join this technological conspiracy to sabotage the collective ritual. Often at the very moment when rawei is being recited, the ghostly presence of smartphones is made irritatingly audible by the hissing static that frequently disturbs the lone male voice. When a call comes in, even when the phone is set on silent mode, the electronic interruption nonetheless disturbs the transmission of signal between the wireless microphones and the speakers; the hissing sound such interference generates can barely be silenced. Extremely annoying is the fact that the phones that lie at the source of such disturbances can hardly be identified. Some even suspect—perhaps rightly so—that it may well be the rawei reciter himself who is to blame for such interruption. While for some practitioners of religion unanticipated technological mishaps may bespeak divine intervention (Blanton 2015, 11–35; Morris 2002; cf. de Vries and Weber 2001), few Jahriyya followers see such static as signs of holy presence. Some find it annoying; others have cultivated a different “technique of inattention” (Larkin 2014); still others are wondrously oblivious and comfortable in checking their social media while following a ritual. As such, they are as much on the productive end of the mediatized ritual sound as they are on its receiving end. Here we can begin to understand the specific articulation of gender and media among the Jahriyya. The gendered division of space

220

Gender and Faith

becomes more manifest as a consequence of mediatization, since the electronic disturbances are perceived most clearly and immediately by those who inhabit the space reserved for the female gender. It is the female position, the space outside the prayer hall yet still within earshot of the mediatized and static-filled male voices, that provides a special vantage point to expose the internal ambiguities of the amplified recitation. Technological mediation lends the Jahriyya women— and those men who happen to share the same position—a special access to the failure of the male voice. But this also comes with a price: inhibited from voicing their own recitation and discouraged from entering the prayer hall, the Jahriyya women have their silenced voices returned to them through the loop of the electric media—distorted, unrecognizable, unpleasant. In many respects, the fact that the Jahriyya women are not allowed a voice in formal rituals constitutes a form of exclusion. The revival of Islam—or the emergence of novel forms of Islamic piety—as is seen among Muslim women elsewhere in the world has yet to gain momentum among the Jahriyya (cf. Mahmood 2005; Rasmussen 2010; Harris 2014; Ahmad 2009; Ahmed 2011; Jamal 2013; Doumato 2000; see also Rosati, this volume). While women martyrs—often wives and daughters of past saints and devoted disciples—continue to be remembered and celebrated, little in the way of Islamic feminism has made an appearance in Jahriyya. Many women, even some among the young, are illiterate, in Chinese as well as in Arabic, and educational resources in the areas where the Jahriyya concentrate have remained woefully meager over the years. As such, to raise women’s status by engaging and reinterpreting classical Islamic texts is simply out of the question for most if not all Jahriyya women. The most one can say of women’s raised status among the Jahriyya is that some women are finally allowed a space to organize their own congregation, and some enthusiastic students of religious knowledge now have a slim chance of being taught by established male clerics. However, as this chapter shows, the story is also more nuanced than that of a simple and clear-cut exclusion of women. The nuances appear most clearly when we link gender to media. The introduction of new sound technologies at once reveals the intrinsic precarity of the male voice and offers new possibilities for women to make their voices heard. Inscribed into the acoustic structure of the recitation, smartphones and wireless microphones unexpectedly magnify the



Gender of Sound

221

internal disharmonies among the male reciters. What previously remained concealed and confined to a small circle—namely, the displeasing voices of some esteemed reciters—is now amplified and conveyed to a wider audience than any Jahriyya voice could possibly have aspired to only a decade ago. The expansion of the ritual’s acoustic field ironically benefits the most unpleasant of the voices. Precisely because they often remain at the margin of the Jahriyya aural field, women are at once the chief beneficiaries of the mediatized voice, and the first among the Jahriyya to perceive the amplified disharmonies. Given some of these women’s rigorous private study, they may even be secretly assessing the competence of the voice streaming out from the speaker. That women are not given a voice does not mean they cannot recite, or that theirs is necessarily less aesthetically pleasing and religiously evocative than men’s recitation. New sound technologies have created abundant possibilities for the Jahriyya women; in due course these new possibilities may well translate into greater shifts to the gendered Jahriyya ritual space. References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist 17 (1): 41–55. Ahmad, Sadaf. 2009. Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism among Urban Pakistani Women. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ahmed, Leila. 2011. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin UK. Blanton, Anderson. 2015. Hittin’ the Prayer Bones: Materiality of Spirit in the Pentecostal South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Doumato, Eleanor Abdella. 2000. Getting God’s Ear: Women, Islam, and Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. New York: Columbia University Press. Eisenberg, Andrew J. 2013. “Islam, Sound, and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship on the Kenyan Coast.” In Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experiences, edited by Georgina Born, 186–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ha, Guangtian. 2017. “The Silent Hat: Islam, Female Labor, and the Political Economy of the Headscarf Debate.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (3): 743–769.

222

Gender and Faith

Harris, R. 2014. “‘The Oil Is Sizzling in the Pot’: Sound and Emotion in Uyghur Qur’anic Recitation.” Ethnomusicology Forum 23 (3): 331–359. Jamal, Amina. 2013. Jamaat-E-Islami Women in Pakistan: Vanguard of a New Modernity? Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Jaschok, Maria, and Jingjun Shui. 2000. The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press. ———. 2014. “Sound and Silence in Chinese Women’s Mosques—Identity, Faith and Equality.” Performing Islam 3 (1–2): 61–84. Larkin, Brian. 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. “Techniques of Inattention: The Mediality of Loudspeakers in Nigeria.” Anthropological Quarterly 87 (4): 989–1015. Lee, Tong Soon. 1999. “Technology and the Production of Islamic Space: The Call to Prayer in Singapore.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 86–100. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Morris, Rosalind C. 2002. “A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age.” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 383–397. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rasmussen, Anne K. 2010. Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vries, Hent de, and Samuel Weber, eds. 2001. Religion and Media. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Weiner, Isaac A. 2014. “Calling Everyone to Pray: Pluralism, Secularism, and the Adhān in Hamtramck, Michigan.” Anthropological Quarterly 4:1049.

Translocal Encounters

Chapter 10

Translocal Encounters Hui Mobility, Place-Making, and Religious Practices in Malaysia and Indonesia Today HEW Wai Weng

I

n 2013, I walked by the Sulaiman Chinese Muslim Restaurant, a Hui Muslim eating place on a busy street in Menteng, the center of Jakarta. I stopped to enjoy a bowl of noodle soup and to talk to the owner of the restaurant, Sulaiman Han. Sulaiman, originally from Henan and subsequently a resident of Xi’an, who comanaged a few Hui restaurants in China, moved to Jakarta in 2012 to expand his food business. He viewed this small restaurant as a starting point; he had an ambitious plan to open ten more in other Indonesian cities. In 2016, his restaurant relocated to Pasar Baru, another district in Central Jakarta. In the same year, he and his business partners opened another branch on the island of Bali. In 2015, I dropped by the Chinese Muslim Authentic Heritage Pulled Noodle Restaurant, another Hui restaurant, when I was doing fieldwork in Bangi, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur. While watching the live demonstration by Hui Muslims of how to make noodles, I talked to Said Pan, the manager of the restaurant. As Said Pan said, his brother Hassan Pan, originally from Lanzhou in Gansu, came to Malaysia a few years ago, to open his first restaurant in 2013. His business has grown rapidly since then, as his restaurants are very popular among middle-class Malay Muslims. As of 2017, his business had thirty-three branches, and its target is rather ambitious: to have more than one hundred branches in cities across Malaysia. Both cases above reflect the growing visibility of Hui people in Malaysia and Indonesia today. Chinese Muslims have a long existence in Southeast Asia (Ma 2003; Tan 1991; for Yunnanese Hui in 225

226

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

Figure 10. Advertisement for Mee Tarik Warisan Asli, a hand-pulled noodle restaurant chain in Malaysia, May 2019. Photo by Hew Wai Weng.

northern Thailand and Burma, see Wang 2006; Chang 2014). In Malaysia and Indonesia, it can be traced back to the visit of Admiral Zheng He in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and more recently the arrival of Ibrahim Ma Tian Ying and his families in the mid-twentieth century. Yet the recent increase and visibility of their presence in both countries, especially in Malaysia, started during the 1980s, largely as a result of student mobility (Wong and Ooi 2013). Many are students from the northwestern parts in China who have chosen Malaysia for furthering their studies. There is no official figure for the number of Hui migrants in Malaysia. Wong (2013) estimated that there are about two thousand Hui students studying and fifty Hui families living in Malaysia, most of whom would have first come as students and later engaged in business activities. My research experience suggests the exact number of Hui migrants in Malaysia would be slightly higher than this estimation.While many Hui in Malaysia



Translocal Encounters

227

and Indonesia today have originated from northwestern China (including Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, and to a lesser extent Xinjiang), there is also no shortage of Hui migrants from other regions, such as Henan, Yunnan, and Shaanxi. The chapter is mainly based on formal interviews, informal discussions, and participant observation in various places run, owned, or managed by Hui Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia, especially those associated with mosques and restaurants. Although most of my interlocutors are not physically based in China, a study of Hui mobility might constitute a part of the ethnography of Islam in China, as it informs us on issues such as why some Hui choose to move abroad, how they are shaping and are shaped by religious practices in places such as Malaysia, and how their overseas experience changes their religious viewpoints and impact Islamic discourses in China on their return. But this chapter is not a detailed multisited ethnographic of contemporary Hui migrants. Instead, it explores their migratory flows, translocal networks, interconnections between places, and transformation across spaces. A potential future research trip in China, especially in northwestern provinces such as Ningxia and Gansu, where many Hui migrants originated from, could provide deeper insights on their mobility. My own identity as a Chinese Malaysian sometimes influenced how my informants responded to me and how they acted in my presence. For example, a Hui respondent in Malaysia asked me to address him by his Chinese name, while Malay Muslims call him by his Islamic name. This reflects how Hui migrants situationally manifest their ethnic, religious, or/and national identity in navigating their life in multiethnic and multireligious Malaysia and Indonesia. There are arguably two waves of contemporary Hui migration in Malaysia: the first started in the 1980s, mainly motivated by educational purposes; the second one began in the 2000s and is driven by multiple reasons. Since the 1980s, many Hui have come to Malaysia to pursue their studies (of both religious and secular subjects) at public universities and private colleges; a high proportion of them are registered at the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM). Gombak and Wangsa Waju, two suburbs of Kuala Lumpur adjacent to IIUM, are places where many Hui are living and, in some cases, also running their businesses. They frequently visit China, keep close connection with families and friends back home, and quite often also persuade more Hui to join them in Malaysia. After the completion of

228

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

their studies, some Hui students stay in Malaysia to develop their careers and business activities, while others, on returning to China, move from the Muslim heartland in the Northwest to the country’s commercial coastal cities such as Guangzhou and Shanghai, where they are largely engaged in the import-export trade and service industries (Wong 2013). In addition to students, there have recently been a growing number of religiously motivated and economically driven Hui migrants, especially since 2000. They come to Malaysia intending to learn about Islam, to work as imams (religious leaders), or simply to live in a Muslim-majority environment, as well as to seek job opportunities or expand their business networks. Although in much smaller numbers, some Hui migrants make their way to Indonesia, for example to study at Saudi-funded Islamic institutions and to run restaurants. Because there are many more overseas Hui in Malaysia than in Indonesia, this chapter focuses on case studies in Malaysia, except for a detailed exploration of the Sulaiman Restaurant in Jakarta. The increase in contemporary Hui mobility might be in response to two current trends noticed among the Hui in China. First, there has been a religious awakening among Hui youths, leading some of them to further their studies in Muslim-majority countries such as ­Malaysia, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia (for more discussions on transnational movements and circulation, see the introduction in this volume, as well as chapters by Alex Stewart and Rachel Harris and Rahile Dawut). Second, there has been an increasing number of Hui businesspeople who are eager to build business networks in Muslimmajority countries. In many cases, religious motivation and economic aspiration coexist (see the chapter by Elke Spiessens on similar traits among Uyghur Muslims). Recently, as China embarked on its ambitious strategy of Belt and Road Initiative, some Hui businessmen tapped into such an initiative to invest in halal industries in Muslim-­ majorities countries. In addition, there are also increasing numbers of Hui traveling to Malaysia and Indonesia for holidays. It is important to note that many overseas Hui keep their Chinese citizenship, strategically use both their Chinese and Islamic identities to navigate their life in Malaysia and Indonesia—both Muslim-majority countries with a considerable number of ethnic Chinese minorities. For many reasons, Malaysia stands out as a best option for Hui Muslims to study, live, or invest in. It is perceived as a multilingual modern Muslim country with a sizeable Chinese-speaking population, comprehensive



Translocal Encounters

229

Islamic education system in English and Arabic language as well as a growing number of middle-class Muslims—offering Hui migrants “cultural affinity,” “religious authenticity,” “educational mobility,” and “business opportunity.” At the same time, there is increasing demand for cultural diversity within the Islamic framework among middle-class Malay Muslims. Together with local Chinese converts, overseas Hui could offer them Chinese-cultured Islamic expressions. For example, Chinese-style mosques, Chinese halal cuisines, and Chinese-style Arabic calligraphy are desirable among segments of Malay Muslims. It is important to clarify the difference in meaning between my use of the terms “Chinese Muslims” and “Hui migrants” in this chapter. I use “Hui” mainly to refer to Mandarin-speaking born Muslims from China, while Chinese Muslims refers to Chinese Malaysians and Indonesian citizens who embrace Islam. Most ­Chinese Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia today are from the third or fourth generation of non-Muslim Han Chinese migrants from southeastern China; many of them are converts. Meanwhile, many contemporary Hui migrants in both countries are originally from northwestern China, especially Gansu Province. Of course, what constitutes Hui is heavily debated and contested. The term “Hui” has had different meanings in different historical periods of China. Hui identities are also expressed diversely in different local contexts in China (Gladney 1996; Gillette 2000; Lipman 1998). I specifically use “Hui,” instead of “Muslims in China,” as most of my informants are ethnically Hui (broadly defined) and there are very few Uyghur migrants in either Malaysia or Indonesia due to their limited mobility (on Uyghurs’ limited mobility, see the chapters by Elke Spiessens, Darren Byler, and Mu Qian and Rachel Harris in this volume). In order to maintain a good relationship with the Chinese government, both Malaysian and Indonesian governments also refuse to accept Uyghur refugees. As in Mandarin Chinese, many overseas Hui prefer to identify themselves as 中国穆斯林 (Chinese-national Muslims), while local Chinese Muslims call themselves 华人穆斯林 (ethnically Chinese Muslims). In English, though, the common use of “Chinese Muslims” might cause some confusion, as some Hui restaurants also label themselves “Chinese Muslim” (in English) but refer to the 中国穆斯林 restaurant. In this article, with the exception of restaurant names I use “Chinese Muslims” mainly to refer to local Chinese converts. Despite

230

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

different nationalities as well as religious schools of thought (most Hui Muslims follow the Hanafi school, while Chinese Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia follow the Shafii school), the ability to speak Mandarin Chinese bonds some overseas Hui and local Chinese Muslims who can speak Mandarin together, prompting the possibility of a “Sinophone Muslim diaspora.” A Hui imam living in Malaysia emphasized that Hui have played an important role in the changing of terms that are used to refer to Islam and Muslims among Chinesespeaking Malaysians (from 回教 to 伊斯兰 to denote Islam, from 回 教徒 to 穆斯林 to denote Muslims). This suggests that phonetic transliteration can better reflect the universality of Islamic teaching (interview, Imam Yu, February 17, 2017). Hui Mobility and Translocal Encounter Building on the concepts of Hui mobility (Wong 2013) and Hui urban entrepreneurialism (Gladney 1993), I have suggested using the concept of “translocal pious entrepreneurialism” to explore the interactions between mobility, entrepreneurialism, and religion among overseas Hui businesspeople (Hew 2016). In this chapter, I am proposing the term “translocal encounter” to understand the intersection between mobility, place-making, and social encounters among Hui migrants. I prefer to use “translocal” instead of “transnational” for three reasons. First, translocality is a concept that can better capture the interactions between places and people beyond the paradigm of the nation-state and globalization (Freitag and Oppen 2010). However, I do not deny the role of the nation-state in such interactions—in this case, Hui and Uyghur Muslims have different levels of freedom of mobility according to different regional regulations. Second, Hui mobility is intersected by various translocal pathways across different cities within a nation-state, as well as borders that reach beyond the nation-state. For example, Sulaiman Han, originally from Henan, first ran his business in Xi’an and has a business partner in Lanzhou (China), then moved to Jakarta and Bali (Indonesia) to open his restaurant, while sending his child to study in Singapore. He also has a few relatives living in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). He often goes to Guangzhou for business and returns to Henan to visit his families. Third, translocality as a research perspective emphasizes “situatedness during mobility,” which allows us to examine spaces and



Translocal Encounters

231

places through both their situatedness and their connectedness to a variety of localities (Brickell and Datta 2011, 4). Therefore, translocality also speaks to the mobility theories that place an unprecedented emphasis on (im)mobility, dwelling, fixity, and stillness as much as movement, speed, and liquidity (Sheller 2011). As Sheller (2011, 1) summarized, the study of mobility “encompasses both the embodied practice of movement and the representations, ideologies and meanings attached to both movement and stillness.” Vasquez and Knott (2014) further emphasized that spatial strategies are crucial in managing the migrants’ presence, visibility, and invisibility. They highlighted three dimensions of migrants’ religious place-making—embodied performance, the spatial management of difference, and multiple embedding across networked spaces. As I will describe below, Hui restaurants in Malaysia and Indonesia entail these three intersecting dimensions— creating a halal space, manifesting unique ethnoreligious identities, and crossing various ethnic, religious, and national boundaries. Furthermore, Hui mobility is not only about movement between places but also about social mobility and religious enhancement—the former refers to their movement up the scale of socioeconomic classes, and the latter points to the cases in which some Hui migrants think they are becoming more pious after living in Muslim-majority countries such as Malaysia. Hui mobility entails not only the movement of people but also the travel of architectural style, cuisine, and knowledge, as reflected in various urban places, such as the Chinese-style mosques, Hui restaurants, and various Islamic educational institutions. In these processes, Hui migrants cross and perhaps in some ways redefine various social borders, including national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. Interpreting restaurants and mosques as sites of translocal encounter, I examine the intersection between translocal flows and local dynamics, the negotiation between Islamic religiosity and Chinese ethnicity, and their interaction with other new Chinese migrants, local Chinese Muslims, and non-Muslims. By exploring both mobile identities and immobile places, this chapter also explores how Hui migrant identities shape and are shaped by various ethnic and religious discourses in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Sharing a similar language (Mandarin) with Chinese Malaysians and sharing the same religion (Islam) with ethnic Malays, as well as positioning themselves as a bridge between non-Muslim Chinese and Malay Muslims, Hui migrants acquire cultural capital in navigating their life in Malaysia, even though they are not citizens. Moreover,

232

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

as ethnicity and religiosity are closely interwoven in Malaysia, the presence of Hui Muslims’ urban places is not only challenging the equation between Malays and Muslims but also providing sites of interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims, between Chinese and non-Chinese, between citizens and noncitizens. In the following sections, by examining some of these places, I illustrate the business activities, religious aspirations, and social encounters of several Hui migrants. Hui Restaurants In recent years, we have seen a growing number of Hui restaurants in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. Using Hui Muslims in Beijing as a case study, Dru Gladney (1993) suggests that to explain the importance of the Hui restaurant as a Hui cultural center in the city, various factors need considering: dietary restrictions (particularly the pork taboo), the dispersion of Hui in most cities, and their important mediating socioeconomic role. In Beijing and other Chinese cities, Hui involvement in halal restaurants is crucial to both their economic survival and the maintaining of collective identity. Hui restaurants in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta play a similar role as sites for Hui migrants to maintain their identity, to preach Islam, and to make a living. Originally from Henan but later moving to Xi’an, Sulaiman Han, who comanages a few Hui restaurants in mainland China, visited various countries in Southeast Asia to explore the possibilities of expanding his food business overseas. Finally he chose Indonesia, seeing the world’s most populous Muslim country as possessing great market potential for his business to survive and develop (interview, Sulaiman Han, January 2, 2013). He explained, “Hui people like to travel, to observe and to learn new things. I would like to learn about the local culture, language, and cuisine while looking for business opportunities.” He refers to Zheng He, the famous Chinese Muslim admiral who traveled to Southeast Asia during the fifteenth and ­sixteenth centuries, arguing that Hui people can look back at a long presence in the region. He also believes Zheng He played an important role in promoting a good relationship between China and Indonesia, as well as contributing to the dissemination of Islam in Java. In 2012, he opened his first restaurant, Sulaiman Chinese Muslim Restaurant, in Central Jakarta. In 2016, he moved to Bali to open a new branch there. His wife, Marian (also a Hui), and his business partners, Wudi (another Hui migrant) and Tan Xinhai (a non-Muslim



Translocal Encounters

233

Han migrant), run the restaurant in Jakarta. Sulaiman Han restaurant serves food from various parts of China, ranging from Lanzhou handpulled noodles to Xinjiang grilled meat to Sichuan Mapo Tofu. Such dishes are somehow different from those commonly found in Southeast Asia, which mostly originate from the southern parts of China. However, in order to meet the demand of the local market, the restaurant also serves local dishes like fried rice and sambal chili paste. The restaurant attracts customers from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, including Chinese Indonesians, both Muslims and nonMuslims; non-Chinese Indonesians; and new Chinese migrants, who are mostly non-Muslims. In the beginning, there was no official “halal” logo in the restaurant, and some Indonesian Muslims were hesitant to visit the restaurant, worrying that it might serve nonhalal food. Today most Muslims do not have a problem with having meals in the restaurant. As Sulaiman said, “As already vividly reflected in the name of our restaurant, we serve Chinese Muslim food. Of course it is halal” (interview, Sulaiman Han, January 2, 2013). The restaurant has a musholla (small prayer room), and all Muslim staff are advised to observe their prayers. Sulaiman also makes hijab compulsory for female Muslim waiters. He often performs Friday prayers at Lautze mosque, a small Chinese mosque near his restaurant, where he gets to know many local Chinese converts. He also gives donations to various local mosques. Sulaiman has a good relationship with some local Chinese Muslims (mostly converts) in the Indonesian Chinese Muslim Association (PITI), who have helped his business, especially in dealing with local authorities. Interestingly, the restaurant has two entrances with two separate dining spaces. The main dining space, decorated with Chinese Islamic calligraphy, is open to all customers. The smaller one, decorated with Chinese traditional paintings, only allows non-Muslim customers, as it serves alcoholic drinks. As Marian, Sulaiman’s wife, clarifies, the smaller dining space is run by the non-Muslim business partner and caters to Chinese migrant workers and businessmen living in Jakarta. She also emphasized that the money earned from the sale of alcohol is only considered the profit of the non-Muslim business partner (interview, Marian, June 20, 2016). Sulaiman Han also works closely with a few other Chinese-national businessmen. One of them is a Han Chinese who converted to Islam after marrying a local Muslim woman and runs “Nusaraya Business Service,” providing consultancy to mainland Chinese businessmen, both Han and Hui who are

234

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

interested in investing in Indonesia. As the halal industry is booming in China, some Hui entrepreneurs also seek to expand their business overseas, including in Indonesia. One of them is the Gansu Jian Ming Muslim Food Company. Such a combination of different businesses and services is not exceptional—for example, Ma Zhiqing, a branch manager of the “Chinese Muslim Authentic Heritage Pulled Noodle Restaurant” in Malaysia also runs a travel service agency, Jing Rong Travel, mainly catering to tourists from China, especially Hui. Wudi, Sulaiman’s other business partner is also a Hui from Henan. He arrived in Indonesia ten years ago and studied Arabic at the Indonesian State Islamic Institution Solo. He speaks fluent Mandarin, Indonesian, and Arabic. He taught Mandarin in an Islamic school and sold Muslim headscarves imported from China, before involving himself in the restaurant business. He claims his restaurant is a gathering place for many new Chinese migrants—students and businesspersons, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Through WeChat, Wudi is connected to many Chinese migrant workers, mostly working at China-owned companies such as Huawei and China Petroleum in Jakarta. Indeed, WeChat plays an important role in Hui business networking, information sharing, and perhaps Islamic preaching (interview, Wudi, February 3, 2017). Wudi also told me various facts about Hui students in Jakarta. While most Hui people prefer Malaysia and Middle Eastern countries as destinations to further their studies, more recently some Hui have also come to Indonesia. Many of them are sponsored by Saudi money to study at Saudi-funded Islamic institutions in Jakarta, such as LIPIA (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Islam and Arab). LIPIA is said to be one of the institutions in Indonesia where Salafi norms and traditions prevail. How these Hui students, despite their small numbers, might change Islamic discourse in China on their return will be interesting to observe (on transnational communities and Islamic revival movements in China, see Alex ­Stewart’s chapter in this volume). Malaysia has many more Hui restaurants than Indonesia. There are at least three different categories of Hui restaurants in Malaysia. The first is the small-scale restaurant, mainly run by a student-turnedbusinessperson, such as the Imam Qin Restaurant. The second type is the larger-scale chain restaurant, mainly run by Hui migrants with some food business experience back in China, such as Salam Noodle and Chinese Muslim Authentic Heritage Pulled Noodle Restaurant; both of these now have multiple branches in Malaysia. The third type



Translocal Encounters

235

comprises local branches of China-based Hui restaurant chains that are expanding their business overseas, such as Amber Restaurant and Qingfang Restaurant. In some ways, these restaurants are not only selling Chinese halal cuisine, mainly from northwestern China; they are also selling “Islamic culture from China” to local Malay Muslims who are searching for cultural diversity within the Islamic framework. Originally from Gansu, where he served as an imam in a local mosque, Imam Ishaq Qin first visited Kuala Lumpur in 2008 to attend a religious course. In 2009, he moved to Malaysia to further his studies in Arabic literature at the IIUM. To support his living expenses in Malaysia, in 2012, he opened a restaurant, Imam Qin restaurant, selling dishes such as Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles. He sees his restaurant not only as a way of making a profit but also as a medium of Islamic outreach. As he says, “I take the opportunity to share my thoughts with my customers, both non-Muslim Chinese and Malay Muslims, about the life of Hui Muslims in China. I want my customers to understand the beauty of Islam and to realize that converting to Islam does not mean that you have to lose your Chinese cultural identity” (interview, Imam Qin, February 5, 2013). Like Ishaq Qin, Yahya Liu was also originally from Gansu Province but later moved to Shenzhen, where he ran a few Hui restaurants. He subsequently moved to Malaysia with his brother in order to expand his business. In 2013, Yahya opened the first Salam ­Noodles Restaurant in Cyberjaya, cooperating with a local Chinese Muslim. He saw this restaurant as a starting point for an ambitious plan to open more branches. In 2016, there were six outlets of Salam Noodles in Malaysia. Citing a difference of opinion with his business partners in China on the issue of serving alcoholic beverages, Yahya Liu told me why he left China and moved to Malaysia. “In China, we ran our restaurants in Shenzhen, a city with a very small Muslim population, and in order to survive, we rely on non-Muslim customers; and we had to serve alcoholic drinks. The money we thus earned is not halal. . . . My brother and I decided to move to Malaysia, as it is a Muslim-majority country, and we can sustain our business without serving alcohol drink. Malaysia is also a better place for us to learn and to practice Islam” (interview, Yahya Liu, February 19, 2016). Indeed, quite a few Hui Muslims I encountered share Yahya’s story, as they see modern and Muslim-majority Malaysia, with its sizeable Chinese-speaking population, as an ideal place, one where

236

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

they can live a more pious lifestyle in a culturally familiar setting. Inside the Al-Saadah mosque complex, a Chinese-style mosque, a Han convert from China, explained to me why she moved to Malaysia to practice Islam: “Compared to Saudi Arabia, I feel more at home in Malaysia, as, culturally and linguistically speaking, there are similarities. I can get by easily by speaking Mandarin. But at the same time, I can learn ‘true Islam’ in Malaysia, because in China, Islamic teaching and learning is censored” (field notes, February 17, 2017). In other words, Malaysia offers some Hui and Han converts from China both cultural affinity and religious authenticity, together with business opportunity. Established in 2015, then tapping into China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a branch from the Hui restaurant chain based in Gansu, the Amber Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur, claims it serves “Silk Road” Muslim cuisine. Reference is made to halal Chinese cuisine from the northern parts of China. However, catering to local demands, the restaurant also serves yee sang, a local Chinese Malaysian dish, during the Chinese New Year period. Situated inside a shopping complex in the middle of Kuala Lumpur, the restaurant attracts customers of different ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds, including many Chinese-national migrant workers and tourists. In 2017, Amber Restaurant opened another branch inside a shopping complex in Petaling Jaya, a satellite city of Kuala Lumpur. In 2015, Qingfang Restaurant, another Hui-run restaurant chain from Henan, also opened a branch in Kuala Lumpur, claiming to serve “authentic Muslim cuisine from China.” Most of these restaurants also bring along Hui chefs and kitchen helpers from China, contributing to a growing number of Hui migrant workers in Malaysia today. Chinese-Style Mosques Both Malaysia and Indonesia are Muslim-majority countries, with a sizeable Chinese minority who are mostly non-Muslims. Only about 2–3 percent of Chinese in both countries are Muslims, and most of them are recent converts. In the past, those who converted to Islam were assumed to be assimilated into the local majority. However, there has recently been a growing expression of Chinese Muslim ­cultural identity, as manifested, for example, in the popularity of Chinese Muslim preachers, Chinese halal restaurants, and Chinese-style mosques (Hew 2014, 2018). Hui migrants have directly and indirectly



Translocal Encounters

237

played a key role in this emergence of Chinese Muslim identity in both countries. Inspired by the architectural design of ancient mosques in China, such as the Niujie Mosque in Beijing and the Great Mosque in Xi’an, there is currently a trend of building Chinese-style mosques in ­Malaysia. Such trends are vivid attempts to support the claim that “there can be a Chinese way of being Muslim” (Hew 2013, 2018). New Chinese-style mosques include the Al-Saadah mosque complex in Seremban, the Muhammadiah mosque in Ipoh, the Sultan Petra Ismail mosque in Kelantan, and the Cheng Hoo mosques in Surabaya, Purbalingga, Palembang, Makassar, and many other cities in Indonesia. It is important to note that these mosques are not built by Hui migrants but by local Chinese and non-Chinese Muslims. While these were established mainly to serve Chinese converts, they are not exclusive, as many non-Chinese Muslims also frequently visit them. In Malaysia, some of these mosques offer religious classes in Mandarin. The lack of local Chinese Muslims with both profound Islamic knowledge and proficiency in the Chinese language was remedied by recent arrivals. For example, Imam Ali from Yunnan and Imam Yu from Gansu were invited by local Muslims to serve as imams in these new mosques. In 2013, in Seremban, a town not far from Kuala Lumpur, a Chinese New Year dinner celebration was held inside the Al-Saadah Complex, a Chinese-style mosque, mimicking the design of the Great Mosque in Xi’an. An imam originally from China, Abu Bakar Siddiq, known as Imam Yu, recited the du’a (prayers) at the beginning of this event. Meanwhile, his wife set up a small stall next to the dinner venue, selling various products, mostly imported from China. Imam Yu, originally from Gansu, first came to Kuching in Sarawak, where he worked as a religious teacher—giving Chinese converts regular classes and counseling on Islam in Mandarin. He later moved to Seremban to serve as imam for the newly established mosque. This mosque, built in 2011, is the first mosque in contemporary Malaysia to conduct Friday sermons in Mandarin, led by Imam Yu. The mosque also recently hosted a Chinese Islamic calligraphy exhibition, featuring Imam Ma Yipin, the imam of the Great Mosque of Xi’an, who has a close connection with Malaysia (on Hui in Xi’an and their references to Muslim fashion in Malaysia and Pakistan, see Yang Yang’s chapter in this volume). Like many other Hui living in ­Malaysia, Imam Yu sees Malaysia as an ideal place for overseas Hui,

238

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

because “I can send my kids to Chinese-language school, and at the same time they can grow up in a Muslim-majority environment” (interview, Imam Yu, February 16, 2013). However, Imam Yu keeps his Chinese-national citizenship and maintains close relations with Hui communities in China. As for fulfilling the role of imam back in China, he does not think that life has become untenable at home; instead, what brings him to Malaysia is a desire to explore opportunities abroad. Indeed, as he says, “Hui people are always traveling for a better life. In the past, we moved around within China, and now we can also move beyond China, yet without losing our Chinese nationality” (interview, Imam Yu, February 16, 2013). In Kelantan, Imam Ali was an imam for the Sultan Petra Ismail mosque, a Chinese-style mosque, which is also best known as Beijing mosque, because its architectural design is inspired by the Niu Jie mosque in Beijing. He led Ramadan terawih prayers (nonobligatory prayers during the month of Ramadan) in the mosque in 2010. Today, Imam Ali is no longer an imam for the mosque, but he is still teaching at an Islamic college in Kota Bahru, the capital city of Kelantan state in Malaysia. Originally from Yunnan, Imam Ali left his home country in 1995 and studied in a college in Terengganu for three years before moving to Kelantan for work. His wife Fatimah, who is also from Yunnan, runs a small stall at a local market during weekends, selling various imported items from China (interview, Imam Ali, September 17, 2011). His eldest son, Hassan Wang, who was raised in Yunnan, has also followed his path and moved to Kota Bahru. Hassan Wang first studied Islam in Chiang Mai, a northern city and a center for Yunnanese Hui in Thailand, before moving to study Arabic language in a college. In 2012, Hassan opened a grocery shop, called Yunnan Berkat, selling products imported from Guangdong in China (on halal e-commerce in Yunnan, see Brose and Su’s chapter in this volume). Hui migrants in Malaysia have close relations with local Chinese converts and Malay Muslims and organize cultural, social, and religious activities together. For example, in the Al-Saadah mosque complex, Imam Yu is working together with local Chinese Muslims to run religious classes for new converts. Some local Chinese Muslims also helped Hui migrants establish and promote their restaurants in Malaysia. Many local Chinese converts look to Hui traditions to legitimize their cultural identities and to provide an authentic way of being Chinese Muslims, despite the diversity and changes that characterize contemporary Hui identities in China. In addition, there are



Translocal Encounters

239

also several differences between these two closely related groups, in which “Chinese-ness” seems to have different meanings and connotations for them. In terms of language, most Hui migrants speak Mandarin with an accent that is different from that of Chinese Malaysians. They also do not speak the dialects (such as Hakka, Cantonese, and Hokkien) used by many Chinese Muslims. In terms of cultural celebrations, many Hui Muslims do not celebrate Chinese New Year in mainland China, but they endorse the Chinese New Year open house events organized by local Chinese Muslims to support their preaching activities. As one Hui migrant said, “In China, we only celebrate Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, the two biggest Islamic festivals. We have joined the Chinese New Year open house celebrations here because most Chinese Muslims in Malaysia are converts, and such cultural celebrations are important for them to maintain good relationships with non-Muslim Chinese” (field notes, February 5, 2013). In terms of food, Hui cooking is mainly (but not exclusively) a mixture of northwestern Chinese and Uyghur dishes, while local Chinese Muslim cuisine is more a mixture of halalized southeastern Chinese dishes. In term of social organizations, local Chinese Muslims are mainly represented by the Malaysian Chinese Muslim Association, while overseas Hui gather within the Overseas Chinese Muslim Association. It is important to note that the “Chinese” in the former organization is written as 华人 (huaren, ethnic Chinese) in Mandarin, while in the latter it is written as 中国 (zhongguo, Chinese-national). Internet Radio and WeChat Besides restaurants and mosques, Hui Muslims also run an online Islamic-themed radio station, initiated by Zainab Zhao and her friends. Born in Jilin Province, Zainab Zhao moved to Malaysia in 2000. She studied accounting at the International Islamic University of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. She is married to another Hui, originally from Gansu. Although she, her husband, and their young children have not been granted Malaysian citizenship, they plan to stay in Malaysia permanently. Since 2006, together with her husband, Zainab Zhao runs a Muslim wholesale and retail business, selling religious clothing and accessories. Most of the products were imported from mainland China. As of 2014, they had two stores in Kuala Lumpur and planned to expand their business to Jakarta, Indonesia. Besides her business career, Zainab Zhao is also a committed activist

240

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

within the Hui circle. Together with other Hui Muslims in Malaysia, she has established a new organization, the Overseas Chinese Muslim Association, and plans to extend its membership to Hui people in other countries, from Indonesia to the United States. Indeed, Kuala Lumpur has become a meeting point for Hui Muslims from different regions in China. As Zainab pointed out, “In China, we might not have a chance to meet each other. But, in Malaysia, Muslims from different parts of China, be it Gansu, Qing­ hai, Xi’an or Yunnan, meet and get together” (interview, Zainab Zhao, February 5, 2013). Zainab is also the executive director of a newly established internet radio station, OneNur (橄榄灯, Olive Lantern). OneNur is the first Malaysia-based Mandarin internet radio station that features news and information about Islam. The social media platform WeChat is another important medium that links up Hui migrants in Malaysia from different parts of China and where they can keep their connections with their families and friends back in China. In 2017, Imam Yu established a WeChat group (大马华穆之家 Home of Chinese Muslims in Malaysia), in which he introduces the group as a platform where Malaysian Chinese (nonMuslims), Chinese Muslims, and China-national Muslims living in Malaysia interact and share information. In 2016, Imam Yu also set up a WeChat page (新月国际视线) sharing news and charity information among local (mainland Chinese) and overseas (mainly Malaysia) Chinese-speaking Muslims. Through WeChat, he initiated the Chinese-National Muslim Volunteer Team for Helping Rohingya Muslims (中国穆斯林援助罗兴亚穆斯林志愿团) to collect donations from Hui, both in China and overseas, in order to help Rohingya Muslims living in Malaysia and Myanmar. To a certain extent, WeChat has helped Hui migrants in overcoming the geographical barriers, bonding Hui living in China and in Malaysia, as well as connecting them to the plights of Muslims living in Myanmar. Yet most of these WeChat groups are operating in the Chinese language. While bonding “Chinese-speaking” Muslims, such online groups might exclude some non-Chinese-speaking Malaysian Chinese Muslims and perhaps also some Muslims in China who do not speak Mandarin as their first language. How could a study of overseas Hui mobility and place-making ­constitute an ethnographic study of Islam in China? In an age of increasing mobility within and across national borders as well as the



Translocal Encounters

241

popularizing of social media, it is proposed that ethnographies of Islam in China should not be confined to a territorialized nation-state of China, but should also include overseas places where Hui migrants live their lives, including, increasingly, online spaces that preserve, even reinvigorate, their connections to China. Hui restaurants and WeChat are in many ways operating in the strong presence of China— some of these Hui restaurants are branches of China-based businesses and many others claim to be serving authentic Muslim food from China. WeChat allows overseas Hui to maintain close relationships with Hui living in China. Moreover, the usage of WeChat is closely monitored by the Chinese state. Having said that, a potential future research trip to China, especially to the northwestern provinces such as Ningxia and Gansu, from which many Hui migrants originated, could further complement such a study—to help us better understand their migratory motivations, translocal networks, interconnections between places, and transformation across spaces. This chapter proposes the notion of “translocal encounter” to capture Hui mobility, place-making, religious practices, and social interaction in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. I have described places such as restaurants and mosques as sites where Hui migrants situate themselves in different local settings and, at the same time, maintain their connection to China amid what I term translocal mobility. By doing so, they are crossing and bridging various ethnic, religious, and national borders in Malaysia, Indonesia, and China. These places entail their spatial movement, cultural circulation, and social encounter; they also show how mobility, education, business, and religion go hand in hand for many Hui migrants. Islam plays a vital role in their business and daily engagements, as they have frequent interactions with local Muslims in both realms. At the same time, their knowledge of Chinese has allowed the Hui to foster greater interactions with Chinese Malaysians through trading, preaching, and social activities. Hui Muslims also maintain various connections, be they familial, religious, or business-related, with China. By sharing their experience on WeChat, overseas Hui may influence religious discourses and practices in China. Wherever and whenever they choose to return to China, their social experience of living in Malaysia and Indonesia may also contribute to changes of Hui lifestyle and identities in their home communities. Hui migrants have also shaped cultural and religious discourses in Malaysia and Indonesia. Hui visibility in both countries has helped

242

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

to break down the common stereotype that Islam and Chineseness are incompatible. Working together with local Chinese converts, they have contributed to the formation of Chinese Muslim cultural identities—for example, through their involvement in Chinese-style mosques and halal restaurants (see above). A closer observation, however, reveals that for Hui migrants “Chineseness” seems to entail different meanings and connotations, as reflected by dialect, food, cultural celebration, citizenship, and so on. For example, whereas there is an increasing number of Chinese-style mosques in Indonesia and Malaysia, there is a growing tendency in China to shift to a different style of mosque architecture: some new mosques built by Hui communities now adopt Arabic style, while the traditional Chinese style has been questioned as not sufficiently “Islamic” (Gillette 2000). This type of trend is perhaps one reason behind the Chinese government’s recent campaign to “sinicize” Islam or to make Islam compatible with “Chineseness” (Al Jazeera 2019). This runs counter to the preference expressed by some Hui migrants only a few years ago. They told me, “In China, we prefer to build new mosques in Middle Eastern design. I am surprised that in Malaysia and Indonesia, Chinese Muslims want to build mosques in ancient Chinese architectural style” (field notes, February 5, 2013). Also, in terms of cultural celebrations, most Hui Muslims do not celebrate Chinese New Year, yet such celebrations play an important role in identity formation when it comes to Chinese Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia. Despite ­cultural and religious affinities, as well as their close relations, there are certain significant differences between Hui migrants and local converts that make Hui and Chinese Muslims two different yet closely related groups. Therefore, the “translocal encounter” between Hui and Chinese Muslims has implications not only for issues of mobility and interconnectedness but also for transformation and discrepancy. References Brickell, Katherine, and Ayona Datta, eds. 2011. Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Chang, Wen-Chin. 2014. Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Freitag, Ulrike, and Achim v. Oppen, eds. 2010. Translocality—The Study of Globalising Phenomena from a Southern Perspective. Studies in Global Social History 4. Leiden: Brill.



Translocal Encounters

243

Gillette, Maris Boyd. 2000. Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gladney, Dru C. 1993. “Hui Urban Entrepreneurialism in Beijing: State Policy, Ethnoreligious Identity and the Chinese City.” In Urban Anthropology in China, edited by Greg Guldin and Aidan Southall, 278–307. Leiden: Brill. ———. 1996. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hew, Wai Weng. 2013. “Cosmopolitan Islam and Inclusive Chineseness: Chinese-Style Mosques in Indonesia.” In Religious Pluralism, State and Society in Asia, edited by Chiara Formichi, 175–196. London: Routledge. ———. 2014. Identiti Cina Muslim di Malaysia: Persempadanan, perundingan dan kacukan budaya (Chinese Muslims in Malaysia: Boundary-making, identity negotiation and cultural hybridity). Bangi: Penerbit UKM (National University of Malaysia Publisher). ———. 2016. “Translocal Pious Entrepreneurialism: Hui Business and Religious Activities in Malaysia and Indonesia.” In Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia: How People, Money, and Ideas from China Are Changing a Region, edited by Pál Nyíri and Danielle Tan, 58–78. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 2018. Chinese Ways of Being Muslim: Negotiating Ethnicity and Religiosity in Indonesia. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Al Jazeera. 2019. “China Passes Law to Make Islam ‘Compatible with Socialism.’” January 5, 2019. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/01/china-passes-law -islam-compatible-socialism-190105185031063.html. Lipman, Jonathan N. 1998. Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ma, Rosey Wang. 2003. “Chinese Muslims in Malaysia in Different Periods of History.” In Chinese Studies of the Malay World, a Comparative Approach, edited by Ding Choo Ming and Ooi Kee Beng, 140–173. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press. Sheller, Mimi. 2011. “Mobility.” Sociopedia.isa. International Sociological Association. Accessed February 9, 2020. http://www.sagepub.net/isa/resources /pdf/mobility.pdf. Tan, Chee Beng. 1991. “A Note on the Orang Yunnan in Trengganu.” Archipel 42:93–120. Vasquez, Manuel A., and Kim Knott. 2014. “Three Dimensions of Religious Place Making in Diaspora.” Global Network: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 14 (3): 326–347. Wang, Liulan. 2006. “Hui Yunnanese Migratory History in Relation to the Han Yunnanese and Ethnic Resurgence in Northern Thailand.” Southeast Asian Studies 44 (3): 337–358.

244

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

Wong, Diana. 2013. “穆斯林流动与新中国移民” (Muslim mobility and the new Chinese migration: A case study of Hui mobility in Malaysia). 华侨华人历 史研究 (Overseas Chinese History Studies) 2:13–29. Wong, Diana, and Pei Wen Ooi. 2013. “The Globalization of Tertiary Education and Intra-Asian Student Mobility: Mainland Chinese Student Mobility to Malaysia.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 22 (1): 55–76.

Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

Chapter 11

Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas Elke SPIESSENS

R

eligious repression in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has been rising since the early 1990s out of fear of dissident movements on an Islamo-nationalist basis. Any platform for Uyghur social organization is considered a potential breeding ground for antistate activities. This results in the excessive zealotry of different state actors in handling religiosity in Xinjiang, and, accordingly, a tense relationship between the Chinese state, the Uyghur clergy, and the Uyghur community in general (Castets 2015, 235, 243; Erie 2014, 101). In a survey among Uyghur refugees currently residing in Turkey, religious repression was overridingly named as one of the main reasons for leaving Xinjiang.1 This article provides insight into the lives of Uyghur Muslim intellectuals now living in Germany and the Netherlands. After fleeing China, where did they go and what did they do? I will look at two kinds of people: Uyghur Muslim intellectuals (Uy. molla) who have left China due to state persecution and intimidation and are functioning as religious leaders in the diasporic communities, and Uyghur students in search of higher Islamic education outside China who have not been able or willing to return.2 We follow their trajectories abroad and the situation in the diasporic communities where they eventually end up. This chapter focuses on the role of religious community leaders and religious activities in buttressing the role of Islam among the Uyghur diaspora in Europe. How deeply Islam is entangled with Uyghur ethno-national identification is a complex issue. Uyghurs generally see Islam as a central aspect of their identity, reportedly more so 245

246

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

than, for example, the other significant Turkic Muslim minority in China, the Kazakh (Mackerras 2008, 218). Moreover, since the second half of the twentieth century, Islamic norms and values have increasingly been used by Uyghurs as a symbol to differentiate themselves from other ethnic groups; and the strengthening of a Uyghur ethnic identity has coincided with the rise of Islamic orthopraxis (Smith Finley 2013, 13).3 But how does this work in the diasporic Uyghur communities in Europe? The need to preserve and pass on the Uyghur identity to the younger generation is strongly present in these communities. What is the role of Islam in this identity preservation? At the same time, the Uyghur diaspora is also a scene of political activism, in which Islam can play a contested role. Although certainly not the sole or even the main aspect of Uyghur political discourse, there has often been a link between Islam and the discourse of Uyghur nationalism and separatism. At present we see that Chinese state repression has inadvertently bolstered the capacity of Islam as a source for Uyghur symbolic resistance (Fuller and Lipman 2004, 344). As several scholars have argued, we cannot see Islam as the cause of separatist movements; rather, we should see it more as a way to express Uyghur discontent toward the Chinese state (Becquelin 2000, 89; Smith Finley 2013; Bellér-Hann 2016; Bovingdon 2010). In this sense, Islam is playing an increasingly important role in Uyghur nationalism and has become a powerful aspect of Uyghur identification. As Byler has argued in this volume, Islamic practice offered a way for displaced Uyghurs to deal with social and political precariousness caused by state oppression and state development. In this article I explore how the role of Islam in Uyghur nationalism and Uyghur ethnic identification is lived in the diasporic situation. For this chapter, most of the data is based on fieldwork and interviews conducted with Uyghur Muslim intellectuals and other members of the diasporic communities in Germany and the Netherlands in 2016 and early 2017. This was not an easy environment to navigate, with trust difficult to gain and easy to lose. The long arm of the Chinese government is increasingly being felt, not only by the World Uyghur Congress,4 but even by the smaller, less politically activist organizations in the Netherlands. Even though almost everyone I met was pleased that I showed interest in their situation, there also was a certain hesitancy around my presence at initial meetings. I had to be careful with who I met and where we met, because my presence could mean trouble for them or their families in China. An



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

247

interview trip to Turkey, which had already been postponed due to the attempted coup in July 2016, had to be canceled due to the increased scrutiny of the Uyghur community in Turkey after the Istanbul nightclub attack in January 2017. Because of the politically precarious situation for most of my interviewees and their families, in this article I preserve their anonymity. When I talk about Uyghur Muslim intellectuals (i.e., mollas), who am I referring to? Ildikó Bellér-Hann has noted that in early twentieth-century Kashgar, everybody who was able to read a bit was known as a molla, and people who could read three-digit numbers were known as damolla (Bellér-Hann 2008, 327). While there clearly are standards to determine who is a molla and who is not, the term remains highly flexible. There are no clear qualifications for someone to be called a molla. In a basic sense, a Uyghur molla is a Muslim intellectual, someone who has specialized knowledge about Islam and is thereby granted a certain level of authority. He has received this advanced knowledge by studying with one or more other authoritative Muslim intellectuals.5 It is important to remember that Muslim intellectuals are not confined to the pronouncements and activities they perform in the name of Islam. They are invested in both the religious and the nonreligious sides of their communities. I therefore find it important to place the experiences of the Uyghur Muslim intellectuals in the context of the communities they live in. The Situation of Religious Scholars and Students in Xinjiang The situation of religious education for Uyghur Islamic scholars has changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. There have been reformist initiatives in Uyghur education, mostly due to the influence of reformist thinkers in Central Asia.6 But the most disruptive influence came from the communist policies of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Religious education was completely shut down, and many clerics and intellectuals died or were imprisoned during this period. In the 1980s, despite the shortage of Islamic intellectuals after the Cultural Revolution, religious education in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region underwent a strong revival, mainly supported by a system of unofficial education. According to an internal survey, in 1990 there were 938 Qur’anic schools in Xinjiang, with a total of almost ten thousand students (Castets 2015, 233).

248

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

Qur’anic schools, mostly the mosque or the imam’s house, were places where an imam taught basic knowledge of Islam that included Qur’anic recitation. If pupils wanted to receive a more thorough understanding of the Islamic scriptural tradition, such as hadith or Islamic jurisprudence, they would go to a local Islamic scholar, a molla, provided that they had one in their town. Often, students would travel to farther towns and cities to seek the knowledge of other scholars. Cities such as Kashgar, Yarkand, and Qaghiliq were home to several mollas and damollas; the latter were advanced Islamic scholars who had the authority to train other scholars. Damollas were often much sought after by students from all over Xinjiang. The teachings of the reformist molla Abdulhakim Makhsum in Qaghiliq are said to have been especially popular in the 1980s.7 However, this system of religious schooling has been steadily dissolved by the Chinese government since the late 1980s. Chinese officials began to worry that private religious schools were stimulating counterrevolutionary activities, and the schools of Abdulhakim Makhsum in Qaghiliq were closed (Castets 2010, 224). The tension in Xinjiang increased after the Baren incident in 1990, when a group of Uyghurs took over a police station and demanded independence for Xinjiang. The Strike Hard campaign (yanda) of 1996 intensified official scrutiny, with officials monitoring and registering the students of private religious schools.8 Religious education in mosques was forbidden, and mosques were only allowed to open during prayer time. Private schooling by scholars became severely limited, if possible at all (Ren 2009, 48–49). The state-controlled Islamic Institute in Ürümchi became the only officially recognized institute for Islamic education in the region. Whereas local officials were lenient before, they now started to hold strictly to the rule that children under eighteen are not allowed to receive religious education or enter mosques (Allès 2003, 2–3; Mackerras 2008, 207; Waite 2006, 258; Bovingdon 2010, 67). As state regulation tightens and private schooling initiatives are repressed, Uyghur religious scholars are becoming largely dependent on state-controlled institutes for the transfer and certification of Islamic knowledge. Since such institutes bear little legitimacy in the eyes of many Uyghurs, religious students often go in search of alternative ways to gain Islamic knowledge. Within China’s borders, these alternatives have dwindled considerably,9 which has led to a shortage of authoritative religious specialists within the Uyghur community. One consequence of the scarcity of educational opportunities for



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

249

Uyghurs within China is that aspiring students want to go abroad. It is difficult to obtain the necessary permission to go study abroad; many, therefore, are being smuggled across the border illegally. When asked why he went abroad to study Islam, an interviewee said it was because of family wishes and out of a kind of rebellion against Chinese restrictions: When I was little, I grew up in an Islamic family. They just wanted me to pursue further studies. At that time, I did not know what I would want to do after graduation. If you . . . the mentality of people is such that if you say that something is not allowed, people would want to know what that is. If you always say “You are not allowed to come here,” “Do not touch this,” always put the pressure, then people will do it for sure. (Interview with the author, December 2016, translated from Dutch)

His statement fits the observation made by Smith Finley and Fuller and Lipman: namely, that the suppression of religion can have the paradoxical effect of driving it into a central place in the lives of Uyghurs (Smith Finley 2013, 243; Fuller and Lipman 2004, 344). In 2001 the Xinjiang government introduced reeducation courses for clergy, meant to train them into “‘loving your country, loving your religion,’ patriotism, supporting the socialist system, possession of thorough religious knowledge, and a good knowledge of the Chinese language” (Ren 2009, 48–49). Imams have to use state-approved sermons; they basically serve as a mouthpiece for government regulations on religious matters. Whereas in the early 1990s mosque surveillance was more covert, officials are now openly monitoring the mosques and their visitors. There is high pressure on imams to conform to state guidelines and to restrict their religious activities to government-sanctioned events. Mollas who have already received higher Islamic education in Xinjiang, and sometimes partly abroad, have fled Xinjiang because of increased intimidation by Chinese government officials and police. When asked why he thought the Chinese government harassed him, one molla who had studied in Egypt and then returned said: When someone returns from universities in Cairo or Turkey, people see them as great religious authorities [chong damolla]. A great many people from different places come together to follow this person. So when

250

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

I came back, I had many followers. When I said something, many people had the tendency to act on it. And so the Chinese government felt the pressure to contain this. (Interview with the author, July 2016, translated from Uyghur)

The authoritative position of Uyghur clergy was considered too much of a threat to Chinese control over the region. My interviewees stated that if they did not attend the reeducation courses or were simply considered too influential, they faced house arrest or jail time. All the men I talked to who had been imams in their communities in Xinjiang had experienced this and fled the country in the 1990s because of it. “Going Outside”: Travel Routes and Destinations The decision taken by Uyghur clergy and students to leave China was mostly driven by necessity, despair, and frustration. They felt they had no choice but to leave their homes, often leaving behind parents, siblings, and sometimes spouses and children. Usually they did not have specific destinations in mind; they just wanted to “get out.” Although their primary need was just to leave China, the people I spoke to in the Netherlands and Germany expressed the general wish to go to Arabic-speaking Muslim-majority countries when leaving Xinjiang, especially Egypt or Saudi Arabia. None of them initially had the specific intention to come to Europe. The reasons countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia were preferred are multifold. First, there is the strong imaginary of the Middle East as the center of Islam. One of my interviewees explained the wish to go to “Arab countries” by a certain lack of knowledge and information in Xinjiang: You have been there, our community is very secluded. It is actually a big prison. We do not know so much about foreign countries. We just think. . . . We study books, the Qur’an and hadith, and we think. In Arab countries it is like the stories. It is difficult to study there [in Xinjiang], there are few mollas and damollas. We want to study Islam in an Arab country. (Interview with the author, December 2016, translated from Dutch)



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

251

Although new media has increased the amount and speed of access to information in Xinjiang, the idealistic idea of the Middle East as the center of Islam continues to draw many Uyghurs. The central role of Arabic as the main language of Islam is also of importance. A certain level of Arabic proficiency is required for Muslim intellectuals to be seen as Islamic specialists. This forces them to spend a considerable amount of time on language training. Madrasa curricula invariably contain a large portion of Arabic language training, and it is usually the first item that trained mollas mention when asked what they have learned during their studies. The necessity to study Arabic, aside from the strong imaginary of the Middle East as the center of Islam, is an incentive for religious students to pursue their foreign education in an Arab-majority country, as illustrated by this interviewee who studied in Yemen: “I wanted to study in an Arab country, because Islam is actually the Arabic language. If you want to study Islam, you have to know Arabic. I thought to myself, if I want to be proficient [in Arabic], I have to go to an Arab country” (interview with the author, December 2016, translated from Dutch). Although Middle Eastern countries have been desired destinations for Uyghur Islamic scholars for centuries, they were more exclusive destinations then than they have been since the 1980s. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Uyghur scholars more frequently visited famous madrasas closer to the Uyghur homeland. Several Central Asian cities, such as Bukhara and Tashkent, used to be important centers of learning for Uyghur religious specialists (Thum 2014, 174). But over the course of the twentieth century, this educational importance of Central Asia for Uyghur clergy has radically decreased, and in the twenty-first century it has virtually disappeared. There are several possible reasons for this; not in the least the availability of wider-ranging communication and transportation technologies, which allow for wider mobility and connectivity with the larger Islamic community.10 As John Bowen has argued, this consciousness of a global Islamic community fueled the search among many Muslims for the highest authority on Islam, far beyond the borders of one’s homeland (Bowen 2004, 882–883). The discourse of Uyghur Islamic scholars is attuning itself to the global Islamic stage, on which Saudi Arabia and Egypt are considered the heartlands of Islamic authority: Every Uyghur has the wish to go to Mecca once in his life. When I was young, I had that same wish. My plan was to go and study in Egypt

252

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

after I had been on haj. Al-Azhar has a history of more than a thousand years, a very strong Islamic history. Their professors know what real Islam is. I wanted to learn that too, and that is why I went there. The educational system of Al-Azhar was very elaborate and very modern. In their program one learns about not just one specific Islamic school but about every Islamic school. This way, every person has a very broad knowledge about Islam, and we can make comparisons and form our own understanding. It is strictly against any radical explanation.11 (Interview with the author, July 2016, translated from Uyghur)

The decline in importance of Central Asian religious institutions in the course of the twentieth century also stems from the political situation in those countries and the considerable pressure China puts on Central Asian governments. Although travel between Central Asia and Xinjiang peaked again during the 1980s and 1990s after the borders were reopened, in recent years tighter border controls and China’s pressure on Central Asian countries to suppress any Uyghur separatist activities have made it much harder for Uyghurs to pursue any activities in those countries (Roberts 2004, 232–234; Bovingdon 2010, 138–146). After the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent Central Asian states in 1991, Beijing increased efforts to maintain stability in the region, trying to keep the independence of Central Asian populations from inflaming equal sentiments in its own restless border province. China’s negotiations with the Central Asian states resulted in the Shanghai Five (China, Kazakhstan, ­Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and ­Russia) in 1996, which has become a platform for economic, political, and military cooperation in the region.12 Central Asia has become highly sensitive to political and economic pressure from neighboring China, further setting limits on the educational opportunities for Uyghurs there. Islamic intellectuals fleeing Xinjiang in the 1990s often first crossed the border to Central Asia, thinking they could seek refuge there for some years and maybe return to China someday. Those who did not want to stay or go back to China often received local help to travel to Europe or Turkey. This became more difficult at the end of the 1990s due to the aforementioned pressure from China, as local governments would restrict the mobility of Uyghurs in their countries and deported blacklisted Uyghurs back to China. In the 1980s, Uyghurs who had the means could travel to Saudi Arabia for haj; they often took overland routes through Pakistan, and then flew farther to Jeddah. Many of the Uyghurs who wanted to



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

253

study at the renowned university of Al-Azhar in Cairo first went to Mecca and Medina for the haj, and afterward traveled to Egypt for their studies. Because of Chinese government restrictions preventing most Uyghurs from directly enrolling in institutions like Al-Azhar or going on the haj, students or pilgrims did not always go there directly, but traveled via Central Asia or South Asia. In the 1990s, Pakistan served as a major transit point for both Uyghur pilgrims and refugees. They made use of the different Uyghur waqf buildings in Pakistan, set up by previous generations of rich Uyghur merchant migrants. One interviewee explained how from 1995 to 1997 many young Uyghurs in search of education abroad traveled first to Pakistan. They were able to cross the border in relatively large numbers by using the old passports belonging to former Uyghur pilgrims, or the papers of traders who had to cross the Pakistani border for their business. The students gathered in the buildings owned and run solely by Uyghurs. These same buildings were also used by Uyghur students, pilgrims, and traders who would come at weekends to talk and trade.13 The intensified border controls and restricted mobility for Uyghurs in Central Asia has pushed Uyghur refugees to another route, through Southeast Asia. While the people I talked to in Europe mostly had come through Central Asia, in recent years, especially since 2014, there have been waves of Uyghur refugees traveling via Malaysia and Thailand who eventually ended up in Turkey.14 The Chinese government not only exerts political and economic pressure on foreign governments; it also directly threatens and pressures Uyghurs living abroad. Since the late 1980s, the number of Uyghur students at Al-Azhar is said to have grown to over two thousand, although hard numbers are difficult to come by (interviews with former students, 2016–2017). In the last few years, the Chinese government has attempted to cut down on these numbers by making it impossible for Uyghurs to leave China and by pressuring students already in Cairo to return home. In July 2017, Uyghur and Middle Eastern news sources reported the detainment and possible deportation to China of up to 150 Uyghur students by the Egyptian security forces (Radio Free Asia 2017a; Middle East Eye 2017; Lemon 2017). Several of my interviewees said that Uyghur students studying in Cairo were tracked and intimidated into returning home. One interviewee explained how the Chinese police tried to convince new Uyghur students in Cairo who were taking Arabic lessons at the university of Al-Azhar to return to China:

254

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

Actually, the Chinese police came to Egypt, and they were checking the Uyghurs in the street. That boy [he pointed at a Uyghur youth present at the Dutch East Turkestan Educational Center] had come here because of that. And I also heard from students that the police were checking at the [al-Azhar] institute’s doors, asking who they were, where they came from, how they got there. . . . They talked very nicely to you, “We come there to help you, do you want to go back? Life is very hard here. We won’t just let you go back, we will help you.” Some people did [go back], but they were scared. They knew that if they didn’t accept, if they didn’t behave nicely, they would get problems. They knew that. They were afraid that if they said that they wanted to stay, they would get problems afterward. Because if they needed a passport later at the embassy, or they wanted to return later, it would be impossible. For us [Uyghurs] it is different, you know, we cannot do anything against the police. The people couldn’t do anything but accept what the police were telling them. They couldn’t get into an argument with the police. (Interview with the author, December 2016, translated from Dutch)

I have not heard any such accounts from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, or other places where Uyghurs have gone to study. In Turkey the impact of Chinese pressure on Uyghur communities and organizations is less dramatic, likely because of popular Turkish sympathy for the Uyghurs and the strong local social network for Uyghurs.15 Uyghur students who go to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other countries often cannot stay there because they do not want to or do not have the necessary papers to stay longer. Many people fear imprisonment if they are to return to China, because they left illegally. When they want to seek asylum in Europe or Turkey, they often ask for the help of organizations such as the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) or the Turkey-based Uyghur organization Maarip. The WUC works together with UNHCR to check the applicants’ background and help them prepare for asylum applications. Uyghur Diasporic Communities in Germany and the Netherlands Uyghur diasporic communities in Germany and the Netherlands are relatively young. The first refugees arrived in the Netherlands in the early 1990s, and new groups are still arriving today. Uyghurs in the



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

255

Netherlands are estimated to number around two thousand and are scattered across different areas. In Germany, around one thousand Uyghurs have settled around the city of Munich. In both countries there are associations that try to organize activities for the Uyghur community to come together. The continuity of these organizations and their activities has been fluctuant and relies on a small core of individuals willing and able to spend their time and resources on bringing the local Uyghur community together. I myself first learned about the Uyghurs and their situation during my college years through a gathering organized by the Uyghur Dutch Foundation. The Uyghur Dutch Foundation is the local branch of the World Uyghur Congress, which has its headquarters in Munich. The Uyghur Dutch Foundation does not hold regular meetings, but it tries to advance the Uyghur cause by raising awareness and supporting activities coordinated by the WUC. The WUC has members all over the world, lobbies for the political recognition of the Uyghur cause, and tries to raise international awareness for human rights violations in Xinjiang/East Turkestan. Even though politics pervades much of the larger gatherings and the rhetoric of the European Uyghur diaspora, for many they are just trying to build their lives in their new place of residence. However, even among nonactivist Uyghurs, I encountered the ubiquitous concern of remembering, if not preserving, one’s Uyghur identity and passing on knowledge of Uyghur history and language to children, many of whom had never set foot on the Uyghur homeland. The Dutch East Turkestan Education Center organizes Uyghur language classes and Qur’anic lessons for children. They have monthly meetings where men and women gather to discuss recent events relevant to the Uyghur community. The foundation also regularly invites wellknown Uyghurs from Turkey or the U.S. The people now leading the center had been organizing social gatherings for the Uyghur community and did not start the foundation until a couple of years later. The chairman explained the need to bring the Dutch Uyghur community together: Uyghurs who come here are all very different people. They grew up very differently. We are not like [the Dutch] here, one group. [Among the Dutch] there are many parties, many foundations, many groups. Here everybody can find their own group. But our community cannot. There we didn’t have parties or foundations or groups. So people all

256

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

grew up very separated. And those people need to come together. (Interview with the author, December 2016, translated from Dutch)

In order to provide the necessary accommodation for their gatherings they have had their own building since 2013, where they hold meetings and festivities and organize classes. Uyghurs from all over the Netherlands come to this educational center. The organizers applaud the democratic environment and the freedom of speech they enjoy in the Netherlands, which allows them to have such an educational center in the first place. But in recent years the number of people attending has diminished, which according to the chairman is a direct result of Chinese threats toward attendees and their families. One way members of the Uyghur diaspora have tried to overcome the limits of being a widely scattered community is the use of new media such as WeChat, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Skype. Social media applications such as WhatsApp and WeChat allow for a broad communication platform. In particular, the middle-aged and younger Uyghurs I met have all said that they had actively used WeChat to connect with the Uyghurs in other countries; importantly, they had also used the same applications to connect with relatives in China. New media is sometimes used to reach non-Uyghur audiences, but this happens mostly in the context of Uyghur rights movements, through footage of political protests and interviews. Even though there is a large network of Uyghur individuals, these individual ties do not necessarily indicate strong organizational coherence. There seem to be too many perceived differences in priorities, goals, and methods among the Uyghur diaspora for there to be any tight cooperation. The Dutch East Turkestan Education Center, for example, expressly did not wish to become a part of the WUC. The two organizations are on friendly terms, but they also have different objectives. Unlike the WUC, the Dutch East Turkestan Education Center is not a secular organization. Its chairman explained: “There are no problems between us, but we are not part of the WUC. Why is that? Because we Uyghurs are Muslims, and we will always be Muslims. We want to do everything for the Uyghurs, but we cannot just omit Islam.” Some Uyghurs at the center explained how they preferred not to attend WUC gatherings that involved music and dancing because it violated their Islamic code of ethics. The Uyghur diaspora is of course not a set of isolated islands. Linguistic and cultural affinity lowers the threshold for interaction



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

257

between Turkish and Uyghur Muslims. Uyghurs wanting to attend Friday prayer often go to Turkish mosques, which are numerous in the Netherlands and Germany. Before the Dutch East Turkestan Education Center had its own building in 2013, it had used a Turkish teahouse and prayed in a Turkish mosque. After they had their own building, however, the contact with the Turkish community stopped. For some, contacts with the Moroccan and Surinamese Muslim communities in the Netherlands had proven to be more difficult, because these communities lacked knowledge of the Uyghurs’ situation and were relatively distant from the Uyghurs in culture and language. Almost every Uyghur I encountered in the Netherlands and Germany had ties with the diasporic community in Turkey. Many often travel to Turkey, where they renew contacts and buy souvenirs. They buy books on Islam and other topics in Uyghur and Turkish, which they take back home and sell at Uyghur cultural events. Turkey has a larger and older Uyghur presence than Germany and the Netherlands, and it serves either as a final destination or as a transit point to other countries for many Uyghur refugees (see Shichor 2003, 285). Places such as Istanbul and Kayseri host a very active Uyghur community. The Istanbul-based East Turkestan Education and Solidarity Association, known as Maarip, offers educational activities and develops Uyghur-language textbooks on Islam. The organization confers a central role on Islam, which is clear from their website’s introductory statement: The Eastern Turkistan Education and Solidarity Association has been established by Turkistani youth who are very well trained, faithful, and highly educated in Islamic, social, technical, and other fields from all over the world including Eastern Turkistan under Chinese occupation. The mission of our association is to educate and bring up Turkistani Muslims, forming a part of the Muslim Ummah (Nation) and suffering from the unbelievable oppression of cruel Chinese communist regime, living in Eastern Turkistan as well as abroad, by meeting their Islamic, social, cultural, spiritual, and earthly needs using all the resources available. (Maarip 2013)

The statement emphasizes the need for well-educated Muslims, who are full members of the global Islamic community. Through reference to Uyghurs as Turkistani Muslims, they clearly show the weight of Turkish-Uyghur ties. The Turkish and Uyghur versions of the website

258

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

give updates on recent events in East Turkestan / Xinjiang and in the Uyghur diaspora.16 However, despite the multiple personal connections between Uyghurs in Turkey and in Europe, many interviewees in the Netherlands and Germany are reluctant to associate themselves too closely with the Turkish Uyghur diaspora, often on account of political or religious differences. They are often vague on the specifics of these differences, saying that they have a “different kind of Islam,” or that they do not wish to associate themselves with their political goals. While connections with the Turkish Muslim communities are often the strongest, connections with other mosque communities also exist. For example, the imam of the Dutch East Turkestan Education Center actively engages other Muslim intellectuals in the Netherlands by providing ijazas, certificates of competence in the reading of a specific Islamic book. Language always seems to be a key reason for Uyghurs to engage or not to engage with non-Uyghur Muslim communities. With some exceptions, for most Uyghur Muslim intellectuals Uyghur is the primary language through which they have studied Islam. Many interviewees said that they could read and recite Arabic but were unable to converse easily in it, which limited their networking capability with Arabic-speaking teachers and audiences. However, in contrast to Arabic, Dutch, or German, Turkish does provide them with a fruitful alternative by which to connect with a wider Muslim-majority community outside the more restricted Uyghur ­context.17 While I often encountered a limited ability to speak Dutch or German among the older generation, the younger generation of Uyghurs in the diaspora, who are often born in Europe, are often fluent in the language of the country they reside in. They use this language among themselves, and they only speak Uyghur with their Uyghur relatives. They have many contacts outside the Uyghur community and can easily mingle with non-Uyghurs. Many of them see Islam as a global religion and do not limit it necessarily to Uyghur practices. At the same time, their Uyghur heritage and the fact that Uyghurs are a “Muslim people” carries much importance to some. Mina, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a molla, was born in the Netherlands. She vigorously insisted on the importance of Uyghurs being Muslims and did not think it appropriate for them to become Christians or atheists. She said she wanted to marry a Uyghur man and thereby to make sure that Uyghur culture and language lived on. At the same time, however, she said that she would not want to live in



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

259

Xinjiang / East Turkestan, because “the Netherlands is also my country now.” She started wearing a headscarf after she had attended an Islamic summer camp and realized she wanted to show that she was a Muslim. Basic Islamic education is one of the ways the older Uyghur diasporic generation tries to pass on a part of the Uyghur identity to their children. Some Uyghur parents take them to the mosque; others send them to an Islamic school, either at weekends, or during vacations, or full time. When asked why he sent his daughter to a full-time Islamic school, one interviewee, not religiously trained, told me he wished her to receive proper Islamic education, something he himself could not give her: Well, see, I myself cannot explain Islamic education in Dutch very well. My daughter cannot understand everything in the Uyghur language. So there we have a problem. If she goes [to that school], she will receive Islamic education in the Dutch language, and it will be explained to her much better than I can do at home in Uyghur. (Interview with author, May 2016, translated from Dutch)

While the father was unable to explain Islam to his daughter in Dutch, he did regard a Muslim moral conduct, which he himself had learned from his father, as a precious quality. Uyghur Muslim intellectuals in Germany and the Netherlands do not have an elaborate educational system. The ones that are actively serving are mostly involved in basic religious education for Uyghur children at weekends, which is often intertwined with Uyghur language and culture classes. The Education Center in Zeist is the only organization in the Netherlands that organizes regular weekend tutorials for Uyghur children on basic Islamic knowledge, taught in Uyghur. It also offers courses in Uyghur language. One of my interviewees has taken Qur’anic lessons with a Uyghur molla in Turkey through Skype, who gave her and two other Uyghur students in the Netherlands weekly lectures and assignments. Other activities of ­mollas include conflict settlement, leading prayer, and performing ceremonies on holidays. Many of the mollas I met did not serve in any educational or religious activity; instead they were preoccupied with their mundane job, or did not live in a neighborhood with enough Uyghurs for regular meetings. Sometimes several mollas gathered among themselves to read and discuss the Qur’an or other

260

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

Islamic texts. This is very infrequent and mostly a matter of repeating what they had learned in their homeland or in Arab countries, “so as not to forget.” What is noticeably affecting the possibility of a more constant religious education for Uyghur youth and adults is the finances. Many mollas in Germany and the Netherlands told me they hardly had any time to organize classes or deepen their own studies because they had to work full time, as shop owners or taxi drivers or in other occupations. The people involved in any form of educational activities, Islamic or cultural, are mostly working as volunteers. The World Uyghur Congress did organize Islamic weekend schooling in the past, but it has stopped doing this because the imam did not have enough time. Even though religion has become a more prominent topic in the WUC’s advocacy of the Uyghur cause, they have not invested significant resources in religious activities. This perhaps is not surprising, since they see themselves as a secular organization. The criminalization of unofficial religious education in Xinjiang and the persecution of mollas unwilling to serve as government mouthpieces have driven many Uyghur students and community leaders to leave China. Ironically, while the Chinese government has continually expressed its fear of foreign influence on Uyghur religious life, its policy in Xinjiang has inadvertently bolstered the importance of foreign Islamic authorities (see also Byler’s chapter in this volume). Although many were attracted by their imagination of the AlAzhar institute, Arab countries, or culturally affiliated Turkey, the trajectories of the Uyghur Muslim intellectuals and students who left China were mostly determined by practical considerations of a country’s favorable political climate, the possible travel routes, and the availability of necessary documents and infrastructure. We see that Central Asia has not only become less hospitable to Uyghurs in general; it has also become less attractive as a region of authoritative Islamic learning, because of the competition of Middle Eastern Arab countries as centers of Islamic knowledge. The Uyghur diaspora in Germany and the Netherlands is relatively young. The communities are not very large, and attempts to get the scattered members together are not always successful. The small number of Uyghurs in Germany and the Netherlands and the need to build a life in these host countries does not allow for an elaborate structure of communal religious education. China’s intimidation of Uyghurs abroad, which does not seem to distinguish between activist



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

261

and nonactivist refugees, is successful to some degree in preventing larger gatherings. Communication technologies such as Skype and WeChat, although increasingly problematic due to fear of Chinese state intelligence, do support the community’s transnational connectivity. This transnational contact is often concentrated on the Uyghur community itself. Because of a lack of time and resources and the priority of other activities over religion, Uyghur Muslim intellectuals in Germany and the Netherlands do not spend considerable time on educational activities. Although there are major individual differences in whether people are politically activist or not, for many members in the diaspora the preservation and remembrance of the Uyghur identity is important. While I would not argue that Islam is central to this identity, it is true that services such as communal prayers, religious holidays, study groups, and religious education for children are often framed as ways to keep the Uyghur identity alive in the diasporic communities. Islam does not seem to function as a unifying force within the Uyghur diaspora in Germany and the Netherlands, as ideas about its role in Uyghur society and Uyghur political activism differ. For relations with people outside the Uyghur community, Islam can offer a common ground. We have seen that the common religion can be valuable, though it is not the main factor for successful interaction. In the contacts with other communities in the Netherlands and Germany, language and cultural affinity are more helpful than the common religion of Islam, as can be clearly observed in the Uyghurs’ contacts with Turks. Considering the relatively high degree of integration of the younger generation of Uyghurs born in Germany and the Netherlands, it will be interesting to see whether and how they seek to reformulate their Uyghur identity, and what the role of Islam will be in these new efforts. Notes 1. This report was based on thirteen interviews carried out by two researchers representing the World Uyghur Congress; the interviews were conducted in September 2015 in Kayseri and Istanbul (World Uyghur Congress 2016). 2. It is important to note that the people who have been able to leave Xin­ jiang belonged to a small group of the Uyghur population who enjoyed a freedom of mobility not possible for many from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds, as mentioned in the contribution by Mu Qian and

262

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

Rachel Harris in this volume. This does not deny the sacrifices they have made, and the difficulties they encountered, which stands in striking contrast to the relative privilege enjoyed by Hui migrants as illustrated in Hew Wai Weng’s chapter. 3. Islam does not seem to bridge gaps between different ethnic groups, as testified by a long history of animosity between the Uyghurs and the Hui (called “Dungan” by the Uyghurs) in the region. See Rudelson 1997, 6; MacKerras 2008, 212–213. Rian Thum also notes that there are nineteenth-century texts where the Altishahri Turki dialect is called “Musulmancha,” in contrast to the Chinese language spoken by the Dungans (Thum 2012, 630). 4. A recent example of China’s pressure and intimidation is the detention of WUC activist Dolkun Isa in the summer of 2017 by Italian authorities on request from China (Radio Free Asia 2017b). 5. Obviously, there is a male focus in this article. There are female religious figures in Uyghur communities (such as büwi), but they do not have the same social function as mollas and follow different paths of religious knowledge transfer. It would make an interesting research topic to look at the different natures of authority among male and female Uyghur religious scholars, and how male scholars can lay a different claim of overall accepted authority due to the more “unofficial” nature of female religious practice. But this clearly falls outside the scope of this article. 6. For an excellent account of this history, see Brophy 2016. 7. Interviews conducted with Uyghur mollas, 2016. See also Castets 2015, 233. 8. Interviews conducted with Uyghur mollas, 2016. See also Castets 2010, 225. 9. Opportunities for Uyghurs to study at Hui private Islamic schools are becoming nearly impossible. See, for example, Erie 2016, 188. 10. Smith Finley ascribes the presence of global Islam symbolism in Xin­ jiang to international trade, pilgrimage, foreign studies, and mass media (Smith Finley 2013, 288). 11. The comment about Al-Azhar being “strictly against a radical explanation” was most likely made in reference to the current image of Islamic schools inciting religious extremism. The interviewee wanted to make clear that he experienced Al-Azhar as a place where there was a tolerance for different opinions and explanations of Islamic teachings. 12. It was renamed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2001, after the entrance of Uzbekistan. 13. See also Rudelson 1997, 49; Rippa 2013. 14. In 2014 and 2015, the Thai government held several hundred Uyghur refugees in detention centers. In 2015, a part of the group was allowed to leave and travel to Turkey, while another group was forcibly deported back to China, an action that was condemned by the UNHCR and other international rights groups as violating international law (Congressional-Executive Committee on China 2015, 288). The WUC is somewhat suspicious of the large number of



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

263

refugees who were able to come to Turkey via Southeast Asia in 2014 and 2015, fearing a plot of the Chinese government to place spies in the Uyghur diasporic communities or even to drain Xinjiang of its Uyghur population (interview with WUC chairman, November 2016). 15. It is not yet clear if and how Turkish policy may become more troublesome for Uyghurs, with the country’s membership application of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. 16. The English version of the website was clearly less well maintained than the Turkish and Uyghur versions and only provided introductory and outdated information at the time I accessed it in July 2017. 17. Shichor (2013, 288) has pointed to the high degree of assimilation of Uyghurs in Turkey, in comparison with Uyghurs in European countries.

References Allès, Elisabeth. 2003. “Muslim Religious Education in China.” China Perspectives 45. http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/230. Becquelin, Nicolas. 2000. “Xinjiang in the Nineties.” China Journal 44:65–90. Bellér-Hann, Ildikó. 2008. Community Matters in Xinjiang, 1880–1949: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur. China Studies 17. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2016. “The Burden of the Past: Uyghur Peasants Remember Collectivisation in Southern Xinjiang.” In Inside Xinjiang: Space, Place and Power in China’s Muslim Far Northwest, edited by Anna Hayes and Michael Clarke, 15–31. London: Routledge. Bovingdon, Gardner. 2010. The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: Columbia University Press. Bowen, John R. 2004. “Beyond Migration: Islam as a Transnational Public Space.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30 (5): 879–894. Brophy, David. 2016. “New Methods on the New Frontier: Islamic Reformism in Xinjiang, 1898–1917.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59 (1–2): 303–332. Castets, Rémi. 2010. “Uyghur Islam: Caught between Foreign Influences and Domestic Constraints.” In China and India in Central Asia: A New “Great Game”?, edited by Marlène Laruelle, Jean-François Huchet, Sébastien Peyrouse, and Bayram Balci, 215–233. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. “The Modern Chinese State and Strategies of Control over Uyghur Islam.” Central Asian Affairs 2:221–245. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 2015. Annual Report. October 8, 2015. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office. http://cecc.gov. Erie, Matthew S. 2014. “Defining Shari’a in China: State, Ahong, and the Postsecular Turn.” In “Islam in China / China in Islam,” special issue, CrossCurrents: East Asian History and Culture Review 12:88–117.

264

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

———. 2016. China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fuller, Graham E., and Jonathan N. Lipman. 2004. “Islam in Xinjiang.” In Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, edited by Frederick S. Starr, 320–352. London: M. E. Sharpe. Lemon, Jason. 2017. “Egypt Is Deporting Chinese Muslims . . . Even Though They May Face Torture.” July 7, 2017. http://stepfeed.com/egypt-is-deporting-chinese -muslims-even-though-they-may-face-torture-1963. Maarip. 2013. “Brief Introduction to the Eastern Turkistan Education and Solidarity Association and Its Mission.” Eastern Turkistan Education and Solidarity Association, last modified July 8, 2013. http://maarip.org/english/blog /2013/07/08/about-us/. Mackerras, Colin. 2008. “Religion in Contemporary Xinjiang.” Silk Road Studies 12:199–220. Middle East Eye. 2017. “Egypt Rounds Up Uyghur Muslims at Behest of China.” July 6, 2017. http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/egypt-cracks-down-muslim -chinese-community-816905577. Radio Free Asia. 2017a. “Detained Uyghur Students Held by Egypt’s Intelligence Service.” July 19, 2017. http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/students -07192017124354.html. ———. 2017b. “Police in Italy Detain Uyghur Exile Group Leader at China’s Behest.” July 26, 2017. http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/detention -07262017164520.html. Ren Hong 任红. 2009. Xinjiang Yisilanjiao Jiaoyu Xianzhuang Yanjiu 新疆伊斯 兰教教育现状研究 (Research on contemporary Islamic education in Xinjiang). Zhongguo Musilin 2009 (2): 48–52. Rippa, Alessandro. 2013. “From Uyghurs to Kashgari: A Pakistani Community Finds Itself Caught between Two Worlds.” The Diplomat. December 20, 2013. http://thediplomat.com/2013/12/from-uyghurs-to-kashgari/?allpages=yes. Roberts, Sean E. 2004. “A ‘Land of Borderlands’: Implications of Xinjiang’s Trans-border Interactions.” In Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, edited by Frederick S. Starr, 232–234. London: M. E. Sharpe. Rudelson, Justin Jon. 1997. Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism along China’s Silk Road. New York: Columbia University Press. Shichor, Yitzhak. 2003. “Virtual Transnationalism: Uyghur Communities in Europe and the Quest for Eastern Turkestan Independence.” In Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and across Europe, edited by Stefano Allievi and Jørgen Nielsen, 281–311. Leiden: Brill. Smith Finley, Joanne. 2013. The Art of Symbolic Resistance: Uyghur Identities and Uyghur-Han Relations in Contemporary Xinjiang. Leiden: Brill. Thum, Rian. 2012. “Modular History: Identity Maintenance before Uyghur Nationalism.” Journal of Asian Studies 71 (3): 627–653.



Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas

265

———. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waite, Edmund. 2006. “The Impact of the State on Islam amongst the Uyghurs: Religious Knowledge and Authority in the Kashgar Oasis.” Central Asian Survey 25 (3): 251–265. World Uyghur Congress. 2016. Seeking a Place to Breathe Freely: Current Challenges Faced by Uyghur Refugees and Asylum Seekers. June 2016, updated June 2017. http://www.uyghurcongress.org/en?download=28639.

“Force Majeure”

Chapter 12

“Force Majeure” An Ethnography of the Canceled Tours of Uyghur Sufi Musicians MU Qian, with Rachel HARRIS

T

he rural areas of Khotän in southern Xinjiang are home to a semiunderground but flourishing community of Sufi practice. Local men and (separately) women take part in a range of ritual gatherings, principally local forms of sama ritual known as hälqä-sohbät (circling and speaking). They associate themselves with local lineages of the Naqshbandiyya, Chishtiyya, and Qadiriyya Sufi orders, but in the local context affiliation is rarely clear-cut; many men attend a variety of gatherings and acquire their religious knowledge in piecemeal fashion from a number of different teachers (Zarcone 2001). Adherents to Sufi teachings are generally known as followers of the “path of the tariqa” (tärikät yol), and those who engage deeply with its practice— sometimes but not always to the extent of withdrawing from their families and communities to follow a life of abstinence and prayer— are known as ashiq (lit. “lovers of God”; see Harris 2017; Light 2008). I lived with this community during 2015 and 2016, conducting PhD fieldwork as part of the “Sounding Islam in China” research project.1 These Sufi groups are the holders and transmitters of a rich tradition of expressive religious culture, which includes a range of sung and recited practices performed as part of the hälqä-sohbät, as well as dastan sung storytelling. Some forms of Sufi ritual, especially those associated with the Chishtiyya order in parts of this region, are accompanied by melodic musical instruments, tämbur and rawap plucked lutes and the bowed satar long-necked lute, in addition to the sapaya percussion sticks that are widely used to provide a rhythmic basis for ritual performance. Much of this ritual repertoire 266



“Force Majeure”

267

overlaps with more secular contexts of performance, including mäshräp community gatherings, and songs, which also form part of the “classical” muqam suites (Harris 2017; Light 2008). Sufi groups are especially active within the local tradition of shrine pilgrimage and festivals (Harris and Dawut 2002; Thum 2014). At the time of writing, all of the shrine festivals of Southern Xinjiang have been closed down, and participating in shrine pilgrimage is regarded as a sign of “religious extremism” punishable by detention in one of the many “reeducation camps” that have sprung up around the region since 2017. At the same time, some of the repertoire performed by Sufis in ritual contexts has been designated as “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH), stripped of its religious connotations, and widely promoted as a form of “minority song-and-dance” on the national stage. I came to my PhD research with a background in world music promotion. Before beginning fieldwork, I had already established a relationship with a musician, whom I will call Abdurahman, who was a respected dastanchi (performer of sung poetic tales) who accompanied himself on the rawap lute, a designated bearer of intangible cultural heritage, well-versed in the important muqam repertoire, and a key figure in contexts of musical performance, which ranged from weddings to mäshräp gatherings to hälqä-sohbät. I had successfully invited him to perform in a world music venue in Shanghai, and on the basis of this relationship I began my fieldwork, working with Abdurahman and his close associates who were active in the Sufi scene. The crossover between the spheres of music and religious practice that Abdurahman embodied was typical of the wider scene that I began to research. During the period of my fieldwork, I tried to arrange three overseas concert tours for the musicians that I worked with. To our great disappointment, all these efforts failed due to various manifestations of what was termed, in the contracts we signed, “force majeure”— that is, circumstances beyond our control. Although some researchers might feel uncomfortable reporting their failures (Seeger 2008, 282– 283), and in this case my Uyghur collaborators are also reluctant to talk about our failure, I believe that it is important to share the experience, both to inform other researchers and would-be cultural brokers, and because it reveals a great deal about the situation of the religious community with whom I worked. Scholars working on the ritual practice and expressive culture associated with particular Sufi orders in other parts of the world have

268

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

extensively critiqued the notion of “Sufi music,” a term that has become popular on the world music scene in recent years and is used to promote Islamic ritual genres (see, for example, Frishkopf 2012). However, as Deborah Kapchan notes, the staged adaption of ritual music does not necessarily lead to a loss of tradition at the local level; it only requires that performers be able “to play several roles” (Kapchan 2007, 237). In practice, many Uyghur Sufi practitioners and musicians are already accustomed to playing a variety of different roles, and they move between performing muqam-mäshräp in Sufi rituals and at events organized by the government. While acknowledging the problems in reframing religious practice as staged musical performance, I maintain that helping to provide the opportunity for these ritual practitioners to present their tradition to international audiences—if the project is conducted in a collaborative way and properly framed—has the potential to empower the practitioners and to strengthen the religious tradition by enabling them to forge connections and understand more of equivalent religious practices beyond their immediate locality. My home discipline of ethnomusicology has embraced the notion of reciprocity between fieldworkers and informants, moving away from the traditional model, in which the researcher’s activity was limited to collecting data toward a more collaborative and mutually beneficial model of research (Seeger 2008, 278). As Barz and Cooley argue, “We are moving from a concern about the potential negative impact on those we study and toward active advocacy for those same individuals and their communities” (2008, 13). Music is increasingly being used as a tool for indigenous communities to claim material and territorial rights (Koch 1995; Seeger 2008). However, such advocacy can only be achieved when the right to self-expression and the right to mobility are present. My experience of the three failed tours demonstrates rather clearly that these present significant challenges for the people of rural Khotän, even though their traditions have been enshrined by the Chinese state and by UNESCO as forms of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent S­ afeguarding. Hong Kong Our first project was a performance that took place in Hong Kong, in March 2016, at the International Conference on Islamic Arts in Intercultural Perspective, a collaborative event by the Chinese



“Force Majeure”

269

University of Hong Kong and the “Sounding Islam in China” research project based at SOAS. As a member of the research project, I suggested that the organizing committee include such a concert. It seemed to me a good opportunity for both the conference and musicians. On the one hand, the performance would enable the conference to include the voices of the research subjects themselves; on the other, it would provide a platform for the little-known sounded practices of Uyghur Sufis and would add to the musicians’ credentials. After discussion, my hosts and teachers in Khotän and I selected four people to take part:2 Abdurahman, a dastan epic singer; Tursuntohti, an expert on muqam; Hebibulla, who was religiously knowledgeable and a hapiz (singer) and leader of rituals; and Niyaz, who was less capable as a performer but very important in executing the project because he spoke Chinese fairly well and was more experienced in dealing with government paperwork. The tour to Hong Kong failed because the procedure to get all the necessary papers was so complicated that it was impossible for us to do so in time, even though we started working on it six months in advance. Although Hong Kong is theoretically part of China, it was more complicated for these musicians to travel to Hong Kong than to another country, because they needed permission from both Hong Kong and China. The procedure was further complicated by the fact that they were required to obtain working visas for Hong Kong. To avoid the paradox that Hong Kong requires a visa from citizens of China, of which it is a part, the visa to Hong Kong is termed qianzhu in Chinese, as opposed to qianzheng, which refers to visas for different countries, but they serve the same function. The process started with the musicians’ application for the ExitEntry Permit for Traveling to and from Hong Kong and Macao (EEP), the designated travel document for Chinese mainlanders traveling to Hong Kong. Hebibulla was denied this because—due to his involvement in Sufi gatherings—he has a record of “illegal religious activities” that rendered him a “key person for inspection.” The second step was to apply for “entry for employment as professionals in Hong Kong” to the Immigration Department of Hong Kong government. If this were completed, the third step would be to apply for an exit endorsement from the Public Security Bureau office where the applicant’s hukou (household registration) is kept. The application for Hong Kong’s working visas involved an application form with details of applicants, submission of a certificate of professional qualification,

270

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

Figure 11. Conference poster for the International Conference on Islamic Arts in ­Intercultural Perspective. Courtesy of Mu Qian.

and a letter of consent to be signed by the applicant’s employer or person in charge of the applicant’s dossier. Most of the group were not in salaried employment and would need to go to the subdistrict office (juweihui) or village office (dadui) for the signature. For these rural Uyghur farmers, who had no formal affiliation, every step was difficult, and we had to spend a lot of time on, and be creative in, preparing the required materials. For the letter of consent, some of the group who had better connections with cadres in government agencies could get an official signature, while others did not have such connections, and I had to find nominal employers for them who were willing to help. As for the certificates of “professional qualification,” only one of the group was able to provide these. Abdurahman,



“Force Majeure”

271

as an officially designated ICH bearer, was able to provide a collection of documents, including a Xinjiang Folk Artists’ Association membership card and “graduation” certificates from three ICH bearer training workshops organized by the Xinjiang government. Such certification is a very real form of currency in southern Xinjiang. The local government pays Abdurahman to organize regular lessons in dastan performance, bringing him new students. ­Students are an important resource who offer him support in terms of money, labor, and social connections. In turn, Abdurahman had also recommended Niyaz and Nurmämät, two of his most loyal students, to become members of the Xinjiang Folk Artists’ Association themselves. These certificates endow them with a semiofficial status that provides some protection, for example, against accusations of “illegal religious activities.” However, they proved of little use in Hong Kong. When we provided these documents as proof of the musicians’ professional qualification, the Immigration Department pointed out that some of the musicians’ dates of birth and names in Chinese characters were not the same as those on their ID cards. This is a common problem in Xinjiang due to the lack of a standard way to transcribe Uyghur names into Chinese. At that point, we decided to give up. We hadn’t yet secured Hong Kong permission, let alone permission from China, and Chinese New Year was approaching, meaning that government offices would be closed for a week. In the end I gave a presentation on the Islamic soundscapes of Khotän at the conference on my own. The fact that I traveled to Hong Kong while the musicians couldn’t make it showed all too clearly the different levels of mobility that I enjoy, thanks to my Beijing residency, higher social status endowed by my education and affiliation, and my Chinese and English language skills. On the contrary, these rural Uyghur Muslims occupy subaltern positions in terms of mobility. As John Urry notes, “Moving between places physically or virtually can be a source of status and power, and expression of the rights to movement either temporarily or permanently” (2007, 9). This is most obvious in south Xinjiang. Every time I fly from Khotän to Ürümchi, I can see that Uyghur people account for less than half of the passengers, although Uyghur people account for over 90 percent of the population of Khotän (Xinjiang 2012). This is also why Abdurahman likes to boast about his trips to Beijing and Shanghai when he busks in the Khotän bazaar, as those cities are far beyond the reach

272

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

of common Uyghurs in South Xinjiang, and such experiences indicate his special status. Korea The second project was to give a concert titled “Sufi Night” at “Transgression and Syncretism,” a program of the Asia Culture C ­ entre Theatre in Gwangju, Korea, in March 2016. Initially, traveling to Korea seemed to be simpler, because we only needed to apply for Korean visas, and theoretically didn’t have to get permission from the Chinese government. The musicians did, however, have to have passports. It has always been more difficult for Uyghur people to get passports, especially those without formal employment. However, for a brief period between 2015 and 2016, the Xinjiang government loosened the controls, and this enabled people like these musicians to obtain passports, although one of the group got his passport so late that there was barely enough time to apply for the visa. At that point I was already in Beijing, and I just managed to get his passport from the courier in time to submit to the Korean Embassy. A few days later, I checked the embassy website and found that their visa applications had been rejected because they “failed to provide legitimate reasons to enter Korea.” This was even though we had been invited by the Asia Culture Centre, a government-owned organization. Maybe the real reason was because they did not have stable jobs and income, or because they had not previously traveled abroad, or due to some hidden reason that I did not know about. In the cases of both Hong Kong and Korea, I felt that their identity as Muslims from Xinjiang played a negative role in their visa applications. I contacted the event organizer in Korea immediately. They replied that they would talk to the Korean Embassy in Beijing, and they asked the musicians to travel from Xinjiang to Beijing according to plan. Just as a glimmer of hope arose, another incident occurred. The musicians were refused permission to board the plane at their local airport. The reason was that the organizer in Korea had booked their flights with their passport numbers, but they only had their ID cards with them, as their passports were still in the Korean embassy in Beijing. After dozens of calls between Xinjiang and Korea, the problem could not be solved, and the group had to go home. It was a hard day for us all. They had held a party before they set out, and some friends came to the airport to see them off. I can’t



“Force Majeure”

273

imagine their mood when they had to go straight home. I filed a complaint to the Korean embassy in Beijing, with no result. Again, I traveled to Gwangju by myself and showed a film I had made of their ritual practice. Turkey The third project was a performance at the Konya Mystic Music Festival in Turkey. In this case, the organizer had enough money in the budget to invite nine musicians, and we planned to re-create onstage a form of mäshräp gathering. I also named the group Khotän Mäshripi. There was no problem with the visa this time, as Chinese nationals can get electronic visas for Turkey online. I obtained visas for the whole group, booked their flights and accommodation, and consulted a contact in the local police station as to whether they would be allowed to travel independently to Turkey. He said it should be fine. Niyaz was anxious about the situation; he had heard conflicting stories about what was allowed, and he went to ask the police himself. At first the police station said that there would be no problems, but on September 20, three days before they were due to travel, Niyaz called to say that now only he and Abdurahman could go, as the police had suddenly forbidden the others to travel and taken away their ID cards. Then he called again to say now nobody was allowed to travel. The Eurasia Commodity and Trade Expo was to be held in Ürümchi from September 20 to 25, and nobody was allowed to travel around Xinjiang at that time. Even the long-distance buses from Khotän to Ürümchi were canceled. Unfortunately, the musicians were scheduled to fly to Beijing on September 23. I tried my best to contact everyone whom I imagined could possibly help—Uyghurs, Hans, professors, officials, friends of friends—but there was nothing I could do. This tour fell through because of an Expo called Silk Road: Opportunities and Future. Naturally, we were very disappointed, but I was able to return to London to begin writing up my dissertation, while for my associates in Khotän things rapidly became much worse. The authorities introduced much tighter control on travel, and my friends who had managed to obtain passports had them confiscated again by the police. Uyghurs who had been lucky enough to travel abroad first found themselves being questioned by the police on their return, and subsequently many of them were detained. Many of my Uyghur friends

274

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

deleted me from their social media, and I lost contact with them. All forms of religious practice—not just large-scale gatherings like the hälqä-sohbät but even daily prayer and fasting—are now regarded as signs of religious extremism, and sufficient cause for detention in the reeducation camps. I know for sure that at least one of the Sufi musicians I worked with is currently undergoing reeducation. Staging Sufism My aims in trying to organize these concerts seemed initially to be straightforward: I want to present a performance of what I had seen and heard among the Uyghur Sufis that I worked with, a form of expressive culture that few people outside these grassroots communities have had the chance to hear. Instead, the kind of Uyghur music that most people can access is in forms appropriated by professional arrangers and performers, which in recent years has often been ­presented under the Intangible Cultural Heritage rubric. As Rachel Harris points out: When the Uyghur Muqam joined the UNESCO list in 2005, although the nomination devoted considerable attention to locally maintained traditions, the staged performances of the Muqam Ensemble and ­Xinjiang song-and-dance troupe continued to dominate the national sphere, while the “representative transmitters” of regional Muqam traditions were brought to Ürümchi to participate in the work of transforming their own repertoire and practice into the aesthetic framework of the established troupes. (Harris 2020)

Both muqam and mäshräp are closely related to Sufism and are often performed together with dhikr in hälqä-sohbät rituals in southern Xinjiang. However, the official ICH discourse in China denies the religious aspect of muqam and mäshräp, and official troupes represent them onstage as forms of “song and dance,” part of China’s colorful multiethnic culture, while those who practice the religious rituals related to this intangible cultural heritage face persecution. By c­ ontrast, I wanted to promote a performance of the sounded practices of Uyghur Sufis that foregrounded its religious meanings and gave wider recognition to the grassroots tradition bearers of this heritage. Although my ideal was to present the authentic musical practice of Uyghur Sufis as it is carried out in the community, I was still trying



“Force Majeure”

275

to organize a staged performance, which would inevitably involve recontextualizing and translating ritual practice. In the early days of my communication with the Konya Mystic Music Festival, the organizer made it clear that I needed to arrange a formal program. “I am assuming they are humble folk [sic] and not professional performers. What we will have in Konya is after all a stage performance and it needs to be planned. Someone will need to act as a [sic] ‘art manager’ for them and simply produce a stage performance out of their tradition,” the organizer wrote in an email. And so I discussed this with the musicians and decided the program would consist of Nawa muqam-mäshräp; the first dastan of Chäbiyat Muqam; the instrumental piece “Shadiyana”; and parts of the hälqä-sohbät, including sung hikmät (“pieces of wisdom” with lyrics attributed to the twelfthcentury Sufi saint Yasawi), breath dhikr, and the local form of sama whirling dance that accompanied the dhikr. This program was meant to showcase the variety of sounded Uyghur Sufi practice. The muqam-mäshräp, which lie at the core of Uyghur musical and ritual repertoire, are a series of songs set to Chagatay ghazal poetry and attributed to Central Asian Sufi poets such as Ali Shir Nawa’i and Baba Rahim Mashrab. This musical-poetic repertoire circulated orally, primarily within the traditions of Sufi ritual performance maintained by ashiq, for several centuries before they were brought into the sphere of national, professional secular performance and fixed within the canonical repertoire known today as the Twelve Muqam (Harris 2008; Light 2008). Although the government and professional troupes have compiled muqam-mäshräp into fixed forms, the pieces played by these “amateur” musicians are still ­flexible in terms of instrumentation and the matching of lyrics with melodies. I wanted to use the opportunity of the Konya Mystic Music Festival to promote a form of muqam-mäshräp that was closer to their roots in ritual practice. This style of performance cannot be found in China, where extravagant shows by professional musicians and dancers like “Dolan Mäshräp” by Xinjiang Song and Dance Troupe and “Forever Meshrep” by Xinjiang Dilinaer Arts Troupe are the norm, while unauthorized mäshräp gatherings have been banned in Xinjiang and can only take place secretly. We chose Nawa Muqam because it was one of the most frequently played muqams at Sufi mäshräp gatherings in Khotän that I attended, and it is suitable for the introduction of the sounded practice of Uyghur Sufis at the beginning of a concert in Turkey. The first

276

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

dastan of Chäbiyat Muqam is a joyful instrumental piece that can uplift the spirit and vary the tone color of the concert. “Shadiyana” is an instrumental piece associated with shrine festivals, especially the Ordam Mazar, which used to host the biggest shrine festival in Xinjiang before it was banned in the late 1990s (Harris and Dawut 2002). Last, a staging of a hälqä-sohbät would showcase the sung poetry of hikmät, breath dhikr, and sama dance, the combination of which would give the audience a comprehensive feel of sounded Uyghur Sufi ritual and create a powerful impact onstage. However, when we rehearsed for the concerts, the musicians almost never followed the program we had decided, and often played other pieces or changed the order. During our rehearsals—itself a new concept for my collaborators—I found out that the improvisational form of a mäshräp gathering is what the musicians had in mind when they were asked to give a performance. A mäshräp usually consists of a number of songs selected by the lead singer in order to facilitate the atmosphere of the gathering, in a similar way to the qawwal singer in Sufi gatherings of India and Pakistan (Qureshi 2006). When I asked the group what muqam they were singing, they often couldn’t tell me the name. Their performance repertoire consisted of a loose body of pieces that circulate among the Uyghur Sufis orally, which is different from the canonized On Ikki Muqam (Twelve Muqam), and their performance practice did not comply with the norms of a fixed concert program. In recontextualizing the music for the Konya Mystic Music Festival, I tried to negotiate a program that would showcase sounded elements of Uyghur Sufism as they are practiced in the community, and at the same avoid making a nonspecialized audience feel bored. The result was a medley of works of different styles, each of which was given a time slot that would neither allow the musicians to perform in a prolonged manner (which they sometimes do at home) nor artificially reduce necessary elements of the works. Another criterion I adopted was to emphasize the more “mystic” part of the Uyghur Sufi tradition, for example the breath dhikr and sama dance, which create aural and physical stimulation and permit the practitioners to enter trance. I hoped to provide a hint of this experience for the audience. The emphasis on these “mystic” parts was in accordance with the concept of the Konya Mystic Music Festival, which purveys a globalized imagination of ritual practice as “mystic music,” legitimized by the location of Konya, where the famous Sufi mystic Rumi was



“Force Majeure”

277

buried. For my Uyghur collaborators, what was important was to “perform something that is uniquely from Xinjiang” (Niyaz, personal communication), to bring their unique local traditions to the international stage and set them alongside what they imagined would be other prestigious foreign styles of Sufism. The process of preparing for the tours also revealed the inner politics of the group and the hierarchies of ritual and musical practice in southern Xinjiang. Participants in Sufi rituals can be divided into three categories: those who had inherited religious knowledge and status and were accorded religious titles like ishan (leader of a Sufi suborder) and imam (prayer leader); ordinary Uyghurs who participated in Sufi ritual practices; and semiprofessional musicians who were less deeply connected to the Sufi sphere but whose musical skill and knowledge were essential for successful rituals. Among the group of performers bound for Turkey, Tursuntohti was an ishan who hailed from the neighboring town of Yarkand, while Hebibulla was an ishan from Khotän. Both had their own followers and considerable pride in their lineage, and when they were brought together into a performing group, they became adversaries. In our rehearsals they would argue about the right way to present the performance. These arguments represented a competition in both religious and musical knowledge. During rehearsals, most musicians knelt on the floor, while Tursuntohti sat on a bench to play the satar long-necked bowed lute. This might have been simply because he found it easier to play the instrument seated, but by sitting on a bench he looked higher than others and visually assumed the leader’s role. Tursuntohti comes from Yarkand, which is famous for its muqam tradition, and he went so far as to say that people in Khotän don’t know about muqam. This naturally annoyed the other musicians. Thus, aesthetic preferences and regional differences came into play in the negotiations of the performance. Most of my collaborators identified themselves as ashiqs, or lovers of God, who sing for God, not for money. Abdurahman, by contrast, made his living by busking in bazaars and shrines. Payment may be an indicator of professionalism for musicians, but at the same time it is a denial of religiosity or the identity of an ashiq. Abdurahman took part in Sufi rituals sometimes, but more as a professional musician paid for his service (in money or gifts) rather than someone who seeks spiritual enlightenment. He did not recite dhikr daily as the Sufis did, so he was on the periphery of the Sufi community. The difference between Sufis and non-Sufis became clearer in

278

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

the rehearsals. Paradoxically, non-Sufis like Abdurahman can become better “Sufi musicians” on the stage, because they make the performance more “musical” with their instruments, but this aesthetic aspect—although it is prized by Sufis—is not the core meaning of the rituals, which can be performed without melodic instruments. For Sufis, sound is a means to enable religious practice; for the audience of a Sufi concert, it is the whole aim. Third, the canceled tours make me rethink the immobility of the Uyghur musicians, and the political factors that affect Uyghur intangible cultural heritage. In recent years China has seen several groups of minority musicians who play tradition-based music, sometimes glossed in China as yuanshengtai (original ecology), achieve national success and go on to tour internationally as “world music” acts. These include the Chinese Mongolian group Hanggai and the southwestern minority group Shanren. For these Uyghur Sufis, however, the obstacles to performing their traditions on the global stage seem insurmountable. In part, this is because of their social status as peasant farmers, whereas the internationally active “world music” minority artists are mostly urban professionals. On the other hand, their ethnic identity as Uyghurs entails more restrictions. Few Uyghur musicians from Xinjiang have traveled abroad to perform, except those affiliated with government troupes such as the Xinjiang Muqam Art Ensemble and Xinjiang Art Theatre. None of the musicians I worked with had traveled abroad, and many had not even traveled outside Xinjiang. It is an open secret that many hotels in China do not accept Uyghur guests, a problem I faced each time I arranged a concert for Uyghur musicians in eastern China. Any hotel that is willing to take them is required to contact the local police to run a security check on them. Even within Xinjiang, such problems persisted. During my fieldwork, regulations required Uyghurs who wished to stay at a hotel to show a “convenience card,” which was difficult for rural dwellers to obtain, especially those with a record of participating in “illegal religious activities.” Even within their hometown, we had problems organizing rehearsals because Niyaz was afraid the police would come to make trouble for him if they heard that a group of people were gathering in his home. Since my departure, the levels of surveillance and control have increased still further. Communication with these musicians has been severed, but we know that at least one of them is detained, at the time of writing, in a reeducation camp.



“Force Majeure”

279

Another issue impeding their mobility is that the system of transportation in China is designed for the Han majority and fails to cater to minority people whose names do not conform to the standard three-character norm. For example, when I tried to book domestic flights for one musician, I found that the designated space for entering the passenger’s name on the website can hold no more than ten Chinese characters, while his name written in Chinese amounted to twelve characters. I had to call the airline to apply for a special case. There is no way to book flights with a passenger’s name written in the Uyghur script. Even for those Uyghurs who have better education and know the Chinese language, their official Chinese names cause all kinds of inconvenience for traveling, banking, and many other official transactions. For the many Uyghurs from southern Xinjiang who have limited Chinese language competence, these barriers are huge. The degree of immobility of these Uyghur musicians is extraordinary. While artists in many other areas of the world travel globally and successfully translate their ritual performance for a transnational audience (Shannon 2003), these Uyghur musicians find it hard to travel anywhere. There is little support for Uyghur musicians from independent producers or NGOs in China. I talked to two music festivals in China about putting on a concert of the Uyghur Sufi musicians I worked with. They initially showed interest but later decided not to go ahead, worried about the possible religious or political sensitivities of the performance that might bring them trouble. Their immobility is combined with restrictions on their ­cultural and religious expression, resulting in the absence of both Uyghur music in the global music market and Uyghur voices in the wider world of Sufism. Although the world music market is often seen as jeopardizing the authenticity of local traditions (Shannon 2003; Taylor 2016), I believed that a performance at the Konya Mystic Music Festival would have a positive impact on the situation of these Uyghur Sufi musicians and their tradition. Situated on the Silk Road, the region that we call Xinjiang today has been a historical meeting point of different cultures, which gave birth to the Uyghur Sufi tradition. The contemporary political border and system have to a great extent cut off Uyghur people’s exchange with the outside world, especially ­Central Asia and the Turkic-speaking world of which it is a part. By organizing these tours I hoped to help the musicians to claim their

280

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

right to freedom of movement, to have the opportunity to reimagine these historical links and see their own traditions within a bigger context, as well as represent their own heritage at the national and international level. My attempts to organize these tours of Uyghur Sufi musicians represented an attempt to advocate for their rights to cultural and religious expression, and the rights of the community as a whole. The struggles of the small group of Sufis I worked with is representative of the wider struggles of the Uyghur community in southern Xinjiang, who are unable to practice their religion, subject to extreme levels of surveillance and social control, and whose expressive couture is appropriated and used to represent them in ways that have nothing to do with their own priorities and sense of self. As Andrew Weintraub argues: If what identifies and distinguishes such a community through its cultural practices is drastically altered by forces beyond the control of its membership, then it becomes meaningless to protect an individual’s right to be part of that community. Such awareness marks a move from individual rights to collective or group rights, in particular because of the struggles of indigenous peoples and minority groups. (Weintraub 2009, 3)

The importance of advocacy in the disciplines of ethnomusicology and anthropology is now widely recognized, but advocacy is also understood to be the most challenging and problematic domain for researchers. Ricardo Trimillos calls on ethnomusicologists to reflect on and assess their role, arguing, “It is at the nexus of the ethics of advocacy, the social conditions of entitlement, and the moral implications of responsibility that we should engage ourselves” (Trimillos 2009, 38). This leads to my last point—to reflect on my role in the local community as well as my influence on the local people. In my fieldwork, I was first a researcher, and then a culture broker (Kurin 1997). The people I met in Khotän drew various conclusions about my reasons for being in their community. Some of them saw me as a student of Abdurahman. Some saw me just as a friend or a guest, slotting me into local traditions of hospitality. For some, I was a visitor from a more developed world, equipped with advanced apparatus such as a laptop, single-lens reflex camera, and high-definition video camera. I know there were rumors that I sold the films I



“Force Majeure”

281

made about them and made money from them. Some people also suspected that I cheated the musicians when I failed to bring them to Hong Kong and Korea. These suspicions were alleviated a little after I divided the compensation from Korea among the musicians. I also tried to help to improve the living conditions of the community in other ways. For example, I organized some friends of mine to donate their used laptops to students of the community. I taught a local person to shoot film so that he could make a living by filming weddings in the future. By doing so, I asserted my role as someone who was more of a community member who abides by the law of hospitality (Bellér-Hann 2008) than a culture broker. Failing to travel to Korea was a face-losing thing for the musicians, especially Abdurahman, whose friends and relatives sent him money to spend during the trip. In the end, he hid in another friend’s house for a few days and pretended that he had actually made it to Korea. I also witnessed him showing journalists the house program of the Korean festival, which included his photo, and telling them he had performed in Korea. I felt guilty because these projects had not brought them any benefit. When we first planned these tours, everybody was excited because they wanted to see the world, make new friends, and show their tradition. Later, when they had to run between different government departments to beg for permission, it became a burden for them, and for me as well, as I felt that they were doing me a favor by enduring all these troubles and humiliations. I have imagined that if we had succeeded in just one of the three tours, I would have become a hero in the community. In arranging these tours, I did have the motivation of getting myself credibility, but I also had more important motives. I felt that the musical sounds of the Uyghur Sufis, which I cherish so much, deserved to be heard by the world. At the same time, I felt that they should have the right to represent themselves rather than relying on those official troupes to represent them. Their voice is as important as anybody else’s if we are to believe in cultural democracy. Unfortunately, all our efforts failed, because of various forms of force majeure that were beyond our control. I have encountered force majeure before in my work in the music business, but I have never experienced so much force majeure in relation to one group. It reveals the adversity that my research collaborators—Uyghur Sufis—face. At the same time, it reveals the limited capacity of an individual researcher to engage in reciprocity and advocacy. Despite my

282

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

enthusiasm, it is impossible for me to change overnight a situation that involves national and international politics. For my collaborators, I can only hope they understood the respect that I have for them as bearers of a unique tradition and my ongoing concern for their well-being, even though we are unable to contact each other. Notes 1. The authorial voice in this chapter belongs to Mu Qian. The role of Rachel Harris is confined to providing some wider context and references, structuring, and language editing. 2. Perhaps ironically given my initial desire to promote and give a platform to the voices of these individuals, in view of the current political climate in Xinjiang I have decided not to give their real names in this chapter.

References Barz, Gregory F., and Timothy J. Cooley. 2008. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bellér-Hann, Ildikó. 2008. Community Matters in Xinjiang, 1880–1949: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur. China Studies 17. Leiden: Brill. Frishkopf, Michael. 2012. “Review Essay: ‘Sufi Music: The Rough Guide to Sufi Music.’” Asian Music 43 (1): 148–155. Harris, Rachel. 2008. The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. ———. 2017. “Theory and Practice in Contemporary Central Asian Maqām.” In Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World, edited by Rachel Harris and Martin Stokes. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ———. 2020. “‘A Weekly Meshrep to Tackle Religious Extremism’: MusicMaking in Uyghur Communities and Intangible Cultural Heritage in China.” Ethnomusicology 64 (1). Harris, Rachel, and Rahile Dawut. 2002. “Mazar Festivals of the Uyghurs: Music, Islam and the Chinese State.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11 (1): 1–18. Kapchan, Deborah A. 2007. Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Koch, Grace. 1995. “This Land Is My Land; The Archive Tells Me So: Sound Archives and Response to the Needs of Indigenous Australians.” IASA Journal 6:13–22.



“Force Majeure”

283

Kurin, Richard. 1997. Reflections of a Culture Broker: A View from the Smithsonian. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Light, Nathan. 2008. Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xin­ jiang. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Qureshi, Regula. 2006. Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seeger, Anthony. 2008. “Theories Forged in the Crucible of Action: The Joys, Dangers, and Potentials of Advocacy and Fieldwork.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shannon, Jonathan H. 2003. “Sultans of Spin: Syrian Sacred Music on the World Stage.” American Anthropologist 105 (2): 266–277. Taylor, Timothy. 2016. Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. Big Issues in Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Ronald Radano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trimillos, Ricardo D. 2009. “Agency and Voice: The Philippines at the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.” In Music and Cultural Rights, edited by Andrew N. Weintraub and Bell Yung. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Weintraub, Andrew N. 2009. “Introduction.” In Music and Cultural Rights, edited by Andrew N. Weintraub and Bell Yung. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Xinjiang weiwuer zizhiqu renmin zhengfu renkou pucha lingdao xiaozu bangongshi. 2012. Xinjiang weiwuer zizhiqu 2010 nian renkou pucha ziliao. Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe. Zarcone, Thierry. 2001. “The Sufi Networks in Southern Xinjiang during the Republican Regime (1911–1949): An Overview.” In Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia: Early Eighteenth to Late Twentieth Centuries, edited by Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Komatsu Hisao, 119–132. London: Kegan Paul.

“Travelers” in the City

Chapter 13

“Travelers” in the City Precariousness and the Urban Religious Economy of Uyghur Reformist Islam Darren BYLER

I

n 2014 the Uyghur migrant community of Black Shell Mountain was a space filled with the sound of both construction and demolition. The sound of Han construction crews building government-­ subsidized orange and yellow apartment buildings, mixed with the cheerful shouts of children on recess at the nearby elementary school and the chanting of counterterrorism army forces that were stationed next to the community after the mass protests of 2009. Farther up the mountain, the sound of sledgehammers thudding against bricks joined the soundscape as one-story homes were dismantled by Uyghur day laborers brick by brick. It was Uyghur migrants that first built up this informal settlement on the hillside in the 1990s, and Uyghur migrants were also the ones who tore the “shantytown” down. In this gray island of brick, dust, sweat, and rubble the gleaming skyline of the city seemed to be at a remove. Here everything seemed to be changing, while city life continued unaffected in the distance (fig. 12). Yet for all the community’s uncertainty, there was still a center to its social life. At the bottom of the hill, in the center of the remaining alleyways was the Black Shell Mountain mosque. It served as the locus of the neighborhood. During the weekly Friday prayers the people in the streets around the mosque grew to several thousand. A vibrant bazaar sprang to life, and for a few hours a spirit of conviviality took over the space. Although plainclothes police also came to scan the crowds for migrants suspected of Islamic “extremism” (Ch. jiduan zhuyi), in many ways the bazaar operated like a weekly rural market. People from an area a half hour’s walk in each direction converged 284



“Travelers” in the City

285

Figure 12. A Uyghur migrant demolishing a Uyghur home in Black Shell Mountain. Photo by Darren Byler.

once a week to worship, buy supplies, and share the news of the week. Migrants from the same hometowns met and commiserated. Those who attended the “underground” prayer rooms (Uy. namaz-xana) in nearby Uyghur restaurants around the city shared the “illegal” digital recordings of Islamic teaching messages they had copied that week. They talk about what jobs were coming available, about supplies of shoes, coats, toys, and cheap electronics that could be sold at a profit on the streets. Although they might describe themselves as businessmen and -women, their overarching self-identification was as “­travelers” (Uy. musapir). Although this identification was not desirable given its association with poverty and homelessness, by identifying in this way they laid claim to a sense of belonging in this mosque community. The interdependence associated with this belonging was something that in turn provided them with a sense of economic support and well-being. Unlike more affluent Uyghurs with the security of urban household registration and well-established positions in companies as productive individual workers, these religious travelers clung to each other for support. Despite the state’s efforts to eliminate their presence in the city through the controlled distribution of rental and commercial permits, in the musapir mosque community the Uyghur migrant population found ways to survive, if only for a time.

286

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

This chapter considers the Islamic sociality of the Uyghur musapir as the basis for a religious economy that prolonged precarious living in the city of Ürümchi in 2014, before the mass detentions of religious Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” in 2017 (Smith Finley 2019). In mainstream Chinese discourses, demolition zones are often represented as spaces of abjection. They are often seen as spaces where the poor are slotted to suffer as their homes and dreams are torn apart and buried in rubble. Although there is truth to this narrative of desolation, this chapter shows that the story of life during the demolition of informal Uyghur settlements was more complicated than this. The Uyghur concept of the musapir—long conceived as an exception to the norm of Uyghur rootedness in farming communities and the stability of land tenure—implies a feeling of loneliness and loss. Musapir, or musafir as it is written in the original Arabic, simply means “traveler,”1 but among Uyghurs it describes a sense of both psychic and material displacement, a kind of homelessness or refugee status. As Elke Spiessens examines elsewhere in this volume, this type of social precariousness describes a wide swath of contemporary Uyghur society. Due to the political and economic circumstances of their lives, many Uyghurs have been forced to move beyond urban communities in China to forms of permanent international exile as religious asylum seekers. The term musapir is similar to the way the Chinese term mangliu, or “blind wanderer,” is used in contemporary Chinese discourse with both the negative connotations of poverty and homelessness and self-ascribed positive associations of migrant toughness and courage. It differs, however, from this Chinese conceptualization in the way it is related to particular religious histories of encultured thought. For Uyghurs, musapir can also describe a particular religious practice— the Sufi tradition of the wandering Islamic mystic—and it is here, at the nexus of the psychic, material, and religious, that it becomes fruitful as a specific conceptualization of the sociality of low-income Uyghur migrants as they wait to be expelled from the city. Many self-identified Uyghur “travelers,” the largest percentage of which were young unmarried men, repeatedly insisted that they were hoping to someday achieve legal status in the city, marry a wife from their home village, and buy an apartment, yet many of them also admitted that this was not likely to happen.2 Most of them focused just on the week in front of them. They lived Friday to F ­ riday, when they participated in the weekly Islamic service and street bazaar. These young men had been sent to the city by their families in order



“Travelers” in the City

287

to support their loved ones back in the countryside and as a way of protecting them from tightening forms of religious policing that grew as a way of containing the rise of pious practice. The younger generation of migrants relied on their network of fellow travelers in the mosque community to help them find more short-term work, pyramid schemes, and training courses when what they were doing in the present fell through. At the same time, an older generation of migrants, many of whom were married and raising children, relied on the same mosque community to survive the turmoil that came from having their homes demolished in Ürümchi’s urban cleansing projects. Increasingly this population of older men and women saw value in the new forms of piety that were being practiced by younger, more devout migrants. Like the younger generation of migrants, they too saw themselves as becoming-musapir in both the material and religious sense of the term. As the “People’s War on Terror” began in 2014,3 Uyghur migrants struggled to achieve economic stability in their lives while contending with the urban policing of Ürümchi. Since 2009 the police have forced hundreds of thousands of Uyghur migrants to leave their urban homes. While some were able to afford government-subsidized housing on the outskirts of the city, the majority of migrants were expelled from the city. The expulsions were enforced by regular home invasions in which Uyghur inhabitants were asked to produce “green cards” (Uy. yeshil kart) or “People’s Convenience Cards” (Ch. bianminka) that proved they were good citizens. Procuring a “green card” required migrants to return to their home villages and petition local officials for the card—a long and difficult process for most resource-poor migrants. Government officials whom I spoke with estimated that less than 10 percent of those who applied for the card were able to obtain it. Anyone without this card was not permitted to leave their home county, nor were they able to rent an apartment or register as a guest in an Ürümchi home. Failure to comply with this order resulted in arrests and detention in “reeducation” internment camps, where detainees were taught forms of Chinese patriotism and the “proper” role of Islam in their lives. Throughout the period of my fieldwork (2014–2015), entire apartment buildings were vacated; hundreds of Uyghur restaurants closed. In Black Shell Mountain, many people were exiled, forced to return to the poverty and draconian policing of rural southern Xinjiang—what many referred to as an “open-air

288

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

prison” (Uy. dalidiki türme). Others dodged the police and lived without permits in the rooms of friends. Uyghur migrant life over this period often centered around Reformist Islamic practice. While, as noted by Alex Stewart in this volume, the turn toward new forms of piety among the Hui in other parts of China was often precipitated by an improvement of their economic situation, there was an inverse trajectory among urban Uyghur musapir. For them Reformist Islamic practice became a spiritual resource helping them survive social and economic impoverishment. As Harris and Dawut show in their chapter, some wealthier Uyghurs in the city demonstrated their piety through forms of conspicuous pious consumption and performance. Similarly, Yang Yang, also in this volume, finds that the Hui in Xi’an began to demonstrate their piety in elaborate wedding celebrations. Yet for the majority of low-income migrant Uyghurs to the city, Islamic practice provided a means not of demonstrating their success as pious urban citizens but, rather, of finding forms of social resilience and autonomy. This chapter shows this by examining the way a family of an older generation of migrants refused to accept compensation for the demolition of their house, thus enacting a “nail house” (Ch. dingzi hu; Uy. mikh öy) resistance, while at the same time they prepared themselves for its inevitable demolition by drawing on the musapir or traveler Uyghur tradition. It shows how they refused to have their lives displayed in a documentary film and instead chose to tell their stories on their own terms. It argues that by participating in a mosque community that was made up of other musapir, the family was able to participate in a religious economy—using the charity of their neighbors to raise a small herd of sheep in the rubble around their home—as a viable means to prepare for displacement. This story is symptomatic of the experience of hundreds of thousands of travelers who failed to claim a secure space in the city. At the heart of the chapter are questions regarding the relationships between religious economy and autonomy. Islamic Practice and Religious Economies In contemporary Ürümchi, Islamic practice offered dispossessed lowincome Uyghur migrants a way of framing socioeconomic struggle. The economic and political precariousness of life as displaced migrants was something that pushed Uyghurs toward reformist forms of Islam.



“Travelers” in the City

289

This push toward new forms of Islam was thus simultaneously an effect of state oppression and facilitated by the state development of new communication networks. Smartphones, 3G networks, MP3 recordings carried on SD cards, and the New Silk Road highways were all part of what has fostered a religious transformation among Uyghur migrants. The precariousness and exposure of social life thus structured the way they understood and deployed Islamic moral frameworks. In addition, the particular form of indigenous Islamic knowledge they drew on informed the way they adapted reformist Islamic frameworks in their own lives. One of the ways this adaptation was expressed was through the changing meaning of the figure of the musapir in Uyghur society. In a 1993 short story called “The Musapir’s Tavern” (Hoshur 2015), the popular Uyghur fiction writer Memtimin Hoshur describes the role of the musapir in Uyghur society at an earlier moment. In his portrait, the figure of the musapir was portrayed as a kind of drunken poet who frequented taverns and opined about Uyghur society and Islamic philosophy. They were Uyghur men of a certain amount of privilege who spent much of their time talking about Sufi flights of the mind while drinking vodka and sorghum liquor. They were presented as men who were bored with life and irresponsible regarding the needs of their families. Hoshur was alluding to the rise in alcohol dependence among Uyghur men in the 1980s and 1990s. He was also commenting on the way this rise in despondency was correlated with the rise in underemployment and new forms of consumption that accompanied the period of capitalist development after Deng Xiao­ ping’s economic reforms in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As in Ruslan Yusupov’s analysis of social despondency among the Hui in Yunnan in this volume, the turn to alcoholism among Uyghurs, followed by a subsequent turn to piety, corresponded to a broader normalization of structural violence and trauma. By the 2000s, as the economic dispossession of the rural Uyghur population intensified, the numbers of rural-to-urban migrants increased significantly. This physical movement, and increasing exposure to global Islamic movements, brought with it a major religious transformation. By 2014 Uyghur men had in large part stopped drinking alcohol. Among low-income farmers from the countryside, the musapir lifestyle had come to be associated with pious Islamic living—a way of giving up on the security of home life in the pursuit

290

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

of piety. In 2014 migrants often said that they came to the city to escape religious restrictions and persecution, which was much more severe in the countryside. The younger generation of musapir now often claimed the traveler’s lifestyle as a material manifestation of inner spiritual struggle. For the older generation, those who have been musapir since the 1990s, this same transformation provided them with social, religious, and psychic resources as they clung to their homes in the city. Now when they identified themselves as musapir and integrated their lives in a musapir mosque community, they were laying claim to an economic and religious position as devout Muslims who were attempting to escape the oppressive colonization in the countryside.4 The transformation of musapir sociality is both a response to historical circumstances and, in turn, a way of producing a fragile form of collective life within a religious economy—a social form that combines religiosity and economic support. What is important here is understanding that for Uyghur migrants precariousness does not necessarily produce an intentional form of resistance-oriented politics; rather, it creates a religious economy that offers temporary social stability. In doing so, reformist Islam is marshaled as a source of relative autonomy against the profound displacements of Uyghur life. As Talal Asad (2007) has noted, contemporary religious economies are the outcome of the intersection of global economic development and what he describes as a global religious revival. Throughout the developing world, emerging forms of religious practice have been linked to economic development and the individuation of work ethics. In Indonesia and Taiwan, Islamic and Buddhist training courses centered around training neoliberal workers in the individual responsibility of time management and productivity through “­spiritual reform” are widespread (Pazderic 2004; Rudnyckyj 2009). Pentecostalism has produced new forms of ethical practice and economic striving in Africa and Latin America (Bornstein 2005; O’Neill 2013). Scholarship in the Middle East has also queried the way Islamic practice is being adapted to capitalist frameworks (Tripp 2006; Kanna 2010; Schielke 2012). In my reading of this scholarship, the sort of religious economies that emerge tend in two directions. On the one hand, there are formally organized projects, such as those analyzed by Rudnyckyj, that “seek to simultaneously transform workers into more pious religious subjects and more productive economic subjects” (2009, 106).



“Travelers” in the City

291

On the other hand, as in the case of Kanna (2010), there are also more “flexible” assemblages where reformist religious practices themselves are pulled together in a highly subjective manner and then circulated among a collectivity. Due to political and historical circumstances, the religious economy of Uyghur migrants to the city tended toward the latter form. Unlike the formally institutionalized situations analyzed by Rudnyckyj (2009) in South East Asia, the Chinese authorities have prohibited all but one highly controlled Uyghur-language madrasa and implemented restrictions of all other forms of unapproved Islamic instruction such as training in modern Arabic and Turkish or translating unapproved texts into Uyghur from languages other than Chinese. These restrictions have prevented Uyghurs from developing formalized religious training courses that center on economic productivity, such as those found in Indonesia. These forms of religious control are further exacerbated by state control of more indigenous forms of Islamic practice, such as Sufi ecstatic rituals and pilgrimages to shrines. Since these religious practices allow for the gathering of large groups of people and foster master-student relations outside the purview of the state, they have also been largely eliminated as a potential threat to the sovereignty of the state. Because of restrictions on these modes of learning and practice, urban musapir mosque communities were often the only source of moral belonging in addition to a primary source of economic stability during the time that lowincome migrants had in the city. For this population, in this time and space, the musapir religious economy provided a network of lifelines that kept fragile lives tethered together. In fact, it was the very instability of their lives that gave the community form and content. Those who lived in the community experienced the space not only as a source of stress but also, as they said, a “comfort” (Uy. teselli)—a community to which they could turn when confronted with the frailty of joblessness or the stigma of becoming homeless. Often young Uyghur migrant men who lived in the community would remark that wandering through the alleyways around the mosque, browsing through piles of used cell phones and eating cheap two-yuan samsa, gave them a sense of relief from the stress of city life. They felt secure in knowing that if anything were to happen to them they would die having lived as “true” (Uy. rast) Muslims. They told me that although all they had was a concrete room to sleep in, at least here they were surrounded by other pious believers.

292

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

The space around the mosque afforded them a sense of autonomy in their everyday lives. Here I am thinking of autonomy not merely in the sense of the self-reliant liberal subject, but in relation to what Kathleen Millar (2014) has referred to as “relational autonomy,” a way of finding a communal grounds for hanging on to sociality. For Uyghur migrants, the mosque community allowed them to build and sustain relationships, develop social roles, and pursue life projects in the midst of uncertainty. To tease apart the threads of this religious economy, I turn now to the story of Emir and his wife Bahar and how they utilized the musapir community in their struggle to keep their home in Black Shell Mountain.5 A Uyghur Nail House and a Religious Economy The house was built into the hillside. When Emir and his wife Bahar had first built it in the early 1980s, they had designed it with sheep in mind. The main door was flanked on the right by a pen made out of old wooden doors. Built into the hillside there was a long hallway made of brick and adobe plaster. At the end of the hallway were coal, wood, and leaf roughage storage rooms surrounding a small courtyard. In the center of this open-air room was a large raised platform where family life took place during the summer. In the far southeastern corner, built farthest into the hillside, was an earthen room that became the center of cooking and family life during the winter. The kitchen was windowless, but Bahar had hung curtains on the wall opposing the eating platform (Uy. supa); on the opposite wall behind the platform was a large poster of what she identified as “a mosque in Saudi Arabia”: Masjid al-Nabawi, in Medina. They had bought it before the beginning of the “People’s War on Terror,” when the sale and purchase of such images were not yet forbidden. There was no running water in the neighborhood. All of the cooking was done over coal fires. On most days, if he was not praying and visiting with other older men at the mosque, Emir could be found puttering around in the rubble that surrounded their home (fig. 13). He would let his sheep out to “graze” and then, chasing them down, put them in an outdoor corral. Bahar spent much of her day preparing food and visiting with other women in the area around their home. Since in Uyghur society women do not participate in the public practice of piety by praying in mosques, Bahar and other women in the community often prayed at



“Travelers” in the City

293

home or in the presence of other women at nearby homes. At lunchtime, Emir and Bahar often shared their soup with me in a large tin bowl. Although there was often snow on the ground outside, the kitchen was cozy. I could feel why they did not want to leave. Sitting there with them it was easy to forget that we were in the center of the city surrounded by twenty-story apartment buildings. All around us was the rubble of the Uyghur neighborhood of Black Shell Mountain. Their house was a “nail house” that had not yet been demolished in the push to bring “control” (Ch. kongzhi) to the city of Ürümchi. They were some of the last of the twenty thousand inhabitants of the neighborhood to be relocated to government-subsidized apartment buildings or expelled from the city. They were fighting to keep their home by refusing to leave. Emir came to the city in 1974. His family back in Kashgar helped arrange for him and Bahar, a woman from a nearby village, to be married in 1982. They had three children. They supported themselves by raising their small flock of eleven sheep. Emir said that when the time was right he would sell them to butchers in the neighborhood. He said, “We have no pension, just the sheep.” It was because of this

Figure 13. Emir walking through the rubble in front of his home on Black Shell Mountain. Photo by Darren Byler.

294

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

that they have refused to take the government’s compensation for their house. “They offered us a 180,000 yuan discount on new housing in exchange for our house because it is so large—over two hundred square meters, but that means that we would still need to pay for the rest of the house (around 300,000 yuan), and of course we couldn’t keep sheep anymore,” he said. They did not want to move into the nearby government housing because they would not be able to live off the land as they have their whole lives. “All of the government officials have told us to leave, but we won’t do it,” he said. Bahar and Emir also worried that if they agreed to move, that they would be moved far away from the Black Shell Mountain mosque community where they had been active members for around twenty years. Emir said that because he had good relationships with the other Muslims in the community, he had a steady supply of leftover food from the restaurants in the neighborhood. The food waste that his son collected from the string of Uyghur restaurants that lined the street leading up to the mosque was what sustained them, he said. Without this “charity” (Uy. kheyr-sakhawet) and the space he needed to keep his sheep, he didn’t know what he would do. He said, “I have always been a musapir, but now we are truly becoming ‘without a home or hearth’ [Uy. öy-uchaqsiz].” In Uyghur the term musapir has a deep cultural meaning. As I noted earlier, in the original Arabic, the term refers simply to travelers. In the Uyghur context, though, it takes on the meaning of a stranger, an alien, a wanderer, or a refugee. In a material sense, people often take it to mean precisely what Emir said: they are becoming “those without home or hearth.” Yet the concept also has a psychic and religious dimension. One of the most common ways in which the term is used is in a proverb that people say when they are going through difficult times: “Until you have been a traveler, you can’t be a true Muslim” (Uy. Musapir bolmighiche, Musulman bolmas). This phrase draws on the Sufi dervish traditions of wandering mystics that have long been a major feature of the Uyghur practice of Islam.6 Since the very beginning of the Uyghur exposure to Islam in the ninth century, “the bringers of Islam” (who today are regarded as “saints” or wali) were those who traveled along Sufi networks from the Middle East and other parts of Central Asia. The Uyghur oral tradition of song and poetry itself was in large part developed by these musapir. Over the past centuries the musapir’s life became one of the dominant themes in both Uyghur classical



“Travelers” in the City

295

music and folk music. It was a theme that reflected the Sufi mystic’s search for “the beloved” (Divine Presence) in a metaphoric or spiritual sense. In the twelve modes (or muqam) of the classical Uyghur music canon, the figure of the musapir is often used in this sense to highlight the fleeting nature of life in this world and to cultivate a yearning for a higher truth. But, of course, the musapir tradition has long been grounded in material realities as well. It is also derived from the way poverty and family obligations forced young men who had learned a trade in their hometowns to travel across the desert to other oasis towns in search of a stable life. Popular songs and poetry on the theme of the musapir often evoke feelings of loneliness and desolation. For instance, in the traditional song “Adargül” the songwriter compares the musapir life to something worse than a rabbit hunted by a falcon: “Even the rabbit caught by a falcon has a burrow in the wilderness, / What does a musapir like me have in this place?” In most cases the figure of the musapir in Uyghur popular culture is used to convey a sense of life out of order. The uprootedness inherent in the musapir life gives way to feelings of hopelessness and reliance on spiritual faith that stem from a lack of social security. In my conversations with middle-class Uyghurs in Ürümchi, many would say they were “like a musapir,” drawing out the metaphorical distinction that they were like homeless travelers. Because of the personal autonomy that was afforded them by the security of urban institutional affiliation, middle-class Uyghurs were often less committed to the religious economy of migrant mosque communities. Lowincome Uyghurs, on the other hand, often spoke of themselves not as “like musapir” (Uy. musapirdek), but “as musapir” (Uy. musapir bolmaq) who were “without home or hearth” (Uy. öy-uchaqsiz). “The Last Farmer in Ürümchi”: A Failed Documentary Emir and Bahar’s positioning in the musapir community produced a tension between feelings associated with both poverty and autonomy. Although both of them acknowledged the poverty of the community and how the structural violence of the city was threatening to erase it, Emir was also clear about the agency he had shown in choosing his life path and his standing as a respected older man or “white beard” (Uy. aq saqal) in the community. Because of Emir’s age and because he was one of the first migrants to claim a space on the hillside and

296

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

build his own home, many Uyghurs in the community treated him with deference. What he stood to lose by leaving his home was more than simply a home. He felt he would also lose the social context of his life. His personal life path and social position were rooted in the mosque community. During one of the many times when I stopped by to see him and Bahar, Emir told me about how his life project had brought him to this place. He said that when he arrived in Ürümchi in 1974 he realized that things were quite difficult for people without official positions and regular food rations. For the first few years, he said, he lived on bread and water. Then, after Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping introduced economic reforms that changed his life. “In the 1980s I started doing some business, selling this and that, mostly fruit from Southern Xinjiang, and by 1984 I finally had enough to afford a wife. That was when she came along.” At this point in the story Bahar interjected, saying he should not be talking so openly about their private love life, but it always seemed as though she was really pleased that he was elaborating on it so much. He continued talking about their marriage and children, until after a few minutes Bahar jumped in again. She said, “Tell him more about what is really happening now.” Emir nodded, and began to discuss the present circumstances of their life in the community. He said: After the incidents in 2009 the government decided immediately that areas like [Black Shell Mountain] needed to be torn down. They came to us with some kind of notice. It was all written in Chinese. There was no Uyghur at all. We couldn’t really understand it. So after they posted it, we asked a woman from the community who had graduated from college to translate it for us. It had four or five points. The first one was that we had no legal right to live in this place. We didn’t have the letter [documents] we needed and we would have to move. The rest of the points talked about where we should move and how the government would help us with it. Of course they were just trying to scare us into moving. How can we not have a legal right to this place? I built it myself. So we decided to just wait for them to give us a new house or force us to move. We are just getting by on what I can make from raising my sheep and the one thousand yuan [my son] can give us from time to time. This is our life. These days the government workers are not coming every day. They say that in the end they know we will move, so they don’t need to waste their time with us. For now things are fine for us.



“Travelers” in the City

297

Although Emir said they were doing fine while waiting for the inevitable demolition of their home, when I began to ask about the implications of what he had said, he became more fearful. He was deeply worried that the state would force them to return to a village in rural Kashgar prefecture without any compensation and that they would be exiled from any sense of community support, since they had been disconnected from their hometowns for nearly forty years. One day I mentioned their story to a Uyghur documentary filmmaker named Mahmud. The filmmaker, himself the son of poor farmers in southern Xinjiang, was intrigued to hear that there was someone living in the city raising sheep as a livelihood. He asked if I would introduce him to Emir and Bahar so they could discuss the possibility of making a film about Emir’s life. Mahmud wanted to call the film “The Last Farmer in Ürümchi.” After we arrived and prayed for the household and Bahar served us tea, Mahmud broached the subject of making the film. He explained that he just wanted to focus on their life experiences. He said that he thought it would be interesting to viewers, because many people did not know that there is a community of “migrants” (Uy. kuchman) living in such poor conditions in the city. While Mahmud was careful not to describe them as musapir, given the stigma of homelessness that was often associated with the word, the connotations of what he said made it clear that this was how he was thinking about the documentary. While kuchman is simply a generic term that refers to someone who has moved to find work, in its current usage, the term musapir, when ascribed to someone else by another, has come to identify someone who is perceived as destitute and in need of pity. Emir was silent for a few moments after Mahmud said this. When he spoke he was quite animated. His upper lip trembled a bit, and he jumped up off the platform a few times as he gesticulated with his hands. He said: About this film thing, I decided that it isn’t a good idea. Since the story is about how we are “poor” farmers, once it gets onto the internet it will go everywhere and people will think I am complaining about my situation. It will make the government really unhappy and then they will come to me asking why I was willing to do what I did. They will investigate me and find out that my residence permit is still in Kashgar, even though my children’s permits are here; they will find out that I don’t have a green card. And then they will make us leave. Also none of

298

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

the houses here in this community have a “lease” (Uy. het). I don’t have one either, so they will just take my home away.

Mahmud said he understood what Emir meant about the sensitivity of making a film like that, and he said he would reconsider the theme. Emir said again that he thought it was not a good idea. He said: “The police think that the people who live here are ‘too dangerous,’ so if we make a film about this place they will definitely notice. It is not possible.” What Emir was alluding to was the way Black Shell Mountain was referred to as one of the epicenters of Uyghur religious extremism and terrorism after the civil unrest of 2009.7 Many Han inhabitants of the city referred to it as a space that if you were to enter at night, you would never come out alive. This reading of the space as the locus of religious “extremism” and “low-quality” (Ch. suzhi hen di) Uyghur migrants was something that migrants like Emir had internalized. He knew that those who lived there were perceived as potential threats, and any public statement against government land seizures could be read as a call to “terrorism.” As Emily Yeh (2012) has pointed out regarding the way “terrorism” has been attached to Tibetan self-immolators, Chinese “terrorism” has come to be “any perceived threat to state territorial sovereignty, regardless of its actual methods or effects vis-à-vis harm to others.” Yet it was not just the threat of state reprisals that had bothered Emir. The way Mahmud had framed the potential film as the story of “poor migrants” (Uy. namrat kuchmanlar) and the musapir identification that this framing implied had also bothered Emir. For Uyghurs, the term musapir can be used as a way of identifying oneself, but it can quickly be perceived as an insult when it is ascribed by others. In fact, Emir thought of himself as having a degree of autonomy within the musapir religious community; it was only when viewed from the outside that he felt himself being stigmatized, and only when viewed by the police that he felt himself being threatened. Emir’s refusal to allow a documentary to be made about his life speaks to both the precariousness of his position and the limited forms of agency he possessed within the musapir community. It also draws attention to the limits of representation of Uyghur migrant sociality under the Chinese political regime. As much as Emir wanted his story to be told, he needed to tell it on his own terms. On a subsequent visit he asked me to tell his story in a way that disguised who he was as much as possible. He said: “As long as they can’t see my face and they don’t know



“Travelers” in the City

299

my name, they can’t hurt us.” To his mind, this would not be possible if he allowed a documentary to be made about his life story. Islam and Musapir Sociality Emir said that for most of his life he did not pray five times a day. He said that it was really only after his way of life was threatened after 2009 that he really decided to take religious practice so seriously. He said that many people in the community became more religious after the violence. Many young Uyghur men were killed or disappeared, children were left without fathers, and the state began to demolish their houses. He said that before 2009 it was normal to be poor and in search of work, but now things were much worse. Out of the population of male migrants who had been there before the violence “only the old men were left.” He said that more young, largely male, migrants had come from the South since 2009, and they also influenced the community. After 2009, when 3G networks were established across southern Xinjiang, many young Uyghurs had become involved in transnational Islamic piety movements that were shared via social media apps. Emir did not understand how those apps worked, but he said that many of the leaders in the mosque community were influenced by such teachings, and he had embraced them as well. He said that almost everyone that attended the mosque was now quite serious about practicing Islam as devoutly as possible. People no longer smoked cigarettes or drank alcohol. Instead they organized their day around visiting the mosque five times per day, or meeting in prayer rooms if they were too far away. As a result, the mosque had become known as one of the centers of reformist forms of Islam in the city. As he became older and the community faced greater and greater threats, it had become the center of his life too; he spent a great deal of each day talking about Islam with other older men at the mosque. Often younger members of the community would stop by to visit with Emir and Bahar, bringing them gifts of food if they had extra or sharing a meal with them if they were hungry. Although the partially demolished neighborhood was in the center of the city, the pace of life was slower here. Strangers were noticed when they walked by because everyone knew each other. It was a community and people protected their own. Nine months after I met Emir for the first time, he told me that they were being forced to move in fifteen days. He said:

300

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

Our time has become short. Next month we are moving into a big building on the outskirts of the city in the Horse Track neighborhood [Saimachang], over by the lake. There are thirty floors in that building! I can’t take the sheep with us, so I’ll have to sell them. I’ve been raising sheep here for almost forty years. There is nothing in the new houses. They’re just bare. Of course they will have water inside, so it’ll be more convenient, but we will have to pay for everything: water, heat, electricity. It’s a money-eating house. The worst thing about this situation is that there is no mosque in that area. I will have to go on the bus to the mosque in front of Xinjiang University during the week and only come here on Friday. We have no choice. This is the government we have. They just take what they want and tell us what to do. The problem is that this new house really isn’t ours. They are just letting us live in it indefinitely. If they want to kick us out they can. We can’t sell it. We have no choice. This government just takes from us Uyghurs and gives to the Han. They are making our lives harder and harder. We don’t have any choice. I have pain from all sides, but God will provide. (Emphasis mine)

For Emir, the most difficult thing about moving into a “money-eating” apartment was not merely the financial uncertainty of needing to pay for utilities or even the fact that he would not be able to continue to practice his livelihood. He had even accepted the fact that the house he had built by hand was going to be reduced to rubble. What was most difficult about the move was the way they were going to be disconnected from their mosque community. Before, they had neighbors from the mosque to depend on for material, psychic, and religious support; they had a daily ritual practice that gave their life a sense of rhythm and purpose. Both Emir and Bahar were highly skilled in caring for their family’s basic needs of warmth and food around the family hearth. Now as they moved into government housing the sense of autonomy, what he referred to as “choice,” and the security that comes from being able to provide for the basic material needs of one’s family, was being placed at the mercy of a “money-eating” house and the further potential for indebtedness. In a similar way, they were also going to lose the sense of social security they felt within the musapir community. Their place in Black Shell Mountain had allowed them to feel as though they had a social role and a sense of dignity as experienced travelers in a community of travelers. As in the proverb regarding the way



“Travelers” in the City

301

musapir life was a prerequisite of “true Muslim experience,” the depth of their experience provided them with a claim to religious, psychic, and material maturity. For them, being musapir had provided them with a way of functioning in a religious economy on the margins of the city. It had given them a sense of “comfort” (teselli) in the midst of precariousness. On May 1, 2015, their house and hearth were demolished. I cannot will myself to be who I want to be, This has nothing to do with whether I am fat or thin. I am alone in my own hometown, I am a musapir in my own ­hometown, This has nothing to do with my moral character. —Abdurehim Ötkür, 2006

In this chapter I have outlined the emergence of a new religious economy that Uyghur migrants turned toward as self-identified musapir or travelers in 2014. By identifying as pious Muslims without a home to which to return, they turned to a type of everyday Islam that responded to the economic and political precariousness of life as the target during the initial stages of the “People’s War on Terror.” Being part of the Uyghur musapir community provided the grounds for a temporary politics of holding on to life even as it was being taken away. The story I have discussed in this chapter is an example how the religious economy of the musapir community was lived. Although the older couple had built a home in the city over the past forty years, in the current climate the community was able to sustain their way of life only for a short time. Yet, despite the ultimate failure of the community to cradle their lives, the Uyghur migrants who lived in the rubble of informal settlements in Ürümchi nevertheless had a certain form of autonomy. This autonomy was limited and contingent, since it was opposed by the state. This is one reason the Uyghur word musapir does not connote the same meaning as the Chinese term mangliu. Both terms could be translated as “traveler” or “blind wanderer,” but they emerge from different forms of cultured thought and social positions within the Chinese nation. For one group, the lifestyle can result in a form of short-term economic stability and moral comfort followed by social erasure; for the other group, a quite similar lifestyle can result

302

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

in long-term economic stability and citizenship in Xinjiang. For Uyghur migrants, becoming a musapir is something that arose from a lack of access to permanent housing, employment, and freedom of religion, something that in general is not the case for Han migrants to Xinjiang. This differential distribution stems from the forms of governance that regulate Uyghur lives both in the city and the countryside. At the same time, though, in 2014 the autonomy of the musapir community did delay the direct power of the state to determine how Uyghurs live. Emir and Bahar’s investment in the community allowed them to extend their stay in the city. When a documentary filmmaker attempted to make an explicit representation of their struggle, they felt compelled to refuse to put their story on public display. The potential stigma of being represented as poor as well as the threat implied by an explicit representation of their noncompliance, made them uncomfortable and fearful. Caught between markers of poverty and representations of religious “extremism” or resistance, they could not allow their faces to be represented. They felt their visibility might exceed the limits of the autonomy afforded by the musapir community. In the end, though, as Abdurehim Ötkür alludes to in the Cultural Revolution–era epigraph to this conclusion, the fate of a musapir is often predetermined. The musapir lifestyle is not a chosen or desired lifestyle, as much as it is one that a migrant accepts as a way of finding a temporary social role. In the end, Emir and Bahar lost their house and were forced to leave the community and enter the state system as precarious tenants in government housing. The failure of representation that musapir sociality points us toward calls into question the work of film and ethnography in attempting to document the hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs that have lost their homes in Ürümchi over the past decade. As much as we Western liberals might feel the impulse to “save” Uyghur travelers from their suffering, we are unable to do so. On a deeper level, then, the failure of the documentary and this chapter to hold their lives in place, to make them matter politically, reflects the limits of the autonomy that the musapir are able to achieve. They are only able to tell a certain kind of story and have their lives represented in particular ways. Often there are no happy endings. As with the community itself, a representation of their lives is only a temporary amplification of their voices. Trying to tell and listen to their stories is a powerful reminder that ethnography always fails. Yet there is also a comfort in being close to these stories, even if just for a time.



“Travelers” in the City

303

In the same way, in the religious economy of the musapir community there is also a temporary sense of comfort and relief from the control of the state. As in Millar’s case, there was a “politics of detachment” that was not simply the “anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation” that Guy Standing (2011, 19) has identified as the conditions of labor precariousness. Instead, Uyghur migrants actively organized a parallel economy of mutual assistance. The precarious community of the musapir, a source of both stigma and comfort, allowed bonds to be built between subjects and for life projects to be extended if not sustained. It also allowed Uyghur traditional knowledge of Islam to adapt and change under new conditions of oppression, dispossession, and exposure to global religious movements. The demolition zone thus became more than a site of ruin; for a time, the religious economy it sustained allowed forms of relational autonomy to flourish. Notes The author would like to thank Rachel Harris, Guangtian Ha, and Maria Ja­schok for their support and suggestions as well as the many Uyghur friends who shared their expertise and knowledge regarding migrant life and the role of the musapir in Uyghur discourse. 1. Musafir also means “traveler” in Persian, Urdu, and Hindi. 2. Given Uyghur patriarchal traditions, young women are less likely to be sent to the city to work since such activity may have a negative effect on their moral reputation. At times though, women are sent to work in the city as maids in the households of relatives or the relatives of neighbors. In the past, male migrants would often marry women from their local village and bring her to the city, however, due to the conditions of policing in 2014, many low-income, undocumented migrants avoided rural–urban travel at all costs given the likelihood of detention. 3. The “People’s War on Terror” began in May 2014 after a series of violent incidents involving Uyghur and Han civilians both in Ürümchi and in major cities in Eastern China. See Zhang 2014. 4. As in Cabeiri Robinson’s work (2013) on the making of muhajir in Azad Kashmir, migration becomes something of a form of jihad or “struggle” within the context of a religious hijrah (exile) in the city. Here I am positing, much as Robinson argues that the Muslims she encountered in her work use the concept of the muhajir, that Uyghur migrants use the concept of the musapir as a way of reconciling new forms of Sunni devotion with older indigenous Sufi traditions and as a way of finding a sense of belonging within a religious economy. It is

304

Muslim Mobilities and Immobilities

worth mentioning that the terms musapir and muhajir can be used interchangeably at times in the South Asian context. I did not, however, find that Uyghurs used the term muhajir in everyday discourse. 5. I have used pseudonyms for all individuals in this chapter in order to protect their identities. 6. See Rachel Harris (2008) and Nathan Light (2008) for a discussion of Uyghur Sufi tradition and its relationship with classical Uyghur poetry. 7. On July 5, 2009, a large-scale violent incident involving Uyghur and Han civilians broke out in Ürümchi after Uyghur high school and college students took to the streets demanding justice for Uyghur migrant workers who were killed by Han migrant workers at a factory in eastern China. Over the next weeks and months nearly two hundred Han civilians were killed, thousands of Uyghur and Han migrants were injured, and thousands of Uyghur suspects were disappeared. This incident also became the pretext for the demolition of the homes of nearly three hundred thousand Uyghur migrants in the city as a way of “controlling” the Uyghur migrant population. See Human Rights Watch (2009); Hansen (2017).

References Asad, Talal. 2007. “Explaining the Global Religious Revival: The Egyptian Case.” In “Religion and Society: An Agenda for the 21st Century,” special issue, International Studies in Religion and Society 5:101–121. Bornstein, Erika. 2005. The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hansen, Lauren F. 2017. “Chinese Construction at the New Frontier: Development, Social Change, and the Government of Uyghur Identity in Urban Xinjiang.” PhD diss., Cornell University. Harris, Rachel A. 2008. The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Hoshur, Memtimin. 2015. “The Musapir’s Tavern” (Musapirning qawaqxana). Translated by Darren Byler and Anwar Abdursal. Unpublished ms. Human Rights Watch. 2009. Enforced Disappearances in the Wake of Xinjiang’s Protests. October 20, 2009. https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/10/20/we-are -afraid-even-look-them/enforced-disappearances-wake-xinjiangs-protests. Kanna, Ahmed. 2010. “Flexible Citizenship in Dubai: Neoliberal Subjectivity in the Emerging ‘City-Corporation.’” Cultural Anthropology 25 (1): 100–129. Light, Nathan. 2008. Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xin­ jiang. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Millar, Kathleen. 2014. “The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology 29 (1): 32–53. O’Neill, Kevin Lewis. 2013. “Left Behind: Security, Salvation, and the Subject of Prevention.” Cultural Anthropology 28 (2): 204–226.



“Travelers” in the City

305

Ötkür, Abdurehim. 2006. “Four Stanza Poems (Written in the Ten-Year Period of Disaster)” (Rub’iylar (on yilliq apet mezgilide)). Translated by Darren Byler and Anonymous. In The Poems of Abdurehim Ötkür (Abdurehim Ötkür shı’irliri). Ürümchi, Xinjiang: Xinjiang People’s Publishing House, 127. Pazderic, Nickola. 2004. “Recovering True Selves in the Electro‐Spiritual Field of Universal Love.” Cultural Anthropology 19 (2): 196–225. Robinson, Cabeiri. 2013. Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2009. “Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 24 (1): 104–141. Schielke, Samuli. 2012. “Capitalist Ethics and the Spirit of Islamization in Egypt.” In Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes: An Anthropology of Everyday Religion, edited by Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec, 131–145. Oxford: Berghahn. Smith Finley, J. 2019. “Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang: Has PRC Counter-terrorism Evolved into State Terror?” Central Asian Survey 38 (1), 1–26. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Tripp, Charles. 2006. Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yeh, Emily T. 2012. “On ‘Terrorism’ and the Politics of Naming.” Hot Spots (blog), Cultural Anthropology online. April 8, 2012. https://culanth.org /fieldsights/on-terrorism-and-the-politics-of-naming. Zhang Dan. 2014. “Xinjiang’s Party Chief Wages ‘People’s War’ against T ­ errorism.” CNTV, May 26, 2014. http://english.cntv.cn/2014/05/26/ARTI140109020780 8564.shtml.

Contributors

Michael C. BROSE is currently director of the East Asian Studies Center and Pan Asia Institute at Indiana University. He researches and writes on the social history of Mongol dynasty China and the historic and contemporary Chinese Muslim community in southeastern China. Darren BYLER is postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He researches the dispossession of ethnoracial Muslim minorities through forms of surveillance and digital capitalism in China and the global South. His first book project, Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculine Violence in a Chinese City, examines emerging forms of media, infrastructure, economics, and politics in the Uyghur homeland in Chinese Central Asia. His current project considers how biotechnical surveillance systems can be tied to new forms of control both in China and in sites across the world where these technologies are exported. Before joining the University of Colorado, he was a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Rahile DAWUT obtained her PhD on Uyghur Sufi shrine culture in 1998 at Beijing’s Nationalities University. She has published two books and more than thirty research articles in Uyghur, Chinese, and English. As professor at the School of Humanities at Xinjiang University she trained a new generation of Uyghur anthropologists and folklorists, many of whom are now completing PhDs in universities abroad. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania; Indiana University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Washington. She has also been a prominent research partner with SOAS, University of London. As director of the Folklore Research Center at Xinjiang University, she received numerous grants and awards from Chinese and international funders, including the Institute of Ismaili Studies (UK), the Royal Anthropology Institute (UK), the Firebird Foundation (USA), and the Chinese Social Sciences Foundation (PRC). Since December 2017 she has

307

308 Contributors been detained indefinitely without charge in Xinjiang’s system of mass internment camps. GE Caixia is the resident ahong/imam of Houfu Minli Women’s Mosque in Zhengzhou, Henan. Guangtian HA is assistant professor of religion at Haverford College. He received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. Prior to joining Haverford, he was a postdoctoral research fellow and research associate of the School of Arts at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is currently preparing a book manuscript titled Fragile Transcendence: Sound and Salvation in Sino-Sufism. Rachel HARRIS is professor of ethnomusicology, and director of research for the School of Arts, at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on cultural policy in China and religious and expressive culture among the Uyghurs. She was principal investigator on the “Sounding Islam in China” project (2014–2017), and her new monograph Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam is published by Indiana University Press. She currently leads a British ­Academy Sustainable Development project working with Uyghur diaspora communities in Kazakhstan. HEW Wai Weng is fellow at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, the National University of Malaysia (IKMAS, UKM). He has published on Chinese Muslim identities, Hui migration, and urban middle-class Muslim aspirations in Malaysia and Indonesia. He is the author of Chinese Ways of Being Muslim: Negotiating Ethnicity and Religiosity in Indonesia (NIAS Press, 2018). Maria JASCHOK is senior research associate, Contemporary China S­ tudies Programme, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of ­Oxford, and visiting professor in the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, King’s ­College, University of London. She is currently working on a study of voice, gender, and silence, based on interpretations of chants from China’s women’s mosque traditions as well as on something more akin to a political memoir, a return to the recent past and her participation in a key moment of Chinese feminist intervention in mainstream education. MU Qian received his PhD in ethnomusicology from SOAS, University of London. He did a year’s fieldwork among Uyghur Sufis in Xinjiang, northwestern China, before completing a dissertation titled “Experiencing God in Sound: Music and Meaning in Uyghur Sufism.” His research is part of “Sounding Islam in China,” a multisite ethnographic study project of SOAS

Contributors

309

supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Mu is a concert producer and has presented concerts of Uyghur music in Beijing and Shanghai. He is also the Chinese translator of Alan P. Merriam’s book Anthropology of Music. Francesca ROSATI is a PhD candidate in the Department of Area Studies at Leiden University in a conjoint program with the Department of Sociology of the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). Her interest areas include China minority studies, gender studies, madrasa education, and the embodiment of religious consciousness. She is currently undertaking research for her doctoral dissertation, titled “‘I Pray, Therefore I Am’: Muslim Women’s Religious Practice in Northwestern China. The Case of Quranic Women’s Schools in Linxia.” She has published a monograph on the history of Islam in China (L’Islam in Cina: Dalle origini alla Repubblica ­Popolare, 2017). SHUI Jingjun is a sociologist, previously senior research fellow at the Henan Academy of Social Sciences, Zhengzhou, Henan. She has conducted research on Hui culture and Chinese religious culture in general. Her first preliminary findings on women’s mosques were published in Huizu Yanjiu in 1996. She has since collaborated with Maria Jaschok, coauthoring, among other books, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam (Curzon, 2000), as well as numerous articles. Elke SPIESSENS (MA) is a PhD researcher in the fields of Chinese Studies and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Münster (Germany) and Leiden (The Netherlands). She is working on her PhD research project, “How to Be Muslim in Xinjiang: China’s Policy towards Uyghur Islamic Education,” at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster, Germany. Alex STEWART is visiting lecturer in anthropology at the University of ­California, San Diego. His research encompasses transnational religious and ethnic identity, religion and modernity, and comparative multiculturalism. His first monograph, Chinese Muslims and the Global Ummah: Islamic Revival and Ethnic Identity among Hui of Qinghai Province features some of the first ethnographic research into the Tabligh-i Jama’at and Salafiyya movements in modern China and ethnic Han converts to Islam. He teaches courses on the anthropology of religion, multiculturalism in the United States, the sociocultural foundations of human development, and modern Chinese society. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA in anthropology with a minor in Chinese language and literature from George Washington University.

310 Contributors SU Min is associate professor at Yunnan University, China. She got her PhD in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2010. Her research interests include anthropology of religion, Muslim-Hui communities and ethnic studies, and anthropology of food. Focusing on the imagination of world religion in modern China, she mainly did fieldwork among Hui communities in southwestern Shandong province. Now she is in Yunnan Province for new research on the transnational flow of food between China and Malaysia, exploring the interactions among technology, religion, and exchange systems in modern society. Thomas WHITE is lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 2016. His research explores the relationship between contemporary social, environmental, and infrastructural transformations in rural China. He is currently completing a monograph, based on his PhD fieldwork, on the role of animals in the politics of the environment and development in western Inner Mongolia. At the same time, as part of the “Roadwork” project at the University of Zurich, he is also carrying out new ethnographic research on the effects of road infrastructure expansion on the lives of pastoralists in Inner Mongolia. Yang YANG is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Asia Research Institute in the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in human geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focuses on transnational religious networks and the politics of ethnoreligious identity in northwestern China. Her dissertation uses an ethnographic approach to analyze the impacts that Hui Muslims’ grassroots connections to non-Chinese Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East have on the Hui’s everyday lives in Xi’an, China. Her current research examines how the Hui diaspora in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, contributes to grassroots connections between China and Malaysia and how Malaysia has become Huis’ new Muslim role model, serving as their preferred destination for halal tourism and their style references for Muslim fashion. Notably, this project analyzes how ethnoreligious identities and mobility intersect in the contexts of migration and the revival of Islamic values in both cultural and political contexts on a global scale. Ruslan YUSUPOV is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is interested in entanglements and problematics of religion and secularism, of ethics and politics, and of violence and hope. He did two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Chinese Muslim town that is known for the outbreak of violence during the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent Islamic revival and that the state recently

Contributors

311

declared a seat of ethnoreligious radicalism and extremism. His dissertation describes how residents of this town attempt to secure a place for Islam in the wider Chinese society in the wake of Islamophobia, state intervention, and the war on terror.

Index

Page numbers in boldface type refer to illustrations. activism: political, 38, 48, 54n1, 261 activist, 240, 246, 260, 262n4; Salafi, 173n25 agency, 19, 23, 56, 91, 167, 200, 203, 283, 295, 298; female, 212; of men, 196; religious, 12, 166, 202n9; travel, 234; women’s, 164 ahong, 23, 55n8, 78–79, 85, 88, 176, 180–202, 208–209, 212, 219, 263, 308; Hui, 87; licensed, 50. See also imam; women, ahong al-Azhar, 42, 252–254, 260, 262n11; Azharites, 176 alcohol, 44, 86, 120, 122, 233, 235, 289, 299; ban on, v, 16–17, 57–73, 107 anthropology, 11, 30, 32, 73, 129, 182, 202–203, 222, 243, 304–305, 307–310; American, 6; ethnomusicology and, 280; folklore and, 7; of Islam, 20, 29, 175; of the Uyghur, 10, 113, 263, 282 anti-religious extremism campaign, 13, 19, 121–122 Arabic, 21, 38–39, 47–50, 54, 72, 135, 143, 151, 160, 171, 185, 191, 201, 205, 209, 218, 220, 234–­ 235, 238, 242, 250–251, 253, 258, 286, 294; and Chinese, 196; English and, 229; Girls’ School, 159; and Persian, 184, 190, 193–194; prayer, 119; removal of,

14; school, 75; script, 140–141, 163, 167, 174, 179; “standard,” 18; training programs, 162; and Turkish, 291; zhong’a, 161 Arabization, 16, 59, 163, 167 Beijing, 7, 31, 90–91, 116, 169, 174, 176, 252, 271–273, 283, 307, 309; Hui Muslims in, 232; Mecca and, 10, 30, 73, 109, 151, 243; “Ox Street,” 11; Ox Street Mosque, 237–238 Belt and Road Initiative, 26–27, 32, 132, 145, 148, 176, 228, 236; One Belt One Road, 151, 167 Buddhism, 76, 83, 89, 91; Tibetan, 78, 80, 89 Buddhist, 76, 80, 82–83, 85, 290; Tibetan, 75, 89; Uyghurs, 8 call to prayer, 2, 127, 185, 214, 215 Central Asia, 1, 4, 8, 10, 18, 26, 30–33, 91, 122, 129n2, 130, 134, 247, 251–253, 260, 263, 265, 279, 282–283, 305, 307; and the Middle East, 157, 294; religious institutions, 252; Sufis, 37, 275 chant, 54, 180, 184–202, 204, 207– 209, 213, 218, 284, 308; among Hui women, 6; Islamic, 23–24. See also recitation

313

314 Index Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 2, 16–17, 48, 50, 67, 155, 257 Chishtiyya, 266. See also Sufi circulation: of chants, 207; maintaining identity, 132, 157; networks of, 9, 228, 241; of styles, 118, 120; of texts, 163 community, 16, 17, 18, 54, 194; of believers, 150, 169; diasporic community, 257; ethnoreligious 59, 61; and mosque, 2, 158, 171n11, 285, 287−288; global, 38−40, 46, 109, 118, 251; production of, 112, 113; transnational religious, 108; Yunnan Hui, 136, 149−150. See also Jama’at Confucianism, 10, 16, 168 consumption, 10; of alcohol, 57−69; halal, 131, 132−133; and media engagement, 118, 128; and representation, 21−22, 97, 112 “convenience cards,” 27, 287 cosmopolitanism, 26, 104, 117 Cultural Revolution, 13, 16, 61, 84−85, 155, 247 da’wah, 39, 47−48, 65 dhikr, 43, 46, 54n5, 274; as performance, 277; and women’s chanting, 204 diaspora, 26, 230; Uyghur, 115, 245−246, 255−261 Dongxiang, 4, 84, 85, 87 drug addiction, 18, 61, 62, 65, 66 Dungan, 4, 262n3; Dungan Revolt, 173n24 East Turkestan, 254–259 e-commerce: “E-commerce Dynamics,” 151; e-commerce platforms, 132, 144; and halal food, 143−144, 238; marketing, 132, 133−134; and “Taobao Village,” 145; websites, 146−147; Yunnan Salaam Group, 133, 137−140 education: “center of moral education,” 61; education initiatives, 14;

failure of Islamic education, 26, 84; female mosque-based, 24, 180; Jahriyya women’s, 206; and marketing, 135, 136; Muslim Mongols, 85; oral traditions, 185; and poverty, 47−48; “reeducation camps,” 5, 7, 14, 27, 121, 274, 278, 286; Salafi, 39; online, 145−150; Uyghur educational opportunities, 248 Egypt, 26, 42, 115, 249; piety movement, 45; wedding celebrations, 127 emotion, 23, 116, 118, 119–120, 186, 198, 213 entrepreneurialism, 18, 82; Hui urban, 98, 100, 133, 139, 230; translocal, 26, 230, 234; women’s, 173n27 ethnography, 5, 6−7, 10, 11, 23, 28, 75−76, 227, 302; challenges, 21; and collaboration, 180; as experience, 198; of gender, 22−24, 25; of religion, 181−182 ethno-nationalism, 9. See also nationalism extremism, 2, 13,17, 70, 111, 167, 267, 274, 284, 298, 302; anti-religious extremism campaigns, 19, 26, 58, 121, 122; foreign extremism, 120, 123; and Islamic schools, 262n11 fashion, 22, 26, 96, 97−99, 97, 106−109, 116−118, 131, 237. See also “self-fashioning” feminism, 22; feminist theory, 181−182; and Jahriyya women, 220. See also gender Gansu, 1, 38 68, 171n1, 171n5; Education Department, 168−169; female Islamic education, 171n4; hijabs in, 46; Linxia City, 155– 157; literacy rate, 166; and migration, 227, 229, 235 Gedimu (qadim), 38, 157, 171n12, 172n20; conversions, 163

Index 315 gender, 4, 12, 19, 70, 220; ethnography of gender, 22−25; gender-based pedagogies, 185; gender complementarity, 183; “gender-critical turn,” 12; gender identity, 189, 216; gender segregation, 122, 124, 128, 166, 209; gendered silence, 200; gendered spaces, 180, 216, 221; intersection of, 198; of media, 213, 218; and religious agency, 166; of sound, 205, 209. See also feminism Germany, 245, 246, 250, 254, 255, 257 government: “alcohol-prohibiting team,” 60; central, 1, 57; discourses, 16; and freedom of religious belief, 67–71, 126; and governmentality, 76; Linxia, 50, 173n79; moral discourses, 63−67; policies, 4, 14, 97, 120, 131, 169, 246, 248; policies in Shadian, 58, 59, 61−63; to “sinicize” religion, 98, 242; and “superstition,” 81; and urban development, 98, 136, 284, 300, 302; Ürümchi, 292, 293–299; and Uyghur mobility, 269, 272−282; and Uyghur traditional culture, 123, 125, 268; Xinjiang, 13, 249, 271; Yunnan, 137, 144−145, 148 hadith, 39, 44, 45, 54n2, 160, 169, 184, 248 haj, 9, 16, 253 halal, 4, 21, 58, 127−128, 140; and e-commerce, 132, 144; food economy, 132, 157, 228; marketing and identity, 141−144; restaurants, 232−236; Salaam Group, 133, 139−140; space, 231; trade fairs, 150. See also qingzhen hälqä-sohbät, 266, 267, 274, 275, 276 Han Chinese, 16, 38, 90n11, 90n14, 102; converts, 52, 229 “Hanicization,” 41. See also sinicization haram, 16, 141 harmony, 204; social harmony, 169, 172n22

headscarves, 46, 58, 99, 113, 234. See also veils Henan, 3, 4, 6, 23, 159, 187, 192, 207, 225, 227, 230 heritage, 7, 12, 134; intangible cultural, 80, 81, 82, 89, 149; state cultural policies, 75, 82; Uyghur heritage, 258; Uyghur Sufi heritage, 267−268, 274, 278 Hong Kong, 11, 27, 187, 188, 268, 269, 271 Hong Le Fu, 212, 215, 217, 218 Hotung, 77, 83, 84 housing: in Ürümchi, 287, 294, 300, 302; in Xining, 51 Hui Muslims: ethnography, 5; gender identities, 22−25; Henan women and songbook, 180; history of naming, 7−9, 77, 84, 85, 89n4, 90n5, 262n3; Islamic revival, 1, 17−20, 37−40, 41, 46, 54; Linxia Qur’anic schools, 155; migration, 225; Muslim diversity, 4; and Muslim Mongols, 79, 85; representation, 20−22, 95; scholars, 4, 6, 79; Shadian ban on alcohol, 59; state’s role, 13−17, 28n1; structural position, 5; studies, 9−13; translocal mobility, 25−28; uprising, 76 Ikhwani, 2, 21, 38, 54; Yihewani, 18 illegal religious activities, 15, 161, 269, 271 imaginaries, 20–22, 98, 101, 107, 109, 250–251 imam, 18, 37–39, 42–43, 47, 53, 55n8, 72n3, 83–88, 90n9, 99, 121–122, 128, 143, 148, 160, 164, 168, 173n22, 173n26, 204, 211, 228, 230, 234–238, 240, 248–250, 258, 260, 277. See also ahong Indonesia, 96, 107, 110, 131, 232, 234, 237, 240, 243, 290–291, 305; Chinese Indonesians, 233; Malaysia and, 225–231, 236, 241–243, 308; Qur’anic recitation in, 214, 222. See also Malaysia

316 Index Inner Mongolia, v, 3, 20, 74, 82, 85–86, 90, 92, 310; Baotou in, 76 Internationalization: of Islam, 12; of Orientalist representations of the Muslim world, 107 Islamic revival: in China, 2–5, 11, 17, 21, 23, 37–38, 44, 54, 58, 74, 107–109, 183–184; global, 37, 109; in the Middle East, 126. See also religious economy, revival Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM), 227, 235 Islamization, 63, 305; of China, 58; of China’s Northwest, 174, 179; re-Islamization, 155, 171 Islamophobia, 17, 58, 311 Jahriyya, 2, 24, 30, 172, 204–221. See also Menhuan; Sufi Jakarta, 225, 228, 230, 232–234, 239 Jama’at, or jama’ah (congregation, assembly), 171, 173 jingge, 184–186, 188–190, 192–196, 198, 201–202, 208 Kashgar, 32, 117–118, 122–123, 125, 127–130, 247–248, 264–265, 293, 297; kashgarlik, 8 Kazakh, 4, 8; China’s, 28, 246 Kazakhstan, 252, 308 Khotan, 125–126 Khufiyya, 2, 157, 172. See also Menhuan; Sufi Korean, 26, 100, 102–103, 116, 272–273, 28 Kuala Lumpur, 103, 225, 227, 230, 232, 235–237, 239–240, 310 Kunming, 31, 135–137, 140–141, 143, 145, 148–149; train station knife attack, 13, 17, 58, 70 Kyrgyz, 4; Kyrgyzstan, 4, 18, 115, 122, 129, 252 Lanzhou, 1, 3, 30–31, 156, 177, 179, 225, 230, 233, 235 law, 29, 57–60, 66–71, 161, 166, 176, 186, 202, 243, 264, 281;

international, 262n14; Islamic, 10, 173; secular, 133. See also shari’a Linxia, 1–3, 10–11, 14, 16, 25, 41–42, 54n4, 55, 156–179, 309; “little Mecca,” 1, 38, 155 listening, 45, 111–129, 180–181, 186, 197–198, 214–215; deep, 213; gendered 207, 210–213 loudspeaker, 214–216, 222 Madā’ih, 208, 213, 217–218 madrasa, 16, 27, 64, 175, 178, 251, 309; in Kyrgyzstan, 18; Uyghurlanguage, 291 Malaysia, 4, 26, 95, 106, 108, 110, 131, 148, 226–244, 253, 308, 310; ethnic dress, 101, 103; and Indonesia, 225 marriage, 32, 103, 105, 125, 130, 158, 296; interethnic, 12; intermarriage between different denominations, 163; ritual, 121, 157. See also weddings mäshräp, 267–268, 273–276, 282 Mecca, 9–10, 30, 42–43, 72–73, 109, 115, 121, 151, 243, 251, 253; China’s Little, 1, 38, 155–156, 160, 169–170 media, 13, 26, 82, 101, 112–120, 127–128, 130, 220, 222, 251, 307; digital, 12; the gender of, 213; social, 4, 18, 19–20, 95, 184, 188, 197, 207, 210, 219, 240– 241, 256, 274, 299; state, 5, 58, 125 Menhuan, 157, 160–161, 163–164, 177 migrant, 42, 295; Chinese, 233–234, 242; Hui, 11, 47, 226–232, 234, 237–242, 262; Uyghur, 27, 253, 284–292, 297–304; workers, 64, 209, 236. See also musapir; refugee modernity, 4, 10, 39, 55, 72, 103, 114, 116, 156, 171n4, 175, 202, 222, 209; Muslim, 108

Index 317 molla, 245, 247–251, 258–260, 262n5, 262n7, 262n8; da-, 247–250 mukhammas, 205, 208, 210, 212 muqam: 267–269, 274–278, 283, 295; Uyghur Twelve, 127, 275, 282, 304 musapir, 285–292, 294–295, 297–304 music, 20, 27, 30–31, 116–118, 122–125, 186, 214, 221–222, 256, 267–268, 273, 275–283, 308; “halal,” 127; Mongolian, 87; Uyghur, 114, 121, 274, 295, 309; Uyghur Sufi musicians, 7, 269 naadam, 83, 85, 86, 87; and Mongol nationality, 88−89 Naqshbandiyya, 10, 266 nationalism, 38; and identity, 246; and religiosity, 12 Netherlands, 245, 250; as destination, 250; and religious education, 259−261; and Uyghur diaspora, 246; and Uyghur Dutch Foundation, 255; and Uyghur identity, 256, 261 nikah, 121–123, 127. See also weddings Ningxia, 2, 77, 85, 134; ethnic tourism, 168; flight from, 77; Hui migration, 227, 241; Qur’an belt, 171n1; Yihewani orthodoxy, 41 nü ahong. See women, ahong orthopraxy, 19 Pakistan, 162, 252, 253; wedding dresses, 95, 100, 101, 104 Persian, 194; ancestry, 102; chants, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 197; historical legacy, 194; Persian origin and Farsi speech, 37; scriptural language, 104 piety, 19, 21, 65, 118, 290; gendered, 24, 155, 181, 184, 189, 292; and halal food, 133, 139, 150; inward sense, 45, 107, 108; movements, 63, 299; new forms of, 287, 288;

performance of, 124, 127, 288; role of media, 112; sensibilities and style, 121; sound and images, 115; symbols of, 22, 75, 96, 97, 98, 108; within Uyghur communities, 112 pilgrimage, 9, 10, 72n7, 262n10; shrine, 11−12, 267, 291. See also haj poverty, 27, 51, 139, 302; and autonomy, 295; and homelessness, 285–288; and revival, 47 prayer, 18, 40, 41, 44–51, 57, 72n8, 78, 119–122, 127, 173n26, 184–187, 194, 204–210, 213–218, 233, 237–238, 248, 257–261, 266, 274, 284; hall, 164, 165, 173n29, 210–211, 213–218, 220; illegal, 13; room, 49, 233, 285, 299. See also call to prayer precarity (precariousness), 2, 14–16, 27, 215, 246–247, 284–290, 298, 301–303 progress, 64, 167, 169 Qadiriyya, 2, 157, 160, 266 Qinghai, 10, 18, 41, 46, 48, 84, 171n1, 227, 240 Qingzhen, 21, 58, 60, 135, 140. See also halal Qur’an, 18, 21, 25, 39, 44–46, 50, 54n2, 72n6, 96, 99, 105, 119, 121, 141, 143, 159, 161, 168, 184, 215, 250, 259; “Qur’an belt,” 155, 171n1. See also recitation, Qur’anic recitation, 14, 24, 26, 47, 50, 54n5, 114–115, 129n7, 180, 188, 191, 204–206, 210–214, 216–218, 220–221; qira’at, 162; Qur’anic, 164, 184, 214, 248 reeducation, 27, 249–250; camps (internment), 5, 7, 14, 121, 267, 274, 278, 286–287 reformist Islam, 21, 27, 124, 157, 247–248, 284, 288–291, 299. See also Islamic revival

318 Index refugee, 229, 245, 253–254, 257, 261, 262n14, 286, 294. See also migrant religious economy, 27, 284, 286, 288, 290–292, 295, 301, 303; extremism, 2, 13, 19, 26, 111, 121, 262n11, 267, 274 (see also anti-religious extremism campaign); policy, 2, 50, 55n8; revival, 17, 21, 24, 58–59, 112, 128, 155, 290. See also Islamic revival; reformist Islam ritual, 60, 164, 167, 206–207, 211–214, 273, 275; animal slaughter, 144; Mongolian Buddhist, 75, 81–82, 86; music, 268, 275; practice, 267, 273, 275–276, 300; purity, 14; sama’ (Sufi), 266–267, 275–277, 279; soundscape, 206, 212, 214, 219; space, 213, 216, 218, 221; voice, 205, 215, 217; washing, 127; wedding, 119–121, 157; women’s, 206 rural: areas, 18, 46–47, 83, 113, 120, 134–135, 139, 201n, 215, 266, 268, 284, 287, 297; development, 47, 132, 144–145; mosques, 51; Muslims, 40, 46, 48, 51–53, 88, 141, 270–271, 278; poverty, 27; rural-urban divide, 113, 115; rural-urban migration, 132, 289, 303 Salaam Group (Sailiamu), 133–150, 151n1 Salafi, Salafiyya, 2, 18–19, 21, 26, 39–54, 164, 173n25, 234 Salar, 4, 28n5, 49, 157 sama, 266, 275–276. See also hälqäsohbät; ritual santai, 45, 164. See also prayer Saudi Arabia, 18, 26, 37, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49, 114–115, 131, 163, 234, 236, 250–252, 254, 292 See also Arabization Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din, 134

sect (jiaopai), 39–42, 46; Tibetan Buddhist, 80 sectarian, 38–44, 158 self-fashioning, 20–21, 112–113, 115, 117–119, 128 Shadian, 11, 16–18, 57–71, 72nn3–4, 75; Shadianistan, 69 shalwar kameez, 21, 22, 43, 46, 48, 118 shari’a, 11, 63, 69, 157 Silk Road, 14, 27, 145, 167, 236, 273, 279, 289. See also Belt and Road Initiative sinicization, 17, 116, 167–168; of religion, 2, 18, 98, 242. See also Hanicization social media, 4, 18–20, 95, 184, 188, 197, 219, 240, 241, 256, 274, 299. See also WeChat sociality, 20, 23, 86, 127, 167, 286, 290, 292, 298, 299, 302 song, 87, 121, 201, 208, 217, 267, 275, 276, 294, 295; pop, 114, 117, 121; red (revolutionary), 14, 61; religious, 18, 184, 208; SongBook, 188−194, 195, 196, 197; song-anddance (gewu), 114–116, 124, 267, 274, 275 soundscape, 197, 200, 206, 210, 211, 214, 215, 284 South Asia, 18, 37, 43, 96, 253. See also Pakistan Southeast Asia, 9, 22, 106, 134, 225, 232, 233, 253, 262n14. See also Indonesia; Malaysia state (the Chinese), 8, 13–17, 24, 55n8, 59, 63, 68, 69, 84, 120, 122, 128, 132, 161, 289, 291, 297, 299, 301–303; Administration for Religious Affairs, 169, 248; control, 25, 60, 291, 303; council, 58, 142; education, 158, 166; power, 302; and Muslim women, 165–169 style, 118, 120; communities of, 117; musical, 114, 117; of prayer, 45, 46; in videos, 116, 117; in weddings, 95–109, 119–129

Index 319 Sufi: music, 7, 27, 268, 272, 274, 278–280; mysticism, 276, 286, 289, 295; orders, 2, 157, 161, 162, 172, 205, 206, 266, 267; poetry, 213, 275; ritual practice, 266, 269, 275–277, 291; saints, 37, 294. See also hälqä-sohbät; Jahriyya; Khufiyya; Menhuan; sama Sunni, 4, 37, 157, 303n4 Tabligh-i Jama’at, 18–19, 37–43, 47–49, 51, 53, 55n7, 61, 64–65 Tajik, 4 Tajikistan, 4 Tatar, 4 television (TV), 115–119, 128, 143, 211 terrorism, 2, 13, 298; People’s War on Terror, 287, 292, 301, 303n3. See also violence Tibetan, 28n5, 156; Buddhism, 75–76, 78, 80, 89; Muslims, 4; selfimmolations, 298 tourism, 14, 62, 82, 98, 114, 118, 128, 134, 139–140, 151n2, 168, 234, 236 translocal, 23, 26, 89, 187, 225, 227, 230–231, 241–242 transnational: connections, 22, 38–39, 53, 96, 261; flows, 20, 26, 107, 126; identities, 26, 54, 167; imagination, 108, 279; media, 118; networks, 9, 17, 39; revival movements, 4, 61, 108, 228, 299; space, 96, 108; symbols, 96–97 Turkey, 26, 245, 247, 249, 252–255, 257–260; 262n14; 263n17; 273–277 umma, 19, 22, 25, 54, 96, 108, 186, 200, 257 unity (tuanjie), 2; ethnic, 15, 62, 87; of God, 164; Muslim, 52; national, 16 urban, 51, 115, 116, 131, 132, 158, 159, 214, 215, 230–232, 278, 284–291, 295; communities, 47,

96, 108; cultures, 186; development, 98, 103, 136, 287; migration, 142, 289; Muslims, 44, 47; policing, 287; urban-rural divide, 113, 115; weddings, 113, 119–120 urbanization, 12, 81 Ürümchi, 13, 27, 113, 115–119, 248, 271, 273–274, 286–288, 293, 295–297, 301–302, 303n3, 304n7 Uyghur, 2, 4–5; education, 247–248, 253, 259; ethnic identity, 8, 246–247, 255, 259, 261; Islam, 10–11, 18, 20, 112, 115, 120– 122, 127, 245–263, 285, 288– 289, 299; language, 255, 257, 258, 291; migrants, 27–28, 245– 263, 284–303, 285; music, 114, 118, 124, 125, 127, 274–282, 295; scholars, 7, 11–13, 250–252; society, 20, 122, 125, 127, 129n2, 261, 291–293, 295–298, 303n2; state oppression, 13–14, 17, 27, 29n9, 254, 274, 279, 286, 287, 299, 304n7; Sufism, 7, 27, 267–282, 289, 291, 294; traders, 76, 253; wedding videos, 111–130 Uzbek, 4, 8, 121 Uzbekistan, 262n12 veils, 13, 14, 21, 101, 105, 127, 128, 173n29 violence: domestic, 12; historical, 14, 40; interethnic, 13, 14, 16, 61, 63, 215, 299; Shadian, 58, 61, 63, 65; structural, 289, 295. See also terrorism voice, 22, 24, 28, 75, 111, 119, 181, 200, 201n1, 204–206, 208, 210–221, 281 WeChat, 95, 188, 193–194, 197, 201n5, 234, 239–241, 256, 261. See also social media weddings: gowns, 95–103, 106, 108; host, 119; Islamic (halal/pious),

320 Index 20, 123–128; night, 201n2; photography, 9, 21, 95–109; videos, 6, 111–130 Weishan, 134, 139, 140, 143, 144, 150 women, 12, 14, 22–24, 96; ahong (nü ahong), 23, 184, 188–189, 192–197; chant, 185 (see also jingge); congregations, 192, 201n4; dress, 99–102; Islamic education, 155–171, 183, 184, 209; mosques, 187; prayer, 165, 173n26, 201, 211, 292; recitation, 204, 205, 209, 212; representation and power, 200; and resurgent religiosity, 184, 185, 187; segregation, 216, 217; voice, 183, 187, 200, 206–208, 220–221. See also xiuti World Uyghur Congress (WUC), 246, 254–256, 260, 261, 262n4, 262n14 Xi Jinping, 2, 26, 28n2, 167–169, 174n33 Xi’an, 9, 11, 22, 95–109, 173n24, 174n34, 230, 237, 240 Xiaozhai, 204, 205, 209 Xining, 40, 41, 46–48, 51–52 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang): arts troupes,

274–275, 278; Central Asian links, 252; food, 233; government policies, 167, 271, 272; links with Inner Mongolia, 76–77; migration, 227, 250, 302; mosques, 2; population, 4; religious repression, 13–14, 17, 27, 68, 70, 113, 121–123, 249–250, 260, 267, 276, 280; religious revival, 11, 18–20, 126, 247–248; rural south, 21, 121, 266–267, 272, 274, 287, 296– 297; Sufism, 7, 277, 279; trade expo, 273; travel, 271–273, 278–279; Xinjiang University, 7, 300. See also reeducation, camps xiuti (shame), 166, 183, 201, 207 Yemen, 251, 254 Yihewani. See Ikhwani Yunnan, 3–4, 11, 16, 18, 21, 26, 41, 57, 74, 131, 204; education, 147; halal e-commerce, 144−145; halal food production, 134–139, 143−144; migrants, 227, 237–238. See also Salaam Group; Shadian; Xiaozhai Zheng He, 226, 232