The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China 9780231552486

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The Sound of Salvation

STUDIES OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia. For a complete list of titles, see page 295.

The Sound of Salvation Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China

Guangtian Ha

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by Haverford College in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ha, Guangtian, author. Title: The sound of salvation : voice, gender, and the Sufi mediascape in China / Guangtian Ha. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2021. | Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021011702 (print) | LCCN 2021011703 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231198066 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231198073 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231552486 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sufism—China. | Muslims—China. | Islam—China. | Mass media—Religious aspects—Islam. | Mass media in religion—China. | Communication—Religious aspects—Islam. Classification: LCC BP188.8.C6 H32 2021 (print) | LCC BP188.8.C6 (ebook) | DDC 297.40951—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011702 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011703

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: Photographs courtesy of the author Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

To Jahriyya, and the saint that never was

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ϰԸ Ի δ˴ Ϩ˴Η ϼ˴ ˴ϓ Ϛ ˴ ˵΋ή˶ Ϙ˸ ˵Ϩγ˴ We shall make you recite, so you do not forget. —Qur’an 87:6

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 1. Archaeology of Sound

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2. The Sacred Circle 75 3. Tempo of Time 4. His Master’s Voice

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5. Labor of Faith 196 Epilogue: Ethnography and the Future of the Jahriyya Sound 236

Notes

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Bibliography 275 Index

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Acknowledgments

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nthropology has often been somewhat of a melancholic discipline, even in the days when its colonial undertone was far less obvious to its most celebrated (white male) European practitioners. Lévi-Strauss wrote Tristes Tropiques, Pierre Clastres Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians: both lamented the devastation of the indigenous worlds they prognosticated were soon to disappear. In a recent interview Anna Tsing, cautious of a perhaps misguided optimism her Mushroom at the End of the World seemed to have caused among some enthusiastic disciples, suggested that anthropologists of the current age ought to learn to “write about failure beautifully.” This book is being completed when the covid-19 pandemic enters its second year and the total number of deaths in the United States exceeds half a million. On the other side of the Pacific, in China, the total death toll remains a closely guarded number, a secret of the government, as it were. Most religious venues, mosques and Sufi shrines included, have been told to keep their doors shut, while restaurants and bars buzz with eager customers, and nearly every domain of life has returned to some form of normalcy. Even before the pandemic, the Islamic clerical school in Ningxia where I conducted fieldwork had been significantly downsized due to increased political pressure (see epilogue). As of this writing, life there has yet to return to “normal,” and no one knows if it ever will. This book is therefore written with a keen sense of loss—ever keener since the fieldwork ended only in 2018, and, upon reflection, one is taken aback by the amount of change that occurred in a matter of less than three years. One often hears that it takes a village to raise a child; others may add that it takes no less to care for an aging parent. The same can be said of a book. A village is not a profession in that it is more akin to a society, though of a smaller scale.

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If one agrees that it takes a village to write a book, one is immediately compelled to reckon with the wider social tolls wrought by a negligible professional success. In this spirit I wish to first thank my partner Nap (Phyllis) Ma, without whose enduring intellectual, emotional, and logistical support not a single word of this book could have been written. While I am the hand that writes this book, the spirit is hers and hers alone. The initial ideas behind this book first struck me in 2011, during my PhD fieldwork. Stuck in a painful writing process that later produced a barely passable dissertation for Columbia University, I sought the counsel of my adviser Myron  L. Cohen, who, with his characteristic sense of humor, asked me to imagine “describing a toilet bowl.” This still remains my most favorite piece of writerly advice. I also thank Rosalind Morris for teaching me Lacan and Marx, and for always challenging me to write with substance and theoretical sophistication; and Elizabeth Povinelli, for teaching me to cross boundaries and be brave. “Worst comes to worst you just fail, and what’s so bad about that?” she once said—or something to that effect. This book represents a teetering attempt in that direction. Rachel Harris and Maria Jaschok have helped me greatly, as teachers, colleagues, and friends. My years in London were enriched by their intellectual curiosity and extraordinary generosity. I thank Caroline Osella and Kostas Retsikas for their honesty, Tatsuma Padoan and Marilena Frisone for their warm and often entertaining company. Tatsuma continues to ring me periodically when taking his daily walks somewhere in Cork, Ireland; and I will forever miss the fresh fish and tomato sauce from Sicily Marilena always managed to sneak across the “UK Border.” I thank Iskandar Ding for the countless days and nights when we drank and laughed, and for showing me what a human mind can achieve with persistent effort. Pablo Rodriguez, Anne Bertreau, Naomi West, and Ewa Zbrzeska taught me Argentine tango and introduced me to a world of kindness and open embrace. Erika Fox showed me what it means to live with vigor, vitality, and  verve. Now in her eighties, she is still composing music full of life that explores the depth of the human spirit. A survivor of the Holocaust, she carries a pride and a serene dignity that I deeply admire. My colleagues at Haverford College have all contributed to this book in various ways. Ken Koltun-Fromm and Molly Farneth have read some chapters and offered me invaluable advice; Josh Moses, being a kindred spirit, is an intellectual companion and loyal friend; David Watt with his unique sense of humor has been a genuinely wonderful mentor to a junior colleague; and Jake Culbertson’s intellectual imagination and witty sarcasm keep me on track. Laura Levitt’s passion and keen intellectual instinct are a breeze of fresh air. I also thank Anne

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McGuire, Naomi Koltun-Fromm, and Terrance Wiley for their unfailing support. Rob Haley, Anna-Alexandra Fodde-Reguer, Dawn Heckert, and Brie Gettleson are miraculous in their exceptional ability to help me acquire books and research materials even in a global pandemic. The book has also benefited from the scrutiny of Rian Thum and David Brophy. Eric Schluessel, David Atwill, Tim Grose, David Stroup, Michael Gibbs Hill, Kristian Petersen, Kelly Hammond, John Chen, Michael Brose, and Dru Gladney have all helped me greatly in various phases of writing. Jon Lipman offered much-needed encouragement in the early stage when I was struggling to overcome some difficult obstacles. I thank Aynur Kadir, Mukaddas Mijit, Tahir Hamut Izgil, Josh Freeman, Darren Byler, and Elise Anderson for constantly reminding me of the wider networks that inscribe the world I am describing. I thank Rafah O. for her impeccable Arabic instruction over the years and Ani Beyt-Movsess for teaching me Persian. Both have taught me more than languages and showed me what it means to cross multiple worlds. As of now Rafah’s family is still in Idlib (she is in Turkey with her eight-month-old daughter) with local covid-19 cases skyrocketing and wide mistrust in society of the government’s (mis)handling of the crisis. She reminds me of how much of a privilege being able to write this book already is. Various parts of this book have been presented in different contexts. I found a home at the University of Hong Kong, where David Palmer was the soul of a monthly (or was it every two, three, or four months?) writing workshop. I thank him and other participants—Tom McDonald, Sylvia Martin, Gonçalo D. Santos—for helping me understand what a good ethnography ought to look like. Till Mostowlansky belongs to that rare category of intellectuals who still harbor a cultured view of the Enlightenment mixed with a healthy dose of criticism. Parts of the book have benefited from presentation at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London (I thank John Baily for the kind invitation), SOAS, University of London, University of Oxford, George Mason University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Association for Asian Studies, and European Association of Social Anthropologists. I thank Jesko Schmoller and Stefan Williamson Fa for continual collaboration across the oceans. This book would not have appeared without the impeccably professional help and unwavering faith of my editor at Columbia University Press, Wendy Lochner, and the consistent efforts of the tireless Ross Yelsey. Lowell Frye and Susan Pensak are miraculous in their efficiency; Christi Stanforth and Emily Shelton helped me greatly with polishing the prose. I also thank the numerous anonymous reviewers who agreed to read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions.

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To the many Jahriyya and non-Jahriyya Muslims who helped me, fed me, saved me from despair, and offered me warm and generous companionship, I am eternally grateful. Not many can be named in these acknowledgments, for safety reasons, but I wish to thank Ma Xiaoyi, who took me in and introduced me to the Jahriyya world. I thank Sijiu, Sanjiu, Wujiu, Sijiuma, Ma Hua, and Ma Teng for giving me a home and looking after me. Luo Yanhui, Yang Deliang, Ma Jianfu, Ding Kejia, Ma Qiang, Ren Jun, and many others were practically family to me, though what I write herein represents my position alone and should not be implied to reflect their stance. As this book took shape, many of my Muslim colleagues in China saw their programs abolished or their students switch careers as the funding vanished overnight, along with the opportunity to publish. In certain ways an authoritarian regime could exacerbate the global inequality in knowledge production: some could write and publish more because others have been barred from writing and publishing. Hypervisibility for some often comes at the expense of crushing invisibility for others. I hope readers can keep this in mind as they proceed beyond this page. At this point my seven-year-old daughter Sybil has written no fewer than ten books, with herself playing writer, editor, and publisher all at once. I hope this ethnography shows that her father can also write something—though certainly not as interesting and thrilling as “Apple Meets New Friends.” Anthropology is also about meeting new friends and making new kinship; I hope I have done her proud.

The Sound of Salvation

Introduction

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y the time this ethnography was committed to writing, Xuebai no longer worked in the Sufi Islamic madrassa (school) in Ningxia where I had spent more than a year for fieldwork. When we first met in early 2015, upon my awkward self-introduction as an anthropologist interested in Sufi recitation, Xuebai generously gifted me a hard copy of Madā’ iḥ— the panegyric poem whose vocal performance I would soon examine in work and learn to appreciate in life. Sitting with a straight back at his desk, he wrote the following in his elegant longhand on the book’s inside cover: “Guangtian my dearest friend in faith—hope this book of praise will become a bond for our friendship that links this world and the next.” I often thought of Xuebai as a poet; even his name beckoned such recognition. Xuebai in Chinese means “cypress in snow”; the figure portrayed was of an upright evergreen standing firmly in a bleak landscape battling severe cold in proud defiance. When he was not teaching and allowed a brief respite to visit his family, Xuebai was an avid beekeeper. “And thy Lord taught the Bee,” the Qur’an (16:68–69) tells us, “to build its cells in hills, on trees, and in [men’s] habitations. Then to eat of all the produce [of the earth], and find with skill the spacious paths of its Lord: there issues from within their bodies a drink of varying colours, wherein is healing for men: Verily in this is a Sign for those who give thought.”1 While he did give thought to such revelations, Xuebai also had his own story about bees, and as he told it his eyes shone with wonder: “They always work as a group, and if you listen attentively, they also have a dawr: as their wings beat through the air they are solemnly proffering their own praise of God.”2 In using the word dawr—a term employed to communicate the combined character of a piece of recitation that some Jahriyya followers translate as diao (tune) in

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Chinese—to describe the buzz of bees, Xuebai was finding musical resonances between what he performed on a daily basis and what he heard from the nonhuman wonders of the animal world. With little difficulty he was instantly able to perceive the presence of the sacred in even the most mundane of creatures. In this he was not alone. The eminent Muslim mystic of the eleventh century, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (ca. 1058–1111), once also mentioned a ḥadīth (a saying of the Prophet) where Muhammad is said to have drawn a comparison between the Sufi’s vocalized remembrance of God and the humming of bees around the divine celestial throne.3 Xuebai was a disciple of the Jahriyya Sufi order in China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Jahriyya in Arabic means “the loud ones”; its followers thus take pride in an array of melodic vocal chants as the hallmark of their spiritual path. One such ritual involves the collective chanting of Awrād, a concise liturgical text composed of excerpts from the holy Qur’an rearranged and interspersed with rhythmic incantations of dhikr (remembrance of God). Every morning as the dawn prayer concludes, the bright sound of Awrād arises in innumerable Jahriyya communities across China, from Jilin in its northeast to Yunnan in its southwest. With their characteristic rhythm, these voices puncture the thin canvas of the diffusing darkness as the cosmos awakes, and humanity is roused from its deep sleep. The euphonious sound of Awrād joins the piercing light of the impending sunrise to give birth to a new day: a Jahriyya disciple’s day thus starts with sound. From 2011 to 2012, and then from late 2014 to the summer of 2015, through multiple connections and a thick skin that earned me respect and contempt in equal measure, I was given permission by the Jahriyya leaders to conduct fieldwork on Sufi recitation at Hong Le Fu, the rural Jahriyya madrasa in Wuzhong, northern Ningxia, where I later had the good fortune to befriend Xuebai. The origin of the project was both incidental and preconceived. I first visited Hong Le Fu in 2011 and was instantly struck by the impressive sound of Jahriyya recitation. This recitation exhibits a signature vocal dynamic: the individual voices that compose the group recitation do not completely coalesce into a coherent whole, but are always slightly out of sync, and some are always slightly off-key. What struck me as particularly remarkable was that, despite the lack of a rigid structure, Jahriyya recitation displays a naturally pleasant polyphonic harmony. One feels embraced by a sea of voices, their alternating rise and fall seeming to mirror the delicate emotional swing felt by the participants. In this sonically composed ocean a virtuoso reciter rides like a master surfer; he—seldom a she— balances himself gracefully on the crest of immense swells, cool and agile in his navigation of the Sufi soundscape.

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A major boost that pushed me toward this line of research took place in 2014, when I joined the “Sounding Islam in China” project based in the music department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. That project, led by SOAS ethnomusicologist Rachel Harris and Oxford University professor of gender studies Maria Jaschok, examines how the production of sound—human voice, instrumental music, and environmental sound—has become a key site for the performance of Islam among diverse Muslim groups in China. The hypothesis is that such practice, in both its intimate sensorial power and profound international repercussions, provides a vital vantage point for investigating the politics and poetics of Islamic piety in contemporary China. Harris had been working on the mediatic practice of Uyghur Muslims; Jaschok would continue with her examination of Muslim women’s recitation in Henan, central China; and I was to produce an ethnography of the Jahriyya Sufis in northwestern China. The aim was to facilitate comparative research and amass a wealth of multimedia recordings as well as textual analysis to produce what would become arguably the first digital archive of Islamic sounds in China.4 This book is an outcome of the aforementioned research project. It examines the use of the human voice in the cultivation of mystical truth. I argue that as the melodic Jahriyya voices persist through two and a half centuries in defiance of oppressive political persecution, they also become gradually embedded in a specific ritual structure that creates among many Jahriyya disciples what I call a “fragile transcendence.” This transcendence is fragile in contrast to the “strong transcendence” normally associated with a conventional monotheistic belief in a personified deity dealing out orders and injunctions, rewards and punishments, from a commanding height; it is also fragile because it is intrinsically weak and ought to remain so. The archetype of this weak transcendence takes the form of a verbal statement made as a comment on ritual practice: I know not where or from whom s/he learned that practice/explanation but I suppose s/he learned it from some Sufi saint. The weak transcendence is therefore also a weak agnosticism in its epistemology because it posits an ultimate source of knowledge that is not so transcendental as to be ontologically inaccessible, yet is still distant enough to foreclose epistemological clarity. The consequence of this weak agnosticism is an act of sublimation, where the revered object is no longer a specific saint, or a particular genealogy with traceable historical evidence. On the contrary, what reemerges from this sublimation is an abstracted sainthood, even a proper saint whose divine light shines through each particular saint, only partially embodied by them in the course of human history, but remains utterly out of reach and disembodied. This notion of an abstract saint is essential to this book, because when combined with specific historical trajectories it has led to the creation of a particular

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kind of Jahriyya Muslim subject: a subject who in her commitment to the mystical path has built into her a deeply entrenched sense of uncertainty and ambiguity, to the point where a certain tolerance toward others can be sustained in the precarious space thus carved out. While it may be argued that the presumption of a transcendental deity can give rise to an analogous condition—though the opposite is likely as true, if not more so—it is essential to note that in abstract sainthood we find a weaker transcendence: the saint both has a face and has no face; he cannot be reduced to a sensory saint, but neither can he live independently from them—unlike the absolutely transcendent Islamic God, who has no worldly incarnation whatsoever. If to many Sufis God is at once majestically distant and lovingly intimate, this apparent contradiction is further amplified in the notion of abstract sainthood. For the sublimation of sainthood can be considered akin to an incomplete process of deification specific to Sufism: incomplete because the saint is not the Prophet, much less God himself, partially deified because he is nonetheless raised above ordinary existence and cannot be reduced to his successive sensory embodiments. This midlevel sublimation/abstraction undergirds the verbal statement that typifies the attitude characteristic of fragile transcendence: I know not where or from whom s/he learned that practice/explanation but I suppose s/he learned it from some Sufi saint. This is because the abstract saint functions like the copula (e.g., the verb “to be”) in a sentence: it links the subject and the predicative—in this case the subject is the saint one follows, and the predicative is that other saint whose existence is supposed but whose identity is unknown (or even unknowable)—and thus cannot exist outside this linking function. It therefore enables a Jahriyya disciple to presume without knowing for certain that there must have been another saint “just like the one I know of ” who had presumably been the originator of the practices and interpretations one observed or heard that differ from one’s own. It is this precarious sense of suspense, analogous to how one feels when an interlocutor ends midsentence without providing a predicative after the verb “to be,” that creates a space where a certain attitude of tolerance can be sustained. Fragile transcendence is thus about entertaining this sense of suspense, grappling with it so as to imagine the possibility of a robust politics of tolerance derived from Sufism, a politics that can potentially offer an alternative ground for critically reexamining our often secular assumptions when considering tolerance, religion, and politics of difference. Saints have always been central to the practice of Islamic mysticism across Muslim societies,5 though the institution of sainthood and its consolidation by socioeconomic means is largely a postclassical—that is, post-Abbasid (750–1258 CE)—development.6 Exerting their influence under various titles, from shaykh

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(old man) to walī (friend [of God]), to murshid (guide) and pīr (the Persian equivalent to shaykh widely used in South Asia), to the Chinese laorenjia (“the elderly,” likely a native equivalent to shaykh) and taiye (great-grandfather), saints are nearly permanent fixtures in any Muslim’s mystical journey. Rather than being interchangeable, each of these terms describes a particular dimension of the Islamic sainthood: walī, with its cognates walā’ and wilāya/walāya, lays stress on the saint’s spiritual proximity to God, the intensity of his or her devotion, and the loving “friendship” thus established between the saint and the Almighty; murshid and pīr bring forth the essential function of the saint as a spiritual guide to his or her disciples, commonly known as murīd (aspirant; literally, “the one who wants/needs/aspires/desires”)—thus the followers are not so much guided as they are construed as a lack that desires to be filled by saintly guidance. And both laorenjia and taiye, derived as much from traditional Chinese patriliny as from Islam’s privileging of the male line after Muhammad,7 highlight the convergence of male dominance and spiritual mysticism among China’s Sinophone Sufis, the Jahriyya included.8 While many Sufi Muslims have no doubt about the identities of the saints they follow, scholars have also noted a certain opacity in Islam’s canonical narratives on sainthood. A well-known ḥadīth traced to Muhammad affirms that there are 356 saints on whom the world rests but whose identities remain concealed.9 In the Sino-Sufi lore some of these saints, being the “secret friends of the Real Lord [zhenzhu de miyou],” know they are saints and deliberately disguise this fact, while others live a life of piety with no such knowledge whatsoever. Neither is it always clear whether sainthood as a divinely ordained quality is transferred to another living human being after the death of a saint—and, if so, how this transfer occurs— or remains with the saint despite his or her death, for what is death to a saint except eternal life? And in some cases, they do not die but simply go into “hiding” (yindun). According to one story related to me by a Sufi of the Qadiriyya order in northwestern China, once, at the height of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when Islam in China suffered the worst devastation to date, a socalled dahuzi ahong (ahong with a bushy beard) was being released from prison.10 On his way out, while his torturer was still looking, he whisked his chin over a flaming cauldron of fiery embers. “With a single swoop, boosh!, his beard vanished,” I was told, “as though shaved off completely by some able barber. Now that his secret is revealed [xianji], he can no more be seen.” The eyes of the narrating Qadirī Sufi glittered with marvel. “He has since disappeared,” he said. “Nobody knows if he is still alive or already dead.” Despite differences in saintly genealogy and liturgical practices, Jahriyya shares the same ethos manifest in the foregoing story of a Qadirī walī. An articulate

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silsila (genealogy) showing the names of past saints (see chapter 1) does not foreclose a sense of uncertainty and ambiguity that accrues to the notion of sainthood itself, and it does not preclude the possibility that a sublimation can occur which transforms embodied saints into an abstract saint. In this book I argue that only when ritual and hermeneutic differences remain irreconciled among the Jahriyya murīdūn (sing. murīd, aspirant, follower, disciple) can such sublimation retain its precarious existence. As mentioned earlier, the Jahriyya saint is both manifest and disguised: he is manifest because every participant in a Jahriyya ritual knows what each murshid (guide) did, and many of their sayings have been recorded in various hagiographies and innumerable oral accounts. He is disguised because somehow no one can claim to have known each murshid in full, and the saint in all his generality supersedes the combination of all murshidūn (pl. form of murshid) who have appeared in the history of the Jahriyya. The sublimation that creates the condition for weak transcendence is the outcome of this very tension among Jahriyya disciples. The fact that elaborately regulated melodic recitations constitute the core of the Jahriyya liturgy only renders the differences all the more perceptible compared to hermeneutical differences centered on texts and discursive practices. Differences in sound can be at once more immediate to the senses and less enduring in time given their material transience. Variations in recitation could also proliferate and become extremely hard to pin down—one Jahriyya reciter once told me that because his daily mood and health conditions often altered his recitations ever so slightly, no two iterations of recitation were exactly the same for him, though the difference might not be as identifiable to an outsider. The apparent transience of the human voice can also be a source of power. When some Jahriyya murīdūn recall fondly, with no external mediatic prop whatsoever, some old tunes or recitations they attribute to now-deceased reciters, the lack of a recording only reinforces the power of nostalgia and render those no-longer-accessible sounds all the more alluring, even haunting. Just as the abstract saint could be the apotheosis of sainthood that sublimates the saints in flesh and blood, so can imagined sounds pull at the heartstrings as powerfully as real sounds (see chapter 2). While this book will draw extensively on those studies that examine the social production and political implication of real religious sounds, it also raises the question of where the body in flesh and blood ends, and why it is important politically that we explore this limit. A growing body of literature has demonstrated the essential role of actual religious sounds in generating potentially transformative politics. From controversies over the Islamic call to prayer in multireligious and multiethnic communities11 to the mediatic production of religious “sensational forms” and

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ethical soundscapes,12 to more recent works that combine affect theory and new materialisms with varying degrees of success, we see in the study of religion, especially monotheistic religions, a rising interest in nontextual approaches to often book-bound religions.13 Scholars have come to realize that the so-called People of the Book (Arab. Ahl al-Kitāb, which denotes Muslims as well as Jews and Christians) are as much People of the Ear. To a student of Islam this should come as no surprise, as the very word for call to prayer, adhān, is derived from the verb adhina, “to listen,” and udhun, derived from the same triliteral root, means “ear” (pl. ādhān). While taking full stock of the sensory sound, this book also departs from those approaches that lay stress almost exclusively on sensory experience—whether such experiences rise to be captured by consciousness or remain under the radar of conscious grasp. In a recent book on Islamic recitation, Patrick Eisenlohr returns the embodied voice to what he calls the “sonic atmosphere,” a field where sounds travel through the air and weave the body into a material network: “I describe sonic events as resulting in the emission of energetic forces—chiefly differences in air pressure—that fill spaces between their sources and those perceiving sound while intermingling with the bodies of those perceiving them through suggestions of movement.”14 This materialistic, even positivistic treatment of sound, aims to remind us that the body and its movement are amenable to being recruited and energized by sounds that cannot be consciously perceived and comprehended; these sounds either transcend consciousness or work their “autonomous” magic parallel to clearly perceptible, “individuated” sounds as they are so presented to consciousness. Following Brian Massumi, Eisenlohr also locates in this fluid, inchoate, and shifting acoustic-material domain potentialities that may lead to alternative regimes of perception.15 While I in part share their enthusiasm, in this book I treat alterity differently. As will be shown throughout this ethnography (especially in chapters 2 and 3), fragile transcendence is built on a notion of alterity that cannot be reduced to a celebration of an obscure (bourgeois?) materialism abetted by new media technologies for measuring and recording sound. Purely sensory differences—for instance, between sounds that can be clearly perceived and “individuated” in consciousness and those other sounds that cannot be so perceived, and that appear thus to work their “autonomous” magic “under the radar,” with no conscious conception involved—cannot give rise to that other notion of alterity, which can only be the outcome of an act of sublimation that transcends the sensory. Fragile transcendence cannot be built on the moving sand of a positivistic understanding of difference and alterity. The Jahriyya saint constitutes an external alterity to the empirical everyday to the extent that he is given to inhabit a place that is both in and out of the sensory world, whether this world hums below

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consciousness or shrieks to earn high-pitched representation. The Jahriyya saint is neither as distant as the Almighty God nor as proximate as a living murshid; he is both dead and alive, with and without a body. Fragile transcendence characterizes this very ambiguity that keeps God at arm’s length through the mediation of abstract sainthood, and it thus highlights the fact that the historical creation of this abstract saint depends essentially on a particular way of looking at liturgical and hermeneutic differences. Yet has it not been argued ad nauseum, to the point of having been assimilated into liberal commonplace, that a remarkable extent of divergence exists in Islamic theological and legal discourses, and that such diversity often harks back to the common monotheistic conviction that “only God knows all?”16 Again, if only God knows all, and divine revelation thus offers the only ultimate bulwark against error, then one cannot presume that the conclusion one reaches, or the legal judgment one issues, is the only correct one. While feverish certainty in the name of “correct” interpretation persists among a portion of probably all religious groups, each time we hear of an instance of religious violence our instant reflex is to argue that, even if the revelation may have been the word of an infallible God, the interpretation has always been the work of erring humans. So what is new about this weak transcendence that an ethnographer claims to have found among a group of Sufis in western China? Do we not find a certain weak agnosticism among all believers of monotheism, if not all religious adherents, who subscribe to some form of the “strong transcendence?” What does it mean to keep God “at arm’s length” through an abstract saint, when this saint looks all the more like a God incarnated?

FRAGILE TRANSCENDENCE?

This book’s argument is rooted in its main subject matter—namely, Sufi liturgical rituals that employ voice as their principal means of communication. No doubt a vast amount of textual reinterpretation has given rise to myriad sociodiscursive movements among liberal-minded Muslims around the globe. From the position of women17 to Islam’s view of homosexuality and transgenderism18 to the muchdisputed compatibility of Islam with modern statehood, sophisticated readings of classical texts combine with a strong historical awareness in generating a new wave of critical exegesis.19 Ancient holy books seem to afford a capacious space for discursive intervention.

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Liturgical rituals appear to be at the other end of the spectrum. They seem rigid and constricting; they are bastions of tradition, and their kinesthetic authority tolerates no dissent. Worst of all, it seems that liturgical rituals with supposedly ancient ancestry cannot care less about what one thinks and as such encourage insincerity and bad faith. Liturgical rituals, among all types of ritual, seem to afford the least freedom and, in the case of monotheism, are particularly apt representations of that whimsical God of fear and fury thundering commandments from on high. The authors of a 2008 book on ritual rightfully lament, “Ritual has had something of a poor reputation in the contemporary world,. . . extirpated as an empty, external husk, lacking in ultimate spiritual significance, or again, condemned as a form of authoritarian control and dominance.”20 These authors have in mind, on the one hand, what they see as a globally hegemonic Protestant Christianity that lays immense stress on individual sincerity, personalized belief, and an entrenched suspicion of external ritual action, and, on the other, liturgical ritual, the type probably most susceptible to such criticism.21 They were not dealing with healing rituals, or ghostly séances, or rites soliciting rain, or spirit possession; these nonliturgical rituals, while often cast in doubt and disrepute, are also making a comeback in the West as well as around the world—that is, if they ever disappeared.22 What has often been singled out and vilified in modern times is not only rituals in general but specifically liturgical rituals, taken as the archetypal “empty, external husk” that seems to bear no recognizable spiritual significance; such rituals drag on though there is no compelling reason for their existence—except perhaps to perpetuate a half-dead clerical hierarchy. Yet this book claims precisely to have found something valuable and worthy of attention in liturgical rituals. My argument is not that such rituals fortify structures of power, or reinforce social solidarity, or teach you that rituals are intrinsically meaningless and have no purpose because life itself is meaningless and purposeless.23 Rather, I argue that liturgical ritual, with its intrinsic explanatory opacity, forms the foundation of a notion of abstract sainthood that has developed among the Jahriyya over the past two and a half centuries. This ritual-based sainthood in turn creates for Jahriyya murīdūn a sense of community that rests not so much on authorized texts and authoritative interpretation as on epistemological uncertainty, ambivalence, and a certain amount of self-doubt that tells one to reserve one’s judgment of others, at least temporarily. This is not to say that all Jahriyya Sufis in China have so far succeeded in maintaining such a precarious sensibility. Some are quick to denounce what they take to be ritual heteropraxy; others rush in to fill the gap by proffering “correct” interpretations of ritual actions. As we enter the modern era and the circulation of

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religious ideas and mediatic forms quickens its pace and diversifies its pool, Jahriyya murīdūn are under constant pressure from reform-minded Muslims to justify their “substandard” Arabic pronunciation (chapter 1) and their “empty, external husk” of a ritual. Yet there is something both in the very nature of liturgy and in its specific historical development among the Jahriyya that resists the drive for homogeneity in ritual practice and explanation, that resists the idea that one must know for certain what one is doing to be a Jahriyya Sufi. One finds as many attitudes in this refusal of homogeneity as one does among those who insist on finding authoritative explanations: some deeply appreciate the import of diversity and see great danger in its elimination, while others seem not to care—or seem to care less, in any case—so long as they can still do what they have been doing all their lives. What I call “fragile transcendence” is simply another way to describe and characterize this space of ambiguity and uncertainty. It is a space of transcendence because it transcends empirical differences in liturgical practices and their explanations, and because it does not offer a solid ground for negotiating an ever-receding overlapping consensus. Fragile transcendence is not about sincere, unreserved dialogical engagement through which a group agrees to a shared explanation about what they are doing in a liturgical ritual and why they are doing it; on the contrary, fragile transcendence is about cultivating a certain apathy, even a “healthy” dose of indifference derived not so much from a complete lack of consideration as from an ingrained sense of ambivalence and self-doubt. “Indifference” could mean absence of interest or concern, but it could also mean absence of fanatical zeal, or, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (2021), “the making of no difference between conflicting parties; impartiality”—a meaning that appears to have become less common in the English language after the eighteenth century.24 Fragile transcendence therefore gestures toward that delicate middle point where those so inclined are to balance themselves between not caring at all and caring just a bit too much. “I know not where or from whom s/he learned that practice/explanation but I suppose s/he learned it from some Sufi saint” means that I think the pursuit of spiritual salvation still needs the guidance of a saint, and it is thus still necessary that one should possess some evidence to trace one’s liturgical practice to a saintly origin, but I do not care so much as to confront the other directly with the stated intention of pressing for an explanation, or cast their claim in scathing doubt all the while seeing no crack in my own. The abstract Jahriyya saint occupies precisely this delicate space. Fragile transcendence is thus necessarily fragile because it is largely counterintuitive, and its connection to the strong transcendence that is the belief in God

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is circuitous, to say the least. In one sense it may even appear akin to a certain “secular” propensity. While it would be tangential to launch into an extensive discussion of the debate over secularism, briefly noting how the notion of fragile transcendence intervenes in this debate can help us clarify the argument and demonstrate its broader pertinence. For despite our knowledge of the historical coconstitution of the religious and the secular as two contrasting and complementing social spheres, each presupposing the existence of the other, our conception of tolerance and the politics it sustains is still largely secular—and secular in a specific way.25 For instance, at the height of the European debate on secularism, Jürgen Habermas writes insistently to remind his reader of the meaning of liberal tolerance: “Tolerance” . . . must be practiced in everyday life. Tolerance means that believers of one faith, of a different faith and non-believers must mutually concede to one another the right to those convictions, practices and ways of living that they themselves reject. This concession must be supported by a shared basis of mutual recognition from which repugnant dissonances can be overcome. This recognition should not be confused with an appreciation of an alien culture and way of living, or of rejected convictions and practices. We need tolerance only vis-à-vis worldviews that we consider wrong and vis-à-vis habits that we do not like. Therefore, the basis of recognition is not the esteem for this or that characteristic or achievement, but the awareness of the fact that the other is a member of an inclusive community of citizens with equal rights, in which each individual is accountable to the others for his political contributions.26

Habermas’s lofty reiteration of the value of liberal tolerance has found friends and foes across the political spectrum.27 Talal Asad,28 Saba Mahmood,29 and William Connolly, among others, have all argued eloquently that the secularist sensibility has to presuppose a historically specific process of subject constitution; liberal recognition therefore has to manufacture those subjects who can thus recognize and be recognized within a liberal frame of reference.30 To be a secularist is thus to privilege a historically particular sensibility that disguises its own particularity and passional nature; cool-headed reasoning in liberal secularism does not exclude senses and sensibilities as grounds for feeling and behaving in specified ways. It will probably do us no good to enter the thick of the polemics over secularism and the secular.31 Fragile transcendence offers us an alternative path precisely because it shows that what Habermas considers an essentially liberal-secularist sensibility of tolerance can also be sustained through an Islamic Sufi tradition; it

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also shows to what extent this putatively secular attitude cannot be founded only on goodwill, generosity, or a genuine desire to understand and tolerate differences. In other words, through the notion of fragile transcendence I argue that an immanent conception of politics is insufficient if we are to construct a viable political framework to grapple with religious (and other) differences. Neither complete immanence nor complete transcendence—that is, neither humanistic secularism nor conventional religion—offers a tenable approach, but fragile transcendence as an idea may well provide a third route. Let me clarify. In the foregoing quote Habermas finds essential to the cultivation of liberal tolerance “the awareness of the fact that the other is a member of an inclusive community of citizens with equal rights, in which each individual is accountable to the others for his political contribution.”32 We are not told in this article on what ground such an attitude can be cultivated; to argue that both the secular and the religious party must be involved in a reciprocal “complementary learning process” still points us nowhere except to urge humility and self-restraint. In an analogous vein, while reasserting the Saidian concept of “secular criticism” as a critical practice, Stathis Gourgouris reinstates an assumption that human existence is ultimately groundless: “[Secular criticism or critique in the ancient Greek sense of the term] is also a recognition of the ultimate groundlessness of human existence, on which societal institutions, laws, traditions, governing structures, and the like are built without ever abolishing it, even if they presume or proclaim to do so.”33 Noble as he is with such tragic sensibility, Gourgouris is brave enough to leave a gaping abyss between the recognition of the ultimate groundlessness of the human condition and the most immediate matters, not even of laws and traditions, or the more distant governing structures and institutions, but of everyday ethics: how you should deal with your upstairs neighbors whose nocturnal celebrations in Ramadan unfailingly disturb your nighttime sleep, or what you ought to do when your Polish Catholic neighbors protest the broadcast call to prayer from your local mosque because they feel threatened, yet again, as a religious and ethnic minority in an America not known for its friendliness to Eastern European Catholics.34 In other words, even after we set aside the question of whether a groundless politics is ever humanly possible—we have never quite had such, which is probably why Gourgouris calls for more imagination—we still need to answer how that “ultimate” recognition can be adopted into mundane everyday politics. Do we then need a “weak” secularity that is as weak as fragile transcendence is “fragile”? This is where I find the concept of fragile transcendence potentially useful in offering an alternative approach. For if human existence has no ultimate ground and our “learning process” has no guarantee of success whatsoever, then it is

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probably rather unfair to assume that we can only fail in a secular way. Have we not long known that religion generates as much anxiety, fear, doubt, ambivalence, and downright disbelief as it does harmony and good fortune, the products often peddled by irritating street monks clad in oversized robes purchased from Amazon? Equally simple-minded is the notion that religion, especially in the form of liturgical rituals at the heart of major world religions, provides only one mode of transcendence (i.e., transcendence as associated with God). While philosophically sophisticated thinkers may have their minds set on finding an unshakable metaphysical transcendence and, failing that, turn to the other end and presume the ultimate groundlessness of human existence, anthropologists tend to idle in the rather muddy, indistinguishable middle. I propose that we consider the Jahriyya saint as a potential paradigm, a midpoint of moderate transcendence that is neither unbendingly secular nor doggedly religious. It is more likely that the incessant self-interrogation, the tragic sensibility that Gourgouris considers crucial to secular criticism, also needs to presuppose a certain weak transcendence as its ground. We can even begin to ponder the following question prompted by the idea of fragile transcendence: What kind of social experience, structured by what principles and occasioned by what histories, can facilitate a form of human encounter whose opacity is so foregrounded that, between us and the other we meet through its mediation, there appears a rift just so wide as to enhance that vague, shifting, and ever-so-delicate attitude of “tolerance?” This book argues that a non-Western, non-Christian, Chinese Islamic source provides us with solid ground from which to probe such questions in a concrete social world saturated with differences. While I write this book in the hope that the notion of fragile transcendence may have a wider purchase in our broader understanding of politics as pertains to religious difference and secularism, we should also remember that its particular form among the Jahriyya Sufis has a specific history and is determined by the special characters of Jahriyya sainthood. Thus, before elaborating on the nature of liturgical ritual and how it constitutes the basis for sustaining the abstract Jahriyya saint, we need first to know who the Jahriyya are, and how they are defined by their sublime recitation.

“THE LOUD ONES”

Jahriyya is not the only Sufi order in China; it is also not the only group that practices vocal recitation. To properly situate the Jahriyya, we ought to have a preliminary knowledge of China’s Sufi landscape.35 It is often said that there are

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four major Sufi orders among China’s Sinophone Muslims: the Khufiyya, the Jahriyya, the Qadiriyya, and the Kubrawiyya.36 While all four are in one way or another derived from Islamic mysticism in Central Asia after the Mongols conquered much of the Islamic world in the thirteenth century, such debts are not always properly acknowledged by the Sufi practitioners themselves. In the case of the Jahriyya murīdūn who attribute their origin to the Naqshbandiyya in Yemen in the eighteenth century (see chapters 1–3), the alternative possibility of a partial Central Asian provenance, when mentioned by a tactless anthropologist could at times trigger lightly veiled belligerence. “Our teaching came from Yemen. end of story.” I was once thus shut down by a Jahriyya cleric who later apologized for his tone but stood his ground regarding his view. What further complicates the matter is how Sufi orders in China are historically named. In Chinese, Sufi orders are often called menhuan 䮰ᇖ, an exonym invented in the late nineteenth century by an imperial official inclined toward their suppression.37 While men means “door,” implying acts of initiation and inclusion that often define membership in a Sufi order, huan betrays a clear sense of political ambition. Huanmen ᇖ䮰, which merely reverses word order while retaining the original characters, means an elite family of eminent political import. By labeling Sufi orders menhuan, Yang Zengxin, the imperial governor who first invented this name in his 1897 petition to the Qing Guangxu Emperor, thus insinuated that Sufi orders were potential threats to imperial rule. While Islamophobia and a local scramble for power certainly drove Yang to make this sinister insinuation, he was in fact rather perceptive in his observation. While other orders may be different, even a cursory look reveals that the Jahriyya by no means constitutes a monastic “order” in the classical sense the term has acquired in Western Christianity. No celibacy demand is made of its disciples; any such acts of abstinence are practiced purely out of individual volition, with no institutional enforcement. I know few Jahriyya men who are not married and who do not subscribe to an entrenched preference for male heirs; in this they are no different from an ordinary Han Chinese. Family life, rather than its rejection, is a vital component of Jahriyya ritual life (see chapters 2 and 3); with the exception of the first three saints in its sacred genealogy, all subsequent murshidūn are chosen from among the biological descendants of past leaders. Mystical truth and blood relations are intimately linked; otherworldly pursuits and worldly aspirations are tightly intertwined. The murshid is both a spiritual guide and a sociobiological father, his fatherhood marked by differential degrees of kinship that include consanguinity as well as affinity. One’s conversion to Jahriyya is seldom an individual matter; the basic unit of conversion has always been family, though its specific size varies from one case to the next. Several

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brothers may convert all at once—I have no knowledge of cases where women’s conversion could generate a comparable familial impact—or they may grow inimical and sever their kinship ties if not all of them find the conversion a palatable option. Family feuds that result from different views on joining or leaving a Sufi order, while considerably rarer now, are still able to command much emotional power when they break out. When one asks someone what Sufi order they belong to, the question posed is often “Whose teaching does your family follow?” (Nimen jia gen shui de jiaomen?). This is further complicated by the fact that spiritual conversion is sometimes strengthened by affinal relations; marrying a son or a daughter into the Jahriyya secures the conversion and seals the connection thus forged. While the acquisition of mystical truth may build on individual self-cultivation, membership in Jahriyya is far from an individual matter. As such this membership is both more and less inclusive than that in a classic monastic order. It is more inclusive because an association with Jahriyya does not necessarily involve a strong personal commitment; a communal affiliation through one’s extended family is the norm for many. One is a Jahriyya follower because one’s grandfather or father had joined long ago (hence the stress on patrilineage); veneration of the Jahriyya murshidūn and reverence for paternity can be mutually reinforcing. It is less inclusive because those without such familial ties are seldom admitted into the order on an individual basis. Such heavy reliance on family, particularly on patriliny, resonates strongly with the Yasaviyya in fifteenth-century Central Asia.38 Perhaps this resonance is not completely coincidental: another name the Yasaviyya had long borne in Central Asia was Jahriyya, owing clearly to its common practice of vocal dhikr (dhikr jahrī).39 This incidental sharing of a name does not necessarily indicate that Jahriyya, which began to spread in China in the mid-eighteenth century, was a direct descendant of the Yasaviyya of medieval Central Asia. Jahriyya is not a patronym derived from an eponymous saint; it merely offers a straightforward characterization of a definitive ritual practice. As such, any Sufi group that practices vocal dhikr may choose to thus designate themselves. While chapter 1 will provide a more detailed account of the historical genealogy of Jahriyya and its connection to the illustrious Naqshbandiyya, it is worth noting here that the intense rivalry between the earlier Yasaviyya and the later Naqshbandiyya in the early modern period often centered on the issue of communal affiliation and hereditary succession. In more than one way the Naqshbandiyya contradicted the Yasaviyya: they practiced silent rather than vocal dhikr and castigated the latter, and they showed strong contempt for hereditary lineage and other forms of association with Sufi saints that were not based on the sacred silsila, the line of succession between mentors and disciples without blood ties.40

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The irony of this historical row is most manifest when we turn to Jahriyya. While claiming descent from Naqshbandiyya, which purportedly objects to vocal dhikr, the Jahriyya murīdūn also find pride in this descent and build their rituals around it. Communal affiliation and hereditary lineage, vehemently denounced by Naqshbandiyya in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and attributed to Yasaviyya as a clear sign of its corruption, also find their way back into Jahriyya. It is as though, in its special history and ritual practice, Jahriyya, as a Sufi order on the eastern margin of the Islamicate world, combined the Yasaviyya and the Naqshbandiyya, despite their overt hostility. This also means that Jahriyya cannot be considered a Sufi “order,” in that its forms of affiliation far exceed the linear silsila and are deeply rooted in local communal relations and kinship organizations. Given the domination of hereditary patrilineage, the extended families of the Jahriyya murshidūn would acquire a status akin to that of feudal lords, with real possession of properties and real control of a locally organized military force. The imperial governor Yang Zengxin, the autocrat who ruled the Uyghur region for seventeen years in the early twentieth century, was genuinely insightful in naming the Sufi “orders” menhuan 䮰ᇖ, for the Sufi organizations in northwestern China were indeed potent conglomerates of powerful families that presided over massive numbers of followers bound to them by relations of faith, kinship, and patronage. Menhuans are far larger Sufi communities with complex hierarchies and segmentations that cannot be neatly fitted into the model of an order defined by a linear silsila. While for the sake of simplicity I will continue to use the term “order” now and then to refer to Jahriyya, the reader should be aware that this is merely an expediency. This point is all the more important because the Jahriyya Sufis this book examines belong to only one of the numerous branches that claim this name for themselves. Here we should note that even local endonyms reinforce the fact that Jahriyya conceptions of geography, kinship, and affiliation cannot be subsumed under the classic Sufi notion of linear silsila. The Jahriyya community discussed in this book bear the name Shagou pai, or, alternately Maqiao pai, while their strongest rival whose base is adjacent to theirs has been called Banqiao pai. While pai means “branch” or “sect,” Shagou, Maqiao, and Banqiao are all local toponyms in Ningxia. Segmentations among the Jahriyya are propelled in part by disputes over the silsila, but more often they stem from divisions in communal affiliation and family feuds. The youngest son of a saint may gather all the local followers around him to form a de facto sect even though his oldest brother is the official heir, and such division—at times openly acknowledged but mostly acquiesced to by the then leader—is by no means confined to the heirs of past saints. Descendants of the close companions or local representatives of deceased

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saints could well establish their own branch, named after their own place of residence. At times these new branches do fight over the silsila, and some such fights are intense and long-lasting; for instance, Shagou and Banqiao have been involved in a prolonged tug of war, and the latter have built a small gallery to showcase all the ijāza (“permission,” “approval,” or “authorization,” here meaning the relics left by the founding Jahriyya murshid that conferred sacred authority on their owners) in their possession. Yet in most cases the social mechanism that causes segmentation among the Jahriyya far surpasses disputes surrounding the silsila. While The Sound of Salvation is the first book-length ethnography of Jahriyya so far published in any language, it certainly is not the first work to introduce Jahriyya to a wider audience. In 1936 Claude L. Pickens Jr., an American Protestant missionary of the China Inland Mission, toured northwestern China with the company of his more famous father-in-law, Samuel M. Zwemer, the indefatigable “Apostle to Islam” who attained such renown through his work among Muslims of the Middle East.41 The pair, propelled by their shared passion for evangelizing Muslims, left behind a remarkable archive of notes and photos about China’s Muslims in the early years of World War II. One such photo shows the illustrious wooden architecture of Hong Le Fu before its complete demolition by the communists in 1950s (fig.  0.1). In the same archive one also finds two

F i gu r e  0. 1 Hong Le Fu. By Claude L. Pickens Jr. Photo courtesy Harvard-Yenching Library.

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separate letters, sent to Pickens by a missionary named F. W. Martin Taylor, that documented the Jahriyya silsila. Pickens’s trip was a concerned response to an urgent call issued more than two decades earlier for establishing Christian missions among China’s Muslims. In 1910 Marshall Broomhall, another member of the China Inland Mission, published his monumental Islam in China: A Neglected Problem. The title was an overt recognition of the importance of “win[ning] this great neglected class [i.e., Muslims in China] for the [sic] Christ.”42 While Broomhall’s broad survey of Islam in China did cover the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Muslim rebellions in which the Jahriyya played a vital role, in that text Jahriyya seldom appeared under its proper name.43 We had to wait yet another half century, until the 1970s, for the first proper academic study about the Jahriyya. In chapter 1, I devote more space to this groundbreaking study and explain its pertinence to the study of the Jahriyya voice. Suffice it to mention here that this work—by the extraordinary Harvard historian Joseph Fletcher, who drew on texts in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Chinese—was able to confirm with reasonable certainty Jahriyya murīdūn’s claim that their founding murshid had received his mystical training from the Naqshbandiyya shayhks of eighteenth-century Yemen.44 The case seems indisputably concluded: Jahriyya in China had its origin in the Naqshbandiyya in southern Arabia. By the eighteenth century, when Jahriyya first began to draw a following in China, the Naqshbandiyya Sufi path had long transcended its place of origin in Khorasan in medieval Persia and firmly established itself as one of the most formidable and impactful Sufi orders in the Islamic world.45 Later academic literature on Jahriyya often relied heavily on Fletcher’s findings, to the point that some even reproduced verbatim some of his less scrupulous terminology. Both Dru Gladney and Jonathan Lipman, two pioneering figures in the study of China’s Sinophone Muslims, followed Fletcher in attributing to Ma Mingxin (1719–1781)—the first Jahriyya murshid—“fundamentalist” tendencies.46 While Ma did propose changes to the practice of Islam among his newly converted disciples, “fundamentalist” as a loosely descriptive and implicitly evaluative term may be less than helpful (or, worse, confusing) in characterizing the kind of difference advocated by the new Jahriyya path in eighteenth-century northwestern China.47 If we are to treat the Jahriyya on their own terms, however, the key distinction between their new path and other Sino-Muslim communities is one of sound. The Jahriyya murīdūn practice vocal dhikr; in their pious remembrance of God they engage in elaborate rituals of vocal performance. While other Sufi orders as well as non-Sufi Muslims in China also practice vocal recitation, the Jahriyya stand out in that their use of voice is so tightly woven into the fabric of their social and religious life that it is far more than simply a sensorial medium for

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the practice of Islamic piety. The Jahriyya do not merely recite; they are defined by their ritualized recitation. Ritualization is thus as essential to the Jahriyya path as are the voices ritualized; and this ritualization, a social process with distinct consequences, underpins the cultivation of fragile transcendence among the Jahriyya murīdūn.

LANGUAGE, RITUAL, SAINTHOOD

A significant feature of the ritualization of recitation among the Jahriyya is the separation of that recitation from the semantic meaning of the recited text. Most Jahriyya murīdūn have no knowledge of Arabic beyond a rudimentary grasp of its alphabet; a lifetime of recitation and pious devotion can thus be built on practically zero knowledge of the Arabic text itself. Even those clerics who have undergone extensive Arabic training do not always focus their minds on the textual subtleties of mystical poetry while involved in an actual ritual. Jahriyya followers often appropriate their Arabic texts in such a way as to pay little regard to their internal semantic structures; a line can be drawn out of context and used to speak to a contemporary event completely irrelevant to the original poem. For instance, in one of the most marvelous stories told of the early modern Jahriyya saint Ma Hualong, the saint said to his closest companion as they parted ways and he went on to face sure death: “Remember this: the day when you read ataytu [Arab. I have come] from Mukhammas will be the day you see me again.” Mukhammas is a Sufi panegyric poem composed in Arabic by Muhammad alTabādkānī al-Ṭūsī—a Sufi saint based in Herat—that comprises 163 five-line stanzas (see chapter 2 for a more elaborate discussion of the poem). Jahriyya murīdūn recite five stanzas each night, leaving the last three stanzas for the final night, which “completes/seals [liao]” the thirty-three-day cycle. The one that starts with ataytu is the 151st stanza, wherein “I have come” is the first sentence that inaugurates the entire recitation on that particular night. In full the Mukhammas stanza that begins with ataytu says the following: Here I come, proffering a few humble rhymes in the footsteps of a noble poem whose attribute betrays its time-honored origin hoping that, albeit tawdry, they will intercede on my behalf. I wish not for the splendor of this earthly world, splendor that the hands of Zuhayr assembled to lavish praise on Harim.48

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Since Mukhammas is a takhmīs built on the original text of Imam Būṣīrī’s illustrious Qaṣīda al-Burḍa—hence the reference to “a noble poem”—this stanza is the author’s modest expression of his pious intent in composing the poem. The first line, wherein we find “Here I (have) come,” bears no hint of an onerous travel, though such is often a principal component of Arabic qaṣīda poetry (called raḥīl), and, valiant and shrewd as he was as a military leader, Ma Hualong is never considered a gifted rhymester. “Splendor of the earthly world” (zahrat al-dunyā) is a direct reference to Qur’an 20:131 (“Nor strain thine eyes in longing for the things We have given for enjoyment to parties of them, the splendor of the life of this world, through which we test them: But the provision of thy Lord is better and more enduring”). It is clear from the stanza above that Mukhammas’s author is well versed in both Islamic and pre-Islamic poetry and does not shy away from referring to poetic works from the period of jāhiliyya (“ignorance,” used by Muslims to refer to the pre-Islamic times in Arabia): Zuhayr bin Abī Sulmā is one of the finest Arabian poets in the sixth and seventh centuries AD, and his poems were once considered so outstanding that they were “hung up” (muʿallaqāt) on the walls of Kaʿba in pre-Islamic Mecca, and Harim ibn Sinān, chief of the Dhubyān tribe, was a paragon of generosity and munificent patron of Zuhayr. In no identifiable way does the content of the stanza or its historical reference allude to wars and wreckage, though Zuhayr did write at a time when tribal wars, in particular between Banu Dhubyān and Banu ʿAbs, was a fixture for contemporaneous literary representation.49 It would, however, be a great stretch to conclude that this background is the reason behind the use of this stanza in the tragic saga of Ma Hualong. Poetry, whether Islamic or pre-Islamic, never entered the Jahriyya clerical curricula, and not even once did I hear a Jahriyya follower comment on the poetic prowess of Zuhayr or other pre-Islamic poets. The great Arabic poetic genre of qaṣīda, which predates Islam and later forms an essential genre for composing panegyrics praising the Prophet, Sufi saints, and worldly leaders, has never been adopted into Jahriyya’s clerical training.50 Mukhammas is studied as a stand-alone liturgical text severed from the historical and literary networks that gave rise to its specific feature, which means a knowledge of Arabic poetry is not considered essential to understanding its main message—or, in particular, its ritual performance. While some Jahriyya clerics do hold dear the ability to explain the poem to the letter, for the vast majority of disciples the lack of such an ability, or even complete ignorance of the poem’s historical references, in no way impedes their ritual practice. What the Jahriyya use of ataytu reveals is a common modus operandi in their appropriation of Sufi poetic texts: they take words and phrases, and sometimes whole stanzas, out of their original context and furnish them with new

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indexical meanings. The link between their new use and their literal meaning in the initial context is tenuous at best; where they are embedded in a ritual performance, that link is almost completely sundered. Such appropriation of text for ritual purposes is in fact a commonplace in the ethnographic archive; anthropologists have long noted the peculiar character of ritual language. The subjection of language to new use and the resulting eclipse of semantics constitute an essential characteristic that marks the process of ritualization. Jahriyya’s ritualized treatment of Mukhammas therefore provides us with a good point of departure for explaining the general features of ritualization, which this book argues is crucial for the cultivation of fragile transcendence. As shall become clear in due course, the ritualization process itself far exceeds the appropriation of texts for ritual purposes; a more apt description would be that texts as well as actions, meanings as well as vocal recitations, are absorbed into an encompassing operation of ritualization that integrates both into a new liturgical structure. This is by no means a new insight. However, in order to understand why liturgical rituals in Jahriyya Sufism can contribute to the idea—and the sensibility—of fragile transcendence, we need to know about the general features of liturgical ritual and about what happens when words and actions undergo a process of ritualization that incorporates both into a new structure. I argue that ritualization lends an ineffable sense of opacity and facticity to ritualized words and actions, which, thus transformed, become essentially “inscrutable” to the participants in the ritual; this very inscrutability lies at the heart of fragile transcendence. To arrive at this understanding, we need to go back to the ethnographic archive, which will equip us with some important theoretical tools. In 1966, addressing an audience of anthropologists and ethologists, Edmund Leach reminded his listeners that, while anthropologists’ understanding of ritual often centers on “behaviours of a non-verbal kind,” “speech itself is a form of ritual.”51 One can, of course, read numerous ideas into this succinct remark. For instance, one can immediately ask, If speech is a form of ritual, then can all forms of speech be considered at some level ritualistic, or is speech transformed specifically by its ritualization? To the former question a strain of language philosophy has long provided a provisional answer. In 1955, in his William James Lectures, J. L. Austin developed the concept of “the performative,” isolating a group of words whose utterance already constitutes a form of action. When I say “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth,” I am performing the act of naming instead of merely describing the action; when I say “I do” at a certain point in a wedding ceremony, I am actually involved in the act of offering my consent to be someone’s legally acknowledged partner. That language can be performative means that speech can have an intrinsic ritualistic element; it is not coincidental that

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naming and consenting to a marriage—actions that exhibit a strong ritual feature—constitute two of Austin’s most prominent examples of the performative.52 If we are to follow later theorists who have shown with great insight that language itself, not just a subset of it, is intrinsically performative, it would not be a great stretch to extend Leach’s remark and argue that speech is always already ritualistic; words are actions through and through.53 And this argument can be fortified by quoting anthropologists who work from the other end and employ a more capacious sense of the performative to describe ritual itself.54 We should note that “performative” does not refer to “performance,” least of all affectively charged theatrical performance.55 When Stanley Tambiah said, in his 1979 Radcliffe Brown Lecture, that he used the performative also to describe the “staged performance that uses multiple media by which the participants experience the event [i.e., ritual] intensively,”56 he came dangerously close to undoing the very conceptual work that has demolished the dubious boundary between the performative and the constative in Austin’s initial theory.57 Despite his stress on performance, however, Tambiah is one of the most eminent defenders of the referential power of ritual speech in twentieth-century anthropology; on one occasion he went so far as to find in language—its deployment of metaphor and metonymy, its power to evoke images and enable comparisons, and its function in linking events across time and space that could not have been linked otherwise through action—a strength that “owes nothing to external reality.”58 He was not alone in making this argument. Perhaps the most famous example in modern anthropology of seeing performative power in referential language is offered by none other than Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his now-classic essay “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” Lévi-Strauss describes with characteristic flair a Kuna shaman’s great feat of successfully facilitating a difficult childbirth. The mother’s agonizing experience is converted into a heroic saga wherein the shaman trudges through an intrepid landscape to release her lost soul from the hands of Muu, the power responsible for the formation of fetuses. Lévi-Strauss’s neat conclusion deserves reiteration: “The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression . . . which induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the reorganization, in a favorable direction, of the process to which the sick woman is subjected.”59 The reference to psychoanalysis is evident and should not surprise those familiar with postwar structural anthropology. However, it is probably worth mentioning that LéviStrauss never did fieldwork among the Kuna, and he never actually observed the working of a Kuna shaman; in writing this essay he relied on the fieldwork of Nils Holmer and Henry Wassén, who were instrumental in collecting the text of Kuna

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ritual chanting.60 In other words, Lévi-Strauss was inferring from extant material: he read the text, and he read that its chanting by the shaman had a palpable effect on the pain, so he assumed that the content and structure of the text must be the secret to the shaman’s success. This turns out to be far from the truth, however: the language of the chant is of such a special register that its mastery requires long and arduous learning, which the woman in pain or most of the shaman’s “patients” could not have undertaken. Carlo Severi, drawing on his work on the Kuna, recently observed that “the song formulated by the shaman, the story supposed to be capable of interpreting the pain, is, for the suffering woman, a lengthy and monotonous sequence of incomprehensible sounds, possibly punctuated only by a ceaseless repetition of fixed verbal form.”61 For Severi, one secret of the cure lies in an essential parallelism: in recognizing those familiar verbal refrains here and there in the course of the shaman’s chanting, the suffering mother could use such minimal comprehension (e.g., the shaman is out on a journey to save my lost soul) to project her own images and her own stories onto those parts of the recitation she does not understand. The cure is a work as much of the woman’s imagination as it is of the shaman and his chant, and sound rather than text is essential in propelling this imaginative projection. Severi thus gives us a different reading of Leach’s earlier remark on speech being a form of ritual. For here the performative power of referential speech is effectively thwarted by its unintelligibility (and in chapter 2 we will see that this applies equally to Jahriyya recitation in liturgical rituals). The matter is not so much the text itself—whether or not it possesses a clear structure and a substantial content that encodes crucial technical or historical knowledge—as its reception by those who participate in its ritual chanting. Language can be intrinsically ritualistic, its referential meaning can command performative force, but its ritualization does not always or necessarily draw on this intrinsic character, and conflating language with ritual is something even the most adamant advocate of ritual speech’s performative power would probably not endorse.62 Which leaves us with a question central to this book’s treatment of liturgical ritual: What is the process of ritualization that subjects words to such a fundamental shift and reshapes its articulation with nonverbal actions? At times anthropologists answer the question of what something is by explaining what it does, as though function or pragmatic effects were sufficient for defining social phenomena. In the field of ritual studies, “securing social cohesion” or “reviving social solidarity” is a common refrain even for those purporting to introduce new approaches.63 Roy Rappaport, one of the finest scholars of ritual in twentieth-century anthropology, considers ritual crucial for perpetuating social

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order over and above the shifting sand of individual “psychic noise.”64 Yet ritual seldom accomplishes such a precarious feat on its own; grand rituals are often accompanied by great communal events that create as much if not more sense of cohesion among the participants. In some cases ritual divides those present as much as it generates among them an often transient, even illusory, sense of intimacy and community. In the case of liturgical rituals that are repeated day in and day out with no particular verve, the participants usually do not quite know why they are there; they simply feel they need to be there. One can of course argue that being in the same space and chanting the same text enhances social cohesion; however, the argument is probably as useless as it is unassailable. Ritual can contribute to social cohesion, but it is not the only way of attaining it, nor is it perhaps the most effective way. So where does this leave us? I pointed out above that this book is about the use of voice in Sufi liturgical ritual, and fragile transcendence as an ambivalent condition is built on its core characteristics. In other words, in this book I am dealing only with a subset of ritual; thus my argument cannot be expanded to cover all types of ritual. However, some anthropologists do insist that liturgical ritual is the prototype of all rituals and consider it the culmination of ritualization. In their book The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw claim that ritual is a particular quality that all actions can potentially possess. Ritual is to action what redness is to a table or softness to a sponge; ritualization is thus defined as a qualitative transformation of ordinary action into a certain heightened form. The first thing to note about this qualitative understanding of ritual is that it is defined in the abstract: redness is a quality that finds its manifestation in certain concrete materials, and rarely if ever do we find a “pure redness” in the empirical world. The same line of thinking further leads Humphrey and Laidlaw to define ritual acts as “elemental”: We suggest that these contrasts between ritual and other practical activity can be explained by the idea that ritual acts are treated as elemental, that is, that each stipulated type of ritual act is thought of as if it were a separate “thing” each with its own essential character. . . . The best way to proceed for the present, we think, is to suggest that, as used by the actors, the names for ritual are in significant respects like the words we use for natural kinds.65

Abundance of the passive voice in the passage (e.g., “are treated,” “is thought of”) reveals that Humphrey and Laidlaw’s definition of ritual adopts the point of view of its participants, and this point of view is characterized by a subjunctive (even optative?) mood (“as if it were a separate ‘thing’ ”). What do they mean by names of ritual acts—as used by the actors—being like the words we use for “natural

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kinds?” While their isolation of the natural from the artificial kind is disputable to say the least—does it still make sense to say a chair is more artificial than gold is, or a lemon is more natural than a table is, in our contemporary age?—it is still worth asking what has led them to such a provocative analogy. For both authors, prototypes of natural kinds, such as “gold,” refer not to use or function but to more or less superficial observable features: They are designed to pick out a “stuff” the true nature of which, although not securely known at least to most of us, is presumed to be an objective fact. This means that occasionally something may be revealed by a scientist to be a member of a natural kind which does not have the characteristics of the commonly held prototype. People’s prototypes do not define what gold is; they are no more than the clues they have about what things might be made of gold. . . . The intension of these terms is ultimately unknown—our scientists’ theories are always corrigible—and their extension is whatever the experts say that they think, for the moment, ought to count. To count as what? Well, to count as being “that stuff.” What the use of these terms seeks to maintain is that people all refer to the same stuff as has been referred to before, using the same term. To be a competent user of the term “gold” does not in fact require of people that they share the expert’s or each other’s theories about the stuff. Indeed, in using the term, they refer to just “that stuff,” whatever it is.66

A linguistic anthropologist may thus see in ritual something akin to the ambiguous function of indexical signs (e.g., deixis, such as “that”/det or a pointing finger).67 Of relevance to us, however, is the idea that in giving ritual acts a name, we are affirming their epistemic obscurity. Ritual actions appear to us as natural kinds because natural kinds appear to us as beings of a certain depth that can potentially be known, but not in one go, and there is no guarantee that we will ever be able to get to the very bottom of it. Ritualization for Humphrey and Laidlaw is the very process whereby an action suffused with intention and purposiveness becomes gradually inscrutable to its animator (i.e., the person carrying it out); the reasons for performing it become opaque, to the point where the question “What are we doing?” gives way to “Have we done it right?” Ritual acts are compared to natural kinds because, to those performing them, the actions they are to execute appear to possess a “peculiar facticity,” a certain enigmatic externality that gives them a strong “objective” quality.68 At one level this is no more than a reiteration of sociological commonplace: we know for a fact that liturgical rituals are composed of stipulated procedures regardless of the personal identity and individual intention of their enactors. They are often about replicating tradition and the structure of

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authority it bolsters, so it is only natural that they appear to be externally imposed and oppressively objective “social facts.” Did not Maurice Bloch argue long ago about the function of ritual in perpetuating political authority such that religion may be considered “an extreme form of political authority”?69 What Humphrey and Laidlaw remind us is that the “objectivity” of liturgical ritual has to do with an essential opacity, and social fact, in order to acquire its “facticity” in the perception of its subjects, must be so perceived as to surpass any specific explanation. A ritual’s perceived inexplicability contributes to a sense of its depth. In confronting the immensity of a “deep” ritual, its participants are to think that there must have been some explanation or some authoritative interpretation of the ritual, but now it is all but lost or in the possession of some authority they have no direct access to. The crucial point is not what that explanation is or whether that explanation can be found, but the very thought that there must have been such an explanation at some point in history.70 For Humphrey and Laidlaw, the apotheosis of ritualization is that type of ritual that generates among its participants this ambiguous recognition of depth and opacity. One cannot overstate the fact that Humphrey and Laidlaw’s theory traces closely the contours of liturgical ritual, and the assertion that one can find in liturgical ritual what is properly ritualistic involves a bold claim that may be less useful to those more interested in the social function or affective potency of ritual performance. Humphrey and Laidlaw’s ethnographic exemplar throughout the book is the Jain puja in India, and their ability to observe a liturgical ritual somehow suspended above contending explanations and diverse attitudes rests on the fact that Jainism in the region they study has seen no enduring politico-religious authority that may have long ago manufactured consensus among its followers. Yet the authors also take great pains to stress that the imposition of explanation is often a religious response, an anxious afterthought, to the subtraction of meaning that takes place in the course of ritualization. I find Humphrey and Laidlaw’s Wittgensteinian approach to ritual germane to the ethnographic material at hand because we can detect a similar tension among the Jahriyya disciples: on the one hand, ritualization confers upon the recitation of Sufi panegyric poetry an epistemic opacity that enables both multiplication of practice and explanation and a certain attitude of indifference and tolerance; on the other, pressure from both reform-minded Jahriyya murīdūn and Muslims outside the order leads many to seek explanations they find defensible on religious grounds. Above all, this approach to ritual exposes precisely how the process of ritualization is essential to the cultivation of what I have come to call “fragile transcendence.” If depth and opacity are characteristic of liturgical ritual, and both, as Humphrey and Laidlaw have shown, contribute to the variation in ritual

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practice as well as its explanation, then it is probably no wonder that liturgical ritual has proven crucial to the formulation of abstract sainthood among the Jahriyya in the past two and a half centuries. Between Jains and their gods, however, there seem to be no significant mediatory figures; by contrast, followers of Jahriyya Sufism capitalize on what liturgical ritual has to offer to formulate a mediating sainthood that creates a generalized Jahriyya saint. While Jainism and Jahriyya Sufism may place a similar stress on liturgy and may exhibit analogous forbearance in the face of ritual variance, Jahriyya disciples combine this common sensibility with their specific history to develop a notion of transcendence that is somehow between the humanly mundane and the godly transcendental. While this may again be considered akin to a “functionalist” approach to ritual—focusing on what it does—it is a sort of functionalism that traces the effects of the liturgical ritual neither to the referential power of the recited text nor to the indexical function of its constituent elements. Rather, it sees ritualization as a social operation, a special way of structuring social encounter and framing social action that creates a scission between the action and the actor wherein self-doubt, uncertainty, and a certain respectful tolerance toward others can be sustained, however precariously. Fragile transcendence is thus not a theological or a philosophical notion; it characterizes an unstable social condition to which the repeated performance of liturgical ritual can potentially give rise. Yet before proceeding we also need to ask, How would a dedicated Jahriyya disciple react to the eccentric idea of fragile transcendence? The question is not of minor import, and I do not raise it out of a belief that the golden rule of ethnographic writing is the consent of one’s interlocutors to their depictions in the ethnography. However, no theory and no ethnographic portrayal can claim to transcend the politics they purport to describe and analyze. In the case of Jahriyya Sufism, the argument that ritualization engenders an inscrutability of constituent ritual elements sounds uncomfortably akin to the modern criticism that Sufi liturgical rituals are “empty husks” with no organic link whatsoever to the recited texts. It is thus only natural to ask, How would a Jahriyya disciple react to the main argument of this book?

THEORY, ETHNOGRAPHY, POLITICS

It is clearly absurd to assume that one can retrieve a uniform point of view from the Jahriyya murīdūn on this matter; they differ as much in this regard as they do on most other matters that pertain to ritual practice. It is likely that some may

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find it an interesting idea. I once shared with a Jahriyya cleric a rudimentary version of the same idea and was given a rare word of praise. “Now you have hit on something that sounds right,” he said. Yet by all appearances many Jahriyya murīdūn seem deliberately set on demolishing the ambivalent space that accommodates fragile transcendence. Chapter 4 shows how the Jahriyya authority endeavors to use new sound technologies to root out the variations in dawr and generate a more unitary ritual soundscape. Beyond such direct intervention in the voice, there is also a pervasive sense among the Jahriyya that there must be an explanation to each component of their ritual recitation, though not many bother to track it down. In the early twentieth century a Jahriyya disciple wrote in the preface to his work recounting the extraordinary deeds of past Jahriyya saints: Indeed scholars of formalities (ʿulamā al-rusūm) reproach the shaykhs and the saints, for they (i.e., these scholars of formalities) observe only the apparent deeds (al-‘af ʿāl al-ẓāhiriyya) while neglecting the hidden spiritual state (al-aḥwāl albāṭiniyya). They say “This is not permitted (ghayr jā’ iz)!” or “That is ḥarām!” or “It doesn’t align with the Book!” They say such and such a shaykh did this, and [asked] “Is this how he set up an example?” They say “Only the ignorant dilettantes follow them.” These scholars are drowned in the sea of idle gossip and prattle (al-qīl wa-l-qāl), and they are not acquainted with the books of Sufism (kutub al-taṣawwuf ) and spiritual conduct (al-sulūk). Even if they are, they are nevertheless blind and deaf, and they only repeat what the legal scholars (alfuqahā’) say of the saints like what those of Pharaoh’s times did to Moses. In this era populated by inventors (mukhtaraʿūn) and innovators (mubtadiʿūn), this short treatise (mukhtaṣar) is a good counsel and a fine volume.71

The target of these scathing remarks was not clear, but they were made at a time when the Jahriyya and other Sufi orders in China were faring particularly poorly in defending their mystical approach to Islam, and their organizational structure centered on sainthood. Since the late nineteenth century, Sufism in China has been embroiled in continuous and increasingly aggressive challenges from new and often more austere forms of Islam that entered China from the Middle East and North Africa. In 1892 Ma Wanfu returned from pilgrimage after six years of extensive travel and intensive studies in Mecca and its vicinities. A prodigy nicknamed tailihui (“the one born well-read,” or, literally, “the one who is well-read in the womb”) even before his overseas journey, Ma Wanfu was among the first modern Sino-Muslim clerics to openly advocate for zunjing gesu, “to return to the Qur’an and eliminate the customs,” wherein the term “customs” encompasses a wide range of Sino-Muslim practices, including Sufi tomb visitation and

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elaborate liturgical rituals commemorating the murshidūn. Object of both enthusiastic support and vehement denunciations—a detractor once smeared animal feces on his door, and others plotted his assassination—Ma Wanfu’s campaign received a major boost when local Muslim warlords in Qinghai saw its potential in undermining the entrenched economic and military might of the Sufi ṭarīqa (path) in northwestern China.72 Regardless of such political manipulation, however, the call for zunjing gesu was echoed across Sinophone Muslim communities from Xi’an to Tianjin, Ningxia to Guangxi. Within fifty years the yihewani (Arab. ikhwa, pl. of akh, “brother”), as Ma Wanfu’s devoted followers came to be known, grew into one of the most powerful Sino-Muslim denominations in China, with its avowed commitment to purging Sino-Islam of later accretions—practices and customs considered despicable “innovations” (bidʿa) absent from Islam’s original revelation. The introduction of Salafism in the 1930s from the Hejaz was also traced in part to Ma Debao, another dedicated yihewani follower who turned toward a more hot-headed and less inclusive approach, presumably because yihewani was still, to his taste, too mild to generate genuine change.73 Where is Jahriyya in all this? At one level Jahriyya was not singled out to become a particular target for criticism. This is because most Sufi orders among Sino-Muslims, while each possessing a distinct set of rituals and celebrating the memories of their own saints on designated dates, still shared much in common with other traditional Muslims in some basic ritual practices. For instance, the practice of passing around a hard copy of the Qur’an among the participants in a funerary janāza prayer to make up for the deceased’s lapsed religious duty (why such an act can accomplish this effect is often left unexplained) was never cast in serious doubt until yihewani began to denounce it vehemently as a lousu, or an “abominable custom,” and on more than one occasion I heard fairly moderate yihewani followers question the need for the large numbers of duʿa (supplication), where in their view one or at most two (e.g., after a regular prayer or a communal meal) would more than suffice. However, one point of dispute does strike a chord with Jahriyya. A Sino-Muslim intellectual wrote in the 1930s at the height of the controversy: Both the new and the old schools recite panegyrics; so why does it matter that some follow a higher pitch while others practice a lower one? If it is objected that using Chinese tunes [zhongguo zhi shengdiao] to read Arabic words makes the reading sound like singing [youru gechang] and is thus highly disrespectful, then how many among the Hui can actually replicate the pronunciation and the tunes of the Arabs? After all, how many are able to reproduce the genuine sound of

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the Arabs with no error whatsoever? If one prohibits the recitation of Arabic works unless the reciter can do it in the Arab way, then probably all Hui Muslims in China ought to read silently! What is wrong with the Chinese tunes when they in fact express an impressive feeling of solemnity and serenity? How can anyone consider such tunes to be disrespectful?74

More than half a century later, exactly the same view was expressed by Ma Songhua, a devoted disciple and extraordinary physician from an eminent Jahriyya family. While insisting that there was a physical difference in the oral tract that rendered Chinese-speakers incapable of pronouncing certain Arabic consonants— his example was the alveolar trill /r/, which has tripped up many a student of Arabic—he was also an avid Jahriyya historian with a knack of collecting, and at times inventing, arcane oddities. An early twentieth-century Jahriyya hagiography mentioned in passing that by the time of the fourth murshid (late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century), there were still two major dawrayn (dual form of dawr) widely practiced among the Jahriyya: one was given the name of Meccan dawr (dawr al-makka), and the other was known as the Yemeni dawr (dawr al-yaman).75 By the second decade of the twenty-first century, no Jahriyya had any idea what those two dawrayn had been, and to what extent their current recitation combined the two and in what proportion. Ma Songhua was among the very few who still paid attention to such textual detail, and he linked it to what was better known as the lingzhou dawr, or dawr of Lingzhou. The latter was better known because Lingzhou is the region where Hong Le Fu is located; Lingzhou dawr thus designates none other than the dawr developed in the area centered on Hong Le Fu since the early nineteenth century. On one occasion he ventured the conclusion that Lingzhou dawr is Meccan dawr, offering no evidence whatsoever to back this up. In a catechism he composed that was later adopted as a history textbook at Hong Le Fu to train the next generation of Jahriyya clerics, he spent five pages laying out a range of information about dawr. He wrote that it originated from Arab music, and he defined music as “an art form that uses organized, regulated, pleasant sound to express human emotion.”76 Apparently ignoring the many Muslim scholars and legal judges who find the idea of comparing Islamic recitation to music repulsive (see chapter 1), Ma Songhua saw no problem in describing the Jahriyya dawr as a “superb musical art form” (chaogao de yinyue yishu xingshi) to “express the classics of Islam and the truth from the Creator.”77 In real life, however, Ma Songhua was a great deal more cautious, and he was fully aware of the numerous criticisms leveled at Jahriyya’s melodic recitation over the past century. In a certain sense one can read what he wrote as both a

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self-defense and a slight overreaction—an overreaction only because it had somehow been delayed for a good century. The defense quoted above penned by a Sino-Muslim intellectual in 1930s was quickly drowned out by voices advocating reform and new Arabic instructions. In 2016 I still heard some Jahriyya murīdūn complain about the scorn they suffered from other Muslims because of their laoyin (old sound) or laodiao (old tune). Chapter 1 will deal more squarely with such politics of Islamic sounds; here we should simply note that this concern over tune and pronunciation, along with a general curiosity about the meanings of their liturgical rituals, has prompted many a Jahriyya murīd to launch a continuing search for more explanations. Although for a few years it seemed some younger Jahriyya disciples devoted to the path were pondering adopting a more “standard” style of Arabic recitation, by the mid-2010s such attempts were all but abandoned. There was a new interest in preserving laoyin—an interest the Jahriyya incidentally shared with many traditional SinoMuslims across China during the same period—and the Jahriyya authority did not hesitate to throw their weight behind such endeavors. Making sure that one has an explanation for what one does in ritual, and being able to provide such explanations when confronted by reform-minded outsiders, thus became a critical task. Ma Songhua’s textbook was written for this very purpose. In other words, even if we concur with Geertz, who argued in the mid-1960s that “[it is not] necessary to be theologically self-conscious to be religiously sophisticated,” we still need to recognize that not all practitioners of religion can afford to be religiously sophisticated without being theologically self-conscious.78 Some, such as followers of Jahriyya, can be forced by circumstance to become theologically self-conscious because they have to answer often less-than-friendly queries about why they are doing what they are doing. Some of the replies they give would likely not satisfy their interrogators: quoting Qur’an 50:39 (“Bear, then, with patience, all that they say, and celebrate the praises of thy Lord, before the rising of the sun and before it setting”) to explain the chanting of Awrād twice a day does not count as an adequate explanation, though the verse may be considered particularly apt in conveying the underlying mood (here the detractors of Jahriyya are compared to those who denied the truth of the Prophet, and Jahriyya murīdūn, like the Prophet, are instructed to endure such skepticism with patience). If fragile transcendence is about sustaining that ambivalent space where contending explanations and divergent ritual practices are regarded with a certain degree of “tolerance,” and where an abstract sense of togetherness can survive without slipping into complete apathy, then how can we modify this anthropological interest in the light of many Jahriyya murīdūn’s genuine concern to explain themselves?

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The matter is not of minor import, especially in the context of religious studies. More than a century ago William Robertson Smith made clear in his Burnett Lectures that ritual practices and concrete institutions of religion, while composing only a part of a religious system, nonetheless constitute its primary component, and all investigations of religion thus need to start from rites and rituals—how religions are done—instead of beliefs and myths that purport to explain them.79 While we often assume that rituals express a system of ideas about the transcendent and are hence secondary to these ideas and serve merely as their practical manifestation, Smith suggested that we look at it the other way around. While his subsequent attempt to search for the pagan origins of monotheistic religions—Islamic rituals are holdovers from the past, in other words, and monotheistic explanations are later accretions on ancient pagan rites—no longer represents the dominant approach in the field, his suggestion of the primacy of ritual in studying a religious system still rings true. Both William Graham and Marion Katz,80 among others, have shown in their scrupulous examination of ḥajj a more complicated relationship between ritual practice and systems of explanation.81 Yet even in Katz’s elaborate combing of Islamic literature, which shows unequivocal evidence of certain components of ḥajj acquiring a more magical efficacy, we still see what Graham calls “the lack of text-act congruity” in ḥajj as well as other Islamic rituals. Prayers and praises offered during saʿy (the walk seven times between the two mountains al-Ṣafā and al-Marwa) have no direct reference to Hājar or Ismaʿīl, and neither does the sacrifice at al-Minā reference Ibrāhīm or Isḥāq. In terms of the dominant explanations given by Muslim scholars, “instead of any mythical interpretation of such acts, there is only . . . emphasis on conformity to tradition or on the ethical import of these commemorative acts.”82 Graham attributes such symbolical economy of explanation to Islam’s “reformational” monotheism, and he considers Islam’s ritualism unique in that explanation of it is marked by a Spartan austerity. But have we not seen that both such explanation austerity and its apparent opposite, explanation multiplicity, are distinctive marks of liturgical rituals with a high degree of ritualization?83 In other words, ḥajj does not display a uniqueness attributable to whatever special character Islam is presumed to possess; likewise, the explanation predicament the Jahriyya have faced since the early twentieth century is not specific to their condition. Even the most commonly shared and least disputable Islamic rituals, such as ḥajj and ṣalāt, do not possess an authoritative interpretation, and if we acknowledge that the practice of ṣalāt also varies across different Muslim groups even in the same society, then the Jahriyya murīdūn are by no means isolated in their particular dilemma, which is perhaps also a clear sign of their vibrancy.84 What does render the

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Jahriyya different and worthy of attention is the specific understanding of Sufi sainthood they have built up on the foundation of this common phenomenon, and their heavy reliance on the voice of recitation in this historical construction. Even though for two and a half centuries Jahriyya appears not to have kept regular contact with the rest of the Islamic world—which is untrue, as we shall see in chapter 1—there is no reason to suppose that their liturgical practices and the sounds of their melodic recitation have been so severely “eroded” by Chinese customs and cultural influences that they are no longer capable of offering reliable explanations on solid religious grounds. It is true that both the Chinese language and the broad Sinic cultural milieu have affected Jahriyya, but it is equally true that a “pure” Islam does not exist.85 There is no doubt that being primarily Sinophonic poses a daunting challenge for many Jahriyya Sufis even to relate to their own holy books as meaningful texts, and not having Arabic or Persian or Urdu as their mother tongue means they cannot easily tap into the rich PersoArabic literary resources to fashion their Sufi learning. Much of the native poetry composed by past Jahriyya murshidūn is in literary Chinese, the most eminent exemplar being the poems by Ma Yuanzhang (1853–1920 CE), arguably the most ambitious and politically enterprising Jahriyya murshid of modern times.86 Yet none of the above should render Jahriyya’s Sufi path and their liturgical rituals any less significant as objects of study, and none of these should lead us to consider Jahriyya a distinct “Chinese phenomenon,” whatever that means. While giving full weight to the fact that Jahriyya Sufism belongs to the broader category of Sino-Islam, this book also shows what a study of a Muslim minority living on the eastern margin of the Perso-Arabic Islamic world can tell us in more general terms about Islam, liturgical ritual, vocal recitation, and that precarious human condition I call fragile transcendence.

OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS

The overall arc of the book traces two interlaced trajectories. The first, most obvious trajectory is the making, unmaking, and remaking of Jahriyya voices—here defined broadly to include both ritual recitations and voices that encompass and enable these recitations. While the book lays stress on the former, from chapter 4 onward the second type of voice gradually acquires more weight, in the form of distorted voices from loudspeakers, statics and hisses that undermine the work of wireless microphones, or convivial exchanges and ebullient laughter among female Jahriyya followers. As we shift our focus from the ritual voices to the

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mundane ones, we will witness both the flexibility of fragile transcendence and its conceptual elasticity, as well as its creation through liturgical diversities and its insurmountable limit: where it begins to loosen and give, and where the tolerance it affords begins to fracture and expose its limitation. This limitation is also where the second, less pronounced trajectory intersects with the first. Even a cursory look at the Jahriyya world would reveal its strongly patriarchal nature: women are barred from taking part in group recitation and are discouraged from attending prayer services in the mosque. Rather than merely stating this as a fact, however, I show through careful ethnographic description the extent to which this is both true and untrue, and I discuss the specific ways women are excluded, as well as how these forms of exclusion contain in themselves seeds of their own undoing. The intersection of voice and gender becomes apparent in chapter 4 and is examined more closely in chapter 5. Chapter 1 provides an archaeology of the Jahriyya recitation, especially its Arabic pronunciation, which proves essential to its melodic shape and political repercussion. I weave into this account a critical reading of early Jahriyya hagiographies that offer a wealth of materials, often hidden in minute linguistic details as opposed to stated overtly, exposing the transregional and translingual making of Jahriyya. Jahriyya recitation—substandard, corroded, much too Chinese to be Islamic, according to some critics—is the sound of a history where neither Islam nor its languages were ever “pure,” and where the sounds of the holy books were likewise manifestations of enduring linguistic diversity and hybridity. While puritanical religious ideologies can induce a historical amnesia and portray these multiplicities as deviations from a conceived norm, sounds of recitation preserve lasting traces of this history that have yet to be erased—traces whose meanings have even been lost to the reciters themselves. Chapter 1 attempts to recover these traces and render them audible once again in the sounds that have so far been (over)heard but not listened to. Chapter 2 shifts the focus from history to the present. It examines the recitation of Mukhammas, a fiver poem whose daore is arguably the most melodic and intricate of all Jahriyya recitations.87 I describe in great detail the structure of the Mukhammas daore, focusing on the special group dynamic it creates in dayi’er—the circle in which reciters are seated. The purpose of my description is to trace out the gradual emergence from the thick vocal fabric thus woven of an abstract, idealized reciter whose disembodied, hovering existence above and within the dayi’er is essential to the Mukhammas daore. Chapter 2 thus fleshes out the conceptual ideas of fragile transcendence and abstract sainthood through ethnographic descriptions and demonstrates the extent to which these ideas are socially generated and enacted, not just entertained by theorists.

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Chapter 3 follows the same line of inquiry, except that here I shift my focus to the recitation of Madā’ iḥ, a panegyric text that combines prose and versified praises of Prophet Muhammad. It is in chapter 3 that the full extent of Jahriyya’s liturgical diversity comes into view, for there I examine the numerous routes and passageways that connect Jahriyya recitation to a wider social world. What is normally built into Sufi mysticism—personal allegiances to specific saints, itinerant travels of charismatic murshidūn across great geographical distances, the secrecy conferred on esoteric teachings not shared (or shared unevenly) among followers, and so on—combines with histories of migrations and enforced exiles to create further splits and diversifications in Jahriyya liturgical practices. Chapter 3 thus demonstrates the historical production of Jahriyya rituals’ “depth,” or, to put it differently, their historical ritualization as defined by Humphrey and Laidlaw. By the same token, chapter 3 reveals the extent to which fragile transcendence is an idea to be grappled with in relation to a history with its own ebbs and flows. Chapter 4 is a transitional chapter in that it is where the two lines of interest— gender and ritual voice—first intersect in a more explicit manner. The mediatization of Jahriyya recitation stretches its tolerance of diversity to a breaking point, where we find it largely coterminous with structural male privilege. Even though there have been women Jahriyya martyrs, and female associates of male murshidūn often received a great deal of respect from the murīdūn, women are still systematically excluded from ritual recitation. The ambiguity of the female position is exposed and amplified by the new mediascape that is the combined product of mounted loudspeakers, wireless microphones, and simple, accessible applications for recording voices on smartphones. That women are excluded, however, does not mean that they play no significant role in the Jahriyya ritual soundscape. On the contrary: the position they inhabit affords a special vantage point that reveals the ambivalence and incoherency at the heart of male recitation. Chapter 4 is thus where the ethnography demonstrates that the abstract saint, the very operation of its abstraction, is predicated on a structural exclusion that renders women ever more remote from the abstract and pressed deeper into the concrete and the materialistic. As such, it also raises questions that Humphrey and Laidlaw do not address and perhaps are not interested in asking: What are the social conditions for ritualization to run its full course? Does the historical process that renders some rituals exceptionally ritualized also entail or even presuppose the structural exclusion of some sections of society from whom abstraction is to be withheld? For rituals to become inscrutable, what else or who else has to be rendered excessively transparent—and transparent to whom? In the end, one may ask whether Humphrey and Laidlaw’s argument constitutes a social theory of ritual.

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Chapter 5, the book’s last full chapter, confronts these questions directly, if only through ethnography. I expand “voice,” a word that has so far referred to the voice of recitation, to cover those other voices—women’s, in particular—that encompass and frame the male ritual voice. Many of these voices are the byproduct of women involved in work preparing for communal meals shared after a group recitation. These exchanges are earthy, irreverent, convivial, and unabashedly entertaining. Some men regard such gregariousness as the precise reason that women’s voices in general must be barred from participating in recitation. Yet men’s voices would remain incomplete, suspended in midair with no tangible spiritual efficacy, if not captured by the very food, youxiang, that is the main product of women’s labor, despite the lack of recognition accrued to the women workers. Men see in youxiang the barakāt (blessing) of their saints and the presence of their saint, yet in the same stroke they appropriate the spiritual value of the product while precluding its producer from participating in spiritual matters. If the fragile transcendence that we have come to uncover among the Jahriyya murīdūn is predicated on this form of exclusion, then do all forms of fragile transcendence necessarily cause some form of exclusion in society, such that the work of abstraction that underpins transcendence simply cannot be extricated from exclusionary logics?

1 Archaeology of Sound

T

he ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen once recounted her experience of gradually attuning to the Islamic soundscape in Jakarta: “On any day I might hear qur’anic recitation played on cassettes in a shop or mall, broadcast on the car radio, emanating from the neighbour’s house where a women’s afternoon study group practiced, coming from a class of schoolchildren down the street, or broadcast live from the five or so mosques that were within range of our house.”1 Referencing Michael Frishkopf, she calls these humanly made and mass-mediated sounds the “language” of Islam.2 Sounds attract and bind; they embrace and overwhelm; they agitate or pacify. For Rasmussen they also speak, and they speak melodically. Students of Islam have long noted the importance Muslims apportion to recitation, such stress on vocal performance derived in part from the literary character of the Qur’an itself. The earliest revelations Muhammad received in his Meccan years (610–22 CE) mainly comprised short hymnic chapters with impressively rhythmic sound patterns. These were poetries now majestically exalting in their praise of God, now overwhelmingly portending in their description of the end of time. “The Calamity (al-qāriʿa)!,” for instance—the 101st chapter—begins with a thunderous warning and then continues, What is the Calamity? And what will explain to Thee what the Calamity is? (It is) a Day whereon Men will be like moths scattered about, And mountains will be like carded wool. Then, he whose Balance (of good deeds) will be (found) heavy, Will be in a Life of good pleasure and satisfaction.

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But he whose Balance (of good deeds) will be (found) light,— Will have his home in a (bottomless) Pit. And what will explain to Thee what this is? A Blazing Fire!3

While in the now-canonical ʿUthmānī recension of the Qur’an these short chapters are pushed to the end—thus, their position in the text of the holy book belies their earlier revelation in voice—their continual use by Muslims for daily prayers and other liturgical rituals only affirms the exceptional power their sounds still command over the hearts of the faithful. In introducing the Meccan suwar (sing. sūra, meaning a chapter from the Qur’an), Michael Sells once called the extraordinary sound-meaning synergy exhibited by these poetic chapters the “sound vision” of the Qur’an, and he went on to proclaim, “No translation can fully capture this sound vision.”4 Oral dissemination was the main mode of transmission even for those longer chapters later revealed to Muhammad in his Medinan years (the chapters that constitute the most essential source for Islamic law), despite their lack of comparable poetic charm. Frederick Denny once observed, “The Muslim position is that the text has been handed down through the centuries both in written and recited form,” but, “interestingly, in theory, the latter takes precedence over the former.”5 Some scholars explain this stress on oral transmission through the particular features of Arabic orthography. “As it usually appears on the page, Arabic script consists of strings of unvoweled consonants,” Brinkley Messick once suggested, and the act of voweling, whether by marking in the vowel signs over and under the consonantal string or by voicing them in recitation, is an interpretive act, lending the script a particular significance in the process. This is important because written texts often allow alternative vowelings. While script preserves a string of consonants, recitation unites consonants and vowels, enabling the production and reproduction of a whole. . . . In comparison with a fully vocalized “word,” a written text can be considered an incomplete consonantal fragment. Preserved in its voweled-consonant recitational form, by contrast, a memorized text is one that has been embodied complete.6

While Messick’s remark pertains specifically to the vocalization of texts, a more general preference for learning from a living shaykh as opposed to a lifeless text is widely reported across the Muslim world. This is especially true in Sufi circles, where a continuous line of transmission—of religious knowledge as much as of the sacred genealogy of succession (silsila)—is of great import. “That is why in

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gnosis, as in philosophy,” Seyyed Hossein Nasr explains, “a person who is said to have really studied the subject is called ustād dīdah, literally one who has ‘seen’ a master, that is, one who has benefited from the oral teachings and also the presence (ḥuḍūr) of the master who embodies those teachings and who renews and revives them through the very act of living their truths.”7 This emphasis on the vocalization of texts and their interpretation by living shaykhs means not that the recitation of the Qur’an—the rules regulating its pronunciation and intonation, its stops and starts—is allowed more variations than normally acknowledged. Though hermeneutical variance is the staple of classical Islamic scholarship, guidelines for how the holy book ought to be vocalized and how to pronounce Arabic properly—the verb ʿarrab means both “to Arabicize” and “to speak clearly and unequivocally,” thus a non-Arab by definition speaks gibberish—tend to be considerably more rigid. It is normally claimed that there are seven canonized readings (qirāʿāt) of the Qur’an, reduced and regimented from numerous earlier variations, but the textual differences between these readings are often less than fundamental, and none of these differences undermine the foundation of tajwīd, the set of elaborate rules a committed reciter must know by heart to be worthy of the title of ḥāfiẓ, “he who preserves [the Qur’an].”8 The very priority accorded to oral transmission paradoxically gave rise to a more constraining and uniform system of tajwīd that permits little deviation, despite subsequent proliferations of various styles of recitation, often named after their representative shaykh. Yet in the Jahriyya curriculum one finds few traces of tajwīd. During the first couple of weeks of my fieldwork many murīdūn I interviewed began with a defensive gesture. “We do learn al-fuṣḥa,” Jianguo told me, using the conventional term to refer to Modern Standard Arabic, itself an adaptation from classical literary Arabic. “But we learned it only in the first year, and not full-time.” Jianguo spent a good six years in the madrasa at Hong Le Fu, where he “grew from a child into a mature man.” When I first asked him whether he had ever studied tajwīd, he gave me a terse reply with a slight blush—“No, never”—even though the training of voice did occupy an essential place in the Jahriyya curriculum. An average day in the Jahriyya madrasa commenced with ten to fifteen minutes of vocal recital of the Qur’anic verse or the Sufi text to be examined in that particular class. The teacher first demonstrated the recitation with his seasoned voice and trained cadence, occasionally pausing to give emphasis to specific words or to offer brief verbal annotations. Then the students reproduced as a group what they had heard, as best they could. On a quiet day, when the nearby grocery store was not blasting egregious pop songs, I could hear the voices of the students in my apartment. If I turned on my recorder, perched it on my windowsill, and faced

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the microphone in the direction of the school compound, I could catch its gentle trace, mingled with the chirping of birds and the fluttering of leaves in the light breeze. This chapter introduces the sound of Jahriyya recitation by focusing on their Arabic pedagogy, which they share with most Sinophone Muslims in China. In so doing I weave an account of early Jahriyya in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, relying on a cautious reading of three major Jahriyya hagiographical texts and circumstantial evidences gleaned from other sources. However, my purpose in this chapter is less historical than anthropological, for my goal is not so much to provide yet another history of the Jahriyya as to draw attention to the aspects of this history that shed light on what is at times referred to as the enigma of the Jahriyya sound.9 The sound has been called enigmatic by Jahriyya murīdūn and casual observers alike: most Jahriyya recitations are in a pentatonic scale and thus clearly resemble classical Chinese music, and this musical affinity may lead one to postulate that the somewhat substandard Arabic pronunciation of Jahriyya reciters—a pronunciation that flattens consonants and defies almost every tajwīd rule, to the point of rendering the recitation distinctly non-Arabic—simply reflects their absorption of Chinese linguistic and cultural influences. Such an observation does have some truth to it, and anyone comparing the recitation of a Yunnan Jahriyya murīd to that of a Ningxia murīd will likely detect traces of local dialects (especially variations in tone) indicating their respective geographical origin. But this quick conclusion regarding exclusive Chinese influence runs the risk of erasing a more complex tri- and potentially multilingual history that gave rise to the Jahriyya sound we now hear. Colloquial criticisms of Jahriyya recitation couched in more reformist terms that equate their unique Arabic pronunciation and musical style to a corruption of Islam by popular non-Islamic elements are no less blinkered in their obliteration of this history.10 Furthermore, in contrast to stressing the unique character of Sinophone Islam—a tendency with special allure to those wishing to highlight its notable intellectual contribution to Islamic thought—studying the Jahriyya Arabic pronunciation has led me to return to a common fate shared by many non-Arab Muslims: that is, by the so-called ʿajam, or the “barbarians” who cannot speak the elegant tongue of the Holy Qur’an.11 Al-Hujwīrī in his monumental Kashf al-Maḥjūb once related a story of Ḥabīb al-ʿAjamī (d. 738 AD; his name literally means “the beloved of the barbarians/Persians”): His conversion (tawbat) was begun by Ḥasan of Baṣra. At first he was a usurer and committed all sorts of wickedness, but God gave him a sincere repentance, and he learned from Ḥasan something of the theory and practice of religion. His

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native tongue was Persian (ʿajamī), and he could not speak Arabic correctly. One evening Ḥasan of Baṣra passed by the door of his cell. Ḥabīb had uttered the call to prayer and was standing, engaged in devotion. Ḥasan came in, but would not pray under his leadership, because Ḥabīb was unable to speak Arabic fluently or recite the Quran correctly. The same night, Ḥasan dreamed that he saw God and said to Him, “O Lord, wherein does Thy good pleasure consist?” and that God answered: “O Ḥasan, you found My good pleasure, but did not know its value: if yesternight you had said your prayers after Ḥabīb, and if the rightness of his intention had restrained you from taking offence at his pronunciation, I should have been well pleased with you.”12

With some fascinating alterations the same story is reproduced in the early twentieth-century Jahriyya hagiography Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī: Once Ḥasan passed Ḥabīb al-ʿAjamī’s cell at the time of the Maghrib prayer. And the Iqāma [the internal call to prayer, recited inside the prayer hall as the worshippers stand in line readying themselves for the service] was being recited [by Ḥabīb]. Ḥasan went in and he heard Ḥabīb was lisping (yalthaghu); he heard him in his recitation of al-Fātiḥa mispronounce the ḥ in al-ḥamdu as h. “The prayer has failed for he who followed his lead!” he said. Thus he [exited] and performed his prayer alone. On that very night Ḥasan saw God in his sleep. He said [to God]: “O Lord, wherein lies Thy Pleasure?” God replied: “O Ḥasan you have found My pleasure but you knew not its value.” “O Lord what is it then?” “It was the prayer behind Ḥabīb. That was the prayer that seals all your prayers (khatmu jamīʿ i ṣalawātika). However, you quibbled over the correctness of verbal utterance—the ḥ in al-ḥamdu—and were thus prevented from the companionship of intention (niyya). [It is] the incongruity between tongue and heart [that you should worry about].”13

The Jahriyya replication includes a more vivid dialogue between God and Ḥasan, and most remarkable is its curious dwelling on the matter of pronunciation by drawing on a specific example. No doubt the subtle phonetic difference between the pharyngeal ḥ and the laryngeal h must have tripped up many a Jahriyya novice. Even many senior clerics are able to tell them apart only in theory; in practical articulation those clerics fare no better than their trainees do. Neither is the difference a particularly prominent one, and its use as an example of phonetic inaccuracy can thus be interpreted as an underhanded defense of the Jahriyya. For if the Jahriyya are able to perceive the fine line between ḥ and h and consider their conflation in recitation a matter of deliberate choice instead of unintended

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error, then who is anyone to berate them of being ignorant of proper Arabic pronunciation and the fastidious rules of tajwīd? The hegemonic dominance of any language requires more than its literary ingenuity; inevitably its linguistic hegemony is the outcome of imperial wars and national campaigns.14 For languages whose very existence relies on the demolition of ethnic and cultural boundaries—including Latin, Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and English—their historical vicissitudes are all the more bound up with the rise and fall of empires and the changing fates of nation-states.15 Furthermore, we have been cautioned to mark the difference between language and script. As Benedict Anderson explains, “Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, and even the Middle Kingdom [China] were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script. Take only the example of Islam: if Maguindanao met Berbers in Mecca, knowing nothing of each other’s languages, incapable of communicating orally, they nonetheless understood each other’s ideographs, because the sacred texts they shared existed only in classical Arabic. In this case, written Arabic functioned like Chinese characters to create a community out of signs, not sounds.”16 However, Anderson’s observation regarding Islam is true only to a certain extent, for the Qur’an is more than a book (kitāb) to be memorized or elucidated, and its significance for most ordinary Muslims both encompasses and transcends its textual existence. As William Graham has shown, the Qur’an, especially those shorter Meccan chapters and select verses from the longer Medinan chapters (such as the famous “Throne Verse” from the second chapter Al-Baqara), was essentially a liturgical text for early Muslims, and its function as such throughout Islamic history has since been downplayed by later Islamic as well as Western scholarship. In highlighting the unique place the Qur’an holds among other sacred books of Islam—such as the prophetic ḥadīth— Graham argues that “it is the Qur’ān’s character as revelation with a particular form (nazm) intended for recitative use in worship that distinguishes it from other texts.”17 In other words, what unites Muslims of diverse linguistic stocks is more than a common Arabic script. Graham’s profound observation highlighting the oral nature of the Qur’an seems to be a complete inversion of Anderson’s argument, for while the latter sees in a soundless script a universal power to transcend differences, the former locates the universal power of the Qur’an precisely in its poetic sound. How are we to reconcile this contradiction? Or what can we learn from this incongruity? This chapter’s examination of Jahriyya’s Arabic pedagogy and the sound of its Arabic pronunciation spans the very distance that separates Graham from Anderson, for I contend that neither is adequate if we are to do justice to the Jahriyya sound. In stressing the orality of the Qur’an and offering a general critique of the

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received text-centric understanding of religious scripture, Graham has inadvertently minimized the extent of the linguistic seams running through the global Muslim community. Not all Muslims pronounce Arabic the same way, and the majority of world Muslims are non-Arabic speakers; a significant number of Muslims today may only have a rudimentary knowledge of Arabic that barely exceeds its alphabet. If Ḥabīb, a Persian living in eighth-century Baṣra, was after all those years still an ʿajamī, a Jahriyya disciple surely cannot fare any better. “I was trained by the grand Yemeni shayhk Muḥammad ibn Zayn [more below] in his hermitage,” the founding Jahriyya murshid Ma Mingxin reputedly said, “and I was but a helpless alien (gharīban ḍaʿīfan).”18 An alien he indeed had been, resented and admired in equal measure by his co-murīdūn, and his Arabic might have exhibited a strong ʿajamī/gharīb accent. If we are to follow Anderson, we will inevitably bypass the significant schism between script and sound, between the word of the holy book and its recitative use, but only in that gap can we grasp the tension that both unites and divides the global umma. Below, I first distinguish my goal in this chapter from the approach normally adopted in the study of Sufi voices. While this book does later address rituals of recitation through an elaborate ethnographic account of Jahriyya Sufi dhikr (remembrance of God), in this first chapter my focus is not on the controversies over music in classical Islam, nor am I particularly interested in the general entwinement of Sufism and musical performances in Muslim societies.19 It is worth noting that, despite their dhikr jahrī, or “loud dhikr,” the Jahriyya murīdūn carefully walk the straight path of classical Naqshbandiyya, with a strong focus on legal orthodoxy. One young Jahriyya disciple, a longtime connoisseur of rock and roll with a wonderful taste for secular Muslim music, once lamented the sobriety of Jahriyya dhikr, comparing it unfavorably to the animated Sufi dances he read about or saw performed in online videos. Musical instruments are strongly prohibited in all ritual contexts. Once a Jahriyya cleric under training was embarrassed that the slight vibrato he added to his recitation was immediately spotted by his mentor. “Probably time to pull back on those pop songs,” the mentor said after replicating the exact vibrato with remarkable accuracy. My interest in Jahriyya’s Arabic pronunciation is derived from the fact that the rhythm and the dynamic of Jahriyya recitation, and its general ethos, revolve around this pronunciation. “I can recite Awrād with al-fuṣḥa,” a young murīd once said to me before doing a quick demonstration, “but it just does not sound right.” He broke off after the first phrase because he tripped over a consonant: he trilled the /r/ in the standard Arabic manner, while in the Jahriyya pronunciation its sound value approximates a soft /r/, closer to its Persian iteration. We also need to note a key distinction that is not unique to the Jahriyya: most orthodox

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Muslims will likely agree that the recitation of the Qur’an is supposed to follow tajwīd, but in the chanting of other texts—such as prophetic panegyrics, Sufi poems, or, more commonly, the Muslim call to prayer (adhān)—there is often a considerable amount of latitude allowing ingenious reciters to show off their vocal artistry, or enabling local dialects to play a weightier role. Not all Muslim recitations are equally subject to the rigid regulation of tajwīd, which is largely applicable only to Qur’anic recitation, and not all Muslim texts share the same sort of musicality. Regarding the Jahriyya, this means that even though their Qur’anic recitation shares the same Arabic pronunciation as their Sufi panegyrics, it is primarily in the latter arena that we hear this pronunciation in its full phonetic glory, to the point where even the Qur’anic excerpts read in these contexts sound slightly different from their iteration in normal prayer rituals. While this chapter may at first appear tangential to the main argument laid out in the introduction, in the broader scheme of things a discussion of Jahriyya Arabic pronunciation is absolutely essential. For, after all, in prayers and in Sufi rituals, in commemorations of the Prophet’s birthday as much as in those numerous occasions where Qur’anic recitation plays an essential role—such as a Muslim wedding—is not the pronunciation of Arabic the first and likely the most eyeand ear-catching element to draw admiration and denunciation alike? A Muslim with no prior knowledge of what she is about to hear may have a moderate tolerance of novel ritual inventions, but what if the sound of the recitation and the pronunciation of her beloved Arabic generate in her a sense of foreignness so strong that she may start to doubt the very Islamic nature of what she has been invited to participate in?

SOUND OF ISLAM

The study of Sufi sounds has scarcely paid attention to the question of Arabic pronunciation; instead the focus has often been the permissiveness of music and musical activities.20 However, the matter is also more complicated than just stated, for even what counts as music, or mūsīqā, is not a simple question with a ready answer. In Islamic literature the dispute over the place of sound is often associated with the concept of samāʿ, or “listening,” and the questions raised of samāʿ frequently revolve around what kind of sound, performed under what circumstances and serving what purposes, can be considered morally acceptable and conducive to the cultivation of faith.21 Drawing on Lois al-Fārūqī’s work,22 Seyyed Nasr has tabulated the different “musical” genres normally found in Muslim

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societies.23 In putting “musical” in quotation marks I mean to stress how, in Arabophone Muslim contexts, mūsīqā often designates types of music that do not include Qur’anic recitation. Thus, among the non-mūsīqā sounds we find Qur’anic chants, call to prayer, pilgrimage chants, eulogy chants, and chanted poetry with noble themes; these are often considered “legitimate” (ḥalāl) sound-making practices. Adjacent to them in Nasr’s chart, and still legitimate despite being mūsīqā, are family and celebration music (e.g., lullabies and wedding songs), occupational music (e.g., caravan chants, shepherd’s tunes, and work songs), and military band music. From here we proceed to forms of mūsīqā that range from being controversial to “illegitimate” (ḥarām). Those considered controversial include vocal and instrumental improvisations, serious metered songs, and music related to preIslamic or non-Islamic origins. At the very bottom of the chart, and thus condemned to almost irredeemable notoriety, we find “sensuous music.” While most devout Muslims will agree that listening to “sensuous music” ought to be categorically forbidden, the lines that separate non-mūsīqā and mūsīqā, on the one hand, and legitimate, controversial, and illegitimate music, on the other, are not always clear. In discussing the historical samāʿ controversy, for instance, Kristina Nelson describes a few cases in late 1970s Egypt. Perturbed by a performance of Qur’anic recitation that sounded to her almost indistinguishable from singing, a writer wrote to the newspaper al-Ahrām to voice her confusion and complaint. In the same period, popular Cairene magazines interviewed serious religious scholars to discuss the relationship between melodic recitation, art, and Islam with the purpose of providing a more informed and updated view on the permissibility of samāʿ.24 If Qur’anic recitation can at times be subject to such controversy, no practice of sound among Muslims, whether involving nonmūsīqā or mūsīqā, can remain safe from denunciation and censorship. Even on those occasions where samāʿ is allowed, the right of access cannot be readily presumed. The stress here is not so much on what kind of music is permitted as on how one should behave while listening, or the specific categories of people that can be admitted to the vicinity of samāʿ rituals.25 Uninstructed ears are invariably warned off. Al-Sarrāj once related a story of a young pupil of the renowned Sufi Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910). The pupil was said to shriek every time he heard dhikr. Annoyed by this nuisance, Junayd threatened to dismiss him if he did not change his ways. The poor soul imposed such restraint on himself that a drop of water trickled from every hair of his body, until one day he uttered a loud cry and expired.26 I once showed a video recording I had made of the Jahriyya recitation to an interested Muslim from outside Ningxia, offering my two cents before hitting the play button: “Their bodies swing gently as they recite.” As the voices unfurled, the perceptive listener, obviously amused, pointed to an

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ungainly figure on the screen. “Look! Isn’t that you? You are the only one who swings his body!” Of course, while samāʿ has been the main point of interest in studies of Islamic recitation, attention to Arabic pronunciation has not been entirely missing. In contrasting the traditional lagu (i.e., melody of recitation) to the Middle Eastern styles being propagated by Qur’anic schools in contemporary Indonesia, Anna Gade also noticed the variations in pronunciation: in the traditional recitation, the Arabic fā was often pronounced as pā, and the interdental thā was rendered into the dental-alveolar sā—and the latter shift was equally clear in the Jahriyya pronunciation. Nasalization was excessive for ʿayn, inadequate for mīm and nūn.27 How one pronounces Arabic, and what decisions one has made regarding this choice—that is, whether to happily embrace the standard Arabic pronunciation or proudly chant on with the old lagu—is based as much on political inclination as on doctrinal preference.28 For instance, propping up a local Javanese lagu could be considered an effort to strengthen a regional Muslim identity with its unique historical trajectory and political implication, which may or may not undermine a more universal orientation toward the global Muslim umma. This is not to make the flawed, emphatically invalid assumption that Arabic is a unified whole, thus non-Arabophone Muslims are unique in their struggle with pronunciation. Half a century ago the sociolinguist Charles A. Ferguson used Arabic as an example to conceptualize the notion of diglossia, and there is no reason to suppose that a traditional Kalimaten lagu or the Jahriyya pronunciation is necessarily always further phonetically from the standard Arabic pronunciation than a local Arabic dialect.29 However, for most non-Arabophone Muslims the matter is also about more than pronouncing Arabic differently, for this difference is often lodged in a bi- or trilingual space where they have to constantly switch not only between different phonetic systems, but between speech and script. This is especially true of Sinophone Muslims. In 1892, on the cusp of modernity, when China’s Muslims first emerged as a potential target for Christian evangelization, a Reverend C. F. Hogg compiled a concise list of “Chinese-Islamic terms” then in wide circulation. Understandably, he began with “Biblical Names”:30 ᯭᑛ Seth. 㩹㘼ᆔⲭ Jacob. ㍒ֶ俜ቬ Solomon. 䱯ѩ Adam. ࣚ⎧ Noah.

Arch aeology of Soun d ᱃ঌࡼ⅓

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ԕঌ′ᐼ唈

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Abraham.

⇽᫂ Moses. 䚄ӄᗧ David. ⡮᫂ jesus. ᱃ਨ俜ܰ

}

‫׍‬ᙍ俜ᝋஷ

Ishmael.

䋫㘼ۢ Pharaoh.

Hogg’s list is no doubt partial, for in addition to ⇽᫂, Moses has also been transcribed as ぶ᫂ and ぶ㯙 in Chinese. Another version of Noah is ࣚ૸, while Solomon has been variously written as ㍐㨺ᴬ or 㰷㨺ᴬ. Some choices of character, as carefully recorded here by Hogg, reflect deliberate efforts at “foreignizing.”31 The use of ࡼ (as in ᱃ঌࡼ⅓, but also ‫׍‬ᙍ俜ᝋஷ)—a character normally employed in imperial records to transcribe non-Chinese sounds—unequivocally conjures a visual representation of foreignness. The ideographic nature of the Chinese script offers a rich ground for encoding politics of identity and difference. Given that 㰷 is a common Chinese surname, the choice between ㍐ and 㰷 in transcribing the first syllable of Solomon involves either a resolute insistence on one’s “foreign roots” or an active embrace of the “host culture.” The trilingual nature of most Chinese Islamic terms soon became apparent:32 ૸㚭 [ha ting] “Sealed” (ሱঠ), the distinctive title of Mahomet’s mission. Khi-

tam, sealing wax, Ar. The Persians say khatam kardan, to seal. ∄ௌцᘂ [bi xi shi tui] Paradise. Behisht (Persian). 䀾ࡼ⢩ [tao la te] The Pentateuch (Tourat), taulat, i.e., Torah. ࡷ⡮䘻 [ze er bu] The Psalter, Ar. kitab azzabūr. ᕅ᭟ं [yin zhi le] The Gospel. Ar. Injil ⭛⡮࣐ቬ [ fu er jia ni] The Koran (Forcau.) Canton dialect. 唈‫ݻ‬഻ [mo ke guo] Mecca. 唈ᗧ䛓഻ [mo de na guo] Medina. ‫[ ֐ⲭނݻ‬ke er bai ni] Sacrifice. Corban. See in Mark 7, 11; in Greek, Syriac Vers.,

Engl. Vers. ֌ᨽ㌽ᘂ [zuo sun na te] To circumcise. Sonat, Ar. The Persians say sanat kardan, to circumcise. ԕ俜ⴞ [yi ma mu] The Imam. Imam, chief leader, Ar. ᫂㍟ⴞ [sa lei mu] Ar. salaam. Heb., shalom, peace. ԕᙍ㍟ⴞ [yi si lei mu] Islam, din al islam, religion of obedience or submission ԕჭ㌽ [yi ma na] Iman, religion, Ar. Same as din.

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Most of these terms were drawn from daily usage. The Arabic word for “to circumcise” is khatana (“he circumcised,” to be more precise), and its Persian form is khutna kardan, “to perform circumcision.” Zuo sun na te, which Hogg translated as “to circumcise,” means literally “to perform sunna,” sunna here denoting the classical Islamic tradition exemplified by the deeds of Prophet Muhammad. “Performing sunna,” therefore, can refer to a broad range of actions including but not limited to circumcision; its use to designate circumcision specifically caused no confusion only because it had acquired this meaning in the local context. While bihesht is no doubt a Persian word, it is somewhat odd that Hogg also offered a Persian explanation of ha ting, or khatm, a common Arabic term used by Sinophone Muslims: khatm al-Qur’an (seal of the Qur’an) is a popular pamphlet that contains the last eighteen verses of the Qur’an, while khātim al-anbiyā’ means “seal of the prophets,” an honorary title held by Muhammad. It is likely that Hogg might have heard Sinophone Muslims in their religious discourse use the compound Persian verb khatam kardan, literally “to do a sealing” or “to seal”—or, alternatively, he had found Persian so widely used in this discourse that he felt the need to offer a Persian glossary where he thought necessary. And Reverend Hogg was well aware of the inadequacy of transliteration: “In transliterations characters have not always their exact sounds. Thus in Abraham ′ (ࡼ) [le/la] is heard ‘ra.’ In fact the Arabic word is spoken and the Chinese characters only represent the sound.”33 Little did he know that the opposite, representing Chinese sounds with an adapted Arabo-Persian script, was far more widespread among Sinophone Muslims, especially among those who had neither the time nor the requisite financial resources to send their children to a local school to learn Chinese. Chinese literacy was by and large a rare luxury for most impoverished Muslim families, as it had been for most families in traditional China regardless of religion and ethnicity. According to a scholarly estimate, by the mid- and late nineteenth century only 30 to 45 percent of the male population in China knew how to read and write, while among women the rate was considerably lower, at an abysmal 2 to 10 percent. And we need to bear in mind that these numbers encompass a whole gamut of people, from the intellectual elites to those who might knew only a few hundred characters and would thus have at best a rudimentary knowledge of literary Chinese.34 We have no reason to believe that prior to the nineteenth century the situation had been significantly better. Compared to Chinese, the Arabo-Persian script has a consequential advantage: an alphabet. While the Arabic orthography is not particularly ideal for representing Chinese sounds, learning an alphabet composed of no more than thirty letters out of which all words are made is still considerably easier than memorizing thousands of

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individual characters for rudimentary literacy. In order to examine how Arabic is taught among the Jahriyya and among Sinophone Muslims in general, we thus need to draw attention to how multiple languages—in this case, Arabic, Chinese, and Persian/Farsi—are intertwined in this pedagogy, which has persisted for well over four centuries.

SOUND OF ARABIC

The first fact to note of Arabic-language instruction among Sinophone Muslims is that their curriculum follows a classic Islamic canon. It includes, among others, Ṣarf-e Mīr byʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAli al‐Ḥusaynī al‐Jurjānī (d.  1413), Taṣrīf ʿIzzī by Izzi al-Dīn al-Zanjānī (d. 1257), and Mi’at ʿĀmil by ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078/1081). These are all fairly well-known works on Arabic morphology and grammar; the latter two are also used in madāris across Central Asia and former Soviet republics,35 while the first, Ṣarf-e Mīr, is a Persian work on Arabic morphology that one finds across South Asia and beyond.36 At what point in history did these books first arrive among the Sinophone Muslims? More important, when and how were they incorporated into the curriculum? While we know that the mid- to late sixteenth century was a time when Islamic education and the training of clerics were first systematized for Sinophone Muslims, we do not know to what extent and in what settings, prior to this point, these books might have already been put to use for learning Arabic.37 While Ṣarf-e Mīr was completed in late fourteenth to early fifteenth century, the other two were both finished before the fall of the Abbasid Empire (1258 CE)—that is, before the Mongols conquered much of Eurasia and accomplished nearly unchallenged dominance. Neither do we know enough about the historical evolution of Sinophone Islamic education to claim with certainty that these three books, among others, had been part of the curriculum from the outset, for the early date of their completion does not translate into their early adoption into Sinophone Muslim curriculum: a text finished in the tenth century might not have reached China until the fifteenth. While some of these books were translated into Chinese in the early twentieth century, these translations were mostly abridgments from the original work.38 Even after these new translations became available, we should remember, the level of Chinese literacy among the general population did not rise significantly until well after World War II. So, throughout history, Sinophone Muslims often used original Arabic and Persian textbooks in their elementary Islamic schooling.

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Considering the distance between the language(s) they daily spoke and the languages they were to learn, it is only inevitable that their studies had to involve long-term face-to-face instruction with a living teacher to an extraordinary degree. Teaching a student with a rudimentary knowledge of Arabic alphabet the intricacies of Arabic morphology, or even the conjugation of one defective/ weak verb, using a textbook in that target language, requires ingenuity, flexibility, and hard work. For the student, this means endless learning by rote. I once witnessed one such occasion in another Jahriyya madrassa near the one at Hong Le Fu. Students were called out of the classroom one after another. By turns confident and timid, each stood in front of a teacher with a long, stern face and blathered conjugated verbs in quick succession. I was barely able to pick out any comprehensible words, but the teacher, to my great amazement, was able to spot the slightest error and would swiftly order the student to pause and rewind. Although learning by rote is not always a pleasant experience, such memorization is so structured that, if applied with consistent effort, it facilitates a grasp of Arabic morphology by intuition— that is, after an extended period of painfully sustained work. Let us take one grammar primer as an example and enter the day of an average Sinophone Muslim child in a local madrassa.39 All of the examples used to demonstrate the fine points of morphology are drawn from the vocabulary of the Qur’an. One lesson starts with a simple, regular verb—ḍaraba, “he struck.” All conjugations of the same verb are then laid out systematically, moving from the simplest to the more complicated: yaḍribu (“he strikes,” third-person singular present tense), ḍarban (“beating” or “striking,” verbal noun), ḍarbatan (“blow” or “punch” or “thrust,” noun), ḍārib (“the one who strikes,” ismu-l-fāʿ il), maḍrūb (“the one who is struck,” ismu-l-maf ʿūl), and so on. And this is only one word, and a regular one at that. The student is then introduced to an irregular defective verb—for instance, farra, “he escaped”— and the same pattern of derivation is replicated. Each verb is progressively more irregular than the one before: farra is still composed of three letters ( f-r-r), but the final r is represented with a shadda (˷ ) on top of the first r, thus producing a prolonged trill. And after farra, the verb given may be wathaba, “he leapt,” which is another weak verb in that it begins with waw, so its third-person singular present form is yathibu. Each of the three root letters that compose most Arabic words is in turn replaced with an alif, a yā, or a waw, which means the text lays out methodically nearly all the common weak verbs: thus, after wathaba we may have bāʿa (“he sold”; here it is the second rather than the first letter of the verb that renders it weak, and, unlike with wathaba, the letter here is alif instead of waw), ramā (“to throw, to cast”; here it is the third letter, a yā, that makes the

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verb weak), after which we may have rawā, which has both waw and yā for its second and third letter. Each lesson follows the same format, moving from a regular verb to progressively more defective verbs, adding ever more complications to the derivation. But there is another essential variation across consecutive lessons. In lesson 2, for instance, we may have for the regular verb naṣara “he helped.” While it looks deceptively similar to ḍaraba, the difference emerges in the third-person singular present form, yanṣuru; here the middle vowel is a ḍamma—/u/ as in yanṣuru— instead of a kasra /i/, as in yaḍribu. Similar slight but grammatically significant alterations are then introduced to all subsequent defective verbs: in contrast to farra–yafirru in lesson 1, we may thus have radda—yaruddu (meaning “to return, to send back”) in lesson 2, and as opposed to wathaba—yathibu, we may therefore have waqaʿa—yaqaʿu (meaning “to fall down, to tumble, to drop”). Each lesson adds more complications on top of variations: the number of letters that compose the verb may increase from three to four, or five, or more; the change in vowel may become ever more difficult to grasp. Students may not be taught the fine shades of meaning each derivation bears; he may not learn, for instance, that while ʿālim, as an ismu al-fāʿ il, means someone with knowledge— thus a scholar—ʿallāma, being an ismu al-mubālagha, means someone who knows a lot—thus an erudite savant. Understanding of semantics comes considerably later than memorizing the morphological variations and takes place only once students are able to engage with the nuances of theological expositions. There is still more to this Arabic pedagogy, for it is at the very least a trilingual process. Ṣarf-e Mīr is a Persian text, though students who have studied the previous elementary primer on Arabic morphology may find it less daunting to use the book to their advantage. “Words of the Arabic language can be divided into three departments,” the book begins, “noun, verb, and particle.” Then it launches into a schematic demonstration: “ ‘Man’ and ‘horse,’ for instance, are nouns, while verbs, for instance, include ‘he struck (ḍaraba)’ and ‘he helped (naṣara).’ As to particles, they include, for instance, min and ʿalā.” The book then proceeds to offer a progressively more elaborate explication of the different types of nouns, verbs, and particles, drawing distinctions based on morphology. Many of the words the students encounter in this book yet again, after their previous studies, belong to the same Qur’anic vocabulary, the only difference being that these same words are now organized and explained in a different manner—yet not so different as to cause serious confusion. Ṣarf-e Mīr uses the same set of Arabic technical terms to designate the different categories of verbs: al-ṣaḥīḥ, almuḍāʿaf, al-mithāl, al-‘ajwāf, al-nāqiṣ, and al-lafīf. It is somewhat odd that Ṣarf-e Mīr, a Persian work, is the second book a Sinophone child was to learn to advance

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his knowledge of Arabic morphology, but this likely indicates the more or less fuzzy boundary between Arabic and Persian in classical Sino-Islamic curriculum. There was no insistence that one must first learn Arabic using an Arabic book; even in the earliest stage Persian could have an essential role to play. Although the teacher might have been aware of the difference between the two languages— which is anything but certain—one could hardly expect a student in his early teens or even younger to have a clear idea of what Farsi was and where the lines lay between Farsi and Arabic, especially since the two share the same Perso-Arabic script. But how would a student read (literally read out loud) a Persian primer explaining Arabic morphology? In most cases records are lost, though on some rare occasions we may catch a glimpse. Ayyūb Ma (1919–1970), or Ma Fulong, an eminent ahong from Ningxia, left us an autobiography he authored under almost impossible conditions in a prison cell at the height of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). How the text was preserved and smuggled out, we do not know (but we know from the preface penned by his son that this was not the only manuscript he authored under incarceration). In 2001, after considerable work, his son managed to get the manuscript published; it was an instant hit and received a second printing in 2010. In a chapter on the pedagogical experiments Ayyūb ahong conducted in reforming Arabic instruction, we read the following, which is worth quoting at length: For a long time, Muslims in China studied Arabic pronunciation through a Persian style. The way we read letters and diacritical marks were all derived from Persian. For instance: ΃‘alif = ঴・ཛ (elifu), Ώ bā’ = ࡕ (bie), Ε tā’ = 䫱 (tie), Ι thā’ = Ӌ (xie). . . . The slant above a letter [i.e., fatḥa in Arabic] we called zebai’er (ࡉⲭቄ, Persian. zabar), double slants above [i.e., fatḥa tanwīn] we called du zebai’er (䜭ࡉ ⲭቄ, Persian. du zabar, literally meaning “two zabars”). The slant underneath a letter [i.e., kasra] we called jiao’er/ziao-er (㔎ቄ, Persian. zīr), double slants underneath [i.e., kasra tanwīn] we called du jiao’er/ziao’er (䜭㔎ቄ, Persian. du zer, meaning “two zīrs”). The single hook-shaped mark above a letter [i.e., ḍamma] we called piesh (᪷Ӱ, Persian. pīsh), double hooks [i.e., ḍamma tanwīn] we called du piesh (䜭᪷Ӱ, Persian. du pīsh, meaning “two pīshes”). When we combined diacritical marks with letters, a letter with a single slant above it thus read, for instance, elifu zebai’er = e [i.e., ‘alif with zabar reads /a/], bie zebai’er = bai, tie zebai’er = te, &c. Likewise we read letters with a single slant beneath them as, elifu jiao’er = yi, bie jiao’er = bi, tie jiao’er = ti, xie jiao’er = xi, &c.40

We need some clarification to understand what is at stake here. Unlike how Arabic has often been taught—where, for instance, a student only needs to associate

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the letter Ώ with the name bā’ and remember that once combined with fatḥa, kasra, and ḍamma it reads ba, bi, and bu, respectively—a Sinophone Muslim child had to fully verbalize bie zebai’er, bie jiao’er, and bie piesh first, before he let out a strongly Persianized pronunciation of these three syllables. The process was thus considerably more cumbersome vocally, and the study of Arabic pronunciation, like that of Arabic morphology and grammar, was therefore equally mediated by Farsi. However, unlike learning Arabic morphology from a Farsi textbook, here the very sound of Arabic underwent a subtle Persianization—a shift often unbeknown to teachers as much as to students. “When I later studied at Peking University,” Ayyūb ahong confessed in the same paragraph, “I did not notice the difference since my Arabic studies there did not start from the alphabet. Neither had I asked . . . how the alphabet was taught and read in Arab countries.”41 However, he might have not failed to notice the audible disparity between his pronunciation and that of his colleagues who had resided and studied in Arabophone countries, not the least of whom was Ma Jian, the finest twentieth-century Sino-Muslim scholar whose Chinese translation of the Qur’an remains the canonical edition.42 By the mid-2010s, when I interviewed some Jahriyya clerics in their early forties, they still conceded that such indeed had been how they learned Arabic, though by then more were aware of the difference between Farsi and Arabic, and few would follow the old methodology in teaching their own students. Yet the old sound persisted regardless of the increase of knowledge.43 A Jahriyya trainee once recorded for me two versions of him reading the Arabic alphabet, one following the Persianized pronunciation, the other demonstrating his interpretation of what he had learned of the standard Arabic pronunciation. He acknowledged the difference and, like many others, agreed that the old Persianized pronunciation, while not ideal, remained firmly lodged in Jahriyya liturgy. A more senior Jahriyya cleric on another occasion related to me an anecdote that had stuck in his memory: a chance encounter between him and an Iranian professor of Islam who visited Ningxia in the early 2000s. On hearing his recitation of the Qur’an and enquiring further about his Arabic pronunciation, the Iranian professor exclaimed with excitement, “That was exactly how we used to pronounce Arabic!” In recalling the anecdote, the Jahriyya ahong sounded less certain than intrigued. “He said thus but there is no way for me to prove it,” he told me, and he wrapped the conversation up with this remark: “However, it is still nice to know that our pronunciation may have had a history, and we are privy to a legacy lost to others.” At this point we need yet to remember that, while Persian had an essential role to play in the elementary Arabic education of Sinophone Muslims, Chinese was

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for centuries still the main colloquial tongue they spoke. While the texts were in Persian and Arabic, and the Arabic alphabet might have been taught through the mediation of Persian phonetics, the daily language of instruction was nevertheless Chinese. Even where the pedagogy relied heavily on verbal communication, tailored textbooks in the vernacular language explaining the fine points of grammar that students could readily consult were still needed. What we need to note, however, is not the existence of these books as the specific manner whereby they combine Arabic and Persian with colloquial Chinese. One such book in wide circulation among Sinophone Muslims in northwestern China bears the title Qawāʿ id al-Naḥw wa-l-Iʿrāb (Foundations of grammar and desinential inflections). While the title makes it sound like another elementary Arabic primer, its content exbibits a significant difference. For a start, the wording of the text renders it akin to a word-for-word transcript of a live lesson: To what category does mubtada’ (i.e., the beginning of a nominal sentence) belong? [It] belongs to raf ʿa (i.e., the nominative case of a noun). And why is it raf ʿa? Because it fulfils [the function of] fāʿ il (i.e., agent of a verb). In what aspect does it fulfil [the function of fāʿ il]? In that it is musnad ilayhi (i.e., the subject of a sentence). And how is it musnad ilayhi? It is so because mubtada’ is khabar’s (i.e., predicate of a nominal sentence) musnad ilayhi, [just like] fāʿ il is fiʿ l’s (i.e., the verb) musnad ilayhi.

Now contrast this with the original and my Chinese transcription below: ˸ γ ˸ γϯ Ϫ˶ ϴ˴ϟ˶΍Ϊ˸ Ϩ˸δϣ˵ ϯϭ˸Ϯ  ˶ ˱ Ύϴϣ˶ ˯˶ ΁˸Ϟϋ˶ Ύϓ˸Ϯ˴ϴ˶ϟϥΎϴθ ˶ ϭ ˶ γ˴ ϭ ˶ ϝ˶ Ύγ˴ ˸Ϯη΃˴ ˶ Ϊ˴ΘΒ˸ ϣ˵ ˶ ˴ϴ˶ϟϥΎϴθ ˶ ˯˳ ˬϝ˶ ϊ˴ ϓ˸ έ˴ ˸ϮηΎ ˶ ϝ˶ ϊ˴ ϓ˸ έ˴ ˸Ϯηˬ ˱ ˸ ˴ϴθγ Ϫ˶ ϴ˴ϟ˶΍Ϊ˸ ˴Ϩδ˸ ϣ˵ Ω˶ ˸Ϟό˶ ˶ϓα˸Ϟ ˶ Ύ˴ϴϣ˶ ˯˶ Ω˶  ˶ ϋ˶ ΎϓˬϪ˶ ϴ˴ϟ˶΍Ϊ˸ ˴Ϩδ˸ ϣ˵ Ω˶ ˸ή˴ΒΧ˴ α΃˴ ˶ Ϊ˴ΘΒ˸ ϣ˵ Ϫ˶ ϴ˴ϟ˶΍Ϊ˸ ˴Ϩδ˸ ϣ˵ ˸Ϯ˴ϗϡ˷ ΁˸Ϯ˴ϴ˶ϟϥΎ Mubtada’ኜ᫂˄க˅ଙ˛ኜ raf ʿa ଙDŽ⛪᫂˄க˅ኜ raf ʿa ଙ˛ഐ⛪լ˄ሖ˅⨮Ҷ fāʿ ilDŽ䱯˄ଚ˅а䶒լ˄ሖ˅⨮Ҷ˛⛪ musnad ilayhi Ⲵа䶒լ˄ሖ˅⨮ҶDŽ䱯˄ଚ˅哬 ཐ˄‫˅ػ‬musnad ilayhi˛ Mubtada’լ˄ᱟ˅ khabar Ⲵ musnad ilayhiDŽ fāʿ il լ˄ ᱟ˅fiʿ l Ⲵ musnad ilayhi.

The sense of direct verbal communication clear in the original text and the Chinese transcription barely comes through in the English translation, for it lies precisely in those almost untranslatable uses of uniquely Chinese modal particles such as Ҷ (liao) and ଙ (li), the latter being especially an indicator of the colloquial register. Sinophone Muslims’ use of Perso-Arabic script to transcribe Chinese, illustrated by the short excerpt above, has long been noticed by scholars.44 Often named xiao’erjing (classics for minors), this translingual practice’s rudimentary development—rudimentary in that such use was confined largely to simple

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transcription and never evolved to produce poetry or any literary work of notable significance—can be traced back to the thirteenth century, when the Mongols conquered China and vast swarths of Eurasia. While this chapter deals with xiao’erjing ሿ‫ނ‬㏃ only to the extent of its direct relevance to the main topic—Arabic pedagogy among the Jahriyya—a brief explanation of its history and the debates over its origin and usage is still necessary. For xiao’erjing’s name itself betrays the intricate linguistic matrix that begot it in the first place. While it can be glossed as “classics for the minors/children,” thus indicating its employment in primary pedagogy, another explanation considers it a variation on xiăojīng ሿ㏃, “minor classics.”45 Jing here refers to the Perso-Arabic script as opposed to a particular body of “books” canonized as religious classics. Other scholars insist that the name should have been spelled xiao’erjin ሿ‫ނ‬䥖, offering scanty evidence to substantiate this claim. A fourth view holds that the correct version of the term is xiāojīng ⎸㏃, thus shifting the tone of xiăo, which also causes a change of character from ሿ to ⎸. ⎸, here meaning “to digest” (it also has the meaning of, e.g., elimination, erasure, extermination), also suggests the extended meaning of “review” after a lesson; xiāojīng, accordingly, is interpreted as the act of “digesting” the content of the lesson after class.46 A similar interpretation is also given of xiájīng ⤩㏃: the argument is that, since the notes and the comments students wrote on the margins of the page render the main body of the text appear narrower, it gradually became convenient to use the word xiá (narrow) to designate the script itself.47 The often subtle phonetic alterations between xiăojīng, on the one hand, and xiăo’érjīng, xiăo’érjǐn, xiāojīng, and xiájīng, on the other, are comprehensible only in the myriad local dialects spoken in northwestern China. When it is upheld, for instance, that xiăojīng is merely a dialectal rendition of xúejīng ᆨ㏃ (yet another variation on the name) by way of an intermediary xiáojīng, as xúe is often pronounced xiáo in some local dialects, the debate winds into a discussion of parochial linguistic niceties that inevitably occlude the participation of those not well versed in these dialects.48 We need not enter the thick of this debate, or comb through xiao’erjing’s phonological intricacies, to notice that, even regarding its name, the matter of pronunciation takes center stage.49 If the difference between, for instance, xiăo’ érjīng and xiăo’ érjǐn, xiăojīng and xiāojīng, or xiāojīng and xiáojīng, is still monolingual—in Chinese—despite dialectal variations, once we move on to decipher Chinese through its Perso-Arabic transcription, mishaps may occur more frequently, at times causing embarrassingly comic effects. One joke told of xiăojīng well illustrates its phonetic ambiguity: it is said that, once, a young Sino-Muslim cleric, while teaching Islamic law to a group of adults, used a xiao’erjing text to lay stress on the ban on alcohol. Instead of pronouncing the

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word 䞂 (“wine” or “liquor”) as jiŭ, however, his rigid intonation of the xiăo’erjīng text, syllable by syllable, led him to announce that the consumption of jī-yóu was forbidden in Islam. Jī-yóu—here lies the punch line—literally means “chicken fat.” Phonologically there is a fine line between jiŭ and jī-yóu; one needs only to slow down slightly to induce an ambiguous change of tone and an elongation that entails a different phonemicization. Reading from a xiao’erjing text, the teacher as much as the student does not always know for certain where one word ends and another begins. Linguistic sequentiality often has to presuppose the existence of discrete phonemes as the basic sound units on which a system of sonic differentiation can be established.50 In the joke it is the very breakdown of this sequentiality that constitutes the punch line. That this joke seems to enjoy wide popularity among many Sino-Muslim clerics indicates that such breakdowns may not have been as exceptional as normally assumed.51 Qawāʿ id al-Naḥw wa-l-Iʿrāb is a xiao’erjing text, and it shows precisely what such texts can do in preserving and reproducing the sound of verbal instruction. For, unlike with a conventional language primer, here the generous dose of modal participles and the unerring mark of colloquiality, especially the frequent use of ᫂/க—it means “what,” and ᫂, its sound accurately represented by ΍α, is a distinctly northwestern dialectal rendition of க—create the impression that the manuscript is a textual representation of a live voice recording. As one decodes each letter, it is as though one were converting the grooves on a vinyl record back into sound, thus acting as a sort of human prosthetic that lends voice to a material text that is but a voice record. One is not so much reading as listening to the ahong methodically parse out with his repetitive prose the different parts of speech of an average Arabic sentence. The catechistic format is not unique. Another contemporary xiao’erjing pamphlet widely read among Sinophone Muslims, xinyang wenda (Questions and answers on faith), utilizes the same format; the language is considerably less colloquial, however, marked by more subdued use of modal particles.52 Qawāʿ id al-Naḥw wa-l-Iʿrāb thus shows clearly the extent to which a special type of linguistic practice figures prominently in SinoMuslims’ primary Arabic education: in reading a xiao’erjing text, even with considerable prior knowledge—like the teacher who mis-read jiŭ as jī-yóu—one is yet caught in a whirlwind of heterogeneous linguistic sounds that are neither completely foreign nor entirely familiar. One had some idea of how to phonemicize and some idea of how each letter is likely to sound. However, one still needs to be cautious and think twice before settling on the one reading one is reasonably certain about and, even then, remain open to being corrected. What do such reading/listening practices imply for the sound of recitation? While no definite conclusion can be drawn, we are likely on firm ground to

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maintain that such trilingual training can potentially entail a continuous circulation of heterogeneous phonemes across Arabic, Persian, and Chinese; each one of these languages is subject to subtle phonetic pulls from the other two over the course of centuries that may be difficult to accurately quantify. Well into the 1990s many Sinophone ahongs still forbade their mentees from reading Chinese books, citing the concern over “assimilation”—one of the most essential Chinese Islamic sources, Liu Zhi’s Tianfang Xingli, was studied mostly in its Arabic translation rather than Chinese original—while xiaoer’ jing remained firmly the major medium for textual instruction, at least in the early phase of education. Thesauruses were compiled for each essential Islamic jurisprudential and theological work in the curriculum that contained xiao’erjing translations of the vocabulary, arranged in an order that mirrored the progression of the text as opposed to alphabetically; the use of such dictionaries often accompanied the trainee well beyond the earliest years of clerical education. Therefore, despite some enduring resistance to the use of the Chinese script, the Chinese language was never barred from this curriculum and remained its chief medium of instruction. What we should note, again, is how Chinese is fitted into this trilingual configuration, and how its sounds, as much as those of Arabic and Persian, could not have remained intact after centuries of linguistic, and in particular phonetic, interpenetration.53 When students switch fluently between Qawāʿ id and Ṣarf-e Mīr, and when they use xiao’erjing for secular epistolary purposes and personal bookkeeping as well as religious learning, the phonetic interpenetration will most likely transcend the confined setting of the madrassa and generate ever more enduring alterations to the sounds of Arabic, Persian, and Chinese in and beyond the realm of recitation. How are we to situate the Jahriyya in this broad scheme of things, which they share with other Sinophone Muslims? How does Jahriyya’s history refract this trilingual circulation of sounds that must have affected their Arabic pronunciation and Sufi recitation? How does this archaeology of sound help us resituate the Jahriyya silsila (sacred pedigree of saints) and the history of its origination? It is to these questions that we now turn.

SOUND OF JAHRIYYA

Three Jahriyya hagiographies can aid us in exploring the possible translingual making of this Naqshbandiyya offshoot in China. The earliest Jahriyya hagiography dates to the early nineteenth century—considerably later than other Sufi

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texts in the adjacent Uyghur region. The indigenous production of manuscripts (histories, hagiographies, and other types of religious literature) among the Uyghurs began somewhere around 1700, half a century prior to the founding of the Jahriyya in China, and a full century before the composition of Jahriyya’s first hagiography.54 This hagiography was penned by a ʿAbdul Qādir, commonly known among the Jahriyya as Guanliye (“Grandfather of the Pass”), presumably because he allegedly lived next to the gated pass on the eastern end of Fuqiang, now the county of Gangu in China’s northwestern Gansu province. The hagiography, bearing the poetic title Reshiha’er, contains the miraculous sagas of the first three Jahriyya saints, their terms largely overlapping and their succession therefore of short intervals. The title of the hagiography likely draws its generic inspiration from the most famous Naqshbandiyya hagiography in Central Asia, Rashaḥāt ʿAin al-Ḥayāt (Beads of Dew from the Source of Life), written by Mawlānā ʿAlī ibn Ḥusayn Ṣafī (1463–1532 CE).55 While many Jahriyya murīdūn believed that copies of the original manuscript still exist in present times, no one had been able to offer more information as to their current whereabouts. I have thus been unable to ascertain what some claim to be its characteristic bilingualism—that it was composed in Arabic and Persian, the latter superseding the former in the second half of the book. The second Jahriyya hagiography, authored less than a century later, may offer us a glimpse of the possible form of this legendary bilingualism. Titled Manāqib al-Awliyā’ (Virtues of saints) and authored by a ʿAbdul Aḥad (known as Zhanye), it hearkens back to a well-established Sufi literary genre, manāqib, that recounts the glorious deeds and noble traits of historical saints. The manuscript is mostly in Arabic, but nevertheless contains occasional Persian insertions, especially where panegyrics are involved. These insertions, few in number, often exhibit a haphazard nature to the extent of containing frequent grammatical errors that render them understandable only after considerable linguistic gymnastics. At one point in Manāqib where the first Jariyya saint Ma Mingxin received extravagant praise from his shaykh for his exceptional station, we read, as a panegyric the author himself proffered,56 ΖδϳϮϗήϴϏ̶ΑϪϤϫϦϳ΍ϥ΍ΪϳήϣϪϤϫήγΪϨϧ΍Ω̵΍ ΖδϳϮϗΐ΋ΎϧΖδϳϮϗΔϳϻϭέϮϧϪ̶̯δ̯Ϧϳ΍ϥΎϫ΍έϩ΍έ̵΍

At the risk of erroneous imposition, the two distiches may be translated as “O he knows the secret of all the Sufi aspirants, he who is strong with no rival / O those who walk his path, a path of he whose light of authority illumes and who is a mighty deputy [nā’ ib].” The invocation of nā’ ib here, and a page earlier

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the itemization of different types of saints (al-abdāl, al-awtād, al-nujbā’, and so on), are clear indications of Ibn ʿArabī’s influence on Manāqib, which is further attested by direct quotes from his monumental al-Futuḥāt al-Makkiyya. On one such occasion the story is of the third Jahriyya saint, Ḥadarat Qutub alʿĀlam, who, while involved in a conversation elucidating “the secrets of religion (asrār al-dīn)” to two of his close companions, was said to have entered a state of ecstasy ( fanā’). The two goaded him on with a somewhat odd request: “O revered grandfather [ jadd], play us a few moves on your sword [sakīn]!” Yet the venerable saint seemed to have happily obliged, despite being in a state of fanā’, where a self-annihilating union with God was supposed to dominate. And, not the least of all, he demonstrated his swordsmanship with remarkable swagger: “While playing he leapt atop the house with great elegance and might.” Amazed by the extraordinary physical power of the saint as much as by his spiritual state, the two disciples jested (ḍāḥikā), “O gray-haired grandfather, you are the cream of all men, and the most supreme of all humanity. With your playing comes the burning sting of fanā’! ” After this we read the following quote from Ibn ʿArabī: Miracle [karāma] comes from the Truth [al-ḥaqq], from His righteous name. There is no miracle, whether a part of it or in total, except by reverence and devotion [‘abrār] to His worship. . . . Miracles can be divided into two types [qismayn]: those perceptible to the senses [ḥissiyya], and those that are spiritual and abstract [maʿnawiyya]. In general, the miracle is not known except through perception, such as through words that tell the mind, or narration that reveals the unseen events [al-maghayyibāt] of the past, the present, and the future, or removing things from being, or walking on water, or traveling through the air, or traversing the earth, or hiding from sight, or responding to supplications in his spiritual state [ḥāl].57

The quote reads as incomplete in that it has truncated the essential section where the second type of miracle, that of the spiritual and the abstract, is discussed. Regardless of this omission, the author of Manāqib seemed to have picked precisely those parts that speak most directly to the visual spectacle of Qutub al-ʿĀlam’s remarkable swordsmanship. At times the text of Manāqib also has an air of fabrication, or at least it exposes the extent to which it may have drawn on earlier Sufi hagiographies authored in places far removed from China. On one occasion where the first Jahriyya saint Ma Mingxin sent out a disciple—his name was Gailanda’er, or Qalandar—to seek out a candidate who was later to become the second Jahriyya murshid, the saga has it that a hermit (ṣāmiʿ), likely

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a Daoist monk, cast in his path a lion (sabuʿ) to prevent him from advancing. Oddly, the lion called out in “a foreign language [lughat al-ʿajam, or perhaps here is meant specifically Persian?],” to which Qalandar replied, “Yes, yes, I am a person with a mawlā!” (naʿm naʿm li-annī ‘ insān dhu-l-mawlā). And as Qalandar approached the temple of the monk, the latter ordered his students to clean the pathway, unfurl the carpets, and “prepare coffee with pure water” (tahī’u qahwa min mā’ ṭāhir).58 We can almost be sure that this is a loan from a different source, or derived from a general intention to emulate other hagiographies where Sufis indeed enjoyed coffee, often as a stimulant to induce heightened ecstasy. If there is a remote possibility that some of the early Jahriyya saints might have drunk coffee now and again (which is highly unlikely), then attributing this foreign habit to a Daoist ṣāmiʿ deep in the mountains of northwestern China is almost a certain sign of its invented character. We should thus not be surprised to find that in Manāqib’s Chinese translation—which was completed in the 1990s—“coffee” has been replaced by “tea” (cha).59 Before we move on to reconstruct Jahriyya’s early history of multilingualism and its bearing on the sound of recitation, we need yet to examine the last modern Jahriyya hagiography that has received official endorsement from twentiethcentury Jahriyya leadership.60 Composed in the 1930s—its author likely belonging to the next generation from Manāqib’s author—this hagiography, titled Hādha alKitāb al-Jahrī (literally This Jahrī Book), is the work of Ma Xuezhi, more commonly known as Mansūr among ordinary Jahriyya murīdūn.61 While the book is mostly in Arabic with a small amount of xiao’erjing transcribing rhyming Chinese poetry and toponyms, it shows a more unequivocal attempt to systematize both the Jahriyya history and its liturgical practice. One hallmark of Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī is its extensive borrowing from the Sufi hagiographical canon. The story of Ḥabīb al-ʿAjamī that appeared earlier in this chapter, for instance, was an adaptation from Al-Hujwīrī’s Kashf al-Maḥjūb. A more substantial loan is drawn directly from the eminent Persian Sufi poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s prosaic work Tadhkirat al-‘Awliyā’ (Memorial of the saints). While the entire al-Kitāb al-Jahrī displays a general ethos and tone of narration that affirm the pervasive generic influence of Tadhkirat, it is primarily in the short preface sandwiched between the main text and the author’s introductory foreword that we find the clearest indication, not merely of this influence, but also of the specific manner whereby Mansūr referenced this prominent Sufi work. For instead of drawing on it in a piecemeal fashion, Mansūr’s preface is mostly—not entirely, with a significant difference to be examined shortly—a selective and abridged translation into Arabic of ʿAṭṭār’s Persian preface to Tadhkirat. Leaving out those specifics that told of the book’s origin and the author’s

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(i.e., ʿAṭṭār’s) intention in composing it, Mansūr selected only those sections most applicable across historical contexts: the saying that after the Qur’an and the aḥādith of the Prophet the discourse of Sufi saints represents the highest of wisdom; that there are different types of saints (e.g., the people of love, the people in pursuit of the Oneness of God, the gnostics); that it is fine, according to ʿAbd al-Rahman Iskāf, to read the Qur’an without understanding its meaning yet still benefit from it, just as imbibing a potion without knowing its ingredients does not undermine its medicinal efficacy.62 One clear feature of these loans is that the original Persian texts are either grammatically simpler or utilize such great numbers of Arabic words that translation requires little more than adding a few Arabic prepositions and erasing the Persian verb “to be” (ast). We are not certain whether such choices necessarily reflect Mansūr’s possibly rudimentary knowledge of Persian, or whether his decision not to offer the source of his reference has to do with a caution (new in the twentieth century) against citing Persian as opposed to Arabic sources in religious writing. It is not implausible that this was the case, for the only full paragraph in the preface that is not drawn from Tadhkirat is a scathing polemic in defense of Sufism, which is often associated with Persian in the eastern Islamic world. “Indeed scholars of formalities (ʿulamā al-rusūm) reproach the shaykhs and the saints, for they [i.e., these scholars of formalities] observe only the apparent deeds (al-af ʿāl al-ẓāhiriyya) while neglecting the hidden spiritual state (al-aḥwāl albāṭiniyya),” the paragraph begins, then continues, They say “This is not permitted [ghayr jā’ iz]!” or “That is ḥarām!” or “It doesn’t align with the Book!” They say such and such a shaykh did this, and [ask] “Is this how he set up an example?” They say “Only the ignorant dilettantes follow them.” These scholars are drowned in the sea of idle gossip and prattle [al-qīl wa-l-qāl], and they are not acquainted with the books of Sufism [kutub altaṣawwuf ] and spiritual conduct [al-sulūk]. Even if they are, they are nevertheless blind and deaf, and they only repeat what the legal scholars [al-fuqahā’] say of the saints like what those of Pharaoh’s times did to Moses. In this era populated by inventors [mukhtaraʿūn] and innovators [mubtadiʿūn], this short treatise [mukhtaṣar] is a good counsel and a fine volume.63

Unlike both ʿAbdul Qādir and ʿAbdul Aḥad, who gave their respective hagiographies a name that clearly invokes previous works of the same genre—rashaḥāt in the former case, manāqib in the latter—Mansūr, despite having cited extensively from ʿAṭṭār, never designated his work as an iteration of tadhkira, a wellestablished genre for Sufi hagiography across the Islamic world; instead, as the

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title and the preface have rendered abundantly clear, the work is either a kitāb, or a mukhtaṣar, or a mauʿ iẓa (spiritual counsel), or a mujādala (disputation). Both Mansūr and ʿAbdul Aḥad claimed that they had relied heavily on Rashiha’er for the early history of Jahriyya, a claim we can hardly validate without access to the latter’s original manuscript. And all three, while proffering detailed and characteristically colorful accounts of the Jahriyya saints in China, remain largely silent on its genealogy beyond the Sino-Islamic world. A full Jahriyya silsila (pedigree of saints), self-published in 2009 in a volume that contains other articles mostly by senior Jahriyya clerics, is the only available work we can consult on this point. With a Chinese translation of Joseph Fletcher’s groundbreaking article on the Yemeni origin of Jahriyya at its heart, the volume is the product of collaborative work between Jahriyya clerics and interested scholars outside academia (most prominent among them Zhang Chengzhi, a Sino-Muslim writer whose popular Xinling Shi (History of the soul) shot Jahriyya into dazzling stardom in China).64 The silsila, or nisba (lineage, kinship, descent), as it has come to be called by the Jahriyya, appears to be the following (to the exclusion of Jahriyya’s Chinese saints): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Shaykh Muḥyiddīn Ḥadarat Khwaja Bahā’uddīn Naqshbandī Ḥadarat Khwaja Tāj al-Dīn Shaykh Ḥadarat Bāqī Shaykh Ḥadarat Zayn Shaykh ʿAbdul Khāliq Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Zayn65

The first name on the list most likely refers to Ibn ʿArabī, who holds the honorific title of muḥyiddīn, “revivor of religion,” in the history of Sufism, though another candidate, ʿAbdul al-Qādir Jīlānī, awarded the same honorific title of muḥyiddīn by his admirers, also needs to be considered—for reasons to be laid out below. And Bahā’uddīn is often considered the eponymous founder of Naqshbandiyya, from which Jahriyya claims direct descent. Ibn ʿArabī died in the year of 1240 CE, almost a century prior to Bahā’uddīn’s birth near Bukhara in the year of 1318 CE; there is thus no possibility that the two could have overlapped in life—a point to which we shall return later. From the third saint onward, we are on relatively firmer grounds in identifying their specific identities. Khwaja Tāj al-Dīn is likely Taj al-Dīn b. Zakariyya ʿUthmānī (d. 1640 CE), who, according to Joseph Fletcher and Itzchak Weismann, first introduced Naqshbandiyya from India to Yemen, where the first Chinese Jahriyya saint, Ma Mingxin, was

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allegedly initiated into the order.66 Ḥadarat Bāqī may have been Muhammad ʿAbdul Bāqī al-Mizjājī (1591–1664 CE), who, along with the three remaining saints, belonged to the same illustrious Mizjājī family of Yemen (they were based in the town of Zabīd) affiliated with the Naqshbandiyya and lodged at the heart of a vast Muslim scholarly network instrumental to a new wave of religious revivalism in the eighteenth century.67 Both John Voll and Dina LeGall, among others, have examined this extensive network,68 and more recent scholarship focused on the Jahriyya—particularly Anthony Garnaut’s painstaking account of Jahriyya’s early modern history and Lipman and Wide’s brief essay considering Khufiyya’s and Jahriyya’s shared genealogy—has offered more evidence affirming Fletcher’s initial findings that condone Jahriyya’s Yemeni origin.69 One piece of evidence raising the possibility that the first saint in this genealogy is ʿAbdul al-Qādir Jīlānī instead of Ibn ʿArabī can be found early on in Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī. This evidence has been consistently ignored by previous scholars, which may suggest that many of them have relied principally on the Chinese translation of al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, which, likely due to the translators’ intention to reinforce a distinct Jahriyya identity in the 1990s, has left this short sentence untranslated. “Know that our most revered Mawlā al-Ḥājī” (Mansūr thus referred to Ma Mingxin) “[follows] the Ḥanafī legal school, and the Qādirī and Naqshbandī ṭarīqa.”70 ʿAbdul al-Qādir Jīlānī is the eponymous founding saint of the Qādiriyya path, whose existence in China both antedates Jahriyya and tends to exhibit less organized and more diffuse institutional forms in present times. Whether Muḥyiddīn is Ibn ʿArabī or ʿAbdul al-Qādir Jīlānī (who died in 1166 CE, almost a century prior to Ibn ʿArabī’s passing), what remains unaltered is the fact that between the first two saints of this genealogy, there is a temporal hiatus of at least eighty years or so, which contradicts a conventional silsila modeled after the classical isnād tradition that valorizes reliable continuity through face-to-face communication. Other versions of the Jahriyya nisba (e.g., the nisba offered by a rival faction to the one at Hong Le Fu) put Uways al-Qaranī at the head in place of Muḥyiddīn, and in the second place we find the ever influential Nūr ad-Dīn ‘Abd ar-Rahmān Jāmī, who in his landmark reference work Nafaḥāt al-‘Uns, labeled Bahā’uddīn Naqshbandī himself as a Uwaysī Sufi: after the Yemeni Uways al-Qaranī, who converted to Islam in the lifetime of the Prophet without meeting him in person—without, that is, being a companion of the Prophet— thus serving as the model for an Islamic Paul of a Sufi initiated into an order with no guidance from a living shaykh.71 Whether of later fabrication or adopted initially from Yemen, this appearance of Uways in one Jahriyya genealogy is an apposite reminder that we need to take all versions of the pedigree with a grain of salt.

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Another question that is not answered by this genealogy, yet is essential for our excavation of the early Jahriyya sound, is their appropriation of other Sufi texts and practices, whether Naqshbandiyya or otherwise, after the passing of Ma Mingxin. A polished genealogy may create the misleading impression that, in the two and a half centuries that separate the present from the time of the order’s establishment, the Jahriyya murīdūn remained unaltered and rigidly loyal to the initial teachings of their founding fathers without assimilating nineteenthcentury Naqshbandiyya sources. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a start, we do not know when the aforementioned genealogies, especially the one published in 2009, were first compiled and refined. Our first incomplete record, assembled in a rather haphazard manner, is the work of a Protestant missionary who visited Ningxia in the 1930s—precisely when al-Kitāb al-Jahrī was being compiled. Neither Reshiha’er nor Manāqib contains a nisba; although a misprinted nisba—the sloppiness is baffling, considering the importance of the matter—is appended to the Chinese translation of Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī published in the late 1990s, a comparable version is nowhere to be found in the original Arabic manuscript. While Reshiha’er is most likely based on the Persian text of Rashaḥāt ʿAin alḤayāt—the French ethnographer Henri Ollone came across a Persian manuscript of Rashaḥāt in his expedition to Gansu in the early twentieth century—we do not know whether either of the two major Arabic translations of this work has affected the composition of Reshiha’er and other Jahriyya hagiographies.72 This is a possibility to be entertained because both of these translations are linked to the Jahriyya, though the respective nature of these links remains to be examined: the first Arabic translation of Rashaḥāt was finished in 1620 by none other than Taj al-Dīn b. Zakariyya ʿUthmānī himself, and the second, completed 250 years later (in 1889–1890), was done by Muhammad Murād b. ʿAbdullah alQāzānī, more commonly known as Murād Ramzī: a renowned Tatar Muslim scholar who traveled widely; combined a classic Islamic education with Naqshbandiyya Sufi training, revivalist inclinations, and a strong Tatar nationalism; and spent the last years of his life in Xinjiang, northwestern China, among the Turkophone Uyghur Muslims.73 Considering the availability of the second translation and the apparent decline in Persian learning among the Jahriyya, is it plausible that, at some point in the early twentieth century, the Jahriyya murīdūn encountered their own Reshiha’er anew through a modern Arabic translation of Rashaḥāt whose author, instead of residing in the distant Mecca, was almost one’s next-door neighbor? If this is a remote possibility for which we have no substantial evidence, on another point we stand on firmer grounds. It seems that at the time of Mansūr’s

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composition of Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī—the 1930s—the Jahriyya were involved in their own revivalist campaign, animated by new Sufi texts they had been able to acquire from outside China. In painstakingly laying out the details of Jahriyya liturgical practices, Mansūr relied overtly on two Naqshbandī-Mujaddidī texts: Regarding the reading of the Qur’anic verses of the Khwājagān [suwar alkhwājagān] in the Naqshbandiyya path, it is like what Shaykh Maẓhar has said in al-Manāqib al-Aḥmadiyya and Maqāmāt al-Saʿīdiyya: “He sits with them in a circle [mutaḥalaqan] at three points in time, that is, after the morning prayer, the noon prayer, and the sunset prayer. The brothers [al-akhawān] are to gather and read the seal of the lineage [al-khatm al-mansūb] [in deference] to the revered shaykhs. After the morning prayer they are to read the seal of the Khwājagān [yakhtimu khawājagān] that include the following Naqshbandī shayhks: Ḥadarat Khwāja ʿAbd al-Khāliq al-Ghujdawānī, Khwāja ʿĀrif Rīwgarī, Khwāja Maḥmūd Anjīr al-Faghnawī, Khwāja ʿAzīzān ʿAlī al-Rāmitanī, Khwāja Amīr Kulāl, and Imam of the Ṭarīqa, Khwāja Bahā’uddīn Naqshbandī.”74

All of the Naqshbandī murshidūn listed here can be found in the Persian Rashaḥāt; neither their appearance in this specific order nor their names appeared in the Jahriyya Rashiha’er. In other words, even if these shaykhs had not been entirely unknown among the Jahriyya murīdūn, their explicit inclusion in a generalized Naqshbandiyya nisba—as opposed to the streamlined one targeting Jahriyya specifically that we previously examined—did not take place until the early twentieth century. And this inclusion is enabled by the arrival of new texts: both alManāqib al-Aḥmadiyya and Maqāmāt al-Saʿdiyya are the work of Shaykh Muhammad Maẓhar (1832–1883 CE), son of the eminent Indian Naqshbandī-Mujaddidī murshid Ahamd Saʿīd (1802–1860 CE) and grandson of the venerated Shaykh Abu Saʿīd (1782–1835 CE).75 Maqāmāt al-Saʿīdiyya, one of Muhammad Maẓhar’s most important written works that have survived to present times, is a hagiography of his own father, whom he served loyally until his death in Mecca, and from whom he adopted the mantle as the leading saint of the Mujaddidiyya. While Shaykh Maẓhar was born in a khānaqāh (Sufi lodge) in Dehli and received his primary Mujaddidī training there in his early years under his father’s meticulous guidance, his teaching and mentoring career took off primarily in Medina, where he is said to have “gathered into his door erudite scholars and righteous seekers from all directions, and offered them different kinds of grace and tenderness.” It is also said that “his path in the caring of the Sufi seekers [sālikīn] is like that of his noblest father and his revered shaykhs, with no substitution, nor alteration in terms of increase or reduction.”76

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We have scant information regarding when and by what means al-Manāqib al-Aḥmadiyya—a hagiographical work of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiya up to the mid-nineteenth century—and Maqāmāt al-Saʿīdiyya first arrived among the Jahriyya. Nor do we know for sure whether indeed Mansūr was citing directly from these two works or was merely replicating an indirect quote from some other source of a still later date. It is worth noting that here we are in the face of an intriguing coincidence whose implication is yet to be examined: the only biography we seem to possess so far of Muhammad Maẓhar has been the work, again, of Murād Ramzī, who produced the late nineteenth-century Arabic translation of Rashaḥāt. The biography is included in the epilogue (dhayl) to his translation that he penned as a commentary and a sequel to the main text. One fact may increase the plausibility of our postulation that the Jahriyya of this period might have indeed possessed a copy of this translation along with Ramzī’s epilogue: the specific content of the khatm al-khwājagān aforementioned in Mansūr’s text—which Qur’anic verses are to be recited for how many times—is a direct quote, albeit abridged, from Ramzī’s epilogue that documents word-for-word the liturgical practices of the Naqshbandiyya as they had come down to him in the late nineteenth century.77 However, a simpler scenario is considerably more likely: both Ramzī and Mansūr were citing from Aḥmad Sirhindī’s Maktubāt (Collected letters), which Ramzī explicitly stated was the source of his khatm, and copies of which—in the original Persian—were also known to be in Jahriyya’s possession prior to the twentieth century.78 What we do not know is whether Mansūr here relied on the original Persian manuscript or its Arabic translation prepared by none other than Murād Ramzī himself in the same period. Jahriyya’s earlier engagement with Maktubāt seemed minimal: the source is not mentioned in Reshiha’er, nor does the latter touch on any topic that pertains to khatm al-khwājagān. Unless the Chinese translation of Reshiha’er has left out significant portions of the original text that contain these contents, it seems not unlikely that Mansūr’s use of Maktubāt was again mediated by Ramzī’s Arabic translation, which, incidentally, became widely available among Sino-Muslims precisely during this time.79 While only a select few Sino-Muslim scholars were known to still teach the Persian Maktubāt in the early twentieth century—most notably Hu Songshan (d. 1955)—by the time Ramzī’s Arabic translation was reputedly brought back to China from Mecca by Sino-Muslim pilgrims, the work had all but been marginalized in mainstream curriculum, not the least due to the decline of Persian knowledge among the majority of Sinophone Muslims.80 Ironically, this new translation became a pivot for Islamic reformism in early twentieth-century China: it was brought back by reform-minded pilgrims and studied extensively by them for the purpose of

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understanding and soon attacking traditional Sufism. As a response to this challenge, and no doubt enabled by the same Arabic translation, Sufis in China soon rose to face off this provocation, thus reconnecting with Maktubāt and revalorizing its role—but this time the translation took precedence over the original. It thus would not have been surprising if Mansūr, responding to the same challenge in his preface to Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, was using the same translation in his composition of the work. Whether Masūr’s rather superficial engagement with Shaykh Muhammad Maẓhar was derived from his reading of the latter’s original work, or more likely again mediated by some other Arabic source—both al-Manāqib al-Aḥmadiyya and Maqāmāt al-Saʿīdiyya are in Persian, and so far as I am aware there have been no Arabic translations, at least not at the time of Mansūr’s writing—it is clear that when Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī was being composed, Jahriyya was undergoing an important transition, even a Naqshbandiyya revival. New texts were being introduced, and new names of previously unknown or underknown Nashbandī murshidūn were added to the new Jahriyya hagiographies. While the initial Jahriyya nisba might have pre-dated this renaissance, the very Naqshbandī nature of the Jahriyya, especially its genealogical linkage to the Khwājagāns (Central Asian precursors of the Naqshbandiyya) was probably less than obvious prior to this point. In other words, Mansūr’s lifetime, and also to a slightly lesser degree ʿAbdul Aḥad’s (author of the Jahriyya Manāqib al-Awliyā’), might have been a unique period of transition for the Jahriyya: a transition that may even be cautiously characterized as a Naqshbandī renewal. No doubt this re-Naqshbandiyyization—pardon the cumbersome terminology—took place unevenly across different factions of the Jahriyya, for both Manāqib al-Awliyā’ and Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī were composed at the behest of Ma Yuanzhang, an essential figure in the modern Jahriyya history who was celebrated by some as the politically ambitious and enterprising seventh Chinese Jahriyya murshid and reviled by others as a shameless manipulator and usurper of the saintly throne.81 Even in the same faction newly instituted liturgical alterations might not have panned out as evenly as expected. By the time of my fieldwork among Hong Le Fu’s Jahriyya murīdūn, who unequivocally recognized Ma Yuanzhang’s wilāya (saintly dominion), many of the practices aforementioned had long become obsolete. There was no talk of khatm alKhwājagān, and insofar as I know no recitation of the revered names of the past Naqshbandī murshidūn set out in Mansūr’s text took place on any ritual occasion. It is not unlikely that remnants of the practice might have survived in some pockets of the Jahriyya: there has never been an official decree from the Jahriyya leadership to abolish it, yet neither has there been, so it seems, any uniform or

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consistent effort to preserve it. The re-Naqshbandiyyization was thus as much a further diversification of its liturgical practices as it had been a revival of Jahriyya’s spiritual lineage. As I will show in subsequent chapters, Jahriyya has never been an immutable order stagnant in its rigid practice of liturgy. However, from the early twentieth century on, it appears that this diversification might have accelerated as some Jahriyya murshidūn and murīdūn encountered new evidences bolstering their Naqshbandī genealogy. This Naqshbandī revival ran parallel to and might have reinforced the decline of Persian learning among the Jahriyya, as attested by the likely Arabic mediation of Mansūr’s engagement with Muhammad Maẓhar’s work, or ʿAbdul Aḥad’s grammatically bizarre Persian panegyric. At one point in Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, where Mansūr describes an encounter between the first Jahriyya saint Ma Mingxin and a wandering Sufi under the guise of a wise fool (majnūn) whose riddle only the saint himself could decrypt, in affirming the truth of the fool’s knowledge Ma Mingxin was recorded to have exclaimed “Ḥaqq ast!,” Persian for “It is true!” We cannot verify the authenticity of this quote, but it is still somewhat odd that, at this point, when he was supposedly quoting Ma Mingxin’s original speech, Mansūr resorted to Persian. There is nothing in the context that would make it necessary to use Persian, and Mansūr’s consistent effort to translate Persian texts into Arabic should precisely have discouraged him from doing so—unless, of course, this textual aberration is a plausible indication of its authenticity as a direct quote passed down orally among loyal followers. Is it likely that the wise fool was Persophone, which would have justified this use of Persian by the founding saint himself? Persian is not the only language Ma Mingxin was able to speak. Hādha alKitāb al-Jahrī mentioned that at some point he was sent off by his shaykh to Rūm—likely somewhere in Anatolia in the Ottoman Empire, or did he even enjoy a short sojourn in Istanbul?—and all Jahriyya histories and hagiographies I have read so far, published or unpublished, make it abundantly clear that the earliest followers of Ma Mingxin, as well as those of his rival Ma Laichi of the Naqshbandiyya-Khufiyya order, were an eclectic group of Turkophone Salars, Sinophone Hui, and Muslim Tibetans. There is also an enduring mystery, so far left unresolved, around the extent of Ma Mingxin’s multilingualism. Whether he returned to northwest China in his mid-twenties or early thirties, by the time of his arrival he must have spent anywhere between ten to twenty years away from the predominantly Sinophone world, wherein his Jahrī teaching was to acquire a lasting following. All three hagiographies had him leave China at the age of seven. But how was a boy of that young age, on returning to China after an epic odyssey of more than a decade in Arabia and Anatolia, able to communicate

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unencumbered in Chinese, a language he presumably had not spoken in this entire adult life up to that point? We have contradictory accounts regarding the route of his pilgrimage: both Reshiha’er and Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī offer hints of him having taken a southbound route through Yunnan to Burma and likely on to the west coast of India, where he embarked upon a ship that took him along centuries-old maritime routes across the Indian Ocean to southern Arabia,82 while other hagiographies and imperial records claim that he had taken the overland route through the Uyghur hinterland to Central Asia.83 One of the key texts for Jahriyya liturgy, Mukhammas, is the work of a Khorāsānī Sufi shaykh and poet Muḥammad Tabādkānī (d. 1486 CE), who was based in Herat most of his life (more on Mukhammas in chapter 2).84 While Fletcher as well as more recent scholarship has demonstrated with convincing evidence that Ma Mingxin had no doubt received Sufi training in Yemen, his was more likely a meandering journey with stops and starts along a tortuous route, and Yemen might have been only one such stop, albeit a significant and pivotal one. The extensive network cultivated by the Mizjājī family in the Ottoman world might have enabled Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Zayn to send Ma Mingxin northward to Mecca or still north to Istanbul for further studies, and the likelihood of Ma Mingxin returning to China via the land route— suppose he traveled by sea on his journey out—thus stopping along the way to visit Sufi shrines and gather Sufi texts in Central Asia, or even enter new Naqshbandiyya lodges for short-term studies, cannot be ruled out.85 Hājj for Ma Mingxin as it must have been for most Muslim pilgrims of the premodern times, was probably less a trip between two destinations than a winding tour punctuated by numerous sojourns. His training in Yemen and Anatolia certainly did not prevent him from refining his teaching by assimilating pertinent texts and practices, Naqshbandī or non-Naqshbandī, from Khorasan to East Turkistan. By the time he arrived at his childhood home, his Chinese might not have been significantly better than his Turkic, his Arabic, or his Persian. No Jahriyya hagiographies tell us how Ma Mingxin’s return trip might have gradually refamiliarized him with the world from which he must have felt to some extent alienated, and in which he was yet to spread his version of the loud ( jahrī) dhikr. That his earliest followers seemed to have hailed mostly from the Turkophone Salars should not surprise us. In Manāqib al-Awliyā’, when the devoted Salar murīdūn of Ma Mingxin, failing to wrest the saint from the talons of a flustered Qing regime, withdrew to a mountain on the outskirts of Lanzhou to regain their strength—they walked straight to their deaths with this fatal strategic decision—ʿAbdul Aḥad recounted that they planted a “big white flag” (ʿalam al-bayāḍ al-kabīr) on the mountaintop:

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The official then ordered a thief to steal this flag [and bring it to him]. He saw written thereon letter[s] of the Book [ḥarf min al-kitāb]. He selected the most knowledgeable scholars [ʿulamā’ al-aʿmāq] to read it, yet none of them knew what it meant. This wrongdoing official then sent the flag to the emperor [alsulṭān]. The emperor then found a scholar from the Turks [ʿālim al-turk] to decode its sound [lafẓahu]. He revealed its meaning and conveyed it in Chinese, and explained the letters [to the emperor]. The emperor saw for himself that all these words were to seek the witness of the emperor [mushāhadat al-sulṭān], and to inform him of their demands and the wrongs they had suffered.86

“Knowledgeable scholars” (ʿulamā’ al-aʿmāq) here most likely refers to SinoMuslim clerics who could read Arabic and Persian but were not able to decipher the Turkic words on the flag, since the imperial “scholar-official” in the text is invariably called amīr (i.e., the local political deputy of the grand Sulṭān). While Mansūr is no doubt Sinophone, this paragraph, probably an adaptation from earlier oral accounts, conveys a clear sense of superiority that accrues to the Turkophone Salars, and a not-so-subtle slight on the Sinophone clerics. Do we here detect traces of an early division between a predominantly Turkophone Jahriyya of this period and the Sinophone Muslims around them? Earlier we mentioned that at the start of Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī Mansūr stated explicitly that Ma Mingxin’s ṭarīqa combines Nashbandiyya and Qādiriyya; combinations of this sort were in fact a recurrent feature among the Salars in the Linxia and Amdo area that was Jahriyya’s initial heartland.87 The pivotal figure Khojā Āfāq (d.  1694), son of Muhammad Yūsuf (d. 1653)—a leader of Central Asian Naqshbandiyya—was essential to both Sinophone Muslims’ and Turkophone Salars’ initiation into the Qādiriyya order in the 1670s.88 There is a space of about a century between Khojā Āfāq’s visit to Gansu and Qinghai, and Ma Mingxin’s return from Yemen and Central Asia. And a curious detail, noted in passing by both Joseph Fletcher and more recently by Alexandre Papas and Ma Wei, may offer us a clue to explain in part Ma Mingxin’s inceptive spiritual thrust among the Salars: it is said that Khojā Āfāq, on his departure from the Salars, appointed a certain Wiqāyat Allāh as his successor (khalīfa), but for some reason the thread broke off shortly afterward, and no more is known of this Wiqāyat Allāh.89 Is it likely that Ma Mingxin, a Naqshbandiyya-Jahriyya-Qādiriyya murshid bearing a name none other than the very Wiqāyat Allāh, was able to evoke so much memory and muster so much emotional power among the Salars that they thought the old khalīfa had returned to renew the path? Although on the whole we can only speculate, it is clear that Jahriyya in its early days was a multilingual and multiply affiliated order (Naqshbandiyya and

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Qādiriyya), combining Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and likely some rudimentary Tibetan, too, in its linguistic makeup. We cannot ascertain which of these languages might have been the dominant one in what period, and it is likely that Chinese and Turkic were used in different contexts. Some Sinophone murīdūn might have been able to speak some elementary Turkic, and the Salars were not entirely unfamiliar with Chinese. When it comes to communication with Sufis from beyond Jahriyya’s immediate purview (e.g., the mysterious wise fool mentioned in Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī), Persian and Arabic might have assisted. In his recent wide-ranging introduction to a collection of essays on the historical use of Persian across Eurasia, Nile Green makes the case for a networked geography of a Persographic as opposed to Persophonic world. The idea is that the uneven dissemination of knowledge of Persian in Eurasia from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century via four major institutions—imperial court, chancery, madrasa for training ʿulamā,’ and Sufi khānaqāh—had given rise to a patched network of distant and disparate centers of Persian learning that was largely text-centric: “For . . . the scribal practices and manuscriptbased exchanges that expanded and sustained the Persianate world across the length of Eurasia did not necessarily require the ability to speak Persian.”90 Incidentally, this stress on script resonates strongly with Benedict Anderson’s argument about Latin, Arabic, and Chinese being sacred scripts of universality prior to the rise of vernaculars. The following quotation appears at the start of this chapter, and it may serve us well to repeat it here, now presumably with a new appreciation of its conceptual innovation: Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, and even the Middle Kingdom—which, though we think of it today as Chinese, imagined itself not as Chinese, but as central—were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script. Take only the example of Islam: if Maguindanao met Berbers in Mecca, knowing nothing of each other’s languages, incapable of communicating orally, they nonetheless understood each other’s ideographs, because the sacred texts they shared existed only in classical Arabic. In this case, written Arabic functioned like Chinese characters to create a community out of signs, not sounds.91

Just as Persian was not necessarily widely spoken across vast areas of Eurasia and thus constituted no genuine lingua franca, so was Arabic or Latin or Chinese not spoken even within the settings of diplomacy and higher learning outside where they were the dominant vernacular in the general populace. The distance between the universal script and the local vernacular was often so wide that an imperial

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college in Japan might have more in common, in terms of writing and the learning built on it, with a college in Beijing than it did with the small merchants peddling local goods next door. While Green does briefly mention the Sinophone Muslims, highlighting their use of Persian texts and going so far as to label them “Persianate Chinese,” the concept of Persographia may not apply as neatly to them as it seems to have applied to other Persian-reading peoples in Eurasia. For not only did Persian texts constitute an essential component of SinoIslamic clerical training (although the decline of Persian learning began long before the early twentieth century), but a significant number of Persian words have also entered the daily vocabulary of many ordinary Sino-Muslims. The most prominent such words include the names of the five daily prayers, whose Arabic names never really caught on, and prayer is still widely referred to as namāz. This is of course not equivalent to speaking Persian, but neither does it justify the argument that knowledge of Persian was entirely textual and confined within madrassa and Sufi khānaqāh. Our combing of Jahriyya hagiographies also suggests that at some point among some Jariyya murshidūn and murīdūn, Persian might have been more than a language for reading. Their Persian reading might not have been as excellent as previously assumed, but their Persian speaking might not have been as abysmal as we thought, either. All of these linguistic complications and a shifting multilingualism from the eighteenth century onward contribute to the sound of recitation we now hear from the Jahriyya. The Persianized Arabic pronunciation is not incidental, nor is it an outcome, as some reformist Muslims tend to believe, of a “corruption” of Arabic by obscure local influences that need be purged to resuscitate a clean sound. There probably has never been a clean sound, as Sinophone Muslims learned Arabic from Persophone and Turkophone scholars from Central and South Asia—each with their splendid accent as proud as Ḥabīb al-ʿAjamī, whom we encountered at the start of this chapter—and continued to absorb texts and practices from these places throughout history. In “unclean” sounds that baffle some and ruffle others, there is a magnificently boisterous history of linguistic multiplicity and phonetic interpenetration that has all but been silenced as we enter the ominous age of the nation-state.

3 While this chapter’s main focus is on the Arabic pedagogy of Jahriyya, I have also included an account of the historically multilingual underpinning of this education. Acknowledging the value of debating the musicality of recitation and the legality of Sufi samāʿ, I have veered off this well-trodden path into the thick woods

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of diverse linguistic sounds. This is not of my own volition. I was led by what I heard, and by the fact that at the margins of the Islamicate world, where languages intersect and transliteration and transcription take place as much as translation does, history dictates how religious books are to be intoned, and the sounds that breathe life into these books are almost inevitably “unclean” and “impure.” While a contemporary student of Arabic may have access to recordings made in Mecca or Medina or Cairo and may thus be able to emulate a “standard” recitation with little intermediate intervention, for centuries a Sinophone Muslim’s Arabic pronunciation was a direct reflection of the multilingualism that defined the parameters of her Islam. It is true that the various languages involved might have played differing roles, and their respective weight might have varied both across different time periods and across different strata of the population: Ma Mingxin’s ability to communicate in Turkic cannot be used as a yardstick to measure the general level of knowledge in Turkic among his early Sinophone murīdūn, and notwithstanding the sway that Arabic and Persian held in the clerical rank and file, Chinese was still the dominant vernacular, and its weight had no doubt increased by the twentieth century, though the use of the Chinese script, as I mentioned earlier, remained controversial among some Sinophone clerics well into the 1990s. However, even after Chinese and Arabic had long eclipsed Persian and Turkic—it took at least the entire nineteenth century for this to happen, even if in that same period Persian texts from South and Central Asia continued to be absorbed by Jahriyya—the sounds of the latter two, especially Persian, are yet preserved in those melodious recitations that daily embrace each pious Jahriyya murīd. It is as though a history that has all but become unrecognizable nevertheless insisted to be heard, and it called out each time a Jahriyya murīd raises her voice to chant and becomes by dint of this very action a proper jahrī (loud) disciple at that very moment. A history of a massive scale that lasts centuries is now dissolved into these beguiling syllables whose true audiences are long gone. Or are they? How are we to recultivate our ears, train them in such a manner that history can yet again become audible? This chapter represents an attempt in that direction. However, knowing this history is still inadequate if we are to understand how these syllables compose recitation, and how recitation, by means of its musical structure and ritual framing, builds this history into the very fabric of Jahriyya community. Most contemporary members of this community may not be aware of it: they can embody this history; they can act out what they do not know and thus become history, as opposed to its conscious articulators. And this is precisely the level where I locate my argument about fragile transcendence and keeping God at arm’s

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length. For as we shall see in chapters 2 and 3, this moderate sensibility of modest tolerance is derived not from interpreting unequivocal Sufi doctrines, but from the very logic of liturgical ritual embedded in specific historical trajectories that define the coordinates of modern Jahriyya. Jahriyya murīdūn do not aspire to be tolerant. They are made so by what they do, and what they do often displays an intrinsic logic that defies intervention by any deliberate collective action. In next chapter we will examine one manifestation of this logic, and we will also have our first encounter with the disembodied, abstract Jahriyya saint. Will it be too far-fetched if we treat him as a persistent echo of the history—no less elusive, no less obscure to a contemporary Jahriyya mind—that we have described in this chapter? I leave the reader to formulate their own answer to this question.

2 The Sacred Circle

O

n the night before the eighth of April in the lunar calendar, the Jahriyya at Hong Le Fu finally concluded their preparation, which had started a fortnight earlier. The next morning they were to perform the largest ritual Hong Le Fu sees each year. Tables had been dusted, wiped with great care, using soft flannel: one began from the smooth, flat surface, scrupulously tracing the nooks and crannies where dust tended to gather, then moved on to the curled legs, tilting the table to its side. For many, such pious work was a worthy opportunity to invite divine favor; thus, young disciples were quick to seize the chance. Under the dim light of the lone incandescent bulb that barely illumined the spacious hall, the lacquered tables, polished and neatly stacked, leaning quietly against the papered wall, glittered in anticipation. Hong Le Fu had eleven such tables, all of them the same size and plain in color. They were commissioned by Sanjiu, a local notable in his sixties whose extended family—he had one sister and four brothers—had been residents of the Hong Le Fu area for more than three generations. Not that the carpentry itself was in any way impressive; the tables appeared modestly unadorned. Seamlessly arranged in a straight line when the time arrived, as if set for a royal banquet, they were to be draped by jingdan, “sheet for the classics,” whose ornamented fabric was to bear the weight of the holy books. The tables, or jingzhuo, “table for the classics,” were invariably paired up with jingdan. Among the Jahriyya the fabrication of these otherwise sacred objects did not comply with particularly strict measurements. The requirement was almost always relative: the height of the table was to accord with the height of a “normal man” (never a woman) on his knees, and the size of jingdan was supposed to be

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proportional to the size of jingzhuo. A jingdan is a sheet of embroidered fabric occasionally inlaid with golden threads, its margins embellished by delicate tassels. Jingzhuo must be fully draped by jingdan, tassels to suspend lightly above the ground, their tranquil elegance adorning the unassuming jingzhuo and effectively blocking the view underneath them. The making of jingdan is a serious matter. Although women are never allowed in the vicinity of jingzhuo during formal rituals, the expertise involved in the manufacture of jingdan lies almost exclusively in the female domain. While carpentry—the craft needed for making jingzhuo—is invariably a male occupation, and a lone one at that (a carpenter often works on his own), embroidery is often a female job, and a more or less collective one. An older woman often plays the leading role, with her kinswomen, at times trustworthy neighbors, joining her lead and contributing their share of the labor. One vital rule has to be observed, however. It explains in part the frequent seniority of the main embroider, in addition to the common stress on virtuosity derived from repeated practice. A woman well past menopause, thus deemed sexually neutral and biologically and socially distant from the “contamination” of menstrual blood, is considered particularly well suited to the task. The jingdan that Sanjiu sent to Hong Le Fu, for instance, was sewn by his elder sister, who was known for her impeccable piety. Male fear of female blood is pervasive among the Jahriyya. Some ahongs took care not to have their own clothes laundered with their wives’ and young daughters’, so as to avoid contamination. A Jahriyya herdsman I once interviewed thus explained the way he disposed of the money earned from selling sick sheep to dodgy restaurant cooks: “The money is ḥarām [“illegal” according to Islamic law], so I can’t spend it. I give it to the women for their hygienic pads [weishengzhi].” While danger need be contained in the first case by enforcing separation, in the second it provided an outlet for disposing of illegal—and immoral—income.1 What remained conceivably “pure” was jingdan and jingzhuo. Their combination, along with the Sufi masters to be seated around them, was given the name dayi’er by the Jahriyya. A dayi’er is a circle that encompasses the low tables, exquisite sheets, noble books, and pious Sufis. How far a reciter will travel to join a dayi’er is determined by how important the ritual is, the latter in turn a reflection of the historical weight of the commemorated saint. The eighth of April, for instance, is the memorial service for siyueba taiye (taiye of the eighth of April, 1778–1848 CE), whose revered tomb is well cared for at Hong Le Fu. A vital figure in Jahriyya’s early modern history, his commemoration frequently draws hundreds of thousands of followers from afar in a matter of hours. The dayi’er on this day often comprises eminent clerics from Ningxia, Gansu, Xinjiang

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(northwestern China), Hebei (eastern China), Jilin (northeastern China), Yunnan, and Guizhou (both southwestern China). This chapter offers a detailed ethnographic description of Jahriyya’s dayi’er in its full ritual glory across two contrastive contexts: private family, and public mosques and daotangs.2 My purpose, however, is more than descriptive. Echoing my argument in the introduction about abstract sainthood and fragile transcendence, this chapter examines how the spectral figure of an abstract, invisible, idealized reciter—in whom trust and confidence are invested, and who is to make amends for anyone’s lapse in recitation—takes shape in the course of highly structured yet bewilderingly flexible collective recitation of Sufi poetry. Let me clarify. The stress on good voice and correct pronunciation in recitation is pervasive among Muslims and surely not a Jahriyya specialty. In such an emphasis on musical aesthetics, however, we often find a subterraneous privileging of the individual, even when the context of recitation is collective. In describing and offering an analysis of the madīḥ and dhikr rituals in Egypt, for instance, Earle Waugh chooses exemplary “singers,” or munshidūn, as prime examples to investigate the repertoire and classical roots of these immensely popular recitations.3 While the work contains an abundance of vivid and extraordinarily detailed illustrations of the collective dynamic—how the munshidūn “read” the emotional reactions of the listeners and alter their songs accordingly, how they meticulously cultivate their intimate relationships with the shaykhs, or how they diplomatically deal with their (at times loose) affiliations with Sufi orders—it seems the collective is largely incidental and offers only a context for the recitation, as opposed to being definitive of the recitation itself. Aesthetic evaluation of the recitative voice appears to be even more individualizing. The following list of criteria, for instance, is used in Indonesia to assess the quality of the reciter’s voice in national competitions of Qur’anic recitation. “Good” voices are those that meet these standards: 1. Voices that are full,. . . sweet,. . . and demonstrate vibrato; 2. Voices that are not off-pitch,. . . not hoarse . . . or coarse; 3. Voices that may be controlled,. . . that is, those that do not disappear . . . on low tones and that do not become sharply shrill . . . on high tones. The voice considered good demonstrates mastery of the three registers: low, medium, and high.4

While it has been argued eloquently that the quality of the voice, when examined in its proper social context, always encodes politics—what counts as “a good

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voice” is always at once aesthetic and political—we have so far only paid scant attention to how communities and the politics they create can emerge from within the space of recitation, and how the dynamics of recitation, in particular, can give rise to distinct forms of sociality that transcend the visible and the perceptible while still generating profound political repercussions.5 This last point is not raised willy-nilly; rather, it is a more substantive iteration of my argument about fragile transcendence. As this chapter will show, the Jahriyya recitation of Mukhammas, when examined on its own terms, creates precisely a form of social bonding that encompasses and transcends the sensory existence of the reciters. This bond manifests itself not in a diffuse social sentiment, a vague and equivocal feeling that one belongs to a more or less amorphous Jahriyya community, but in an elusive yet persistent supposition that there exists in the space of the recitation, and even beyond, a spectral, invisible, idealized reciter who condenses in himself a sort of abstract sociality par excellence that remains irreducible to sensory perception. While at this point that claim may sound obscure, the task of this chapter is to substantiate it through thick ethnographic descriptions of the Jahriyya Mukhammas recitation. What is the relationship between this abstract reciter and the abstract saint I discussed in the introduction? At this point in the ethnography it is hard to expound the precise nature of their affinity. The abstract saint seems to evoke a picture painted in such broad strokes that the abstract reciter, whose contour is to be sketched out within the four walls of the recitation hall, appears at once too rooted in ethnographic minutiae and too trivial to contribute anything valuable to the main argument. Yet one can also refine the main argument somewhat: the abstraction of sainthood can be regarded as predicated upon the abstraction of all leadership roles, however minor and temporary, and potentially every member of the Jahriyya can be subject to the same operation of abstraction that characterizes their notion of sainthood. In the end, one might even hypothesize that in Jahriyya Sufism everyone can potentially become a saint—not that they will ever be so acknowledged, but that the work of abstraction may so run its course that this otherwise implausible development is not only possible, but perhaps inevitable. The figure of an idealized, abstract reciter can then be seen as a diffused, diluted version of the abstract saint, the latter only a heightened condensation of the former that hangs in midair, like an undying shadow peering over the shoulder of every Jahriyya murīd as he ingratiates himself in the music of recitation. There is no clear, conscious formulation of this figure by the Jahriyya murīdūn, and I have not found any canonical textual references that describe or explain this group dynamic (unlike, e.g., the voluminous accounts on Sufi samāʿ). In other

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words, the argument this chapter makes is based on ethnographic observation and the inferences I draw from these observations. When a Jahriyya murīd told me that he believed the words he omitted in recitation would be vocalized by someone else in the same group, and yet everything I observed seemed to contradict this claim or cast it into doubt, I began to ask what this contradiction meant, and how it might reveal an aspect of the recitation structure that had not necessarily been fully perceived by the murīd himself. Or he might have perceived it, grasped it intuitively, and thus felt no need to put it into clunky social scientific or philosophical jargon. I also need to remind the reader that the very notion of abstract sainthood, and the idea of fragile transcendence, is my own formulation, one that may or may not go down well with followers of Jahriyya, and each of them may disagree with the next on this point, as they do on most other points. However, I hope the reader will be persuaded that the ethnography laid out below weaves a fabric strong enough to bear the weight of my inferences, and it is the subjunctive rather than the indicative that defines the ethnography to follow. I am not arguing that there is an abstract, idealized reciter so much as I am saying that there would not have been the recitation and its complex rules had there not been this invisible reciter. It is in this precise sense that the recitation described in this chapter can lead us to reconsider the classical thesis in ritual studies—first made by Victor Turner—that ritual is essentially of the subjunctive mood: it is less about what is than what could have been or what would be, less about tangible, solidified “social facts” than new possibilities and novel horizons.6 The only point I would like to add is that these exciting possibilities and horizons that transcend the hic et nunc are not necessarily perceived distinctively as such by those participating in the ritual. This amounts to saying simply that rituals at times—perhaps more frequently than we care to admit— generate more social and affective energies, spin out more ghosts (if the invisible reciter can be considered a ghost), and create more social bonds than we generally realize. But isn’t this excess precisely what ritual is all about?

THE SACRED CIRCLE

Between dayi’er and recitation there is a linguistic as well as a ritual link. Another word with a kindred morphology, daore, frequently appeared in the daily speech of the Jahriyya murīdūn I knew, used matter-of-factly to describe and assess the sound of recitation. Its ubiquity was matched only by its characteristic ambiguity: it seemed to include every aspect of the chant, from tune and rhythm to

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cadence, timbre, and volume. I seldom heard a Jahriyya Sufi characterize their recitation in musical terms, though many vivacious young disciples affected a hobby in singing; some would go so far as to compare their vocal chanting to musical performances (such analogy was rare and invariably frowned upon by the elders). However, no formal musical training was deemed necessary, and no musical terminology was deliberately applied. The linguistic proximity between daore ਘ⟡ and dayi’er ᢃ‫׍‬⡮, practically nonexistent in Chinese, is not clear unless by recourse to a conversion. The Arabic term for daore is dawr, while dayi’er originates from dā’ ira in Arabic. Both dawr and dā’ ira share the same triliteral root, d-w-r, this basic combination holding a cluster of meanings that all center on the sense of circle and cyclical rotation. The patterned replication of rhythm and the turn of melody mirror the circular seating of the Sufi reciters.7 “The ritual never ceases, for the rotation of the heavens never terminates,” I was once told. “One must refrain from speaking after cleansing oneself if one is to enter [shang] a dayi’er. Speech breaches xiaojing [“minor ablution,” performed prior to daily prayers as well as before commemoration rituals, wuḍū’ in Arabic],” warned Sijiu, one of Sanjiu’s younger brothers. “My father used to observe those on dayi’er. Once in the middle of an ermaili [ʿamal in Arabic, meaning “action,” “deed,” or “work,” used commonly by the Jahriyya to refer to a ritual; more on ʿamal in chapter 3] he hurled an incense bowl at an ahong for his slumber and inadvertence.” The primacy given to dayi’er and its connection to daore at times offer the poetically minded much food for thought. In describing dayi’er an acclaimed SinoMuslim novelist even availed himself of an analogy drawn from alchemy: Objects used for dayi’er are inviolably sacred. The ambience in the dayi’er is solemn and serene. After the ahong has cleansed himself he cannot make a sound until the ritual begins. The first sound of his voice would be the sound of the flawless classics. If the followers may still languish in other sacred realms, when they join the dayi’er they would be as though recast in solid iron. . . . Although I am now far away in the remote Beijing, I still feel palpably that I am rooted in that dayi’er. . . . Forgive me for waxing rhetorical now and again, for the sound of dhikr has once more risen by my ear.8

This chapter’s description of dayi’er focuses specifically on the daily chanting of Mukhammas, a “fiver” poem—each of its stanzas comprises five lines—composed as an expansion of a famous Sufi qaṣīda poem: Imam al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīda al-Burda (more below). While daore’s melodic rotation unfolded sequentially along the temporal axis, the circle of dayi’er gives recitation a rounded shape in space, their

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linguistic proximity thus mirrored in their ritual congruity. Since the name Jahriyya (the loud ones) signals a vibrant style of recitation, a resounding and emotive voice, regulated by a beautiful daore, thus lies at the heart of Jahriyya’s charm. A story from the golden age of Jahriyya (the late eighteenth century) recorded in Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī states: It is transmitted that our noblest Ḥadrat al-Mawlā [fourth Jahriyya saint Ma Yide, or siyueba taiye] went with a small retinue to Suojiacha in search of knowledge.9 A Suo akhūnd (ahong) who was the teacher of the school said [to them], “Drought has impoverished the people [of this place] and there is no money [to support you here].” Just when Ḥadrat was about to leave with his companions, the mu’adhdhin announced the ʿAṣr prayer. [On hearing this] Ḥadrat said to his two companions, “Let’s return now that ʿAṣr has been announced. We can leave afterwards.” Thus they returned and performed wuḍū’ [ablution prior to the prayer]. While they were just finishing up their washing, the group ʿA ṣr prayer ended. So they went in [the prayer hall] and performed their own ʿA ṣr prayer. After which they read the glorious al-Awrād. [It just so happened that] a bursar [of this mosque] stood by and eavesdropped on them [istaraqa alsamaʿ muḥtasib wāḥid ʿalā al-istiʿadād]. He was the manager of school affairs. The beautiful song [ghanā’] of al-Awrād reached deep into his ears, and set in motion the bird of love in the cage of his heart [iḍṭaraba ṭayra al-muḥabba fī qafasi qalbihi]. Once they had finished al-Awrād, this bursar beseeched them, “O students [khulafā’], do not leave. Do stay for our school.” He then spoke to the teacher of the school [i.e., the ahong who previously refused to house them], “These students will remain and study here. Their expenses are on me.” “Then so it should be. I concur and shall be their teacher,” replied the ahong. As such Ḥadrat remained [in the mosque] with his companions. Outwardly [ fī al-ẓāhir] he was a student in search of knowledge; yet inwardly [ fī al-bāṭin] he was a traveler on the spiritual path of truth [sālik al-ḥaqq].10

Despite the caution in comparing recitation to musical performances, Mansūr seemed not to hesitate in using ghanā’—meaning song or singing—to describe the recitation of Awrād. The Sufi imagery of the “bird of love” (ṭayra al-muḥabba) is clear beyond doubt; the bird often represents the human soul.11 Al-Ghazzālī (d. 1111) once wrote a lovely little treatise, Risālat al-Ṭayr (Epistle of birds), using birds as an allegory for a story on the pursuit of spiritual truth,12 and Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. 1221), the prestigious Persian poet and Sufi hagiographer whose Tadhkirat al-Awliyā’ remains a key reference for Jahriyya as well as other students of Sufi sainthood, wrote Mantiq al-Ṭayr (The conference of the birds), a

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brilliant Sufi poem that continues to be one of his best-known poetic works.13 Reference to the opposition between ẓāhir and bāṭin, a common feature across Sufi literature, again invokes the opposition between the exoteric (outward, literal, unequivocal meanings of texts and practices) and the esoteric (inward, secret, hidden, ambiguous, even impenetrable meanings of texts and practices).14 Exoterically, the mawlā was only practicing the daily prayers and fasting as a commoner, while esoterically, the very same actions and many more constituted mystical trainings that led him to the ultimate union with God ( fanā’, or, in Jahriyya parlance, fan na). Unsurprisingly, the story has since been read as a fair representation of the founding moment when Suojiacha—later a Jahriyya stronghold—surrendered to the enchanting voice of the Jahriyya daore. For many contemporary murīdūn, voice constituted the essence of Jahriyya. “I once thought the Jahriyya daore would soon be lost. It only seemed inevitable with the passing of older ahongs,” Sulayman told me when we first met. “So I bought a tape recorder and tried to record as much as I could.” Born into a pious Jahriyya family, Sulayman was heir to an illustrious genealogy: both his father and grandfather were treasurers of a prominent local mosque, and the land on which the mosque stood was in fact his family’s private property. Shortly before the Communist takeover in 1949, his family tactfully donated the land to the order—“tactfully” because this generous contribution acquitted them of the cardinal sin of land ownership, which brought ruin on many an elite Chinese family between 1949 and 1976, when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was brought to a close after wreaking havoc nationwide. This donation further secured his family’s distinguished status among fellow Jahriyya, the result being that Sulayman received innumerable invitations to participate in private Jahriyya rituals not open to nonrelatives. He grew up steeped in the voice of the jahrī (loud) recitation. So there he was, with a shoddy cassette recorder—later a smartphone— fumbling to record the sound he feared might soon disappear. Before long, though, he found relief. “I realized that my worries had been completely rootless,” he said. “Voice is the blood and vein of Jahriyya. Insofar as Jahriyya continues to exist, its voice will persist on, we will survive.” His optimism was probably overstated but not entirely unjustified. Among Jahriyya clerics, certain Qur’anic verses and Sufi poems were colloquially referred to as menmian jing, “classics of the façade.” They were so called because they were the conventional liturgies the clerics recite while presiding over family rituals. To have a disagreeable voice, or, as the Jahriyya would say, to “have a bad daore,” would at once tarnish the name of the reciter and jeopardize the ritual, potentially undermining its efficacy or even provoking the wrath of the propitiated. One could lose face by having a dreadful

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voice. Just as all houses need a façade (menmian), so will the Jahriyya voice thrive so long as the order continues to exist and every murīd still considers face (mian) worthy of preservation, and a good voice, like a beautiful face, always says more than a thousand words. Whether one’s voice is agreeable or abysmal, one seldom recites on one’s own—or, perhaps more accurately, individual recitation is always secondary to collective chanting for a Jahriyya murīd. There is something about the group that is simply irreplaceable, something that is almost indescribable yet so persistent that even a flippant anthropologist can feel its existence after sustained participation. Further below I attempt to describe this indescribable grain of the collective voice; before that, though, let us first turn to the poem recited.

POETRY OF THE CIRCLE: MUKHAMMAS AND QAṢĪDA AL-BURDA

While this chapter focuses on Mukhammas’s ritual performance, we need first to understand its principal literary features, for this will throw into sharp relief the extent to which Jariyya’s recitation diverges from many Sufi traditions where similar poems are recited. The term mukhammas is derived from the basic triliteral Arabic root kh-m-s, meaning “five.” Takhmīs, the verbal noun (maṣdar) of form 2 of the verb, means “making something into five,” so mukhammas literally means “that which has been rendered into five or made fivefold.” A poem bearing such a name typically consists of numerous stanzas, each composed of five lines, and takhmīs denotes the technique of poetic construction that, for example, expands two hemistiches into a five-line stanza. Though histories of Arabo-Persian poetry often have little to say about mukhammas as a separate category, takhmīs receives the attention it deserves.15 It is often considered one of the most prevalent forms of poetic composition in the tradition of prophetic panegyric, where Prophet Muhammad is the main mamdūḥ (the praised one).16 When presented in its own right (though never completely separate from takhmīs) in scholarly studies, mukhammas is often aligned with other strophic poems (musammaṭ), characterized in structure by the formal break into separate rhyming stanzas.17 But we should also note in passing how Arabic literary terms such as takhmīs and mukhammas are often treated among the Jahriyya. Many Arabic terms in the Jahriyya discourse, including mukhammas, madā’iḥ, dawr/daore, and dā’ ira/dayi’er, once lifted out of Arabic, acquire the status of proper nouns in their new linguistic habitat. Mukhammas, rather than the literary product of a particular style of

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poetic composition, or a specific genre of panegyric poetry, became the title of a book, and Madā’ iḥ, rather than the plural form of madīḥ (praise), became the title of another.18 For the purpose of recitation, as well as to illustrate the literary ingenuity of the poem, an experienced Jahriyya murīd would normally count the vowel marks of each line, leaving out sukūn, the diacritical mark indicating a silent letter. While the number of letters in a line of Mukhammas may vary from twenty to twentyfive, it is remarkably consistent that most, if not all, lines in Mukhammas possess fourteen short vowels. This stress on vowels runs parallel to a significant weakening of consonants audible in recitation: for instance, the backward articulation of q in Classical Arabic is invariably frontalized and given a sound value close to that of g, while ʿ, a pharyngeal fricative whose position of articulation is also at the back of the throat, has vanished almost completely (just as it has in Persian). Also disappeared is the plosive component of hamza, again showing similarity to Persian. The Jahriyya recitation thus increases the weight of vowels by frontalizing and flattening out consonants, and those consonants that appear to put up the most formidable resistance are the first to go. What deserves more attention is the poem’s literary traits. The composition of Mukhammas was rooted in a tradition from a particularly controversial period in the history of Islam. Over a century after the passing of Prophet Muhammad, the golden age of the Abbasid period (750–1258 CE) was marked by a profound transition. The role of writing grew increasingly vital, complementing the primacy previously accorded to the oral dissemination of knowledge and literature among the Arabs. While this process was never completed, and even now the teaching of a muʿalim (teacher) in a classical setting requires face-to-face tuition and strong personal allegiance—reading on one’s own without the personal instruction of a living shaykh is considered fundamentally inadequate—it is still true that the thriving of writing culture in the Abbasid Empire gave rise to a critical transition in Islamic scholarship and literature.19 This transition entailed “a stunning efflorescence . . . of (analytical) sciences expressed in written prose,” which led further to “the coining of technical terms, the analysis and classification of materials of a vast cultural scope and, above all, the development of a ‘language’ of ‘scientific’ discourse, that is, the dialectical mode of expression (mujādalah) that typifies ʿ ilm al-kalam [speculative theology], but quickly spread to all areas of literary discourse.”20 This epoch produced its own poetical form, characterized by its exquisite, twisted, and, according to some, excessively vain style. The new form did not have a proper name except for a designation that merely stated dryly that it was “new” (badīʿ).21 Derived from the triliteral root b-d-ʿ, badīʿ means “new, novel, original,”

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and, unfortunately, it holds a negative connotation in the history of Islam. The basic verb form badaʿa means “to invent” or “to introduce,” and its signification in religion often involves the notion of introducing “novel” (read: controversial) ideas, interpretations, and behaviors that did not previously exist in the accepted tradition. Form 2 of this verb is baddaʿa, which means at once “to stand out” and “to accuse someone of heresy.” Yet badīʿ as a novel poetical device was not completely new. According to the poet theoretician Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 908), the five figures of speech that characterized badīʿ—namely, metaphor (istiʿāra, such as in “the claws of death,” or “the eyes of religion were cooled,” meaning that the Islamic armies were victorious), paronomasia (tajnīs, such as playing with root letters, a feature rather prominent in the Jahriyya Mukhammas), antithesis (muṭābaqa), epanalepsis (radd al-ʿajuz ʿalā al-ṣadr, repetition of a word from the beginning of a phrase or verse at the end), and playful dialectics emulating theological jargon (al-madhhab al-kalāmī, “the method of kalām”)—were not entirely original. They had already been present in ancient Arabic poetry as well as in the Qur’an and wisdom aphorisms.22 For Ibn al-Muʿtazz the novelty was essentially of a quantitative than a qualitative nature: badīʿ differed only because older figures of speech were exaggerated and excessively applied in the new style, far exceeding their more subdued and piecemeal use in older poetry and the holy book. A line (bayt) from the poet Abu Tammām (d. 845), for instance, demonstrates the use of paronomasia, or tajnīs: ˸ Ϊό˴ γ˴ ˵ ˸Ϯ˴ρ ϰ˴ Ϭ˸ ˴ϓ Ω˶ ΎΠϧ˸ Ϲ΍ ϭ ϡΎϬ ΩΎό˵δ˶Α ϯ͉ϮϨϟ΍ ˵ΔΑ ˸ή˴Ϗ Ε˴ ˶ Η˸ Ϲ΍ ω The remote country is happy [saʿadat] with Suʿād For she has gone obediently to Tihāmah and to Najd 23

The wordplay hinges on saʿadat (to be happy) and suʿād (Suʿād) and displays a feature unique to the period in question: the two words do not share a genuine morphological link. Here a toponym, Suʿād, is morphologically unrelated to the verb “to be happy” (saʿadat); the latter is inserted into the poem only to create an evocative sound effect and a visual—that is, morphological—affinity. Abu Tammām drew criticism for such “excess”: “It appears that he did not pass by a place-name that he needed to mention or that occurred in a story that he mentioned in his poetry without deriving a tajnīs from it or creating a figure of badīʿ. Thus, he was at fault and violated a definitive precept.”24 A comparable example of tajnīs can be found in the Jahriyya Mukhammas. In the sixtieth stanza, which narrates the birth of the prophet and the foreboding of the Sassanian Persians, we read: “On that day when the Persians perceived [their

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impending doom], they were warned of their undoing, misery, and punishments” (yawmun tafarrasa fī-hi al-fursu anna-hum / qad undhirū bi-ḥulūli wa-l-bu’si wal-niqami).25 Here the word for “Persians,” al-furs, resonates with the word for “perceive,” tafarrasa, which is form 5 of farasa; as such a proximity in sound not in morphology is employed to make the remarkable point that perhaps the very name of the Persians reveals it has been preordained that they would at this point in history perceive their impending doom. The play with root letters in Mukhammas could at times appear rather convoluted. For instance, the first line in the twelfth stanza states, “I have accepted the arrival of that which is to be accepted with the attitude of acceptance” (aqbiltu iqbāla maqbūlin bi-dhā-l-qibal): the construction of the entire sentence is based on a euphonious play with the root letters q-b-l. Indeed, in the preface to Mukhammas the poet states unequivocally that “as August came and went [i.e., as the years passed] my ability to make takhmīs and tajnīs . . . was driven on [toward improvement].”26 If badīʿ was already under heavy attack for its twisted pretention in the golden age of the Abbasid period, it was even more severely berated in the postclassical period (ca. 1250–1850 CE), the era that gave rise to Jahriyya’s Mukhammas— although Sufi mystical poems often enjoyed a higher stature than “secular” poems and suffered much less reprimand due to their religious nature.27 As mentioned above, a mukhammas in Arabic poetry is the product of takhmīs, a manner of composition that expands a short poem into a longer one composed of five-line stanzas. Accordingly, a mukhammas often comprises two complementary parts woven into one single poem: the original poem on which takhmīs is performed, plus the new lines that have been inserted. Regarding Jahriyya’s Mukhammas, the base text is the famous Qaṣīda al-Burda, or Ode of the Mantle, composed in the thirteenth century by the eminent Egyptian Sufi Imam al-Būṣīrī of the Shādhiliyya order. Many Jahriyya murīdūn view their three major liturgical texts—Awrād, Madā’iḥ, and Mukhammas—as “three tastes of medicine” (san wei yao) prescribed by their Sufi saints for the spiritual health of their murīdūn.28 This view of poetic recitation’s healing power resonates with the miracle story surrounding the composition of al-Burda. Legend has it that after having been afflicted with hemiplegia, al-Būṣīrī in all earnestness composed al-Burda—a panegyric to the holy prophet—in hopes that the latter would intercede on his behalf for God’s compassion and relief of his pain. “I recited it over and over again, and wept and prayed and entreated,” al-Būṣīrī reputedly said. “Then, when I had fallen asleep, I saw the Prophet. . . . He stroked my face with his blessed hand, then threw a mantle over me. When I awoke, I found my health restored . . . so I arose and went out of my house, and I had not told a soul about this.”29 Thus the poem

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received its title, Qaṣīda al-Burda (Ode of the mantle). In Chinese al-Burda received a no less poetic name, Gunyi Song. While song means “recitation” (as in songdu) or “praise” (as in gesong), gunyi invariably denotes the exquisite regalia worn by royalties and nobilities; gunyi song thus invokes an imagery of superiority and exaltedness not altogether present in the original Arabic title. The Chinese translator clearly understood quite well that translation was more than an artless practice of hauling literal meaning across languages. Performing takhmīs on al-Burda has been a common practice among pious poets across the Islamic world ever since al-Būṣīrī’s qaṣīda became popular among medieval Muslims. According to one estimate, in Egypt alone there have been no fewer than eighty mukhammasūn in circulation, and considerably more variations can be found in non-Arab lands, such as India.30 Suzanne Stetkevych has argued eloquently in favor of the supplicatory nature of the mantle odes (for alBūṣīrī’s is not the only qaṣīda al-burda), given that the composition of both the original poem and later additions (as in the form of takhmīs) constitute acts of devout petition.31 Both the lengthy confession of one’s aimless pursuit of worldly pleasure oblivious of the incremental arrival of old age, and the lengthier praise lavished on the prophet, serve to lay the foundation for a complete surrender to Muhammad’s power of intercession. Comprising 160 lines (abyāt, plural of bayt; each bayt has two hemistichs, separated by a caesura), al-Burda can be divided into ten sections: (1) lyric-elegiac prelude; (2) warning against the desires of the self; (3) praise of the noble messenger; (4) what is said about his birth; (5) what is said about his miracles; (6) what is said about the noble Qur’an; (7) what is said about the night journey and ascension; (8) what is said about the holy war and the expeditions of the messenger; (9) supplication and plea for intercession; and (10) fervent prayer and petition. Written in the great classical tradition of qaṣīda poetry, al-Burda is meant to be recited as well as studied as a poetic text.32 The literary features of al-Burda are conducive to its liturgical use; in addition to the abundance of badīʿ artifice in its lines, al-Burda was composed as a mīmiyya, meaning that the end of each distich rhymes with the letter mīm. This is not an arbitrary choice, for the letter mīm occupies a special place in Islamic mystical thought. A ḥadīth qudsī (“the holy saying,” extra-Qur’anic revelations passed down through the prophet’s words) states that “I [God] am Aḥmad without the mīm”—and without the mīm, of course, aḥmad becomes aḥad, “One.” The name Muhammad itself is derived from the same triliteral root as aḥmad: both come from ḥamida, “to praise”; muḥammad means “the praised,” while aḥmad means “the more praiseworthy,” itself another name often given to the prophet in Sufi poetry. Al-Būṣīrī’s own name is Muhammad; so is the name of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, who helped greatly in

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popularizing the foregoing ḥadīth through his gracefully crafted Conference of the Birds. The distance between the prophet and God is thus the mīm in his name. In the meantime, because muḥammad contains two mīm’s, so the prophet must be for both worlds (ʿālamān, sing. ʿālam, with one mīm)—that is, this world and the next.33 Mawlānā Rumi (d.1273) once remarked, “Aḥad is perfect, and Aḥmad is not yet in the state of perfection; when the m is removed it becomes complete perfection.”34 It has been widely acknowledged that al-Būṣīrī’s al-Burda is itself a contrafaction (muʿāraḍa, imitating the rhyme and meter) of another famous Sufi love lyric (ghazal), ʿUmar ibn al-Fāriḍ’s “Was That Laylā’s Fire?” (“Hal Nāru Laylā?”), which itself is a mīmiyya.35 The author of the Jahriyya Mukhammas worked his own poetic magic on al-Burda: he broke each distich into two lines and added three more lines above them to create a five-line stanza. While al-Burda is a mīmiyya, the new Mukhammas follows a slightly different rule. The three added lines endrhyme with the first hemistich of the original distich, which now is the fourth line, leaving mīm as the final letter of the last line, which ends the entire stanza. We need to note at this point the rather obscure history of Mukhammas’s creation. The author, a certain Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Mawlawī al-Tabādkānī al-Ṭūsī, states unequivocally in the preface that he based his composition on another incomplete mukhammas: An old intention [I have long harbored] arose from the bottom of my heart, and a strong determination is renewed in my inner thought [sirrī]. Such took place in the course of my travels: I came upon a mukhammas of al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīda al-Burda—may God revive the spirit of its [i.e., al-Burda’s] author [nāẓimihā] and give him peace and life. However, because of its [here the pronoun is masculine, thus denoting the mukhammas, since qaṣīda is feminine] author’s haste [istiʿ jāl], there has not been enough time [lam yafi al-waqtu] for him to complete [istifā’] the precious pearls of its benefits, nor has he been able to perfect [istimām] the delicacies on its exquisite high table.36

Yet, despite the “strong determination” (ʿazīma ʿaẓīma), al-Tabādkānī had to give in to the whimsical force of circumstance. War was devastating his hometown in Khorasan, and only after the travail (al-fitna) had eased and peace (al-ma’man) had been restored, so he tells us, could he resume the work and finally accomplish the literary feat that is the Jahriyya Mukhammas we now possess. Furthermore, he wrote that there had been more than one manuscript of al-Burda in circulation at the time and that the order of the contents varied from one version to the next. For this reason, he chose the copy (al-nuskha) with the interpretation of a

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certain shaykh bearing the name of al-Jalāliyya al-Khajandiyya, or, as he states a few lines later, Jalāl al-Dīn. He tells us that Jalāl al-Dīn had been a resident of Medina for years, before having to depart under the pressure of debt. Yet, before his departure, the governor (naqīb) of Medina was blessed with a dream in which he saw the noble prophet, who asked him to pay up the debts of Jalāl alDīn so he could stay on. “But he has never told a soul about his debt, or his decision to leave,” al-Tabādkānī marvels. Once the governor had informed Jalāl al-Dīn of his sublime vision and offered to help, the latter abandoned his intention to leave and lived next to the holy prophet (or his tomb) until the end of his years.37 Al-Tabādkānī’s mukhammas is more than a simple expansion on al-Burda. Close to the end of his short preface, he states that in his poem he has, among other things, interpreted the structure of al-Burda with a lucid translation (bitarjumatin wāḍiḥatin) to make it easier to understand and added an epilogue to supplement and complete it.38 The translation that results is the Persian mukhammas sharing the same page with the Arabic one, below the main text and copied in a more common format (each of the first two distiches written in one line with a caesura between the two hemistiches, while the last line is left to stand on its own), and the epilogue, as we shall soon see, further illustrates the nature of this mukhammas as a supplicatory text. That al-Tabādkānī found it necessary to provide a Persian translation to make his mukhammas easier to understand (tashīlan) is probably an indication of the extent to which he supposed his main audience to be Persophone Muslims. After all, from the little information we have of him, he seemed to have spent the majority of his own life in Herat, the so-called pearl of Khorasan, the seat of religion and culture in the eastern Islamic world.39 Al-Burda is composed of 160 distiches, while al-Tabādikānī’s mukhammas has 163 stanzas—which means the last 3 stanzas, translated below in full, constitute part of the epilogue (takammula) he penned independently of the original poem: I praise God, Lord of the Worlds, For this takhmīs of al-Burda with contribution from al-Mawlawī (Jalāl al-Dīn) I have composed with pearl my rosary of praise most beautiful I have affixed the pure porcelain of rich ideas To contain the treasure trove of elegance and gem O Lord, accept it as a service to the prophet O Lord, make it accepted for the exalted presence of the prophet Ennoble my lips to kiss on his door

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Allow my forehead to touch the truth of his holy land After the triumph of my circumambulation around the forbidden realm For Thou, my God, I have begun, and in Thou thus I end Receive my dark shadow with your illuminating light, and erase my wrongs Scrutinize my disgrace and my shameful condition with your kindness Forgive me of my rebellious disobedience and sin And grant me mercy with Thy Bounty, O He Who is generous and noble

Another part of the epilogue is an ingenious supplication composed of formulaic constructions. At the heart of each is a word whose first letter follows the order of the Arabic alphabet. Thus, the first sentence reads “O my God, with the sacredness of the letter alif, bless the family [āli, the first letter of the word being alif ] of Muhammad,” and the second sentence reads “O my God, with the sacredness of the letter bā,’ bless the bravery [balā,’ the first letter being bā’] of Muhammad,” and so on, until we reach the last letter of the alphabet, where we read, “O my God, with the sacredness of the letter yā,’ bless the yāsīn of Muhammad upon whom God gives blessing and peace.” Here yā and sīn are the two mysterious letters that begin the thirty-sixth chapter of the Qur’an (Yāsīn is also a common honorific name of Muhammad). All of these elements, plus the short prologue— which seems not to have been al-Tabādkānī’s work, and in which it is stated that if anyone recites the praise of the prophet, his family, and his companions thirtythree times a day, “God will open a door between his tomb and the prophet’s tomb so he can see him until the Day of Resurrection”—suggest quite unequivocally that the Jahriyya Mukhammas is a supplicatory text composed and recited specifically to solicit God’s blessing and the prophet’s intercession. It is also clear that even though al-Tabādkānī added his own name as the author of the text, he was by no means the only Sufi poet who created it. Not only had there been multiple versions of al-Burda, there must also have been abundant exemplars of mukhammas in Khorasan and beyond that were a constant inspiration for his own takhmīs. While I have not been able to cross-check the Jahriyya Mukhammas with any other mukhammasūn in circulation in Central and South Asia to see if there has been any specific cross-referencing (or even direct loans), I would not be surprised if such overlaps show up in future research. Moreover, I have also come across fragments of the Jahriyya Mukhammas in other Sufi and non-Sufi Sino-Muslim groups in northwestern and southwestern China, most of them holding no official affiliation with Jahriyya whatsoever. One stanza from Mukhammas, the thirty-fourth—known colloquially as muḥammadun, since its

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first four lines all begin with the name of Prophet Muhammad—was popular among Muslims in Yunnan, though their muḥammadun varies slightly from the Jahriyya edition and appears incomplete. Whether this and other comparable fragments belong to that “unfinished” manuscript al-Tabādkānī alluded to in his preface, or whether they are merely corruptions of the Jahriyya version that circulated beyond the order itself, we can hardly decide. What is clear is that, despite the insistence of some Jahriyya murīdūn that their order was built on unique texts in their sole possession, the Jahriyya liturgies both borrowed heavily from the vast repertoire of Sufi literature in the eastern Islamic world and contributed to their further dissemination. All of this sounds fine, but we have yet to investigate the specifically liturgical use to which Mukhammas is put. As shall soon become clear, our knowledge of the literary features of Mukhammas will help us throw into sharp relief precisely how far its ritual recitation diverges from the text. Rhymes that are supposed to generate delightful euphonies are omitted at the very point where their enchanting power is at its most gripping, as though the recitation were designed to undermine precisely those features that render the poem a superb literary work. And there is a reason for this otherwise curious tampering: in the place of a synchronized collective chanting regulated by euphonious rhymes, we hear a sort of asynchronized synchronization from which arises a form of social bond that at once consolidates mutual trust and displaces this trust from being invested in any actual member of the congregation. We now turn to this abstract figure and the choral dynamic that creates it.

VOICING THE CIRCLE, CIRCULAR VOICES

The recitation of Mukhammas follows a particular calendar. Each night after hufutan (khoftan in Persian, the last of the five daily prayers), five stanzas of Mukhammas are to be recited. This was practiced even at the time of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when all religious activities were banned, and their covert practice risked capital punishment. “We recited secretly at night, in pitch darkness,” Sijiu recalled. “My father let me guard the door and alarm him the instant I saw government officials approach. Then he would quickly slip the book into the fold of the quilt and recline in bed, pretending to be resting.” When circumstances turned completely hostile and even such covert practice was out of the question, the recitation in Sijiu’s family ceased. His father was apprehended and imprisoned, and in the course of the tribulation he was severely traumatized. “I

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went to visit my father, but was told off outside the walls of his roofless prison cell,” Sijiu reminisced, his voice allayed by sorrow. “I was too short to see anything at all, so I had to pick a few bricks to stack under my feet and raise myself up. I saw my father lying down in the corner of the shed. He was scrubbing his back against the bare rocky ground, rubbing and bumping his head against the wall, wailing and shouting words I could not comprehend.” Yet the halt of the recitation did not take place all at once. The Jahriyya leader of the time—by this point the last murshid had departed, and his son had taken over—never suggested his followers suspend the recitation for the sake of selfprotection. Some might have carried on at their own risk, defying political persecution under extreme circumstances; however, for those who had decided to cease the practice temporarily, it was not too difficult to resume the practice after the 1970s. Such resumption normally did not begin from the first stanza of Mukhammas. This is the very point of it: starting from the day when the recitation dropped off, the reciter now freed from political suppression counted how many stanzas should have elapsed in the intervening years and then began from the passage that would have been the right one had the practice not been discontinued—as if somewhere in the world the recitation of Mukhammas had never stopped and never could stop: one continued others’ recitation as much as had one’s own continued by others. The time of Mukhammas was thus always a cosmic time that encompassed and surpassed the time of the individual. Likely due to the arid climate of northwestern China—the dry summer heat made Ramadan particularly challenging—at Hong Le Fu the brief moment of respite before the recitation started was often punctured by coughing. Over two hundred students in their late teens and early twenties, along with senior clerics and elderly murīdūn in their seventies and eighties, dutifully “performed” this cacophony, which signaled the imminence of the ritual. Accompanying the coughing was a succession of collaborative acts on the part of the reciters: immediately after the duʿā’ (supplication) that concluded hufutan, those close to the front of the prayer hall would rise and fetch the low tables on which to lay copies of Mukhammas. Not a second was wasted, not a beat lost, and no rules were specified as to who ought to be performing this preparatory work; even a clueless rookie (male, of course) would not be barred from so doing. Senior clerics, on the other hand, seldom moved a finger: they preferred the work done on their behalf and considered this a fair reflection of their seniority. While the tables were being arranged into a straight line, and the reciters began to kneel around them, forming a dayi’er, those sitting at the heart of this newly formed circle lit an incense stick and planted it solemnly in a brass burner on the table ( jingzhuo) in front of them. Presently the sound of Sūrat al-Mulk arose, led

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by the presiding reciter.40 While junior murīdūn (even some senior ones with no extensive experience in this regard) were often barred from taking the lead, they were generally allowed to join the dayi’er, insofar as they had been properly dressed—no shorts, and at times no polo shirts—and cleansed. Sūrat al-Mulk is often referred to as tabār among the Jahriyya, following the convention that a Qur’anic chapter is often renamed in shorthand after its first word: al-Mulk begins with tabāraka (“Blessed is [He in whose hand is dominion]”), while the Jahriyya murīdūn drop the last syllable in their naming for the sake of phonic brevity. This type of omission is a common practice for many SinoMuslims in northwestern China. Human names can be subject to the same alteration: Sulayman, for instance, can become Susu, and Yusuf is at times broken down into three separate components—Yus, Susu, and Suf, each used as a nickname for a different Yusuf. This is particularly apposite when there are more than one Yusuf in the same family or the same village, for religious naming—in Islam as in other monotheistic religions—at times displays an embarrassing lack of imagination. The Jahriyya murīdūn remedy this with remarkable ingenuity and a unique sense of humor. The recitation of tabār that precedes the chanting of Mukhammas is an exemplar of Jahriyya collective work. Depending on the number of people in a given dayi’er, one of two ways of reciting tabār may obtain: it is recited in either twelve segments or forty. The distribution of segments is not decided in advance but randomly determined by the position each reciter happens to occupy in the dayi’er and by the total number of participants. A dayi’er composed of thirty reciters, for instance, normally opt for the forty-part option, which means that some reciters might have to recite two different segments from tabār in one sitting. The two ways of splitting up tabār correspond to two contrastive modes of recitation, one an intensified version of the other. While the twelve-part practice often gives each participant adequate time to prepare (since each segment lasts longer in time), the rapid rotation built into the forty-segment practice almost completely rules this out. In the twelve-part practice a reciter often dramatically prolongs the last syllable of his recitation, thus signaling to his successor that he is about to finish and is ready to pass it on; in the forty-part practice, on the other hand, such phonic signaling is used considerably less and replaced by a different dynamic. Since here the shortest piece lasts barely more than three seconds, and even to an initiated ear it might not sound as nearly identifiable as normally assumed, those in the dayi’er often have to listen attentively. In fact, not only is listening enlisted, but scrupulous calculation and meticulous observing are also in order. Though disruptive acts such as turning one’s head sharply to check one’s position in the dayi’er are strongly discouraged, slight adjustments are often tolerated. One

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must know not only when one’s own turn might arrive, but also what segments of verses would be recited by one’s immediate neighbors, for a turnaround of three to four reciters takes a matter of mere seconds. Junior students are frequently embarrassed by their inability to keep up with the swift pace; stuck in the middle of a recitation and disrupting its continuous flow, they are often prompted by senior peers. When dumbfounded and failing even to pick up the most obvious hints, their neighbors will without the slightest hesitation interject and brush them aside. While these occasional wet blankets are not blamed—the shame is enough of a lesson for them—their mates at times poke fun at them, more to ease their conscience with humor than to chastise them for having disrupted the flow. The recitation of tabār in its forty-segment option paves the way to the Mukhammas ritual in a notable manner. By sonically signaling the position of each reciter in the dayi’er, it both sharpens their attention, alerting them to what is soon to follow, and leads them to firmly situate themselves in a collective environment. The quicker tabār courses through the dayi’er, the more neighbors an individual reciter has to consider in his calculation, and the larger his immediate circle becomes in his imagination. Swift circulation of tabār segments thus quite literally conjure the dayi’er into being acoustically. At a certain point, the size of one’s immediate circle in the imagination of a reciter might expand to such a degree that it eventually coincides with the ambit of the entire dayi’er, so the extent of social solidarity becomes almost proportional to how fast the sound of tabār moves from one reciter to the next. This very dynamic sets the stage for the Mukhamma recitation. The daore of Mukhammas is seldom taught formally in the classroom. While most students could join the recitation and find their bearings in it, only a handful were courageous enough to individually record for me a stanza from the poem. Frequently I was referred to a more senior (gao nianji) student or an experienced cleric to advise me on how to recite a particular line, and even those from the latter two groups sometimes found themselves at loggerheads in such matters. These disagreements had to do in part with the particular musical structure of the Mukhammas daore, for the first lesson a novice had to memorize was that in each stanza the five lines that compose it have three different daores: the first and the third line share the same daore, while the fourth line replicates the daore of the second. The fifth line, as it were, holds its own separate daore, distinct from all the rest. Every stanza repeats the same melodic shifts, with only slight variations in lines containing a different number of short vowels. A line with fewer than fourteen vowels, for instance, could have at least two different daores. Such points of ambiguity are built into the very structure of Mukhammas’s daore and can at times generate quite a bit of confusion and cause audible disharmony in

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collective recitation. However, even when a line has exactly fourteen vowels, it is not always clear why it cannot be given a different daore. The Jahriyya recitation of Mukhammas does not always abide by the conventional distinction between short and long vowels. A short vowel can be treated as either the same length as a long vowel or twice as long, and a long vowel can be extended further to meet the needs of recitation, or shortened to the length of a short vowel—or even shorter. A student can figure out where he should extend the length of a certain vowel and where he should shorten it only by taking the collective voice as his reference. In other words, even though most Jahriyya murīdūn I knew asserted that Mukhammas had three different daores, in practice more than three existed, and the difference between the three was often less than evident—even to a seasoned Jahriyya reciter. Because of this inherent ambivalence, some Mukhammas texts were marked by zhutou (pausing head), which indicated a short pause (fig. 2.1). Nearly every Jahriyya cleric I interviewed emphasized the vital role of zhutou, so it was rather puzzling that most Mukhammas texts, even those distributed to the students for training purposes, were not thus marked. Some senior Jahriyya murīdūn would with great pride show me their own copies that had zhutou, often carefully conserved and cherished as precious heirlooms. The lack of zhutou in most texts seemed to have entailed a special hierarchy at once in text and in family stature: the closer a text in its visual representation to its vocal rendition, the higher its position in the textual corpus, and a family that owned such texts was thus accorded a higher status—though, likely to their chagrin, the norm was quickly shifting, because some recently printed Mukhammas had begun to incorporate zhutou. Zhutou is used to distinguish one daore from another and reduce the total number of daores that could potentially apply to a line. Changing the position of a zhutou could thus entail a complete change of daore: vowels that have been short might be lengthened, whereas long vowels might be abruptly cut short. Since such variations rarely follow the conventional rules of Arabic prosody, theoretically there is almost an inexhaustible range of possible alterations in the Jahriyya system. For any given line in Mukhammas, the difference between the “right” and the “wrong” daore could hinge on no more than where to place the pause, and the diacritical necessity of zhutou is largely a reflection of this intrinsic ambivalence. Nonetheless, there is still some truth to the Jahriyya statement that each fiveline stanza of Mukhammas possesses three different daores. The difference, if not completely salient in melody, is clear in another respect. The key lies at the end of each line, particularly on the last two syllables. To explain what this means, we need first to consider the basic structure of Mukhammas recitation. The leading

F i gu r e   2 . 1 A page from a copy of Mukhammas, with zhutou written in dark red circles above the script. Bottom of the page is the Persian translation of the stanza.

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reciter is never given the role of a lone soloist in this recitation; on the contrary, he uses his voice primarily to calibrate its pace, set its tone, and cover up the “disorderly reading” (nian luan le) by helping to raise the voice of those considered correct. He is supposed to have a strong vocal presence in the chorus, his voice possessing an impressive projection that renders it audible even at the back of the prayer hall. And his insistence on the correct daore must be unwavering. Er ahong, for instance, who normally led the Mukhammas ritual at Hong Le Fu, was known for his booming voice. “It requires a special technique,” he once told me. “Reciting and leading the recitation are two entirely different matters.” As a matter of fact, his voice was not particularly euphonious; nonetheless, he was given the leading role, in spite of his secondary position in the Hong Le Fu clerical hierarchy. Compared to Yang ahong, the primary cleric, whose voice was unfortunately much softer, Er ahong, given his relative youth and impressive vigor, was in general more popular as a leading reciter. At times one would hear students complain about the distressing prospect that a particular day’s recitation was likely to be led by Yang ahong. “His voice is too weak; it is rather likely that we will nian luan le,” some would say. Only through this stress on the leading vocalist can we begin to comprehend the difference between the three daores. By way of an example, let us take the third stanza from Mukhammas: ΎΘϔΧ Ϊϗ ΐϠϘϟ΍ ϲϓ ϯϮΠϟ΍ϭ ϯϮϬϟ΍ ϻ Ϯϟ ΎΘϜϧ Ϊϗ ΐΤϟ΍ Ω΍Άϓ ϢϴϤλ ϲϓϭ ΎΘϤγ Ϊϗ ϢδΠϟΎΑ ϰϨπϟ΍ϭ ϯϮπϟ΍ ϻ Ϯϟ ΎΘϤ˷ ϫ ΎΘϔϛ΍ ˴ΖϠϗ ϥ· ϚϴϨϴόϟ ΎϤϓ ϢϬϳ ϖ˸ ϔΘγ΍ ˴ΖϠϗ ϥ· ϚΒϠϘϟ Ύϣϭ

law la-l-hawā wa-l-jawā fī-l-qalbi qad khafatā wa fī ṣamīmi fu’ādi-l-ḥubb qad nakatā law la-d-ḍawā wa-d-danā bi-l-jismi qad samatā fa-mā li-ʿaynayka in qulta ikfutā hammatā wa mā li-qalbika in qulta istafiq yahim

Were it not for the desire and passion that hide in the heart, In the innermost heart of love they wreak havoc; Were it not for the weakening and emaciation of the body that have become incurable Then why would you say to your eyes, “Enough are your griefs!” And to your heart you say, “Stop being deluded!”

The first point to note is that the last two syllables of the first and the third line (i.e., fatā and matā) are fully vocalized by all reciters in synchronization (or

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ideally so), whereas those of the second, fourth, and fifth lines (katā, matā, and yahim) are not. Melodically speaking, the endings of the second, fourth, and fifth lines have a far more fragile relationship to the syllables preceding them than the endings of the first and the third line do. This difference was amplified, in my experience, at the level of recitation, for the leading reciter would normally drop the ending syllables of these three lines to catch a breath. While the voices of the followers were still trailing off on katā, matā, and yahim, he would instantly regain his breath and cut right into the impending silence by voicing the first word in the next line. As though waking up from a brief slumber the followers would gather their strength and recover their verve; by the time they had completely caught up with the leader and their voices again coalesced into a cogent, synchronized whole, half of the new line would have elapsed. The leading reciter acted like a shepherd, and the followers his flock: when the latter slowed down and appeared to doze off, the former flipped his whip and roused them up, causing them to regain their bearings and continue their journey with renewed vigor. The collective voice, while disintegrating into an amorphous jumble of voices on katā, matā, and yahim, was immediately reassembled—often within a split second— and regained its vivacity by the time the recitation reached the middle of the next line, only to trail off yet again near the end. This account may appear trifling and banal if we leave out an important factor. For the Jahriyya murīdūn all recitations must necessarily meet a specific requirement to qualify as a felicitous ritual performance: every word of the poem must be unequivocally and correctly enunciated. No consonant and no vowel are to be left out, either by intention or by neglect. However, this rule applies only to the reciters taken as a group. That is, even if not all individuals in a dayi’er are able to lend voice to every single syllable—this was in fact precisely what happened in the Mukhammas recitations I heard—as long as someone in the group has vocalized those syllables, the recitation will not have lost its ritual efficacy. We must pause here to highlight what is entailed by this specific rule of recitation. Almost all the Jahriyya reciters I interviewed advised that, if one wanted to record a good Mukhammas recitation outside the conventional ritual context, one would have to find at least three to four reciters, for a smaller number would not be able to produce the ideal acoustic thickness (hou). But even more important than the sonic depth was the desired continuity of daore. This point was brought home to me when I volunteered to join Sijiu in his daily Mukhammas recitation. Although he lived next to Hong Le Fu, Sijiu still chose to recite Mukhammas in private. “After my father passed away in 1997,” he told me, “I decided to recite the Mukhammas at home, though I sometimes do join the

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congregation at Hong Le Fu.” As a solemn memorial service, Sijiu shunned the congregation only five minutes away and chanted the noble Mukhammas under the bleak white light of an LED lamp, using the hand-copied manuscript his father had left him, with the zhutou methodically marked out. I was still new to the Mukhammas daore at the time; all I could do was hum along while he recited. Scrambling to find the right pitch for each syllable and pitiably breathless in trying to keep up with the rhythmic shifts, I was barely at it when suddenly, in the middle of his recitation, Sijiu gently picked up a half-burnt incense stick from the low table, nipped it between his forefinger and thumb, and began to point to the words as his voice modulated and his recitation flowed on, without losing a beat. “I heard that you had studied the classics [nian guo jin],” he later told me, “so I thought you should be able to tag along.” By nian guo jing he meant that I was able to pronounce the Arabic alphabet and thus should have no problem learning the daore—or so he anticipated. “I learned completely by listening to my father recite every night,” he said, “and did not study the letters until much later.” The last stanza we recited that night had nothing special in itself. Each of the five lines had fourteen vowels exactly, so variations of daore were accordingly minimal. Especially impressive to me, the novice, was that at the end of the second and fourth lines Sijiu was perceptibly accelerating, and the consequent interruption in the otherwise smooth flow of daore even provoked a slight sense of panic and agitation (more in me than in him, I reckon). He was wrapping up the ruhu (rhyming syllables) at the end of lines 2 and 4 in a forceful, even violent manner, leaving me in a mood of subdued irritation. It was as though he were blaming me for slowing him down, or was trying deliberately to confuse me and make me anxious. To my inexperienced ear his reading of the ruhu was little more than perfunctory. It sounded as if he tried—and audibly failed—to squeeze these two syllables into a split second that was simply not there, as if ruhu were merely a nuisance the recitation had better be rid of in the first place. To me the ruhu at the end of lines 2 and 4 sounded like a peculiar redundancy, save which the daore would have been full, compact, and aesthetically pleasing. “If my son had been here,” Sijiu said, obviously perceiving my discomfort, “he would have read the ruhu in the second and the fourth line, and I wouldn’t have to read them as I just did.” I sought desperately to affirm my conjecture. “Then the daore wouldn’t have felt choppy?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied. “The daore cannot be continuous unless someone else reads the ruhu on my behalf so I can take a breath and begin the next line. I read for him the start of the new line, and he reads in my stead the end of the previous one. Together we can read every word, and the daore will not break.”

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What Sijiu so succinctly summarized, and that I later found replicated on a far larger scale every night at Hong Le Fu, was an essential feature of the Mukhammas daore. Insofar as this daore needed to sustain its melodic continuity, it must necessarily find its vocalization in a collective recital; it simply did not and cannot exist in its full melodic glory at the individual level. Within the collective recitation an individual’s version was only a privation, a lack that constantly called for its eventual fulfillment in the whole. It became a metonym for the collective and existed only for the sake of referring to it. Perhaps the “son” Sijiu referred to was more than the actual son he had, the son who had gone on to college and then to Japan for advanced studies, or the other son, who had now settled in Los Angeles and was struggling to make ends meet (he will appear again in chapter 4). That “son” might have been another metonym for the hundreds of young men the same age as his own son, the young students who called him shifu (master) and showed him great respect for his contribution to the upkeep of Hong Le Fu. The institution of the collective was reinforced by yet another factor. Notwithstanding the intricate rules that governed the Mukhammas daore, in a given instance of recitation it was not uncommon to observe that, many reciters, either in or outside the dayi’er, appeared surprisingly relaxed—some seemingly so relaxed as to barely make a sound at all. Others looked as though they had their thoughts elsewhere, contemplating affairs that stirred their hearts or drowsing for a moment, motionless. The young students were not alone in falling victim to this type of lapse; even the more senior clerics could succumb. They were barely keeping up with the recitation; and when they did come around, where they decided to chime in—judging by when they opened their mouths, for this was the only way I was able to make an observation during a recital—was largely arbitrary and by no means in agreement with the structured regulation of the daore. They could fall silent right in the middle of a line rather than at the beginning, or skip a whole stanza without making a sound. In other words, although at the collective level the rule of recitation might hold and the daore of Mukhammas was continuous and smooth, at the individual level no such regularity existed; personal whim rather than collective rule tended to dominate. Even at the collective level nothing effectively guaranteed that the last two syllables of lines 2 and 4 in each stanza would indeed be voiced by the reciters. The fact that it was the chaotic overlap of individual voices that reigned supreme in this split second ruled out the possibility for any feasible rectification. The rule was followed only to the extent that the recitation did not completely fall silent, and no perceptible discontinuity could be registered. In the end, perhaps no more than a semblance of continuity was maintained; no one was or could ever be certain that what took place at the end of the second and fourth lines

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indeed followed the rules otherwise rigorously insisted on. It seems more likely that the collective rule was observed only in its individual breach. This point calls for more elaboration. While Mukhammas was so composed that internal as well as end rhymes abound, and the play with tajnīs appears in practically every stanza if not in every line, these apparent acoustic features had all but disappeared in the Jahriyya recitation. One could hardly recognize the original nature of al-Burda as a mīmiyya only by listening to the Jahriyya murīdūn recite. Even at the end of lines 1 and 3, where the last two syllables were supposed to be vocalized clearly by all reciters in perfect sync, one could barely get a feel of the rhyme because you need at least two consecutive lines with the same end rhyme to make it both aurally identifiable and persistent enough to resume after an intervening line with a different ending. With the Jahriyya Mukhammas recitation, however, this is precisely what did not happen, as though the chanting of the text had been so deliberately designed as to break as opposed to tap into and reinforce the rhyming structure built into the poem. At the end of lines 2 and 4 (and often 5, too), we hear not so much a group reading of the syllables omitted by the leading vocalist as an inarticulate, indeed “disorderly,” mumbling of voices exhibiting no hint of structure whatsoever. While in some rare cases some degree of synchronization could be perceived—of the hundreds of recitations I participated in, I can recall only one such case—in the vast majority of recitations one could barely tell whether the presumed continuity of daore and the idealized division of roles had been followed through consistently. However, many Jahriyya murīdūn found this uncertainty impertinent, and they seemed unperturbed by its insidious threat to the efficacy of the ritual. Their laxity in practice was thus in stark contrast to their unequivocal verbal insistence on strict adherence to the rule. The lapse of some reciters was also mitigated by recourse to a relative primacy many Jahriyya murīdūn attributed to listening. “Even if you cannot or do not recite,” I was once told, “you can still receive the blessing by listening to the recitation. Others read it on your behalf. Insofar as you are present and turn your ear to it, you can always enjoy the barakāt [blessing].” In the case of an inexperienced reciter, listening might in fact be more beneficial, for, “as a reciter, you will be punished in the hereafter for having misread a word. But, as a listener, even if what you heard was inaccurate you are not the one to blame. It is the reciter who shall be responsible. You will still receive the barakāt in full as if the recitation had been impeccable.”41 As such, it was somewhat of a miracle that the Mukhammas recitation could have survived to the present, for one cannot help but wonder why would anyone want to be a reciter in the first place, rather than remain safely and blessedly an illiterate listener.

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Though this stress on listening had not given rise to an elaborate disciplinary regime, it did have another profound impact.42 It extended the reach of the recitation far beyond the dayi’er of the here and now, for it facilitated the portability of the Jahriyya voice (this will prove crucial to the circulation of Jahriyya recitation via modern media; see chapter 4). Whoever listened to a recitation, live or recorded, would have accrued spiritual benefits even the reciters themselves might not have received. Though such listening ideally requires a pious intention and an attentive ear, on many occasions in everyday life ordinary Jahriyya murīdūn simply proceeded with their chitchat undisturbed as the recitation unfurled from the speaker of a tape recorder or a computer. Even in the setting of a collective ritual, unless one found oneself in the prayer hall and next to the highly revered reciters, one would be surrounded by festively dressed children weaving through the crowd, playing pranks on adults and among themselves, chastised only when they became loud enough to drown out the sound of the broadcast recitation. While such disturbance was admittedly rare for Mukhammas recitation, given its more confined setting in the prayer hall, it was considerably commoner for Madā’ iḥ recitation, which we will examine in the next chapter. What conclusions can we draw from these descriptions? A Jahriyya reciter who missed certain syllables or even whole stanzas often presumed that there would always be someone in the congregation who would stand in for him, fill his shoes, and read his portion on his behalf. Even if he temporarily withdrew from the recitation, insofar as he listened on he would be able to receive the blessing in full and relied for this certainty on his understanding that, in the end, there is always that someone, regardless of who he might be. This presumption, and the implicit sense of (mutual?) trust that it implied, was the very condition for the reciters’ motivation to be in the dayi’er at all, for save such a presumption, the recitation would in the final analysis amount to nothing. The structured daore of Mukhammas, particularly the melodically incongruous endings of the second and fourth lines, was thus only a condensed manifestation of this latent logic that governed the entire course of the recitation. It is quite unlikely that the anthropologist was the only person in the congregation who noticed that some participants were not following the rules. That practically no one was disturbed by what they saw indicates that many were perhaps quite certain that there was always someone in the group who would fill the blank. This someone might not be immediately identifiable, and he might remain invisible, yet he had to be somewhere in that space. Different reciters might fill this role at different moments throughout the recitation; perhaps for a few fleeting seconds one would embody this someone oneself, knowingly, or, more likely, unknowingly. It existed less in the perceived space of the recitation hall than in

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the imagination of the reciters. The rules of recitation existed not because everyone would necessarily follow them to the letter; on the contrary, such rules drew their power only from the imagination that there would always be someone out there, somewhere, who would comply with them. Their power to regulate did not abate because of the ubiquity of lapses; neither was the efficacy of the ritual undermined by the apparent and endemic inadvertence. If anything, such visible failures—if “failures” is even the right word—only made the sound of the recitation all the more convincing as an indicator of sociality.43 For the voice of that someone possessed a special, even magical, charm, precisely because no one knew which of the actual voices might briefly embody it, and, if so, in which precise instant. The voice was not a strong one, either. It vanished the moment we tried to pin it down and assign it a body—a vocal fold that was capable of making audible sounds. Paradoxically, while the name Jahriyya means “the loud ones,” the definitive voice of Mukhammas revolved around a silent yet persistent murmur, an almost inaudible, ineffable whisper that could not be heard unequivocally but whose absence was so present that all sounds paled in the face of its mute intensity. Perhaps the jahrī (loud) of Jahriyya was a silent loud, and the sound of Jahriyya in the end an imagined sound? What is this imagined sound if not the sound of the social, of that which transcends the individual and exerts its power on the individual from the outside and yet, despite such externality, is still intimately woven into the very fabric that makes the individual? The imagination that there is always someone somewhere who will read omitted syllables on one’s behalf continually lends credence to a social consciousness, whether this is intellectually comprehended or merely intuitively grasped. That this imagined someone is nowhere to be found does not undermine so much as it strengthens the grip of this social sentiment. By losing the body of this someone, the Jahriyya murīdūn regain the specter of the social, and the voice of this spectral reciter is only a silent whisper. Yet in this silence there is no tranquility; on the contrary, it is charged with the intense voice of society.

3 For some years the study of Islam in anthropology has had a love affair with the notion of ethical self-cultivation, partly inspired by the work of Michel Foucault.44 It is said that this conception of Islam and of religion is an antidote to the Protestant fixation with “(personal) belief” that has dominated the West’s understanding of religion.45 While few in this school of anthropology have bothered to draw a sharper conceptual distinction between faith and belief—the two cannot

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be more different, and faith as much as belief has defined what religion means to many in the West—ethical self-cultivation seems to have caught on across a broad spectrum of anthropological literature on religion, spirituality, and ethics.46 But some beg to differ. For in the rush to study ethics and self-cultivation, discipline and technologies of the self, we are led steadily toward a focus on the concrete and the material at the cost of thinking more critically and innovatively about the abstract and the intangible. Swimming against the tide, some have lamented, “What is the matter with transcendence?”;47 others have suggested that our job as anthropologists of religion is to capture the “wow” moment that, as Durkheim once ingeniously described, injects in us “a rush of energy.”48 In Islamic studies, Amira Mittermaier has called for more attention to be paid to what cannot be grasped by the concept of self-discipline, to what overflows the self and stands outside it, giving it a long, hard stare that cannot be assimilated into “selfcultivation”—her example being the soul-stirring dreams that Muslims in Cairo dreamed and sought interpretations for.49 What can we learn from the Jahriyya murīdūn with regard to the power of the abstract? Sufi orders often give out an air of strict rules and stricter disciplines; the murīd’s behavior is to be carefully and meticulously regulated; the murshid is to be respected, and his orders must under no circumstances be defied. Sufi orders, in other words, seem to offer the perfect occasion to ask questions about discipline and ethical cultivation, sans self, instead of abstraction and transcendence. Yet, as this chapter has shown, it is precisely by examining the ethical rules and disciplines—in this case, the discipline of the musical daore of Mukhammas— and turning our eyes (and ears) to the incongruity between what is said and what is done, what is upheld in discourse and what occurs in practice, that we can begin to reopen that route to the abstract and the transcendent that is neither severed from nor encompassed by the sensorially perceptible. Every Jahriyya reciter knew how to recite and what sounds to omit, and to any novice they would suggest strict compliance. We can either halt here and take what they say as it is, or, risking rebuff and irritation, we can say, “But this is not what you did” and proceed from there. This chapter has taken the second route. The abstract in this chapter assumes the shape of a fluid, idealized reciter in whom trust is invested, and who is imagined to carry on the recitation where one has left off—either to start a new line or simply to take a break. In rather broad strokes, one can say there is a division between the leading reciter and the congregation; thus, when trust flows from the latter to the former, it bends toward the saints who used to be leading reciters themselves, and with whom contemporary leaders are often deemed to have a special connection. Yet this is a simplification. Trust flows both ways, and it also flows among the congregants

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themselves. It is no doubt an overstatement to claim that through Mukhammas recitation and the mediation of the abstract reciter, every Jahriyya murīd can be considered a minor saint. But then what is a saint if not he who creates genuine trust and mutual dependence as much between him and his followers as among the followers themselves? I would not be surprised if a Jahriyya murīd calls this one of those miraculous “secrets” ( jimi) of the murshidūn.

3 Tempo of Time

F

or many Jahriyya Sufis over the age of sixty, something happened after 1960. Although it was not yet clear what that was, the year would remain a significant threshold. After two years of unceasing political campaigns to debase and disgrace him, the last Jahriyya murshid, Ma Zhenwu, finally passed away in 1960. The humiliation began in May 1958 with what was likely his first public vilification, published on May 10 in Gansu Daily, the mouthpiece of the Gansu Provincial Committee of the Communist Party. Following the overused revolutionary genre of suku, or “speaking bitterness,” the reprimand was less direct ideological censure than a collection of personal resentments presented as voluntary expressions of long-repressed grievances.1 The victims were fastidiously named in the text, their Muslim minority identity stressed and their words reproduced ad verbatim. The intended message was beyond doubt: that it was not the party as much as the Jahriyya Sufis themselves who were most adamant in renouncing their religious leader. From obstructing land reform and orchestrating assassination to perpetrating torture and organizing secret insurgency, Ma Zhenwu was spared no accusations of crimes commonly thrust upon those condemned as counterrevolutionaries in the late 1950s. Within the space of a few short months, satirical comics began to appear en masse, along with scathing reproaches in other newspapers of northwestern China (fig. 3.1). To some contemporary Jahriyya murīdūn for whom the wound has yet to heal, the late 1950s was a time of great agony and massive upheaval. Ma Zhenwu came as the definitive seal that completed a long pedigree of Jahriyya sainthood—or daotong (pedigree of dao)—that dated back to at least the mid-eighteenth century. It was widely believed among the Jahriyya disciples that when their first saint, Ma Mingxin, left his mentor in Yemen in the 1740s, he was told that the

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F i gu r e   3 . 1 “Denouncing Ma Zhenwu.” Ningxia Daily, August 26, 1958.

teaching he had been ordained to pass on would last no more than eight generations of murshidūn. All those who ascended to the throne of leadership afterward would be the “guardians” (kanmen ren) of the order, obligated not to deepen or expand the teaching, but simply to preserve and continue it. In principle, the guardians were not allowed to introduce new ritual practices or new ways of vocalizing canonical texts, although both were within the ambit of the power of a genuine murshid. A pious Jahriyya murīd was supposed to be retrospective, to cherish and celebrate old practices rather than take the risk of inventing new ones. With the passing of Ma Zhenwu in 1960, the initial mandate immediately took effect. “Whoever says that there will be another murshid is a kāfir [unbeliever],” the first Jahriyya guardian, Ma Liesun, reputedly said in the 1980s. The idea of a seal to sainthood is not a particularly Jahriyya innovation. As early as the ninth century CE, the preeminent Sufi jurist and ḥadīth scholar alḤākim al-Tirmidhi (d. c. 869) had offered the first taste of what later became, in the work of Ibn ʿArabī, the definitive exposition of khātim al-walāya, “the seal of sainthood.” While the work in which we find this early source by no means represents al-Tirmidhi’s systematic explanation of this essential concept, it is obvious even there that the seal of sainthood is modeled on a pivotal Islamic idea: “the seal of the prophets” (khātim al-anbiyā’). According to this doctrine, Muhammad represents the last prophet in whom prophethood culminates and, by the same token, terminates; the seal of sainthood serves an analogous role in

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the world of Sufi murshidūn. When a student requests an explication of the role of the “chief saint” (sayyid) who seals the “friendship with God” (another translation of walāya), al-Tirmidhi launches into a long exposition of the spiritual hierarchy among the prophets, in the midst of which he proclaims, “Upon Muhammad He has bestowed special honors such as He has not given to anyone else amongst mankind. There are things from his special status which are hidden from men at large, except God’s chosen few, and there are things which everyone necessarily knows.”2 Conceived in analogous terms, though in principle always subordinate to the Prophet, the seal of the saints is portrayed as almost the perfect man on earth: Then God will send a Friend whom He has chosen and elected, whom He has drawn unto Him and made close, and He will bestow on him everything He bestowed upon the [other] Friends but He will distinguish him with the seal of Friendship with God. . . . And he will be God’s proof [ḥujja allāh] against all the other Friends on the Day of Judgement. By means of this seal he will possess the sincerity [ṣidq] of Friendship with God the same way that Muhammad possessed the sincerity of prophethood. The Enemy will not speak to him and the carnal soul will not find the means to seize its share of the Friendship with God.3

We need not examine the fine distinctions between the different types of saintly seal—seal of the Muhammadan Sainthood, seal of the Universal Sainthood (inaugurator of Universal Sainthood being Jesus), or seal of children4—or the relationship between the seal and the “perfect man” (insān kāmil) to identify some key differences between this classical notion of the seal and its apparent Jahriyya variant.5 While Ibn ʿArabī was often invoked by some Jahriyya clerics to justify the Sufi approach in general, engagement with his ideas was often less than rigorous. What most strongly distinguishes the Jahriyya idea of the seal is the lack of a clear hierarchy. The last saint was never celebrated as the apotheosis of sainthood, and the founding saint, Ma Mingxin, still occupies the pride of place, unchallenged by any of his successors. There is little sense of a chronological progression that reaches its apogee at the moment of sealing. In fact, even in al-Tirmidhi and Ibn ʿArabī the idea of the seal possesses no temporal implication, and posterity does not translate into spiritual superiority.6 The eleventh-century Sufi master al-Hujwīrī (d. 1074), in quoting Abu al-Ḥasan of Fūshanja, had already noted that “today Sufism is a name without a reality, but formerly it was a reality without a name.” He quickly added, “In the time of the Companions and the Ancients . . . this name did not exist, but the reality thereof was in everyone; now the name exists, but not the reality. That is to say, formerly

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the practice was known and the pretence unknown, but nowadays the pretence is known and the practice unknown.”7 While as a rule of thumb we need to be cautious in taking most Sufi writings at face value while using them to reconstruct historical truths—their self-deprecatory tone and general loathing of the times are more a display of piety than reliable historical observation—the existence and popularity of this retrospective point of view is a clear indication that the privileging of either past or future generations is not a priori in Sufism.8 And linear time, either progressive or regressive in direction, plays a considerably less important role here than it does in some streaks of contemporary reformist Islam. This ambivalent attitude to linear time is just as clear among the Jahriyya. While there do exist widespread laments that today is inferior to the bygone eras when there were still reigning saints, no hierarchy is assumed among the Jahriyya saints themselves; each murshid is deemed to have borne his own mandate and his own destiny. Each generation had their own mission, which may well have included completely abolishing the order or allowing certain much-coveted ritual practices to die. Though the preservation of old rituals still exerts a strong hold among many, for others an attitude of letting go and moving on seems to be less a betrayal of Jahriyya than a much-needed renewal, or a new interpretation apropos of the end of sainthood, and this is a particular kind of renewal or reinterpretation. New inventions are highly discouraged, even censored, while old practices are left to phase out gradually, of their own accord. The seal of the Jahriyya genealogy in 1960 marked a sea change. In the local dialect spoken by the Jahriyya murīdūn in Ningxia, the concept of “epoch” translates as guangyin. A common figure of poetic speech meaning “light and shade,” it is often used both in high Chinese literature and in proverbial idioms to denote the general concept of time. Among the Jahriyya, this conventional reference received a slight twist: it was used to describe a given epoch as pivoting around a particular saint, treated as the pillar (quṭb), whose upright stature and unrivaled piety carried the cosmic weight of his time. While narrating happenings in the lifetime of Ma Yuanzhang (1853–1920 CE), the seventh and perhaps the most consequential murshid in the modern history of Jahriyya, a follower would normally begin by saying, “In the guangyin of Shagou Taiye . . .” (zai shagou taiye de guangyin li).9 An epoch was thus defined by the saint who ruled it with the sacred mandate of God. What was special about Ma Zhenwu was that he was given the terminal title Ben Guangyin Taiye, “taiye of the contemporary times.” While the epochs of all previous murshidūn possessed specific proper names that distinguished them from all ages that preceded and succeeded them, Ma Zhenwu’s epoch seemed to be almost eternal “contemporary times.” It began on the day of

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his ordination and extends indefinitely into the future, presumably until the day his God resurrects the dead and deals out His relentless judgment. The linguistic function of an indexical term such as “contemporary times” reinforced the sense of a temporal arrest: time had stopped, its suspension becoming the definitive feature of the forthcoming epoch governed by the “guardians.”10 There was and would only be one epoch, that of the “contemporary times,” and history—at least the one with the humankind as the presumed subject—had already ended. Somehow in this cosmological closure the Jahriyya had become “the last men,” and their time a perpetual “now.”11 The dramatic force of this strong eschatology was merely intensified by the drama of political persecution. When the termination of the genealogy coincided with graphic violation of the last saint, many Jahriyya took this to be a telling sign: indeed, the final saint had departed, and the world he left behind would never rise again to a position deserving a new saint.12 The atrocity and abomination were perhaps not abnormal, but unequivocal signs portending the utter abjection of a saintless world. The Jahriyya needed to bear with such scandalous obscenity, following the teaching of the Qur’an, which preaches endurance. Yet something else also changed after 1960, in a way some found hard to fathom. This had to do with the sound of Jahriyya rituals—in particular, the recitation of Madā’ iḥ, a panegyric text devoted to the holy Prophet. Almost all of the Jahriyya murīdūn I spoke to shared a common view: that the chanting of Madā’ iḥ was considerably faster nowadays than it used to be, and one was not supposed to accelerate, as such a change of speed signaled lack of scruple. A slow pace was always preferred as both a manifestation of patience and an exhibition of devotion. Comments on the speed of the recitation were ubiquitous, though the criticism was often leveled at others and seldom at oneself. The prevalence of such comments also cut across generations: even those who had no experience of  the old recitations believed that contemporary recitations—the only kind they had known and been brought up in—were disturbingly quicker than they should be. “The guangyin has changed” (guangyin bianle), an ahong born in 1982 sighed when I asked. “The world is deprived of the murshid. No one is here to take control and slow things down. It’s a different world now. This is how it is.” Another older ahong approached the matter from the other direction: If you think about what happened after 1960, and look at where we are now, you will know that there simply cannot be more murshidūn after Ben Guangyin Taiye. You had the ten years of Cultural Revolution [1966–1976], and then the reform and opening-up [gaige kaifang]. Now everyone is chasing money, everything is about the economy. How can you have a murshid in such a society? Can

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a murshid ever exist and emerge unscathed in such an environment? That’s a sign from God. It’s a miracle for the Jahriyya. The line of murshid cannot extend beyond that point.

Even though, technically speaking, contemporary times are not so much without a murshid as temporarily suspended in an epoch governed by one single murshid, both ahongs took the current era as one of rapid transformation, spinning out of control and accelerating in the pursuit of economic self-interest. For the one, the end of sainthood was not only an absolute mandate but also a presage of future occurrences; for the other, the turbulent changes took their toll on the increased and still-increasing tempo of Madā’ iḥ recitation. In the tones of both, one sensed social criticism as well as a reluctant reconciliation; the lack of a living saint was at once lamented and acknowledged. While the change of tempo was denounced, somehow that change was also considered inevitable. It is clear that when a Jahriyya follower spoke about the pace of recitation, he was offering a comment on politics and social change. It is also true that many followers did not necessarily treat the tempo of recitation as a direct reflection of political vicissitudes, nor were they invariably disgruntled nostalgics who resented the panic and anxiety brought on by the hectic pace of a modern life. However, they did tend to establish certain connections between the apparent features of the reciting voice and their perceptions of the world around them. They might not interpret the increased pace in the same way, but few would speak of it only in terms of ritual norm. This chapter takes this perception of accelerated recitation seriously and describes the material social shifts that have indeed contributed to a genuine change of speed in the chanting of Madā’ iḥ. I am not intending here to seek a causal relationship that might explain the origin of this perception. For even if some extent of causality did exist, the quickening of pace could have happened without these changes; recordings from the early 1990s that some Jahriyya murīdūn shared with me as exemplars of the “correct” recitation at times exhibited an even faster speed than some contemporary chants—much to their chagrin, when I tactlessly tried to point this out. And the acceleration could also have not occurred despite all the social shifts I describe in this chapter; examples to this effect will be provided in the ethnography that follows. What I am interested in is how these critical social shifts combine with specific Jahriyya practices—practices whose ramifications are derived as much from the broader Sufi tradition as from the nature of liturgical ritual—and give rise to an enormous number of variations in the way a Jahriyya disciple recites. I describe differences not for their own sake but to show how the social and liturgical production of these differences entails a particular attitude I have come to

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call “fragile transcendence.” What is essential is determining not that there are differences but how these differences have been created; knowing the latter is the first step toward answering how we are to live with differences with neither malice nor apathy.

FROM MUKHAMMAS TO MADĀ’IḤ: INTO THE THICK OF THE SUFI VOICE

This third chapter, building on the first two, examines the recitation of Madā’ iḥ. Chapter 1 resituated the Jahriyya voice, particularly its Arabic pronunciation, in a wider history of linguistic interpenetration in the Persianate world, hence revealing the premodern transregional connections that gave rise to the Jahriyya liturgies and rituals, and chapter 2 described the entwinement of voice and sociality in contemporary Mukhammas chanting, thus bringing the study of the Jahriyya voice from history to the present. Chapter 3 approaches Madā’ iḥ recitation by drawing specific connections between its accelerated pace and those broader social shifts that most intimately and profoundly affect the Jahriyya society. The perception of acceleration in chanting was not limited to Madā’ iḥ alone, however, but tended to include all Jahriyya recitations. This is evident even when we turn to the pace of Mukhammas rituals. Normally a Mukhammas session is supposed to last anywhere between twenty to thirty minutes; the larger the congregation, the more the recitation tends to slow down. “When there is a large group,” an ahong once told me, “it is impossible to recite faster even when the leader wishes to. He is always reined in by the followers and forced to adapt.” In my experience, when the dayi’er comprised a smaller group—fewer than ten people, for instance—the vocal dynamic described in chapter 2 often shifted and entailed an increased tempo. The participants might fear that the syllables at the end of lines 2 and 4 in each stanza would indeed be dropped without anyone dutifully vocalizing them; their voices would then audibly stiffen and speed up to ensure that the poem was fully enacted. Rather than leave the syllables to others, they would rush to fill in the blank themselves; at such moments, ironically, the daore was often on the verge of its undoing. The followers’ rush triggered a conspicuous reaction from the leading reciter, who had to accelerate in turn. It is remarkably ironic that when everyone seemed exceptionally keen on taking the voices back into their own hands, thus aspiring to genuinely embody that idealized pious reciter who never missed a single syllable, the collective chanting began to unravel. It was precisely on the brink of

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complete disintegration when every murīd tried assiduously to emulate that model reciter and breathe life into his elusive shadow. However, the specter must remain a specter for the sounded sociality to take shape at all and for daore to sustain its integrity; an incarnated spectre is daore’s ultimate nightmare. It is also essential to note that daore cannot truly take off until the congregation is beyond a certain size, though most Jahriyya murīdūn weren’t able to offer me a specific number in this regard, nor was I able to accurately quantify this observation. Moreover, the requisite size of the congregation might also diminish dramatically without the sociality necessarily unraveling, if the remaining reciters were virtuosos of daore who could compensate for low numbers with high skills. While Mukhammas ritual continues to focus our attention on what takes place within the prayer hall, the recitation of Madā’ iḥ points us beyond it. It compels us to read from the increased tempo a wider range of changes that have altered the socioeconomic conditions underpinning the Sufi vocal practice. The Jahriyya Sufis do not reside in a void where their rituals remain intact and isolated from the shifts that have otherwise transformed the world around them. While the Mukhammas ritual, described in the previous chapter, offers a glimpse of how voices can create social relations simply by virtue of their structured performance, it provides us with little information regarding the larger social world that inscribes its recitation. The community it forges is largely an imagined one, and this imagined community, though surely a consequential reality of its own right, still lacks substance except when tethered to more concrete social assemblages such as kinship relations or migratory networks. It is true that the voices of Mukhammas are regulated by a cogent daore that functions as much in its breach as in its observance, and an ethnographic description of this musical cogency and the ensuing social solidarity should serve as a good introduction to the Jahriyya vocal tradition. Nonetheless, it can offer little more than an introduction; it may intrigue but cannot ultimately demonstrate how voice, sociality, and politics connect in a more substantive manner. Moving beyond the prayer hall, the voices of Madā’ iḥ land us more squarely in the tangible materialities of the Jahriyya world. It brings the sublime rituals in line and often in conflict with social and economic shifts and, by the same token, expands the horizon for a deepened ethnography of the Jahriyya voices. The difference between Mukhammas and Madā’ iḥ can be shown in yet another way, one derived more directly from the experience of fieldwork. Much of my knowledge about the Jahriyya Arabic pronunciation, examined in chapter 1, was acquired by following the Mukhammas ritual on a daily basis. I joined the prayers, and then the sacred dayi’er, with a pocket edition of the text. I listened attentively, inquired punctiliously (not to mention irritatingly),

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and drew up phonological charts as accurately as I could. I was able to make revisions and grapple with ambiguities because the ritual itself took place every night. I would not panic if I missed one session, since I knew the basic phonetic rules would repeat themselves whenever I rejoined the congregation. I had plenty of time and adequate latitude to make mistakes and correct errors; the very cyclical nature of the ritual enabled my careful dissection of its sounds. The opposite was true of the Madā’ iḥ ritual, for, despite the enthusiasm and the goodwill of my Jahriyya interlocutors, I attended considerably fewer Madā’ iḥ rituals throughout my fieldwork. I beseeched my Jahriyya friends to inform me when a Madā’ iḥ recitation was about to take place and often learned afterward to my great dismay that such recitation had already occurred. For the first few months of my fieldwork I thought that I was being deliberately alienated, or plainly ignored, that the warm welcome I received and the help I was promised were mere formalities. Frustration combined with stress and anxiety gave rise to what was perhaps the typical despair that is the lifelong companion of fieldwork. However, patience did eventually pay off. What initially appeared as either a disheartening rejection on their side or a dispiriting failure on mine turned out to be something quite different. The difference was brought home to me before a Madā’ iḥ ritual hosted by a middle-aged Jahriyya murīd whose son had died in a car crash ten years before. The poor man had never fully recovered from the devastating trauma. He spoke gently, often with a slightly discomfiting smile that might look awkward to some and had no doubt contributed to the common impression that he was still suffering from a mild mental breakdown. We often greeted each other on our way to the daily prayers, but seldom engaged in extended communication. On the day prior to the Madā’ iḥ recitation that he had scheduled to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of his son’s death, Sijiu sounded that he had his mind set on bringing me along. “I will let you know the time tomorrow morning so we can go together,” he said. I got up around six the next morning and waited anxiously for Sijiu’s phone call, knowing that such recitations often took place before nine. To observe the full preparation and set up the recording devices, one often had to arrive considerably earlier. When the clock struck eight, I still had not heard from Sijiu and began to panic. Recalling that doing fieldwork was as much about being excessively proactive as it was about being comfortably indolent, I rang Sijiu on his mobile phone. On hearing my inquiry Sijiu fell silent for two seconds, and then, audibly hesitating, he replied in a husky voice, “Maybe you should not come today.” After another brief pause he continued “The host lost his son ten years ago, so today is a family occasion. He does not know you that well, nor are you a relative. It might be inappropriate. What do you think?”

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Dejected, I resigned myself to accept the fact, but only a few minutes later, Sijiu called back in a different tone: “I spoke to the host and he thought it okay that you join us. So come along to my place, let us go together.” The discomfort that I felt in most Madā’ iḥ rituals I participated in—and that clearly was felt by others who found my presence mildly intrusive—never fully dissipated, except in the one family I knew most intimately. I later realized that this was precisely the point: while the Mukhammas recitation invariably took place in the public space of a prayer hall, forging social ties with its organized daore, Madā’ iḥ recitation represents a more intimate occasion limited only to a select group. While nearly all male Jahriyya murīdūn were allowed to participate in the Mukhammas ritual, only close family members and respected ahongs were invited to a Madā’ iḥ ritual. Stumbling into such a protected realm as an irrelevant (and irreverent) anthropologist with a camera and a portable voice recorder would understandably provoke discomfort. That my usher was Sijiu touched a tender nerve. All participants in such rituals received a nominal to relatively substantial monetary recompense, the amount ranging from ten to several hundred RMB, depending on the role one played in the recitation. A leading reciter might receive two hundred or more, whereas his followers in the dayi’er might receive half of this amount, or even less. It was not uncommon for a distant relative who did not participate in the recitation to receive no more than twenty RMB. In the case of the ritual I was allowed to join, Sijiu was one of the subordinate reciters in the dayi’er, while I was neither a distant relative nor a reciter in any capacity. It would have been rude and disrespectful to Sijiu if the family that invited him did not give me any nietie, as the money was conventionally termed (after the Arabic niyya, or “intention”), and leaving anyone out was the last thing the host family would want to do, for the final success of the Madā’iḥ recitation relied on the completion of this charitable act. The ritual was left suspended in midair and its prospect in inviting divine favor undermined if the host did not ensure that every person present at the ritual had a judicious share of nietie. This very fact might have contributed to Sijiu’s hesitation: by inviting an unrelated onlooker to the intimate occasion of Madā’iḥ, he was risking his own credibility and potentially jeopardizing his good name. I was there for no apparent reason other than my irksome research; however, the host family still had to prepare an additional portion of nietie for me. In order not to offend Sijiu they might have to reluctantly set my share at around fifty RMB—an unusually high amount for someone of my position—which turned out to be precisely the amount I eventually received. It was a delicate situation; Sijiu had every reason to hesitate. The obstacles that prevented me from acquiring the same level of literacy with Madā’ iḥ as I did with Mukhammas, therefore, had little to do with how much

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effort I made. The difficulty indicates that I was in the face of a completely different kind of ritual, whose articulation with other aspects of the Jahriyya world differed considerably from what Mukhammas was able to reveal. As will become clear in this chapter, this preliminary observation led to another important fact definitive to Jahriyya’s knowledge of Madā’ iḥ—namely, that practically no one, not a student or a senior ahong, had the confidence to claim that his knowledge about the ritual orthopraxy surrounding Madā’ iḥ was authoritative. This was more than a matter of humility. Not only was the Madā’ iḥ ritual frequently performed on familial occasions, but details of the ritual themselves might also reflect idiosyncratic familial traditions. A certain male ancestor might have been a close companion to a certain murshid whose private instruction had authorized him to change certain minor details in the layout of the dayi’er, or in what silent supplications to recite prior to the chanting of Madā’ iḥ. Such minor alterations were barely noticeable to those outside the family; from one generation to the next, these well-guarded intangible heritages gradually solidified into cherished familial customs that became the source of pride. Different companions might have received different sorts of instructions. No one was in a position to monopolize the knowledge of Madā’ iḥ except the murshid himself—and even he was unable to hold such a monopoly, since he was not the only saint in history. When a murshid claimed a large following and traveled so extensively that many of his murīdūn belonged to different groups that scarcely overlapped (see chapter 4), the extent of diversification became even greater. The fact that even a Jahriyya murīd would rarely be invited to a family Madā’ iḥ if he was neither a relative nor a reciter contributed to the perpetuation and proliferation of such variations. Although many Jahriyya disciples continued to insist on correct (zhengque) or pious (qiancheng) ritual practices, few could reach a consensus as to what those practices were or ought to be. What I observed among the Jahriyya in terms of Madā’ iḥ was similar to what struck Katherine Ewing when she initially began working on Sufism in Pakistan. “Whenever anyone made a statement about religious practice, and especially about pīrs [saints] and Sufism,” she observes, “there always seemed to be someone else around to disagree—even within the confines of a single family.”13 My predicament in fieldwork was thus less mine alone than an indication of a structural uncertainty and heterogeneity built into the Jahriyya ritual orthopraxy. I might not have been the only one who felt alienated; what appeared to be the idiosyncratic experience of a woefully incompetent anthropologist might have been a reflection, no doubt to a different degree, of what had long existed among many Jahriyya murīdūn. A certain sense of alienation—unevenly distributed depending on what family one came from and how close one was or one’s ancestors had been to past murshidūn—was almost intrinsic to Jahriyya discipleship. The boundaries of fieldwork were blurred

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only because the world in question was not a closed, stagnant community. Variations of the Sufi voice were abundant among the Jahriyya, and such diversity, whether intentional or incidental, articulated the esoteric and the exoteric, the sublime and the mundane. In the following sections I first lay out the textual and ritual networks that gave rise to Madā’ iḥ. This is both to situate the liturgical text in the wider Islamic world and to reveal the divergence of its Jahriyya use from Sufi traditions elsewhere. To return Madā’ iḥ to its ritual iteration, I then describe the intimate linkage between the private family and the saintly cosmology manifest in the role of the leading reciter; this link constitutes one of the major sources for the variation of Madā’ iḥ liturgical practice. One key difference has to do with the distinction between the public Madā’ iḥ in a daotang and a private Madā’ iḥ in a family setting—a distinction that says as much about their disparity as about their interdependence. In the remaining sections I examine the social changes that have worked in combination to precipitate the increased pace of recitation. Not all reciters were equally aware of such external pressure, which had nonetheless affected their ritual practices, and even fewer would be able to explain these changes in the often overly unequivocal terms proposed here. But almost all participants in such rituals were still able to remark even in passing on the perceived shifts, and whether or not they were aware of it, the quickening of pace managed to add one more twist—a crucial one, as we shall see—to the diversification of Madā’ iḥ recitation.

MAWLID AND THE “SHĪʿĪ INFLUENCE”

In Arabic madīḥ has the general meaning of “praise,” and its plural form is madā’iḥ (praises). In a classical Arabic qaṣīda poem, the last section of the ode is often called madīḥ, and the mamdūḥ, “the one who is praised,” can be either pre-Islamic governors and nobilities or sultans and emirs in the heyday of the Islamic caliphate. Post-Muhammad qaṣīda has been integrated into the Islamic tradition, and some of the best exemplars of qaṣīda—such as Al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīda al-Burda—are works of prominent Sufi masters, but in principle the mamdūḥ can be any worldly ruler or anyone considered venerable and worthy of such dedication in the eyes of the (at times obsequious) poet. The Islamic garb of qaṣīda could thus be shed as easily as it was first donned in the mid-seventh century. The Jahriyya madīḥ, however, leaves little doubt that the principal mamdūḥ is Prophet Muhammad. As we will see below, the Jahriyya madīḥ belongs to the conventional genre of mawlid texts celebrating the noble birth of the Prophet, texts often chanted

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during the annual commemoration of the Prophet’s birthday in the month of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, the third month of the Islamic calendar. Thus, to situate the Jahriyya madā’ iḥ, we first need to grasp the general contours of mawlid panegyric and its articulation with ritual performance. While the earliest courtly celebration of the Prophet’s birthday may be traced back to the Fāṭimid Caliphate (909–1171 CE), it did not become a popular practice, especially among ordinary Sunnī Muslims, until the twelfth or thirteenth century CE.14 However, one cannot conclude from the apparent discontinuity between the Fāṭimid courtly mawlid and the current mawlid widely observed across the Muslim world that the Sunnī mawlid has a completely separate origin from comparable Shīʿī practice. (The Fāṭimid Caliphate is an Ismaʿīlī Shīʿī caliphate; its capital is Cairo.) According to Marion Katz, the origin of the Sunnī mawlid may well lie in the popular Imāmī Shīʿī tradition that pre-dates the Fāṭimids.15 This postulation is based on the distinct commonality shared by later mawlid celebrations and certain key features of Shīʿī devotion. Unlike the Fāṭimid courtly commemoration of mawlid, which was largely an exclusive prerogative of royalties and nobilities, both Sunnī mawlid and the Imāmī tradition lay as much stress on domestic rituals and private acts of devotion as they do on public displays of piety. In both, too, there is a stronger sense of personal allegiance to the Prophet and members of his family (especially his daughter Fāṭima and his cousin/son-in-law ʿAlī), an allegiance that among the Sunnīs usually culminates in Sufism. In her study of Islamic panegyric poetry, Suzanne Stetkevych also observes that the emergence and consolidation of the medieval madīḥ nabawī (prophetic praise) “is undoubtedly part and parcel of the medieval cultural religious phenomenon of heightened personal devotion to and celebration of the Prophet, especially as intercessor on Judgment Day.”16 This “heightened personal devotion,” while directed primarily toward the Prophet, certainly owed greatly to an extensive Shīʿī influence on medieval Islam. Mawlid texts normally exhibit this personal allegiance through elaborate and often exquisite descriptions of the birth and early life of the Prophet, highlighting miraculous details (such as the light of Muhammad; see below) that tend to generate ever more intricate and at times tortuous theosophical developments in Sufi works. It has been argued that this stress on narrative may also have had its origin in Shīʿīsm, a historiographical conjecture backed up by ethnographic evidence.17 Before moving into a detailed exposition of the Jahriyya madīḥ text, however, we should first clarify the nature of this personal allegiance, especially the specific way it is considered “personal.” This clarification encompasses devotion to the Prophet in a broader paradigm of personal allegiance that also includes the devotion of a Sufi aspirant to his master saint, and as such it can help us

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understand how much the Jahriyya formulation of sainthood contributes to the many liturgical variations underlying the notion of “fragile transcendence.” A Jahriyya cleric once remarked that a Sufi needs a guide as much as a Muslim needs a messenger or a child needs a parent. According to him, a Sufi, and by extension all humans keenly seeking truth and salvation, is first born biologically from a mother who is to nurture and teach him to the best of her abilities, yet prior to his complete submission to a Sufi guide, he is considered a savage, a child of no genuine parentage, a headless chicken roaming the world with no clear sense of his place or his purpose in this world and the next. He needs to be “reborn”— shengyang (given birth and nurtured)—at the hands of his Sufi shaykh, whose mission is to transform him from a child into a true murīd (aspirant), breathing soul into the dry husk of a body in his possession. The second birth completes the first, which by itself is existentially inadequate. The way one Jahriyya ahong framed it made it sound almost like an insult to say someone has no guide: “He has no father to instruct him” (mei die jiao)—an affront in Chinese that implies at once an illegitimate birth and a lack of proper family upbringing. Both allusions, needless to say, are heavily androcentric. There are different ways to demonstrate the level of devotion a murīd is supposed to show his beloved murshid. A common analogy one frequently comes across in Sufi writings compares the aspirant to a corpse lying motionless and thus abandoning himself in absolute surrender to the able hands of his guide. The extent of this submission could appear baffling, if not irritating, even bordering on idolatry in the eyes of non-Sufi Muslims with a modern mindset, or traditional Muslims following the path of the classical ʿulamā’ (scholars). In his work on the Naqshbandiyya in India, Arthur Buehler relates a story about Abū al-Ḥasan alKharqānī (d. 1033 CE) to explain the Sufi adage “Service [to the shayhk] is preferable to [the] worship [of God]” (al-khidma afḍal min al-ʿ ibāda): When some travellers asked Abū’l-Hasan al-Kharqānī . . . to pray for their safety, he advised them to set out on their journey in the name of God and call out Abū’l-Ḥasan’s name if they ran into trouble. When highway robbers attacked the caravan, those who called on the shaykh were saved and those who called on God were robbed and killed. Abū’l-Ḥasan explained later that those who called God directly petitioned someone they did not know and so received no aid. Those appealing to Abū’l-Ḥasan used the name of a person who knew God and who could then intercede and assist them.18

While I have heard no comparable prioritizing of personal allegiance to the murshid over the worship of God among the Jahriyya, a similar episode is recorded

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in Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī: when Ma Mingxin, the first saint of Jahriyya, took leave from his shaykh, the latter allegedly told his disciple from al-Ṣīn (China), “When misfortune and distress strike, remember me and call upon me” (idha abda’at al-fitnu wa anzala-l-balā’ fa-dhkur wa-daʿunī).19 We are subsequently told that afterward Ma Mingxin invoked the name of his murshid on three separate occasions: once when a Salar practiced his bewitching magic with a saddle;20 once when the rain turned torrential and Ma Minxin’s home—a cave hand-carved into a loess mountain—was threatened by flooding; and once when the martyrs sacrificed themselves in 1780s Lanzhou in their failed attempt to rescue Ma Mingxin from the gallows.21 Personal allegiance among Sufis far transcends the invocation of the shaykh’s name in times of tribulation. Al-Ghazzālī once described it thus: The disciple [murīd] must of necessity have recourse to a director [shaikh, or in Persian pīr] to guide him aright. For the way of the Faith is obscure, but the Devil’s ways are many and patent, and he who has no shaikh to guide him will be led by the Devil into his ways. Wherefore the disciple must cling to his shaikh as a blind man on the edge of a river clings to his leader, confiding himself to him entirely, opposing him in no matter whatsoever, and binding himself to follow him absolutely. Let him know that the advantage he gains from the error of his shaikh, if he should err, is greater than the advantage he gains from his own rightness, if he should be right.22

In chapter 2, we learned how Jahriyya attributes a special privilege to listening as opposed to reciting: responsibilities for the mishaps in recitation are to be borne by the reciters, while the listeners receive the blessings in full, regardless of the errors or whether they understand the meanings of the recited text. No doubt the vast majority of Jahriyya reciters are not Sufi murshidūn; thus this privileging of listening is not necessarily an indicator of the listener’s devotion to the reciter. If anything, the stress seems to be more on the immense burden a reciter has to reckon with than on the dedication a listener is supposed to feel toward his murshid. Al-Ghazzālī considered following the errors of the shaykh preferable to following one’s own rightness, but he did not go so far as to claim that following the shaykh’s error is nobler and hence incurs more benefits than following his rather than one’s own rightness. In other words, what would the act of pledging allegiance be if it supersedes and supplants he to whom one pledges allegiance? Whatever the answer to that question, the Jahriyya murīdūn and most Sufi and Shīʿī worshippers seem yet to have substituted the act of veneration for the

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venerated himself. We will have opportunities to return to this point in chapter 4, but at this point it is worth noting that both the textual affinity between madīḥ and mawlid and the strong manifestation of personal allegiance to the murshid would likely lead a casual observer to suppose that the Jahriyya (and possibly Islam in China in general) have been heavily influenced by Shīʿīsm. Insofar as basic facts are concerned, there can be no objection to this supposition. Though correct, however, it is so broad and ill defined as to be almost useless. For if the mawlid tradition itself bears strong resemblance to the Shīʿī narrative tradition, and if in Central and South Asia there has been for centuries a general pro-Alid and pro-Ahl al-Bayt (People of the Prophet’s Family, especially ʿAlī, Fāṭima, Ḥusayn, and Ḥasan) sentiment that cuts across Sunnīs and Shīʿīs—to the point where a popular Sufi saint’s sectarian affiliation often remains uncertain—then should one really be surprised to find hints of Shīʿīsm here and there among China’s Muslims, for whom mawlid and madīḥ are widely celebrated?23 The very question “Is there Shīʿīsm in Chinese Islam?” is not only misguided but misleading, for it applies a rigid and suspiciously modern Sunnī-centric point of view to how Islam has been practiced in Asia for centuries.24 This is not to deny that one can likely uncover specific historical linkages and ritual commonalities between Sino-Muslims and Shīʿī groups in Asia and Iran. But one should hesitate to cry a Shīʿī presence, rather than a diffuse Shīʿī influence, wherever a hint of the commemoration of ʿĀshūrā’ or the mourning of Ḥusayn is spotted among Muslims in China.25 With regard to the Jahriyya this cautionary remark needs special emphasis, for here the tragedy of Ḥusayn and Ḥasan is treated as a trope for the sufferings of the Jahriyya saints themselves, and martyrdom constitutes a quintessentially pious act that at times defines the very identity of a Jahriyya murīd (see chapter  4).26 While I have not observed among the Jahriyya any institutionalized commemoration of ʿĀshūrā’, stories of women martyrs—including the lionhearted Salīma, the female Salar warrior who gave her life to rescue Ma Mingxin—call to mind the Karbala narratives about Zaynab, sister of Ḥusayn, who rushed to battle in the face of grave danger, only to be summoned back to her “womanly” duties by her soon-to-be-martyred brother; or Haniyeh, wife of Vahb, who did not allow herself to be so restrained and repeatedly defied the men’s orders until she eventually received the honor of martyrdom.27 In Jahriyya’s insistence on having no more than eight murshidūn, do we also detect a remote resemblance to Twelver Shīʿīsm? Perhaps precisely because of these at times uncanny resemblances, we need to beware of resorting to any potentially simplifying sectarian terms in our treatment of Jahriyya. Mindful of such pitfalls, let us now turn to the text of the Jahriyya madīḥ.

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MADĀ’IḤ AS A MAWLID TEXT

A cursory description of the basic structure of Madā’ iḥ might note that it is composed of sixteen sections, fifteen of which correspond to the fifteen saints of Jahriyya: the first seven to the seven saints outside China (see chapter 1), and the rest to the eight saints within China. Out of these sixteen sections are extracted four compact segments to be used for recitation: Kaizan (beginning of the praise), Zhongzan/Jiuzan (the middle praise/the nine praises), Dazan (the grand praise), and Wanzan (the end of the praise). In offering this description, however, we are both anticipating ourselves and providing a misleadingly simple account. The first thing to note about Madā’ iḥ is its biographical/hagiographical nature. Unlike most classical sources on the life of Muhammad, it follows only a rudimentary chronological order that is frequently thwarted by its clear design for liturgical use. There is no recounting whatsoever of the foundational moment when the Qur’anic revelation first descends on Muhammad through the mediation of the archangel Gabriel, who is loving and abusive in equal measure. In fact, the whole episode of Muhammad’s prophetic mission is largely missing from the text. Rather, stress is laid on his early life, especially on his cosmic preexistence as a divine light that passes through a prolonged pedigree of prophets before receiving its final incarnation in the flesh and blood of an Arab man in seventh-century Arabia. The text begins, interestingly, with a narrative about the mother of the Holy Prophet, Āmina, who “felt no pain, nor weight, in her pregnancy” (lam tajid liḥamlihi ‘alaman wa lā thiqalan). With no advance warning or further elaboration on her condition, the text immediately moves on to narrate the Prophet’s birth: She gave birth to him—God bless him and give him peace—who was born circumcised, his eyes adorned with kohl. He shone with marvellous dignity and awe. Our prophet Muhammad was born—God bless him and give him peace— with a face finer than which the world had never laid eyes on. No one outshines him; nay, his light is of such brilliance that it outshines the sun! His front teeth surpass pearls; indeed they are far more superior and grander!28

The birth was monumental: his name was chanted and his remembrance celebrated for days on end by all creatures of the world. Dark nights were lit in awe of his nobility, and idols tumbled in fear on hearing the news of his birth. Those seated on high thrones lowered their place in humility and submission, and the magnificent palace of Khosrow, the mighty king of Persia, trembled in

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terror.29 No literary excess is spared in lavishing praise on the Prophet, yet what at first appears to be rather conventional prophetic panegyric displays a few exceptional characteristics. Classical sources on the life of the Prophet often begin with a lengthy account of his genealogy, which is traced back to Adam.30 This tradition is adopted in more popular mawlid texts, though not all of them go so far back. In the famous mawlid of al-Barzanjī (d. 1746 CE), used widely as a liturgical text by Muslims in South and Southeast Asia,31 Muhammad’s lineage is traced through his father ʿAbdullāh, grandfather ʿAbdul Muṭṭālib, to Hāshim, ʿAbdu Manāf, Quṣayy, Kilāb, and Murra, and eventually to ʿAdnān, descendant of Ismaʿīl (Ishmael).32 Another detail distinguishing the Jahriyya Madā’ iḥ from the Barzanjī mawlid is that the latter provides a full, though short, account of the revelatory event and ends with the success of the Prophet’s Hijra (migration) to Medina in 622 (and hence contains no account of his military campaigns and his conquest of Mecca; the Prophet in al-Barzanji, therefore, does not appear as a heroic and miraculous military leader of a new faith-based community); no such feat is recounted in Madā’ iḥ. Mawlid al-Barzanjī follows a lucid chronological order, and although its narrative is not devoid of impressive literary flair, it is not essentially a poetic text. By contrast, the text of Madā’ iḥ shows a clear alternation between prose and poetry. While the full extent of this distinction surfaces in recitation, it is also a hallmark of the Madā’ iḥ text. All but the last of the fifteen sections into which Madā’ iḥ is conventionally divided are composed of three parts: a prosaic narrative on an episode of the Prophet’s early life (called rawei, from Arabic rawī, “it is so transmitted that . . .”); a verse that either offers a loose commentary on this narrative or waxes lyrical in its praise of the Prophet (called beiti, from Arabic bayt, meaning a line of verse, here used as a generic denotation of poetry); and, finally, a short poetic refrain that constitutes a reply to beiti (called zhewabu, from Arabic jawāb, “reply”). Typographically, rawei, beiti, and zhewabu are sharply distinguished: the last is often printed in red ink, while the line breaks and diacritical marks in beiti indicate its poetic nature. In other words, while both Mawlid al-Barzanjī and the Jahriyya Madā’ iḥ are panegyric texts used for popular recitation, both textually and typographically the latter seems to have been composed and copied specifically with its ritual use in mind. It is not a text first authored or compiled separately and only secondarily adapted for recitation; rather, it was a liturgical text from the outset, its use in ritual recitation being its raison d’être. I used the word “compiled” purposefully, because Madā’ iḥ appears more like a loose collection of popular vignettes of the Prophet’s life than a finely crafted literary composition in its own right. The scene of Āmina giving birth to Muhammad is twice repeated with similar language; likewise, the fire of the

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Zoroastrians is twice extinguished and Khosrow’s grand palace twice shocked to its core. If we compare the Jahriyya Madā’ iḥ to another extremely famous mawlid text, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Bakrī’s fabulous al-Anwār, which was likely composed/assembled prior to the tenth century CE and is probably the most influential source in the development of the mawlid genre, it is clear that Madā’ iḥ focuses almost exclusively on the events that took place immediately before and after the Prophet’s birth.33 The narrative first has Muhammad himself proclaim, I was a shaft of light in front of God two thousand years before He created Adam. This beam of light offered its praise to God, through which all angels proffered their own eulogies. When God created Adam, He cast this light into the clay that made him. Then He let me descend into the world via Adam’s spinal cord. I was then carried in Noah’s Ark, lodged again in his spine. He next sent me to Ibrahīm’s spine when he was cast in fire. He continued to move me from one chaste spine to the next, and from one pure, perfect womb to the next—until God eventually revealed me from amongst my parents who never committed fornication.34

Yet only a few pages later we find another, more elaborate account of the same set of events that are described in both Madā’iḥ and al-Anwār in analogous terms: It is said that when God the All-Mighty, the Most Exalted, wished to bring out the best of his creation, Muhammand—God give him blessing and peace—He ordered Gabriel—peace be upon him—to seize a handful of clay from the place of his [future] tomb. So Gabriel did, and rose with this clay to the highest heavens. He dipped it in the celestial spring Tasnīm, then presented it to God. From the clay dripped down a sweat which God used to create the light of all the prophets; indeed, He created them all from the Light of Muhammad. Then the clay was deposited in Adam’s spine; the glorious Light which preceded the clay had thus been cast in Adam’s spine [along with the clay]. Angels ceased from their flights; huddling close they proffered their prostration to Adam.35

We have no accounts of the adventures of Hāshim, especially his voyage to Medina to marry Salmā, or the famous siege of Mecca, where ʿAbdul Muṭṭālib miraculously tamed a furious elephant, and millions of birds that materialized out of thin air launched their overwhelming assault on the Yemeni King Abraha’s army; in al-Anwār both episodes receive extensive attention. That is, even in terms of offering an account of the Prophet’s early life as the basis for poetic eulogy,

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Madā’ iḥ appears to display rather a narrow focus. We are parachuted into the moment of the Prophet’s birth with no foreknowledge whatsoever of his noble ancestors’ greatest feats. Madā’ iḥ does include conventional narratives on the visits of houris and past women luminaries who attended Āmina as she gave birth to Muhammad, and ʿAbdul Muṭṭālib’s indescribable joy after the Prophet’s birth and his consequent prayers of gratitude at Kaʿba; or Muhammad’s suckling at the breasts of the wet nurse Ḥalīma (with her feeble ass magically gaining strength after she had decided to take Muhammad in, and her dry breasts suddenly swollen with overflowing milk), and even a brief account of the opening of Muhammad’s chest by two mysterious visitors who cleansed him of evil, and all of them are well documented in classical sources as well as in mawlid texts. But none of these accounts add anything new or literarily innovative to the wider mawlid archive. They read as if they were plucked from multiple sources of varying credibility—al-Anwār, despite its immense popularity and broad circulation, was by no means a credible source for mainstream ʿulamā’— and assembled only at a later date to be used specifically for liturgy.36 Near the end of the Madā’ iḥ narrative, before it launches into a long supplication that takes up a third of the text (which again shows the text’s deliberate design for liturgy), is recounted another story that we find neither in al-Anwār nor in most classical biographies of Muhammad. The story is about the conversion of a Jewish couple in Cairo via a dream where they saw the Prophet; they were struck by the dream after observing their Muslim neighbor’s exuberant banquets in celebration of the Prophet’s mawlid. Marion Katz traces this story back to as early as the fourteenth century CE, to a mawlid text by Ibn Jābir al-Andalusī (d. 1377–78 CE) that bears the stock title Kitāb Mawlid Rasūl Allāh (Book of the Mawlid of the Messenger of God); however, she clarifies that this story largely owes its post–fourteenth century popularity to its inclusion in another mawlid text known as Sharaf al-Anām (The exalted of the humankind).37 We have scant information with regard to how or when this story was included in Madā’ iḥ, and I have not come across or heard mentioned a manuscript of Sharaf in my fieldwork. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the Jahriyya Madā’ iḥ draws inspiration and narrative exemplars from a much wider range of texts than simply the classical sources, and its compiler seems to have had no qualms whatsoever about including materials from other mawlid texts not entirely reputable in the eyes of mainstream religious scholars. Although the Jahriyya treat their Madā’ iḥ as they do most classical Islamic texts—as a sacred book that contains both mystical wisdom and superb scholarship (some Jahriyya clerics commented on the beautiful imageries and lush vocabularies of the text)—it is also clear that Madā’ iḥ resembles a highly popular text used by ordinary Sufi Muslims in ritual recitation, rather

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than a finely researched scholarly text narrating the biography of the Prophet. The lengthy supplication that fills a third of the text affirms this observation. If Madā’ iḥ is a mawlid text compiled specifically with recitation as its main (and perhaps its sole) purpose, then we ought to examine precisely how it is used in recitation. The rest of this chapter will be dedicated precisely to this task, but before that we need to clarify how the ritual performance of Madā’ iḥ in fact renders it less of a conventional mawlid text, which seems to have been our conclusion so far. For while many mawlid celebrations often fall on the birthday of the commemorated mamdūḥ, Madā’ iḥ recitation among the Jahriyya usually occurs on death anniversaries. Carl Ernst once observed that “the celebration of saints’ death anniversaries seems to be peculiar to the Islamic East, since in Mediterranean countries celebrations commonly occur on the birthday (mawlid) of the saint.”38 But the usual name of this death celebration is ʿurs, “marriage,” as opposed to mawlid or mawlūd (which also means “birthday”), since the death of a saint is considered his eternal marriage to the divine and thus worthy of celebration. No such name is employed by the Jahriyya to designate their Madā’ iḥ recitation, which is invariably referred to as ermaili (Arab. ʿamal; see below), and the death anniversary of any deceased, saint or no saint, is frequently referred to as jiri, a Chinese term that literally means “death anniversary” and is commonly used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike (though some Muslims shun its use precisely for this reason). In other words, while we may include the Jahriyya in the “Islamic East” along with South and Central Asia because of this shared ritual practice that sets them apart from the “Islamic West,” the Jahriyya Sufis seemed to have conferred on ʿurs a different name and never quite treated it as a marriage of any sort. Notwithstanding such nominal differences, however, the Jahriyya Madā’ iḥ seems to furnish us with another piece of evidence that affirms Jahriyya’s roots in a broader network that links Sino-Sufism to Islam in South and Central Asia.

FROM TEXT TO RITUAL

Just like the Mukhammas recitation, the Madā’ iḥ ritual is organized around the sacred dayi’er. The first essential distinction to be drawn is between two types of Madā’ iḥ dayi’er—namely, daotang dayi’er and family dayi’er.39 Although they share the same text, the spatial arrangements of these two dayi’ers differ dramatically. Before explaining these differences and their implications, we will first note some general features of the Madā’ iḥ ritual.

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At the time of my fieldwork, not all Jahriyya ahongs were deemed equally equipped to lead a Madā’iḥ ritual; that status stemmed less from an objective evaluation of pertinent skills than from the personal preferences of certain selfproclaimed pious followers. An ahong with a note of certification, given either orally or in writing by a past murshid or one of his contemporary descendants, was considered particularly competent. Though in principle all Jahriyya ahongs who had acquired official ordination were authorized to lead a Madā’ iḥ recitation, for some older Jahriyya murīdūn the ritual of public endorsement could hardly rival a more personal link to the saints, for three reasons. First, a personal link was often thought to involve emotional intimacy, affective attachment, and spatial proximity. A disciple favored by a murshid normally attended to the latter’s daily needs and served as his loyal retainer. He cultivated a closer relationship with the saint and often became a licensed narrator of his legends, later to be recorded in writing after the master’s demise. As such, he played the dual role of servant and companion, thus replicating the same mode of relationship as that between Muhammad and his companions in the early days of Islam. An important advantage of this physical and spiritual intimacy was that the servant/companion might receive confidential instructions from the saint to the exclusion of other followers; he might be spoken to, or even with, regarding undisclosed intricacies of ritual practice that were not included in conventional Sufi training.40 He was of course not allowed to divulge such secrets to a third party—the connection between him and his murshid was essentially personal. This meant that curious outsiders not privy to such mystical teachings often considered him a vast repository of esoteric instructions, whether or not this accorded with his actual level of knowledge. While the content of such instructions remained hidden, this did not prevent the admirers from adoring the personality who was known to possess such untold truths. If anything, deliberate concealment only increased the extent of fascination. But possession of secret knowledge is not the only factor that contributes to the companions’ high status. I have known cases where an ordinary Jahriyya with zero clerical training was nonetheless accorded the honor to lead a Madā’ iḥ recitation. This has to do with another perceived consequence of subservient companionship to a murshid. Even more venerated than the knowledge consciously formulated and verbally transmitted by the saint was the unspoken daily conduct of the revered master, which could only be observed and emulated up close. Piety was derived not only from heeding verbal instructions but also from subconsciously absorbing the diffuse devoutness thought to permeate the life of the saint in its entirety. A saint might follow a more elaborate procedure in performing the obligatory ablution, or light a particular number of incense sticks before

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his prayer. He might have a special sitting posture, or might recite the Qur’an with a distinct cadence. A child born to and raised in such a family was ranked higher in their faith than an ordinary child, even if the latter possessed more religious knowledge. Despite the criticism that this constituted an un-Islamic privileging of bloodline, the point was less biological progeniture than family upbringing, to the extent that a certain notion of sympathetic magic could be said to exist among some Jahriyya murīdūn.41 The idea is that the aura of the saint was so contagious that those physically proximate to him might receive a fair share of it; they were therefore naturally more qualified to lead a Madā’ iḥ ritual. The third factor that makes these close associates more desirable as ritual leaders has to do with a general understanding of the specific role to be played by the leading reciter in a ritual. Such a reciter often shoulders twin duties: while he needs to be more knowledgeable about the recitation and more experienced in comporting himself and directing others, he also has to recognize that his role surpasses that of a mentor and a director combined. By tacitly agreeing to accept the highest amount of nietie, he is made to bear the massive burden of intercession. The larger the family, the number of participants, and the amount of the monetary tribute, the heavier the burden becomes. While there have long been controversies surrounding the Islamic legal legitimacy of accepting money for—or just after (this change of preposition encodes a minefield of disputation that is still raging at the time of this ethnography)—Qur’anic recitation or Sufi ritual, the issue is in fact far less black-and-white than “selling” Islam for petty economic gain, as some modern Muslim reformers are inclined to believe. Sijiu once recalled a Madā’ iḥ ritual that his father participated in. In the middle of the recitation, likely only for a few seconds, the leading ahong inadvertently glanced out the window and was briefly entertained by the funny outfits of two passersby. This moment, though fleeting, was nonetheless quietly noted by Sijiu’s father. When the ritual ended, he lost no time in calling out the ahong. “What were you looking at?” His voice thundered with indignation and contempt. “Do you not see passersby every day in the streets? What was so special about them? The family invited you, gave you money, and now how did you repay them? By looking through the window at some random people? Are you worth the money, or can you bear what that money is for? They put their hope in you. Now tell me—can you save them, or even yourself?” As such, nietie has become less a payment for service than a token that bespeaks the conferral of obligation. The ahong who receives the nietie has to bear the unbearable and attempt the impossible; he has to fulfill the promise of redemption by offering himself up as the intercessor—an endeavor with no guarantee of success. It was thus not surprising to find some (though very few) ahongs

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reluctant to lead a Madā’ iḥ ritual, for they considered themselves utterly incapable of keeping such a daunting promise. Somehow, by accepting the money and the responsibility that came with it, one had already committed the sin of conceit. What distinguished the close associates in this respect was the fact that their intimacy with the murshidūn effectively redistributed such massive weight along the whole genealogy of sainthood. It was held that, even if they might not have been as knowledgeable as other ahongs, in the end—when everyone was to be judged in front of God and all ahongs had to account for their previous acts of intercession— the saints would speak up and intervene on behalf of their own companions. And these saints, who passed on the daotong among themselves, would also come to one another’s rescue. It was less a hierarchical ranking of spiritual power than a sense of shared responsibility that lent the close companions their credence. The devout families put their hope in these associates and servants of the past saints, and the latter in turn dispersed it across the entire pedigree of sainthood, to the point where they became less leaders of Madā’iḥ recitations than cosmic portals linking individual families to the entire pantheon of deceased murshidūn. From the private sphere of the family to the longue durée of Sufi cosmology, the preference for the saints’ companions bespoke the nature of the Madā’ iḥ ritual as necessarily straddling the intimate and the far-flung. However, the sharing of responsibility is not the only bond that ties the leading reciter to the revered saints. Just before each Madā’ iḥ ritual there is a brief repose, during which the leader will quietly recite an incantation. The content of the incantation again constitutes a well-guarded secret and forms a vital component to the training of senior ahongs. However, the incantation itself does not have to be drawn from complex literary compositions or esoteric religious texts; more often than not it consists largely of combinations of familiar formulas used in daily prayers and praises. What makes it special is not so much its substantive content as the specific ways of combination: whether, for instance, ‘astaghfirullāh al-ʿadhīm, “I seek the forgiveness of God the All-Mighty,” should be repeated three times, or ten times, or thirty-three times, and with what other formulas it should be combined. Each saint might add his own touch to this incantation, and the rules of combination might also change numerous times during the guangyin of one single saint who claims to be continuously inspired. Such changes are not necessarily known to all. This uneven distribution of knowledge, compounded by the fact that the incantation is silent, has contributed to further diversification of the Madā’ iḥ ritual orthopraxy. For those who possess a large repertoire of such incantations, the brief silence before the ritual is also a time for rigorous assessment. A senior Jahriyya ahong in his early eighties, known for his discipleship with two saints, once destroyed a renowned reciter

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who enjoyed high regard in the local community. Commenting on the latter’s performance in a particular daotang Madā’ iḥ he stated bluntly, “He wasn’t able to memorize the incantations. He had two options: he could have gone for the long or the short version, the first passed down from Shagou Taiye [the seventh saint], and the second from Ben Guangyin Taiye [the eighth and last saint]. Yet he used neither. He mumbled in pretention just to hide his incompetence. I kept count of the time,” he added, smiling mischievously. “It was too short for the long version, and too long for the short one.” Although I have in this chapter called the Madā’ iḥ ritual by its literal term, this was not its common name among the Jahriyya. Normally all major rituals, including the cyclical completion of Mukhammas every thirty-three days, were subsumed under the umbrella term ermaili (ʿamal in Arabic, meaning, e.g., “action,” “deed,” “labor,” “work”). And the actual performance of the ritual was described with a characteristic verb: guo, “to pass.” While the daily recitation— rather than the cyclical completion—of Mukhammas was often called nian Mukhammas (to read Mukhammas), a Madā’ iḥ ritual, regardless of its size and location, was always an ermaili that the participants guo, or gen, “to follow,” for those who were present but not reciting. Guo ermaili was a ubiquitous term in all the Jahriyya communities I have visited, for the simple reason that there were a large number of ermailis that needed to be guo-ed on a regular basis, both in the family and in the local daotang. The death of a family member, for instance, often entailed a long list of ermailis at regular intervals: first on the fifth day after the death (wu ri), and then on the seventh day (the first seven days, tou qi), then the fourteenth (the second seven days, er qi), the twenty-first (the third seven days, san qi), the twenty-eighth (the fourth seven days, si qi), the thirtieth (head of the month, yue tou), the thirty-fifth (the fifth seven days, wu qi), and the fortieth (sishi ri). What followed thereafter were the monthly commemorations, which for some families could last up to two to three years. While the expenses for each ritual decreased progressively, since fewer participants would be invited as the death gradually faded in time, the frequency and regularity of such ermailis could still cause problems in family finances. An ermaili’s cost, the bulk of which came from the nietie and the communal meal, ranged anywhere between several thousand and hundreds of thousands of RMB. While chickens were often slaughtered for the meal, more prosperous families keen on feeding a larger group would bring in an ox, which could increase the cost considerably.42 By and large, there were no rules regarding which particular excerpt from Madā’ iḥ should be recited for what kind of ermaili. However, this was also where the daotang Madā’ iḥ ritual began to diverge from the family Madā’ iḥ ritual. As I mentioned earlier, the text of Madā’ iḥ was divided into sixteen sections, and out of these sixteen were extracted four excerpts that were more frequently used

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for ermaili: Kaizan (beginning of the praise), Zhongzan/Jiuzan (middle praise/ nine praises), Dazan (grand praise), and Wanzan (end of the praise). These names clearly indicated their relative position in the textual corpus, and Dazan was the climactic praise. Dazan’s spot at the apex was obvious in its ritual performance: while most ermailis were performed with the reciters seated in a dayi’er, the chanting of Dazan required a standing posture.43 Both the pitch and the volume of the Dazan recitation distinguished it from other recitations, which in part explained its exceptional popularity among ordinary Jahriyya families, especially for joyous occasions (such as weddings). Many families did pick one of these four sections, or, rather, adopted the passages suggested by the leading ahong. For the latter it was surely more convenient to choose from better-known parts. This did not always hold true, however, for the leading ahong’s suggestion was based as much on his estimation of the host family’s piety as on his preference for convenience. The irony was that a genuinely devout family would normally not wait for the ahong’s suggestion but instead took the matter into their own hands. Rather than falling prey to the aesthetic attraction of Dazan, or surrendering to convenience, they often followed a specific principle in deciding which part of Madā’ iḥ they wanted recited. This principle was brought home to me when I joined my first family Madā’ iḥ recitation, hosted in Wujiu’s house to memorialize his deceased father (fig. 3.2). The date of the ritual, January 2, was not the exact anniversary of his father’s death. The consideration that prompted their decision to alter the date also determined which passage from Madā’ iḥ was be recited: on January 3, the following day, the grand annual daotang ermaili dedicated to Ben Guangyin Taiye would take place. Pitching one’s family ermaili in temporal proximity to the daotang ermaili was at once a demonstration of devotion and loyalty, and an attempt to maximize the efficacy of one’s own ritual by tapping into the auspices of the collective recitation. For many families who subscribed to such a practice, the actual date of a family ermaili never quite fell on the same day as the real anniversary; it was always somewhere between the authentic date and the date of the closest collective ritual devoted to a certain murshid. The final decision was usually the outcome of careful reflection and measured compromise. The choosing of the passage to be recited followed the same course of deliberation. For the ermaili I participated in, Wujiu specifically informed the leading ahong that the section of Madā’ iḥ to be recited on that particular day was the one devoted to Ben Guangyin Taiye, the same section to be chanted the next day in the serene hall of Hong Le Fu daotang. This is one way the relationship of discipleship is concretely embodied in Jahriyya ritual practice. Both the timing and the choice of text for a daotang ermaili are reproduced in the family ritual, albeit for a purpose at once related to the collective ritual and different from what the latter is set to achieve. The family

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F i gu r e   3 . 2 Getting ready for the ermaili at Wujiu’s. Photo by author.

ermaili reiterates the ritual performance of the daotang ermaili, linking the memorial of a deceased family member to that of a revered murshid so as to tap into its efficacy: in addition to commemorating the pertinent saint whose passage is to be recited, and the Prophet Muhammad, for whom the Madā’ iḥ poetry was initially composed, the family ermaili has a third dimension—namely, a

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supplication to invite divine favor for the deceased relative. Like a reported speech that transposes what was said into a new speech event, the family ritual reproduces the daotang ermaili but rides it to a slightly different end. And the success of this diversion relies essentially on the fact that the family ritual itself is largely an indexical citation of the collective ermaili. The temporal proximity of the reporting to the reported speech is meant to secure the felicity of this citation. What is transposed is as much the formal efficacy of the collective ritual as its substantive content. To follow a saint, therefore, is to align one’s time and ritual practice to a conceived original and to use multiple pointers to frame one’s own family ritual as an iteration of this original. The reverse, perhaps, is no less true: the presumed originality of daotang ermaili is itself entailed by the repetitive citations and reiterations it receives in the innumerable family ermailis. Every Madā’ iḥ recitation in a family setting is characterized by the trinity of its mamdūḥ—Prophet Muhammad, the commemorated saint, and one’s own ancestor—and the family recitation is literally a re-citation. It is considerably easier to decide which excerpt from Madā’ iḥ should be chanted in a daotang ermaili. One way to do this is probably clear by now: that the passages to be recited are those dedicated to the saint memorialized on a particular occasion. However, this general rule could hardly explain many other occasions I observed—for instance, when the commemorated figure was not a saint. He could be either a kanmen ren (guardian) or the local deputy of a previous saint (reyisi, from Arabic ra’īs, “chairperson”), in which case there would be no Madā’ iḥ passage that corresponded to his stature. Even in those cases where the ermaili was indeed devoted to a saint, the segment recited was not always the one that correlated with him in the book. Variations and exceptions were not rare, though such deviations seldom undermined the grip of the general rule on people’s minds. Furthermore, these variations followed another principle that in itself precipitated even more diversification. This new principle must be seen in tandem with the broader socioeconomic shifts that have affected most Jahriyya communities since the 1980s. The end of the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent economic revival enabled many a Jahriyya murīd to muster the requisite financial resources necessary to rebuild the mosques and daotangs that had been demolished or left in ruin during previous years. This wave of reconstruction was considered by many to be a cyclical replication of what had repeatedly taken place in the history of Jahriyya. Hong Le Fu, for instance, was completely destroyed in 1870 by the Qing court; restoration had to wait until 1911, when Shagou Taiye, the seventh saint, was able to redeem the fate of Jahriyya under the rule of the new nationalist government. This round of revival was terminated and reversed again in the late 1950s, when much of Hong Le Fu was confiscated by the Communist government and converted into

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administrative offices and foul pigsties, if not razed to the ground. Rebuilding did not start well until 1986; the new compound was finished in 1988, only to undergo a further renovation in the 1990s. This history was not specific to Hong Le Fu daotang alone; most Jahriyya mosques and daotangs sustained the same level of damage as hundreds of thousands of mosques, monasteries, and temples from 1958 to 1978. Repair and reconstruction of religious buildings became a popular enterprise in the new era starting from the late 1970s, but they were not necessarily at the same pace. The completion of a mosque or a daotang was often marked by the performance of a Madā’ iḥ ermaili, which at once celebrated the triumph of faith over suppression and initiated the new building into the Jahriyya world. This initiation normally revolved around the recitation of the opening section of Madā’iḥ. Everything was supposed to be a new start, and all subsequent rituals, no matter to whom they were devoted, ought to follow the natural order of the book.44 Rather than each excerpt being harnessed to a particular saint, the content of each recitation was regulated by the particular temporality of the mosque or daotang in question. In contrast to the temporal simultaneity rigorously practiced in the daily Mukhammas recitation—the same five pages were recited among all Jahriyya groups, regardless of their geographical location—the Madā’ iḥ ermaili seemed to exhibit a remarkable temporal multiplicity. Each mosque had its own schedule, and no two daotangs shared the same calendar. The rebirth of Jahriyya Sufism in the age of relative political freedom and economic prosperity materialized through innumerable smaller beginnings that did not share the same time frame or the same order of recitation. While clearly contradicting the conventional correlation between the recited text and the memorialized saint, this multiplication of temporality was recognized by all the Jahriyya murīdūn I interviewed. None of them seemed bothered by the apparent incongruity between these two different, even opposing, practices. Whether such coincidentia oppositorum was new or had long been the norm among the Jahriyya, I cannot decide, for the rebuilding of demolished mosques and daotangs, as I mentioned earlier, had been an integral part of the modern Jahriyya collective memory.

THE T WO DAYI’ERS OF MADĀ’IḤ

The most salient difference between a daotang ermaili and a family ermaili lies less in the decision taken about the recited text than in the stark contrast regarding the organization of dayi’er, the sacred ritual circle discussed in chapter 2. As

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a matter of fact, even the daotang dayi’er can be divided into two different spatial arrangements (fig. 3.3). While the total number of participants in a daotang dayi’er can reach up to fifty or so, normally only half of these participants are actively engaged in the recitation. The main difference between the two spatial layouts of daotang dayi’er has to do with how the last twenty-two Qur’anic chapters, those often recited before the official commencement of the ermaili, are distributed among the reciters. This Qur’anic prologue is referred to as liao jing, “to complete the classic,” indicating that this reading is in fact a continuation and completion of a preceding ritual. A Madā’ iḥ ermaili cannot begin with liao jing unless someone else, often a highly regarded ahong in the local Jahriyya community, has previously read through the entire Qur’an but skipped, as it were, the last twenty-two chapters. Formal permission has to be acquired from this ahong so the reciters can finish the chapters he has left suspended. An ahong can brag about the number of “readings” he has in store, and devout families keen on performing liao jing in their own family ermaili have to pay nietie to procure one such reading from him. Thus, the last twenty-two chapters of the Qur’an

F i gu r e  3 .3 The two arrangements of a daotang dayi’er, hand-illustrated by a Jahriyya ahong. Photo by author.

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constitute an almost independent body of text in circulation among the Jahriyya. If we look at the recitation of the whole Qur’an as a continuous process— relayed from one reciter to another or several others, for example—then the recitation, whether individual or collective, can be considered an uninterrupted flow punctured only by brief intervals of silence (i.e., when the ahong awaits invitations to pass on his reading). This concatenation of voice and silence, which incidentally displays a similar dynamic to what we observed in the passing on of tabār segments among students (see chapter 2), forms a massive chain that can connect people across vast geographical distances, for it is perfectly acceptable for a Jahriyya murīd to ring someone thousands of miles away to procure one such “reading.” The first way to distribute the twenty-two chapters in a daotang dayi’er is easy to grasp. The reciter in position 1 in figure 3.4 begins with Surat al-Ḍuḥā (The Morning Hours), and the next reciter continues with Surat al-Sharḥ (The Relief). Moving clockwise, each reciter chants one complete chapter, with the leading ahong almost always ending up with the thirteenth of the twenty-two chapters, Surat al-Fīl (The Elephant). Surat al-Ikhlās (The Sincerity) is recited once by three different reciters, so, as a result, the remaining nine chapters after Surat al-Fīl are covered by eleven reciters, and the last reciter, the twelfth (represented by a

F i gu r e   3 . 4 The first layout of a daotang dayi’er. Large ermailis in a daotang normally have two segments of Madā’ iḥ recited; hence, such roles as the leader of beiti and the reader of rawei are doubled. Their positions are symmetrically distributed around the axis of the leading ahong. Made by author.

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forward slash between 22 and 1 in figure 3.4), is left with nothing to carry on with. This very void gives the last reciter a highly revered status, for his obligation is to close the full circle by reciting the opening chapter of the Qur’an, Surat al-Fātiḥa, and the first five verses of Surat al-Baqara. It is he who completes in the public prayer hall what has started elsewhere in a private setting, and in his voice lies the apotheosis of a prolonged personal recitation. This venerable role endows him with another great responsibility: he is to quietly and solemnly read an exquisite supplication to finally conclude the ritual of liao jing. His voice is audible only to himself. The supplication can last up to ten minutes, to the point where impatience begins to be noticeable in the crowd. However, it isn’t uncommon for tens of thousands of people to remain disciplined and stay almost completely silent during a five-minute supplication, their attention transfixed by the barely audible voice of a single individual, both their bodies and their minds suspended in exceptional tension anticipating resolution. The gripping force of the long supplication, although silent, was indeed breathtaking. The second way to distribute the twenty-two chapters in a daotang dayi’er differs only in its treatment of three chapters. Surat al-Ikhlās is still recited three times, but by one reciter as opposed to three. And the two chapters that succeed it—the last two chapters of the Qur’an, Surat al-Falaq (The Daybreak) and Surat an-Nās (The Mankind)—are also combined for recitation by one person. The outcome of these alterations is that, instead of covered by eleven participants, the nine chapters are now read by eight, leaving the ninth reciter to conclude the cycle of liao jing (fig.  3.5). In other words, while the core dayi’er consists of twenty-five reciters in the first arrangement, here the number dwindles to twenty-two. This second arrangement was admittedly rare among the Jahriyya. It was often attributed to Hong Le Fu alone, in fact, and was deemed an idiosyncratic custom of the Jahriyya community surrounding it. Legend has it that this special layout was first established by Huanye, a Jahriyya luminary known for his impressive perseverance through the long years of political upheaval in the second half of the twentieth century. A native of Hong Le Fu, he was heir to a rich ritual tradition, though few who survived him were able to explain the tradition’s exact origin. No one knew whether it was the legacy of a particular murshid, or derived from a combination of legacies from multiple saints; in other words, no one knew whether its legitimacy was bolstered by one line of transmission or supported by numerous lines. The compelling power of this tradition was reinforced by another factor: it was commonly believed that, if not for the lasting and unfaltering effort of the ordinary Jahriyya followers living in the Hong Le Fu area, the daotang itself would not have survived the repeated destructions throughout history. “It is the people of the Hong Le Fu area who built

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F i gu r e  3 .5 The second layout of a daotang dayi’er, practiced only at Hong Le Fu. The distribution of the roles of rawei reader and beiti/zhewabu leader is more flexible, though they continue to pivot around the central axis posed by the leading ahong. Made by author.

and rebuilt the daotang for the murshidūn, not the other way around,” a senior ahong once remarked to me. As such, Huanye was a local embodiment of this admirable resilience; the stature he had acquired was thus a token of respect extended to the community of which he was an illustrious member. The second arrangement of daotang dayi’er, therefore, was a homage paid less to the murshidūn than to the murīdūn, for without the latter, even the physical space needed to shelter the dayi’er would not have existed in the first place. Compared to the daotang dayi’er, the layout of the family dayi’er is considerably more flexible. For starters, the direction the leading ahong faces in the two types of dayi’er differs dramatically. While in a daotang dayi’er his face is turned invariably toward Kaʿba, and he is therefore seated with his back turned to the followers not in the dayi’er, in a family ermaili the very opposite occurs. From the perspective of those murīdūn merely following (gen) the ritual as opposed to joining it as active reciters, the layout of a family dayi’er cannot be more different from that of a daotang dayi’er: in the latter setting they rarely see the face of the leading reciter, but in the former his facial expressions and bodily movements

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are completely exposed to their idolizing gaze, which occasionally turns discomfitingly inquisitive. Contrary to the commonplace that all reciters in the dayi’er ought to sit upright in a tight-knit circle, between the two adjacent reciters who begin and finish liao jing—that is, he who recites Surat al-Ḍuḥā, and he who performs the long supplication in silence—a modest space is often left. These two men are required to sit slightly obliquely; both of them face the leading ahong sideways, leaving an empty space directly in front of him (see figs. 3.4 and 3.5). This somewhat odd aperture is left unoccupied because it is supposed to be the very position assumed by the saint commemorated in the ermaili. No one but him is allowed to take that spot; anyone who violates this rule is in danger of sacrilege. This renders the position of the leading ahong understandable and explains in what spatial sense he is the leader of the entire ritual. By turning his back to the followers and fixing his eyes on that crevice, which somehow tears through the otherwise tightly knit dayi’er, he becomes the spiritual fulcrum that transmits the power the ritual generates to the saint presumed to be present in that apparently empty throne. The virtual line that connects the leading ahong to the open spot across the table, arching through space over a whiff of scented smoke, is the very conduit through which the ritual’s efficacy is channeled. It is thus not surprising that the spot where the ritual energy condenses has to be vacated, reserved exclusively for a disembodied specter. The dayi’er operates almost like an electric circuit, and the rush of energy that courses through it powers the invisible yet pulsing apparition of the Jahriyya murshid. This very dynamic is absent in the family dayi’er. The spot supposed to belong to the saint is occupied by the leading ahong instead, and no care is taken to reserve space between any two reciters in the dayi’er. What further distinguishes the two dayi’ers is the manner of distributing Madā’ iḥ excerpts among the reciters. As mentioned earlier, each of the sixteen sections of Madā’ iḥ is tripartite, composed of a rawei (prosaic narrative on the early life of Prophet Muhammad), a beiti (versified praise of the Prophet), and a zhewabu (reply to beiti). While rawei is often read by an individual reciter, both beiti and zhewabu are the work of a chorus, albeit facilitated by seasoned reciters appointed on-site by the leading ahong. Whereas in a daotang ermaili the distribution of rawei, beiti, and zhewabu are often predetermined, the assignation of these same pieces in a family ermaili is considerably more flexible. What matters is not so much a regulated division of texts as the consistent and measured application of a core principle of propriety: the leading ahong should always show his gratitude to the host family by reciprocating the deference he has rightfully received. This involves a variety of practices expressing the virtue of rang. To rang means to act self-effacingly, to descend from the esteemed place one is given and

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humbly recommend others in one’s stead. In a family dayi’er, rang can take numerous forms: an ahong can gently signal to a member of the family who is in the dayi’er to initiate the ritual, or, as is more often the case, he may invite the latter to read the long supplication that concludes liao jing. He can as well devolve the responsibility of reading rawei or leading beiti to someone related to the family. As most reciters in the dayi’er are either ahongs or their students and companions—in which case choosing someone from among this group would have been a lot easier and more convenient—the respect shown by going the extra mile to practice rang is often quite evident. This also means that families that host such ermailis must include among themselves members who can read the Madā’ iḥ or have received some preliminary training in Jahriyya recitation. A family with no such relatives runs the grave risk of embarrassing themselves, for, sans such a safety net, even if the leading ahong practices rang, there would simply be no one in the family he can rely on. A family thus incapable of providing its own reciters when one is needed will be deemed unworthy of respect in the first place. The practice of rang might then quickly mutate into a demeaning humiliation: a polite and deferential ahong can gracefully put you in irredeemable shame precisely by showing off his deference where such is obviously not due. A family of no pious reciters is a pathetic laughingstock, and men of such families will have to live with thinly disguised contempt and ridicule that put their masculinity in serious jeopardy.

MADĀ’IḤ IN TIME 1: THE GRAIN OF CONSUMPTION

One of the most confusing things about the Madā’ iḥ ritual, especially its family version, is the numerous names it receives in different contexts. While ermaili is certainly a widely accepted term, chi youxiang and guo nietie are two alternative designations, and both are more commonly used in daily parlance. In contrast to the apparent neutrality of guo ermaili, chi youxiang and guo nietie carry strong allusions to acts of consumption. To unpack these allusions and link them specifically to the tempo of recitation, we must move beyond the internal liturgical intricacies of Madā’ iḥ recitation. So far this chapter has laid out the major coordinates of the Madā’ iḥ ermaili and fleshed out the sketches with thick descriptions. The remaining sections will weave the Madā’ iḥ ermaili back into a complex network of social and economic shifts since the 1980s that have inscribed and no doubt transcended the Jahriyya liturgy. The voices we hear in an ermaili are necessarily multimodal in that they point at once inward toward the

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musical and liturgical elements that compose the Jahriyya ritual cosmos, and outward to wider social transformations that encompass the religious realm. To come to grips with this dual nature of Jahriyya liturgy, we need to return to a somewhat symptomatic irony obvious in the names given to the Madā’ iḥ ermaili. All ermailis, whether in a daotang or a private home, involve communal dining. However, since the dawn of the modern period the association of consumption with ritual performance has come under frequent attack, particularly from modern reformist Muslims. This association is by no means specific to the Jahriyya, its prevalence proved as much by the vehemence of its critics as by the intransigence of its apologists. A proverb from the early twentieth century continued to be used by many to characterize one—and for some the—key difference between modern reformist Islam and more “traditional” practices: newer forms of Islam were supposed to follow the dictum “If you recite the Qur’an, do not dine; if you dine, do not recite the Qur’an” (nianjing bu chifan, chifan bu nianjing). The attack targeted primarily ahongs, who were often treated to exorbitant meals after the recitation. But though it began as a fresh reformulation of Islamic orthopraxy with a revolutionary zeal, this criticism quickly stagnated into selfrighteous complacency. Even in the early twentieth century, when the reproach still possessed much momentum, some Muslim intellectuals were already expressing reservations: “The families slaughter lambs and invite the ahongs for recitation. . . . If the new sect [xinpai] prefers not to strain the families they should refuse to eat, and retire [immediately after the ritual]. However, they should not blame others for doing otherwise.”45 It was thus not surprising that at the dawn of the “new sect” some families might have felt deeply offended and confused when their deferential hospitality was refused by the reform-minded ahongs. They might have felt more disturbed than they would have been had the ahongs enjoyed the meal they had so carefully and devoutly prepared, sometimes days in advance. By rejecting what they deemed a commercial transaction that “sold off” the Qur’an in exchange for petty income or mouth-watering food, the xinpai severed a vital relationship that bound the clerics to those they served; their newly conceived orthopraxy was achieved at the cost of community. In their advocacy for austerity in religious activities, the reformist Muslims in the early twentieth century were joined by the modern Chinese state. Combining entrenched bias against popular religion inherited from imperial times and modern notions of religion modeled largely on Christianity, the new republic, founded in 1911, ran successive campaigns to exterminate what it considered wasteful ritual practices both in institutional religions and on more popular occasions such as weddings and funerals.46 The ambivalence of these campaigns has been noted by some contemporary scholars:

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Beyond the physical destruction and forcible banning of festivals, the state managed to disrupt local religion by bankrupting it. . . . Taxing superstition—such as levying a tax on all temple festivals and traditional-style burials, as well as on the sale of incense and spirit money—was an idea that had always been in the political discussion since the late nineteenth century. The tax was sometimes encouraged and sometimes opposed by the central government, was applied very differently from one locale to the next, and in some cases worked as a strong incentive against large festivals. An ambivalent strategy, it both aimed at reducing the “waste” of ritual consumption and created a source of income that the local authority did not want to see totally disappear. For that reason, such taxes were eventually banned by the central government during the 1930s, but continued to be levied by many provincial or local authorities.47

Taxing was merely one of the measures taken by the central and local authorities. Another well-known strategy of the state was to confiscate the properties of religious institutions and subject them to other uses, most commonly as schools. The large-scale and conceivably controversial movement of miaochan xingxue (temple properties for schools), extensively examined by Rebecca Nedostup, showed clearly that the modern state reform of religion was as much about the restructuring of local economy as it was about the consolidation of new ethics and moral values.48 As such, the conversion of temples to schools in republican China was comparable to what happened to Islam in some traditional Muslim societies, where the “privatization” of Islamic law and its displacement by a modern civil code in the public sphere were predicated on a broader socioeconomic shift that completely refashioned the classical system of religious endowment known as waqf.49 Except in years of exceptional political turmoil, properties belonging to Jahriyya mosques and daotangs remained mostly secure from governmental confiscation. However, the frequency of ermaili, as I mentioned earlier, did exert substantial financial pressure on less well-off families. One of the numerous indictments leveled at Ma Zhenwu, the last Jahriyya saint who passed away in 1960, was that he had amassed a large amount of wealth by officiating rituals and, wittingly or unwittingly, had thereby strained the domestic economy of many a Jahriyya family. There was some truth to this charge, though exaggeration and fabrication were the hallmark of newspaper reports of this period.50 This was all the more ironic since Jahriyya had often prided itself on being essentially a Sufi order made for the abject and the impoverished—a claim that had led a populist novelist to describe it as a “religion of the paupers” (qiongren de zongjiao).51 Much of this association of Jahriyya with a vaguely defined destitute

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peasantry was derived from stories that portrayed the founding saint, Ma Mingxin, as a maverick murshid repudiating the extortionate expenses of Sufi rituals. He allegedly said that a few dates—some said three—would suffice for the meal that concluded a ritual, and that an impecunious family should not be debarred from hosting an ermaili merely out of poverty. This saying, believed by most Jahriyya murīdūn to be authentic, also sounded ambiguous: on the one hand, it was akin to the reformist idea in the early twentieth century that denounced the extraordinary costs incurred by the performance of a religious ritual. On the other hand, Ma Mingxin did not completely eschew the idea of a meal that sealed and completed the ermaili. He did not say, or was not thought to have said, that the consumption component should be abolished once and for all. On the contrary, as if backed into a corner he had to acknowledge that the meal was still essential for the conclusion of the ritual, and even if one had little to spare, omitting it would undermine the ritual’s efficacy, if not annul it outright. This paradox is clearest when we turn to the names given to the family Madā’iḥ ermaili. One such name, guo nietie, was the commonest of all three. The dual meaning of guo, “to pass,” was particularly apt in subtly giving away the ambivalence: one could “pass” an ermaili in the sense of spending time performing and following the ritual, or one could “pass” the nietie in the sense of money changing hands. While all the Jahriyya murīdūn I interviewed were aware of the reformist criticism and would soon be on the defensive if anyone alluded to it, few seemed bothered by the use of this ambiguous name for ermaili. Compared to guo nietie, chi youxiang, another name of the family ermaili, was more disconcerting. More will be said about youxiang in chapter 5; here we need only note that youxiang is a deep-fried dough that is the Sino-Muslim equivalent to challah and is eaten after every ermaili. As such, chi youxiang, “to eat the youxiang,” was unnervingly straightforward in its evident reduction of the ermaili to an act of consumption. The apparent vulgarity was reinforced by the imagery invoked: while guo nietie only alluded to money changing hands, chi youxiang made no effort to hide the brazen association of ermaili with guzzling food. An obvious yet barely noted contrast might have intensified the repulsion often felt toward this term. Both recitation and eating use the mouth; the oral orifice is both where voices emanate from and where edibles enter the human body. Yet both the direction and the anticipated effects of the two acts cannot be more different. Whereas recitation is a projection of the voice outside the body, eating is often associated with avaricious acts of consumption that swallow things—including the voices to be projected out—into the body. Chi youxiang was often used sarcastically to satirize ahongs who rushed from one family to the next to fill their bloated stomachs with ever more food. Such ahongs might occasionally be referred

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to as youxiang ahongs. Some youxiang ahongs were particularly good at calibrating how much of what food they could consume after each ritual, and in what order, so as to leave adequate space in their stomachs for the ermailis to follow. I have never been able to crack their secrets, thus missing my chance to pursue perhaps the only genuinely useful transferable skill fieldwork offered me. One thing that gradually crystallized as my work deepened was that the criticism directed at youxiang ahongs, and the frequent remark that there were now more such ahongs than there used to be, had to be taken with a grain of salt, for such criticism, with its moralizing tone, often entirely disregarded the vital socioeconomic conditions that underpinned the Madā’ iḥ ermaili. It was obvious that many more ahongs were now being whisked from one ermaili to the next and that the time reserved for each ritual had perceptibly diminished. A comparison of two renditions of Dazan, one recorded in the 1990s and the other in 2015, shows that the speed had increased from thirty-seven beats per minute to about sixty-four beats per minute—or, in other words, had nearly doubled in a matter of twenty years. With the increased pace, consumption had no doubt become all the more conspicuous, for if the recitation had to speed up, so would the eating. Given that quicker recitation alone triggered unease among the host families, the sight of an ahong shoving food down his throat so he could move on to the next feast would no doubt be irredeemably revolting. Consumption thus became the venue where conflicts derived from wider social shifts were condensed and expressed—at times with extraordinary vehemence.

MADĀ’IḤ IN TIME 2: THE SPACE OF RITUAL, THE PACE OF VOICE

In 2011, when I first visited Hong Le Fu to do research, the village that embraced it was a sprawling habitat with single-story brick houses and dirt paths that became muddy traps in rainy weather. It was equidistant from the closest city and the township seat; the trip to either destination took thirty to forty minutes. Two bus routes served both directions, though the intervals were often unbearably long. I once waited for forty minutes and had to call it a day because the bus that eventually arrived was dog eat dog. Many chose to share a taxi with fellow travelers, and few cab drivers would agree to taking only one passenger. It was a tacit agreement: the passenger took it for granted that the driver would stop midway to a waving customer, and generally a driver took in as many people as could possibly fit into the stifling space of a claustrophobic Volkswagen. The village was by

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no means remote, if “remote” describes geographical distances from urban centers (the trip to Yinchuan, the capital city of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, took only an hour), or its accessibility via public transport. Much had changed in the village by the time I returned for follow-up fieldwork in late 2014. For one thing, the national campaign that had been officially dubbed “the construction of the new socialist countryside” (shehuizhuyi xinnongcun jianshe) had by then almost completely transformed the landscape around Hong Le Fu.52 A new residential compound, complete with flower beds and outdoor fitness equipment, had replaced a scattering of single-story houses. Sevenstory apartment buildings dominated the skyline, with two-story town houses stretching out to encircle the gated compound. Those who purchased these properties were not granted full property rights; rather, they all had to accept, often reluctantly, something called “collective property rights” ( jiti chanquan), which made the village the sole legal owner of the properties built on its soil. While this partial ownership was supposed to bring down the price, from the moment this was proposed everyone knew that it was more of a hoax than a genuine discount. A town house cost around four hundred thousand RMB, an astronomical figure for many an ordinary family around Hong Le Fu. Some of them had since sunk into long-term debt and had exhausted all sources of loans only to avoid being displaced. The few lucky ones who managed to cobble together a down payment for the more expensive town houses received a small courtyard in front of their properties, little more than a tract of land hedged in by curbstones (fig. 3.6). This modest luxury was denied those who had to shanglou, as the usual saying goes—in other words, to move up into an apartment building. More changes were to follow the alteration of residential structure. The arable land that each family was reassigned once they had shanglou-ed was not what they used to possess, for the latter had since been converted to build more apartment blocks. A large farming garden was then fenced off for this purpose; trees that used to stand in its soil were felled to make space for profitable crops (fig. 3.7). Each family was given a small tract, the income from it barely adequate even for minimal survival, thus forcing many to migrate to the closest city and take up menial construction work simply to make ends meet. The expropriation had not been complete, the consequence being that the meager amount still in the possession of migrant workers’ families served as a sham safety net of minimal sustenance that created the conditions for low wages and deferred payment, the common destiny of many a migrant laborer in the city. Another change was that, while previously handy agricultural implements were conveniently stored in the courtyard and well looked after, the architectural design of an apartment building and the interior renovation many families chose to pay for—as they did

F i gu r e  3 .6 Small courtyard in front of a town house. Some families used the land for flowers and vegetables. Photo by author.

F i gu r e   3 .7 The farming garden in the village that surrounded Hong Le Fu. Photo by author.

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look forward to a complete upgrade from their old dwelling—had rendered this completely unfeasible. Keen on both keeping their new homes clean and saving space for state-of-the-art appliances such as a flat-screen television, they had to find alternative spots outside the building for their tools. One solution, accommodated by the real estate developer contracted by the village, was to build rows of storage cells at the margin of the compound, each sold separately with a corresponding apartment. The supply was predictably outnumbered by the demand, and as a result, many families that continued to engage in agricultural work had to think up expedient arrangements. Some colonized the landing between the staircases that connected two flights; others borrowed the storage rooms owned by their relatives or close neighbors; still others completely shifted their main source of income and sublet their meager possession to those whose land was adjacent to theirs. The land parcels rented out were at times so small that some families did not ask for payment—they were simply grateful that someone had agreed to take care of what they had (reluctantly) left behind in their enforced pursuit of a new life. It was the change within the new family home that had affected the performance of ermaili most profoundly. In former years, many Jahriyya families who had lived in a single-story housing complex with a fenced courtyard often had a separate room dedicated exclusively to fulfilling religious duties. Such rooms at times stood on a slightly raised foundation that indicated their special status. Elaborately carpeted and lavishly scented, they served as the carefully guarded spaces for daily prayers and ermaili performances. The walls were often decorated with exquisite Arabic calligraphy, mostly Qur’anic verses or commonly used praises written by notable Jahriyya disciples and ahongs. Images were not prohibited in such sanctified spaces, either. Photos of past saints and their descendants, or cheap reproductions of such, were frequently seen in these spaces, making them not only a place of worship but also a private gallery; families who put on such mini-exhibitions prided themselves on these cherished possessions and displayed them front and center, so that curious visitors who came for an ermaili could not miss them. These rooms of piety largely disappeared when apartment buildings replaced single-story housing complexes. Previously a family of moderate means had enjoyed a considerable amount of autonomy in building and maintaining a separate room for ermaili, and the move into an apartment was an involuntary renunciation of such autonomy. They could hardly add a new room: the new building had made each room into a standard size that barely allowed for significant structural alteration. And they could not set a room aside for ermaili unless they decided to sacrifice a bedroom, which was generally not a viable option, since most new apartments had no more than three

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bedrooms for a family that used to occupy four to five houses in a fenced complex with a central courtyard. This led almost invariably to the disappearance of the ermaili room and the unpalatable decision that Madā’ iḥ recitation would have to take place in a makeshift dayi’er, often set in the new living room. Some families, to be sure, did manage to keep a separate room for ermaili. I lived in one such apartment during my fieldwork, and for seven months at Hong Le Fu I slept on a thinly carpeted plank bed made for the sacred dayi’er. The bed was built to fit neatly with three walls of the room, with one side kindly left open for me to exit and begin my day of frustration. It was widely held among the Jahriyya murīdūn that a family needed an enormous bed—even larger than the California King size, according to my observation—to comfortably accommodate all the reciters, and the lack of a big enough bed was often deemed to signal an improper upbringing and a want of devotion (fig. 3.8). The discomfort from kneeling on a hard-tiled floor in the cramped space of a living room might have contributed to the increased pace of Madā’ iḥ recitation. Even though most ahongs had undoubtedly grown used to such long kneeling from years of practice—the recitation could last anywhere between thirty minutes and an hour—for a man in his sixties the change of environment would still have caused a great deal of distress. The cost of such getting-used-to often included an increased pace, just so they could relax and release the tension sooner. But this minor discomfort is not the only factor we need to consider to explain the acceleration of recitation. The rise of apartment buildings also caused a higher population density in the area, with the inevitable consequence that a local mosque or daotang now had to serve a great deal more people than it used to. People who

F i gu r e   3 .8 Two proper beds for dayi’er. Photo by author.

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were previously scattered over a large area and used to seek service from a number of mosques and daotangs, basing their decisions around the principle of geographical proximity and convenience, now had to invest their hope in one single mosque/daotang. This naturally put more pressure on the ahongs, who now had to serve a larger constituency (in terms of numbers, not geographical range) than they used to. Remarks such as “The constituency [ fang] is much larger now” and “An ahong is much busier than he used to be” were frequent complaints I heard from the clerics I interviewed. Contrary to the intuition that higher population density would also entail a correlated contraction in the territorial size of the constituency, what actually took place was largely the opposite. The reapportioning of land precipitated by real estate development, along with the local government’s attempt to attract industrial investment, had also caused the newly shanglou-ed population and those still outside its ambit to scatter ever more widely in the area around Hong Le Fu. These same changes forced some villagers to settle in ever more marginal locations. Left without a nearby mosque or a daotang, they often had to affiliate themselves with a mosque/daotang far down the main street that linked them to other villages. In other words, the reapportioning of land and the building of apartment compounds had given rise to two contradictory results. On the one hand, they had entailed an unprecedented concentration of population in a smaller area, forcing ahongs to serve a more populous constituency with the same amount of resources; on the other hand, such concentration coincided with an opposing trend of dispersion. While more families now needed to be served in a densely populated area, the ahongs also had to travel longer distances and spend more time on the road to lead ermailis in families that lived far from one another. In an almost complicit manner, these two developments in conjunction made the sacred labor of intercession even more backbreaking and demanding than it already was for the strangled ahongs. Some ahongs owned motorcycles; others saved up to purchase a small van. Prosperous families sometimes sent their own cars to pick up the ahongs, while the less well-off could only place their trust in the self-discipline of the ahongs themselves. On more than one occasion a leading ahong, with his subsidiary assistants, arrived twenty to thirty minutes later than the designated time. Such delays were admittedly rare and exceptionally scandalous, yet the reason behind them was the common condition in which everyone lived. Of all the factors that further exacerbated the spatial change discussed above, one stood out as pertaining specifically to daotangs that functioned as regional centers such as Hong Le Fu. Although the term nietie, meaning “intention” in Arabic, indicated its supposedly voluntary nature, the survival of most Jahriyya

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mosques in fact relied heavily on a steady inflow of nietie on a monthly basis. The contradiction was evident. The contribution of nietie was de jure voluntary; whether and how much one gave was entirely up to oneself, so to enforce nietie would be morally outrageous and ethically appalling. However, many rural mosques in less prosperous places would have long ago shut their doors if they had relied on the erratic goodwill of their constituencies. It was not altogether uncommon for the total amount of nietie a rural mosque received over the course of an entire month to fall below one thousand RMB. This was barely sufficient even for running a low-maintenance mosque. The prayer hall had to be heated, often by burning coal and channeling the steam into the radiators; the hall had to be illuminated for evening and dawn prayers, so electricity bills had to be paid on a regular basis; the resident ahong had to be paid a modest salary, since this was likely his only full-time job, and his entire family had to scrape a living from this tiny stipend. All of these costs, among other necessary expenses such as the provision of water for ritual ablution, combined to make the several hundred RMB of nietie look pitifully inadequate. Most ahongs were visibly embarrassed when speaking about this contradiction: they thought they should not complain about money, since their job was to serve God, but when the water supply was cut off and lights in the prayer hall fell dark, even the bearded old man upstairs had to pay the utility bills. The upshot of these intractable realities was that, despite the putatively voluntary nature of nietie, families living in the constituency of a rural Jahriyya mosque were often obliged to make regular monthly donations. The amount varied from one place to the next and was based in part on the financial situation of the family in question. For many families, this was more of a nominal show of  loyalty and solidarity than any substantial help. However, there was also a distinct difference between paying a small amount and not paying at all. I know of cases where families who had consistently refused or neglected to make such contributions were denied ermaili services by their ahong. His refusal might be indirect, or brazenly blunt. The infuriated ahong could base his decision explicitly on the claim that, since the family involved had not financially supported the mosque, they did not in fact belong to the constituency he was obligated to serve. An initially noncompulsory donation thus became a mandatory tax imposed through public humiliation and private peer pressure. When a mosque needed renovation or a complete overhaul—both were common in the past three decades and are becoming even more common now—the additional cost would only further exacerbate the conflict. What distinguished important daotangs such as Hong Le Fu from ordinary mosques was their relative financial independence from the rural communities

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they served. Able to attract donations from farther afield, and receiving regular financial installments from leaders of the order who diverted the nietie they received to the daotang, Hong Le Fu had its own endowments (waqf ) managed by the leading ahong and his assistants. Those who came from afar to visit the revered saints entombed at Hong Le Fu were understandably more generous in their donations. On one occasion I witnessed a pilgrim from Xinjiang drop a brand-new stack of neatly bound one-hundred-RMB bills into the donation box. That single piece of nietie could have been ten thousand yuan. Such large donations were admittedly rare, though some well-off families did make regular tributes ranging from several thousand to hundreds of thousands of RMB on an annual basis. The larger financial transactions were made internally, by passing the cash—always cash—directly to the leading ahong. The more renowned the daotang, the more diverse its sources of income, the more financially independent it became in relation to the local community it served. One consequence of this financial disparity between a central daotang and an ordinary mosque was that families with strained budgets often tried to avoid paying the taxes due to their local mosques by shifting their allegiances to a daotang that might be far away in a different village. The combined costs of sending for ahongs in a distant daotang and the higher nietie due to these more revered ahongs were still considerably lower than the regular taxes requested by the local mosque. Few Jahriyya constituencies possessed clear boundaries, and even people who lived geographically close to the local mosque might choose to shift their allegiances to a faraway daotang. Changes to the local economy had significantly altered the livelihood of many a Jahriyya household; consequently, more families than ever before had begun to resent the taxes imposed by their local mosques. The absolute numbers of such families might still be low; few Jahriyya murīdūn would openly voice their grievances, and to transfer one’s allegiance based on financial concerns was still socially disapproved of. Many continued to support their local mosques and donate to projects of renovation and reconstruction. Such shifts in allegiance had long been noted, however, at least in the Hong Le Fu area. Numerous times in the past three decades Ma Liesun—son of the last murshid, Ma Zhenwu, and the first guardian (kanmen ren) after the seal of sainthood— tried to redraw the boundaries among the several Jahriyya communities in the larger Hong Le Fu area. The hope was that the income of the nearby mosques would not be drained as people abandoned them and turned to the central daotang. But, despite his determination, these efforts had mostly failed. Because affiliating oneself with a daotang rather than a mosque was cheaper in the long run and also offered ahongs who were more esteemed, more and more Jahriyya families found that option irresistible.

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All of these different yet related factors coalesced to cause the acceleration of Madā’ iḥ recitation. Serving an area with denser population meant that an ahong had to lead or attend three to four ermailis on a single morning, and a delay in any one of these rituals—due, for instance, to the late arrival of a particularly important senior family member—would set in motion a domino effect that caused ever more delays for ermailis in the afternoon. Host families often had little to no idea what hectic schedules the especially well-known ahongs had; their dash from one family to the next in the same apartment block or the same residential compound was often interspersed with trips to families miles away. It would have been mission impossible if the ahong had not adjusted the time slots proposed by some families; he had to manage his trips as efficiently and cleverly as possible. The time spent on the road had to be taken into consideration, as well as the length of each ermaili. A sense of anxiety loomed large over the heads of many ahongs, despite the façade of composure they had to cultivate as respectable clerics. By all means they should conceal their stress; they had to engage in small talk with those family members who would soon join them in the recitation. They must show that, even though they might have a frantic schedule lying ahead, they were nonetheless completely earnest toward the host family. They needed to convince the family through their measured serenity that, despite all of their other obligations, their sincerity and devotion were not even a tad compromised. In this they were aided, somewhat ironically, by the family members who would join them in the sacred dayi’er. As I discussed earlier, each of the sixteen sections of Madā’ iḥ is composed of three parts: rawei (prosaic narration of the miracles attributed to the Prophet), beiti (panegyric poetry), and zhewabu (poetic reply to beiti). The practice of rang normally dictated that the leading ahong give the responsibility of leading beiti or zhewabu to a member of the host family. He could hardly control the latter’s pace in recitation. Some members of the host family were well aware that many ermailis nowadays were marred by a faster speed; to prevent this from happening to their own families, they tried to deliberately slow down the recitation by exploiting their roles in the dayi’er. I was once at a family ermaili where the ahong was twenty minutes late. Perspiring profusely and panting with embarrassment when he eventually arrived, he had to apologize to the host family, one of whom was a renowned ahong himself. “I tried to recite as appropriately fast as I could,” he said, “but when the person leading beiti opened his mouth, it was so slow that I thought ‘Good lord, now I have tasted eternity!’ It took me two hours!” He received a pat on the back from the other ahong, who commiserated with a knowing smile and a “Tell me about it.” There was thus an almost perpetual tug-of-war over the speed of Madā’ iḥ recitation. While an ahong might prefer to manipulate the speed of the recitation in

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order to fit as many ermailis as possible into his tight schedule, members of the host family in the dayi’er would always try to wrest as much time as they could from the ahong by deliberately slowing the pace. This was understandable, as they must have paid him a handsome nietie and spent lavishly to prepare a luscious meal; the least they would want was for the ahong to compromise the efficacy of the ritual by darting to the next ermaili. Everyone knew at some level that the acceleration of the recitation was almost inevitable, and that the ahong must leave in time to officiate other ermailis. Yet they always succumbed to the wishful thinking that they had been the only household served. The more the ahong wished to speed up, the more the host family tried to slow him down. A large gap also emerged within the clerical rank, for as more families shifted their allegiances to a central daotang, the gain of the latter also became the loss of numerous local mosques. Nietie, a central component of an ahong’s income, was the one item that could generate a significant financial disparity among the reciters. While an ahong working at Hong Le Fu might receive as much as a couple thousand RMB a month just by leading ermailis, this amount dwindled considerably for those who worked for rural mosques. Once few were willing to pay the imposed tax on a regular basis, it became equally unlikely that they would invite the ahongs in these mosques to officiate their ermailis. It was invariably a double loss for the disadvantaged clerics. The irony was that the ahongs who were most revered and best paid—those working for daotangs like Hong Le Fu—were the same people who were most susceptible to accelerating their recitation. Some ordinary murīdūn would emulate this faster recitation as they understandably considered this the model practice, while the more knowledgeable would shake their heads and privately berate such quickening as a blatant display of hypocrisy. Chi youxiang, the satirical term for ermaili that mocked ahongs for their avaricious appetite, was frequently invoked in this context. To these critics it seemed as though the gluttonous ahongs could not wait to complete the ermaili, enjoy their meal, take their nietie, and leave for the next feast.

3 To be sure, many Jahriyya families—perhaps most of them—had little understanding of Madā’ iḥ’s text. Even those who joined the dayi’er and led the beiti might know next to nothing about the meaning of what they were reading. They had learned the Arabic alphabet with the Jahriyya pronunciation and had surely absorbed the ethos of daore from years of listening. By and large many of the Jahriyya reciters I interviewed had only an abstract idea of Madā’ iḥ’s contents. Some had read portions of its Chinese translation, done either by Chinese

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scholars of Islam or by enthusiastic Jahriyya ahongs; others might have picked up hints from piecemeal discussions they had overheard between the more knowledgeable. Most knew that Madā’ iḥ was a panegyric of the Prophet, and some were able to offer a more or less folkloristic interpretation of the poem. Hagiographies of the Jahriyya murshidūn also drew on Madā’ iḥ for their narrative style and poetic inspiration. In ritual performance, on the other hand, understanding of meaning mattered only marginally, if at all. For many Jahriyya disciples I knew, the termination of silsila after the death of Ma Zhenwu meant that a direct connection with God through the murshid had been irrevocably severed. While stories of some previous murshidūn’s alleged success in accomplishing unity with the Almighty continued to circulate among some devout followers, there was a general sense among most Jahriyya murīdūn that the road to such transcendent spiritual experience had been closed once and for all after 1960. With no clear guidance issued by a living saint, reciters were celebrated purely for their vocal artistry, yet however aesthetically pleasing and evocative their voices were, they were by no means thought to pave the way toward spiritual salvation. The devout could continue their practice of recitation, but whether they would thus become closer to their Lord remained a question no one could definitively answer. This chapter began with the perception of time among contemporary Jahriyya disciples; this perception was at once a critique of politics and a comment on ritual. The deterioration of politics and the seal of the sacred genealogy coincided, both heard as a faint echo in the increased tempo of Madā’ iḥ recitation. It was as though time itself had accelerated and become increasingly impatient in its anticipation of the End. I have herein described the ritual as well as the many social and economic factors that had precipitated this acceleration, and along the way we have been able to observe the myriad linkages that connected the private family ermaili to a variety of social and religious forces beyond its immediate reach. Acts of consumption were at once an essential component of the ermaili and an indicator of wider, more obscure changes. The voices of Madā’iḥ spoke as much of the centrality of sound to the efficacy of ermaili as of the fact that, insofar as sounds possessed materialities and were voiced by people living in concrete social worlds, they were subject to both the constraints and the potentialities derived from broader social shifts. While the relationship between the pace of recitation and the swings in politics may have been metaphorical, this abstract relationship does materialize into more tangible forms once we use the voice as the fulcrum to examine the multiple planes superimposed on the Madā’iḥ ritual. How do these complexities fit into the ambit of fragile transcendence? Unlike in chapter 2, here we find no abstract reciter or structured musical daore. Although

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technically we can notate both rawei and beiti, thus convert them into sheet music, and claim that they do have a daore, it is unlikely that such musicological work will produce the same conclusion as the one in chapter 2, which was not arrived at via musical notation in the first place. What this chapter does demonstrate is the extent to which Jahriyya liturgical variation increases considerably once we zoom out and begin to trace the innumerable links that embed these rituals in the social world that encompasses them. If, as we discussed in the introduction, liturgical ritual exemplifies the process of ritualization in that it creates an impenetrable depth and thereby gives rise to the disposition that enables fragile transcendence, then the more we shift our attention to the wider historical inscription of the ritual, the more that ritual’s depth will become socially amplified. Not all liturgical rituals are “deep” in the same way, for the same reason, or to the same degree. It is perhaps not incidental that as we expose the social articulation of the liturgical ritual—as opposed to treating ritual as a condensed representation of the social, or a special occasion where social norms are reproduced or destabilized—we find its impenetrability heightened, for, after all, is not the social itself that impenetrable core that defines who we are, yet remains elusive, and dauntingly so, whenever we wish to come close and stare it in the eyes? Somewhat paradoxically, the depth of the social is made partially visible through the perceived impenetrability of ritual. However, are we also reaching the limit of Jahriyya liturgical variation? Can it be stretched apparently limitlessly while still managing to maintain its hold and generate a sense of community among the diverse murīdūn? Are there structural limitations built into this variation, thus undermining its claim to a certain unmarked commonality? These are the questions underpinning the next chapter’s examination of the gendered mediatization of Jahriyya recitation. We will see that liturgical variation and the community it creates are not “neutral,” especially along lines of gender—a point that will become increasingly evident over the course of chapter 4 and will culminate in chapter 5, where we discuss the very gendered material condition that gives the male recitative voice its outward serenity.

4 His Master’s Voice

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ne consequence of long-term fieldwork for the anthropologist is that they become inextricably entangled in the lives of those they work with over the years. People die, others are born or reborn; some get married, others divorced. When one returns for more research, days or even weeks pass before one can begin the new work. One has to catch up, listen to stories of happiness and sorrow, share the joy and grieve the losses. It is rude, even cruel, to “collect data” when it is people’s lives that demand commitment. Ethnography soon becomes history, and field notes, ink still fresh, fade into memory. At the time of my first visit to Hong Le Fu in 2011, Sijiu was a proud Jahriyya murīd. His father had been a loyal disciple and close companion to the last saint; Sijiu had inherited this acclaimed legacy with pride. He “always kept his head up,” his nephew told me while driving me to Hong Le Fu when I returned in late 2014. “But things have changed now,” he said in a sad tone, after a light sigh. For many Jahriyya families, especially those with children studying and working in a foreign country, the prospect of them becoming involved in a romantic relationship with a non-Muslim partner was a persistent source of anxiety and distress. Numerous times I received requests from worrying parents pleading for me to put their sons and daughters abroad in touch with local Muslim communities. “If it is not too much trouble,” a father once wrote to me in a polite email, “could you introduce my daughter to a Muslim boy in Britain to take the pressure off us [ fangxin]?” Most of the time I was hardly able—or willing—to help. Neither did the Jahriyya youngsters necessarily share their parents’ concerns, or agree to what some deemed excessive intervention in their private lives. While some young Jahriyya murīdūn did consider faith an essential

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factor for choosing a date, this preference was by no means shared across the board. Between one’s devotion to Jahriyya and one’s preference in romance, there intervened myriad concerns that varied from one person to the next. The disparity that thus emerged between the decision a young Jahriyya disciple was prone to make and the will of their family could at times result in mortifying feuds and heart-rending separations; this was precisely what happened to Sijiu. Teng, his eldest son and the apple of his eye, was admitted to a prestigious medical school in northeastern China in the early 2000s. From there his assiduity earned him a well-deserved place in a much-sought-after doctoral program in Japan. With a promising professional career lying ahead of him, and his entire extended family back in Hong Le Fu expressing pride in his impressive achievements, he suddenly decided to change course. He left Japan and moved to California. He overstayed his visitor’s visa after an academic conference and began to work, presumably illegally, as a chef in a local halal restaurant. “Somehow he got tired of the research. He became weary of the tubes and the beakers. He simply couldn’t stand them anymore. He wanted to smash everything and end it all,” his younger brother Hua later confided in me. This story was too patchy, the reason too frivolous, so suspicion was in the air. But, despite everything, Sijiu continued to wire Teng money to pay for his legal consultancy and eventually acquire a green card. Even his rent, I was later told, was covered by Sijiu. This did not last long, however. Less than a year into Teng’s illegal immigration Sijiu received an unexpected phone call. “Are you Teng’s father?” a young female voice asked from the other end. “Yes?” Sijiu responded hesitantly. “Very well, then,” the voice continued. “I’m his wife. And he has a son, too, who is one year old now. I think you should know.” The worst suspicion had thus been confirmed, and word went around fast. Teng had moved to America because his girlfriend—now his wife, who was not a Muslim—had an uncle in Los Angeles, and she preferred to set up their family there rather than in Japan (or in Hong Le Fu, for that matter). Teng could not persuade her to stay. Neither could he proceed with his research, as life had worn him out in numerous ways: he worked odd jobs to pay for tuition, peddling cheap made-in-Japan home appliances to gullible Chinese consumers, and now his fiancée insisted on leaving Japan for America. His studies had not been progressing particularly well, and his Japanese, according to what I heard, was not ideal, either. Maybe he thought it was not a bad idea, after all; perhaps life could indeed restart, for the better, in Los Angeles. It was hard on his father. Before all this, Sijiu used to pride himself on being a ritual connoisseur and reprove others for their conceived errors; since then he

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had learned to refrain from these interventions and remain silent. He did everything he could to persuade Teng’s wife to convert to Islam. He visited Teng in Los Angeles for several weeks in 2014, cooked for them (which he never did back home), and performed all Jahriyya rituals unfailingly at their designated times. “I only wanted her to say the shahāda [the Muslim profession of faith]. She doesn’t even need to believe in it. Things never happen all at once.” Yet all his efforts were in vain. “She said she couldn’t say it unless she genuinely meant it,” sighed Teng’s mother, Sijiuma. “Maybe she’s right.” Sijiu showed me the hundreds of photos of Teng’s son on his iPad—a bright boy with lovely glistening eyes and a broad forehead that Sijiu believed was a sign of exceptional intelligence. But his smile was always mixed with sadness. “Life is not easy,” he sometimes remarked. Till the end of my fieldwork, however, I was never shown a picture of Teng with his wife. I heard that Teng read Mukhammas every night; he had asked Sijiu to send him a copy of the text. “He’s a good boy, he reads the classic every day, he never stopped,” Sijiuma told me. Nonetheless, he was thousands of miles away from Hong Le Fu. When the voice of Mukhammas arose in the serene hall after the late evening prayer, it was morning in California, and Teng was perspiring profusely in a stifling hot kitchen kneading dough for a halal restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. There were of course brief moments of respite and reunion. Two weeks before the arrival of Ramadan in 2015, Sijiu hosted a Madā’ iḥ ermaili to prepare for the holy month, as most Jahriyya families did. “Teng will join us today,” he told me in advance. How this was done was shortly brought home to me: in the master bedroom of his new house, the site of the ermaili, Sijiu set up his smartphone on the bed, propping it up with a hardback copy of Madā’ iḥ. The camera faced the sacred dayi’er, though the sight was piteously blocked by the broad back of a reciter. On the small screen I saw the fuzzy image of a young man, wearing the white hexagonal hat that was the hallmark of Jahriyya identity, holding a baby in his arms (fig. 4.1). This was Teng. From across the Pacific he listened in to the voice of Madā’ iḥ and abandoned himself to the sound of home. This was likely the first time that his son, Yusuf, had ever heard the sound of Madā’ iḥ; he would most likely remember nothing from this first encounter. But somehow both Teng and Sijiu hoped that the Jahriyya voice could cross the ocean and reach deep into the boy’s heart. The screen froze from time to time, yet the voice persisted, and insofar as it persisted, the tenuous link was not severed. Through the smartphone Teng brought his son home. At that moment, he was there, behind the dayi’er, taking part in an ermaili that prayed for the forgiveness of the living, the dead, and the undying. It was a men’s world; neither Sijiuma nor Teng’s wife was present.

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F i gu r e   4 . 1 An ermaili across the Pacific. Photo by author.

WHITHER THE JAHRIYYA SOUND? MEDIA AND ITS DISCONTENT

This chapter describes the gendered mediatization of Jahriyya recitation. It pivots around an apparently simple observation: that the ambit of the Jahriyya ritual depends on how far the voices travel and by what means.1 While Teng’s reunion with his family was enabled by new technologies of telecommunication—in which the transmission of voice appeared to be smoother than that of images— for others the same set of technologies produced other, even opposing, effects. In addition to an unprecedented expansion of the virtual space that brought together those who were physically separated, new technologies of the voice, particularly audio applications on smartphones, had also rendered listening at once more portable and more intimate. The voices sounded all the closer to the heart as they passed ostensibly undisturbed into the ear through a headphone. In contrast to the collective recitation that had long dominated the configuration of listening among the Jahriyya, mediatization had generated new modes

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of sound reception and created new spaces for sound production. However, anxieties over what constituted the orthodox sound, including the standard pronunciation of Arabic, were also intensified in the course of mediatization, and disputes emerged at multiple levels—not only between the Jahriyya murīdūn and the “orthodox” sound exemplified by Saudi recitation, but also among different groups of Jahriyya murīdūn. While resistance to the Saudi influence was evident in numerous measures taken by the Jahriyya authority, these same measures also initiated a new process of normalization aimed at reducing the heterogeneity of Jahriyya recitation. This move to standardize, as we will see in this chapter, sought to align all recitations with a historically and geographically specific daore: the one that had been practiced at Hong Le Fu. The standardization effort was in part precipitated by the digitization of recitation, for the intimate mode of listening the latter enabled had made it considerably easier to aurally distinguish among different regional daores of Jahriyya recitation, on the one hand, and, on the other, between the Jahriyya recitation as a whole and “standard” Arabic recitation in wide circulation online. This increased audibility of difference caused by mediatization undermined as much as it facilitated the initial aim at standardization. Thus, ironically, the digital attempt at homogenization only rendered the fact of heterogeneity all the more perceptible. People recognized the differences, reflected on their meanings, protested their silencing, or simply pretended that nothing had changed. The Jahriyya authorities were not so much challenged as they were flatly ignored. However, this is by no means the whole story, for mediatization is always an articulation of what is mediatized with the form of the media itself, and all media forms have to rely to varying degrees on concrete material infrastructure.2 Where one placed the stereo microphones in the dayi’er (though mono microphones would have worked better with vocals) had a direct impact on the acoustic shape of the sacred circle as it was perceived by listeners outside the prayer hall. Particular configurations of the soundboard might also inordinately amplify the low frequency range of the collective recitation, resulting in an unpleasant, droning bass voice reaching a far wider audience than did the higher-pitched euphonious voices often thought to distinguish the Jahriyya recitation. While the acoustic range of the ermaili had been expanded by its live broadcast, its aesthetic value— and the sense of serenity it supposedly invoked—might have been undermined precisely by this mediatic extension of the human voice. With new technologies of inclusion also came new forms of exclusion, as well as new avenues for expressing grievances. One such grievance takes form along the lines of gender. All major Jahriyya rituals that I took part in were heavily androcentric; women were often allowed

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to follow (gen) but were seldom, if ever, permitted to recite. Mediatization had precipitated a dual shift, which, so far as I was aware, had yet to completely destabilize the status quo. Although women were still excluded from reciting in formal rituals, they often utilized simple smartphone applications to record their own recitations and circulate them, mostly within close circles of female friends and relatives. Occasionally, however, the recordings would transcend these intimate worlds and reach a larger—mostly male—audience. With regard to the reception of sound, especially the broadcast sound of public ermailis hosted in daotangs, we witnessed a more significant change. Amplified voices had no doubt expanded the acoustic ambit of the ermaili, for those who used to be outside the earshot of the naked human voice could now easily follow the ritual without having to press themselves into the packed prayer hall. When the loudspeaker installed on the roof of the majestic hall sent the recitation to those kneeling, sitting, or standing on Hong Le Fu’s massive open square (fig. 4.2), they could rest assured that the spiritual efficacy such mediatized sounds carried had not been undermined, even when mixed with erratic static and piercing crackles. This is where we can begin to comprehend the complicity between androcentrism and mediatization among the Jahriyya: although women were not prohibited from entering the prayer hall to follow the ermaili, they were not particularly encouraged to enter, either. The pride of place was always reserved for men. Some women explained to me that they were admitted only once all men had found their spot and there was still space left; others chose to remain outside even when there was still seating available in the hall after all of the men had been accommodated. Many women preferred to sit close to the entrance, the sound of the ermaili reaching them just before it vanished into the open space. Mediatization had only exacerbated this precarious position, for the acoustic inclusion it seemed to have enabled only offered further justification for women’s exclusion from the prayer hall. Before describing this dialectic of in/exclusion and revealing the gendered nature of Jahriyya liturgy—a theme that receives fuller attention in chapter 5—I will first explain another aspect so far left unexamined in the variation of Jahriyya recitation. At the opening of chapter 3, I highlighted the manner whereby Madā’ iḥ recitation compels us to zoom out from the prayer hall and expound the many linkages between the Jahriyya sound and the social world it inhabits; such scaling-up, I argued, was not afforded by what the Mukhammas recitation was able to reveal. In this chapter I follow the same trail of investigation, for the regional variations in Jahriyya’s daore, ever so slight yet no less identifiable to a trained ear, have largely been the outcome of two and a half centuries of migration by both the murshidūn and the murīdūn. As this chapter is the last one in this ethnography before we move on, in chapter 5, to reverse the world

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F i gu r e   4 . 2 Hong Le Fu’s open square. Photo by author.

thus far described and examine it from its periphery, we need to note the specific way in which it closes the circle of ethnographic description. Exposing the history of migration that initially gave rise to the variance of daore will return us yet again to the early phase of Jahriyya in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the main point of interest for chapter 1. Yet by linking this early history to the

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latest application of new sound technologies by Jahriyya murīdūn to preserve and alter their recitation, we are also demonstrating the current resonances of that history; we are underscoring that the more sensitive we are to the historical and social embeddedness of Jahriyya liturgical rituals, the more we find their depth increased, their impenetrability and inscrutability fortified, and their diversity, to put it more plainly, becoming ever richer and more difficult to place under a centralized control. But, as we shall see in this chapter, the failure of such control (even just temporary control) was not for want of trying: contemporary Jahriyya leadership did at one point attempt to put a stop to these variations, only to be defeated—not so much by any concerted effort on the part of the murīdūn as by the inexplicable and ineffable force of history. It is as though the deceased murshidūn, looking down at their descendants attempting to standardize at the expense of unwittingly inducing another round of amnesia, worked together to ensure that this would not take place, and that historical voices, while not necessarily remembered, would continue to make themselves heard in the wonderfully diverse Jahriyya daore.

MAPPING THE VOICE: THE ITINERANT SUFI

Sufi masters seldom remain fixed in one location. One need not invoke the venerable tradition of the wandering ʿāshiq musician in Central Asia to realize how vital movement has been to the cultivation of a mystic disposition.3 The Qur’an enjoins Muslims to “travel through the earth, and see what was the end of those who rejected the Truth” (6:11), yet the wandering Sufis might as well be searching for signs of divine presence rather than observing, and ridiculing, the conceived foolishness of the deniers in their meanders. In the broad Persianate world that initially gave rise to Jahriyya, the roaming Sufi masters were crucial in weaving dense networks of pilgrimage over expansive territories that eventually sedimented into sacred geographies embracing areas as large as Iran, Central Asia, China, and South Asia.4 One obstacle to assessing the actual impact of such Sufi migrations has to do with the fact that, for us moderns who are used to air travel and who comprehend geography through the prism of contemporary cartography, the mobility of Sufi masters in a certain region (such as northwestern China) may appear negligible, as it seldom traversed the sorts of distances that could remotely match modern standards of long-distance travel. Moving between Hezhou (present-day Linxia in Gansu Province) and Jinji (present-day Wuzhong in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region) is now an overnight train journey

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in a passenger car; one falls asleep as the train departs and wakes up in the morning when it grinds to a halt. By contrast, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a Jahriyya murshid made such trips, it was often days or weeks on the bouncy back of a stallion or in a sedan chair. When he traveled with his family and his entourage—the Jahriyya masters were often married and tended to have large families, unlike the lone vagabond ʿāshiqūn (plural of ʿāshiq)—the trip would take considerably longer. Ma Mingxin, the founding saint of Jahriyya, traveled extensively across northwestern China. He was recorded to have visited, among other places, Hezhou (present-day Linxia in Gansu Province), Dingxi (Gansu), Xi’an (Sha’anxi Province), Qinzhou (present-day Tianshui in Gansu), Fuqiang (in present-day Gangu County, Gansu), Qin’an (Gansu), Guanchuan (Gansu), and Gaolan (present-day Lanzhou, capital of Gansu Province). Marked out on a map, they form a long corridor that links the Tibetan and Turkic areas in the west to the predominantly Hui and Han regions in the east (fig. 4.3). However, the most profound Sufi migrations in the history of Jahriyya were not voluntary travels intent on converting others to the new teaching. Starting from Ma Mingxin, who was executed by the Qing officials in a dramatic scenario in 1781 on the towering city wall of Gaolan (Lanzhou), Jahriyya had been

F i gu r e   4 .3 Travels of Ma Mingxin. Made by author.

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subject to successive waves of violent clampdown at the hands of the imperial government. Bloodshed was frequently visited upon them, and rebellion, either for self-defense or for retaliation, became almost synonymous with Jahriyya’s name in the minds of the ruling elites. The most tragic anti-imperial revolt in the history of Jahriyya was the uprising in the 1860s led by Ma Hualong, or shisan taiye, the fifth saint in the Jahriyya genealogy. It lasted almost a decade and joined forces with Muslim rebellions in Shaanxi—a connection that at once expanded the influence of the Jahriyya military campaign and contributed to its ultimate defeat. One report claimed that nearly the entire extended family of Ma Hualong, three hundred souls in total, were slaughtered after their reluctant surrender in early 1870s. Tens of thousands of Jahriyya murīdūn were forced to leave Hong Le Fu, then the military and religious center for Ma Hualong; they went on exile in Huaping (Ningxia), Lingzhou (Ningxia), Pingliang (Gansu), and Guyuan (Gansu).5 Ma’s closest companions were sold into lifelong slavery, and women were subject to dreadful humiliation and violation. Many lived in appalling poverty, doing all they could to scrape a living from a despairingly inhospitable natural environment. For those who did manage to survive, even to flourish—it was nothing short of a miracle that they did—these political exiles paradoxically brought Jahriyya to places it would otherwise have reached only years later, if at all. While the Qing government strictly forbade the performance of all Jahriyya rituals, the hidden fire of devotion was never completely extinguished. Biding its time, a feeble flicker would flare up into a consuming blaze. There was among the Jahriyya murīdūn what many considered a venerable tradition of collective responsibility. The devoted Jahriyya disciple would either sacrifice himself in place of the master to acquit the latter, or turn himself in as a conspirator just to be convicted and executed along with his saint at the gallows.6 “At the execution and death of each saint,” a Jahriyya murīd in his sixties once told me, “an entire generation of murīdūn passed with him. They were determined to follow [gen] the guangyin.” He was speaking specifically of the late 1950s, but it applied just as well to other periods. Each saint had his own time and his own generation, and, to some followers, a transition in such apostolic time, even when the succeeding saint’s credential was beyond a shadow of a doubt, could still signal a minor Day of Judgment. They would thus rather “follow the guangyin,” enfold themselves into a rapidly fading era, and perish as that world closed in on them, forever sealed to posterity. The word used for “follow,” gen, was the same word as used in describing the action of “following” an ermaili. Gen ermaili and gen guangyin almost shared the same sense of urgency, of following on the heels of something or someone dear yet soon to disappear. The Jahriyya said that dayi’er, the sacred circle formed by the seated reciters, was a boat, and those who gen

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ermaili were to have a piece of their baggage ferried to the hereafter, where it would be safely deposited and wait quietly for its owner to collect it. “I beg to have a piece of my luggage carried on taiye’s boat” (wo zai taiye de chuan shang shao jian xingli), some would say. In times of harrowing upheaval, some disciples vowed to keep their exiled or enslaved masters company, openly or under cover, so as to protect them and provide subterraneous financial assistance wherever needed. This was what happened to Ma Jincheng, or bianliang taiye, the sixth Jahriyya saint, a grandson of Ma Hualong. Jailed at the age of nine when his grandfather surrendered to the Qing court, he was castrated at the age of twelve and then sent to serve in an elite Manchu family in Bianliang, now Kaifeng in China’s central Henan Province. His Sufi name was Ḥilāl al-Dīn, “crescent of faith.” Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī recorded someone’s ominous comment on this name, implying bianliang taiye’s controversial stature in later days: “The crescent is ephemeral: some can see it, others cannot.”7 Indeed, some contemporary Jahriyya recognized his place in the pedigree, while others denied it vehemently, referencing his castration to prove his ineligibility. While Ma Jincheng’s was far from the most geographically remote exile in the history of Jahriyya—chuanchang taiye Ma Datian, the third saint, was sent to Jilin in northeastern China—in Bianliang he received an immense amount of help from loyal Jahriyya followers, especially from Ma Yuanzhang, later the seventh murshid. Well-off murīdūn set up business franchises in the city, choosing deliberately venues near the Manchu family, where Ma Jincheng was enslaved. They provided for him regularly until his death in 1890. “To evade the pain and suffering inflicted by the unbelievers is a violation of God’s will,” he reputedly said. These voluntary as well as compulsory migrations of Sufi masters and their devoted disciples gave rise to a vast territorial network composed of numerous Jahriyya communities. For various reasons some murīdūn might have stopped midway rather than follow their saint to his destination. They then formed a small hamlet wherever they chose to settle down and later turned into a volunteer relay post assisting future Jahriyya pilgrims who were to visit the tomb of the saint in question. Others might have followed the saint to the journey’s end, served him while on exile, buried him when he died, said the requisite prayers, and built a gongbei (Arab. qubba, Pers. gunbad, dome, cupola, or vault, here meaning a tomb of said shape) dedicated to him that would become the center of their small community. None of these communities were isolated from the others; all were encompassed in an extensive network that reached west to Xinjiang, where the Turkic-speaking Uyghur Muslims concentrated, and east to Jilin, where the Han were the majority population. Almost every Jahriyya murīd I interviewed owned a map on which were marked out all major tombs they had to visit at least once a year (fig.  4.4). It was not uncommon that now and then a group of Jahriyya

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F i gu r e   4 . 4 Major Jahriyya tombs in China. Image courtesy Ma Xiaoyi.

followers from the same community would rent a coach and drive to visit all tombs along the pilgrimage route bookended by their home village and the daotang where they were to take part in a major commemoration ritual. For instance, students departing from Hong Le Fu headed for Lanzhou, where the annual ermaili dedicated to Ma Mingxin was to be held, would normally visit most Jahriyya shrines in Ningxia and Gansu. They often had to leave three to four days in advance just to leave time for these essential digressions. I even met a Jahriyya from Xinjiang who was committed to visiting all Jahriyya tombs on foot, a physically and mentally demanding journey that could take up to a year (fig. 4.5). This immense network encompassing eminent tombs and the small communities embracing them was just as much a network of support in times of need. In the Republican period (1911–1949 CE), Zhiguo’s family used to live in Xiji, a Jahriyya stronghold in southern Ningxia where shagou taiye Ma Yuanzhang spent much of his illustrious life. His untimely death in the devastating Xiji earthquake in 1920 was a massive blow to the Jahriyya, who were still slowly recovering after the fall of the Qing dynasty. At that time Zhiguo’s grandfather was a minor clerk in the local county government—not a particularly good job. The pay was risible, and social status was a pipe dream; his reason for clinging to the position was not political opportunism, but simply the need to survive. However, this career (non)option did not exempt him and his family from public and personal abuses during the Cultural Revolution. He was predictably imprisoned, humiliated, and tortured. Whether he survived the dreadful ordeal, his family never knew. Not long after his detention, Zhiguo’s grandmother, then in her forties, decided to escape. She brought her children close to her chest, gathered what she had left of the meager family valuables, and set out on a dark night—toward Xinjiang.

F i gu r e  4 .5 A committed pilgrim. The cart carries supplies and at night functions as a sheltered bed. Photo by author.

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“Daozu taitai [Ma Mingxin’s second wife] had once been in exile there, she was buried on the bank of the Yili River in Xinjiang. There is a small Jahriyya community near the tomb. Thus, my grandmother thought there would be other Jahriyya murīdūn living there who could help us and give us a life [gei women yitiao shenglu],” Zhiguo reminisced. Those trying to survive a new political turmoil thus relied on the network forged during previous ones. Jahriyya murīdūn made long journeys not only for pilgrimage but also to evade oppression and seek a livelihood. The sacred geography was about both mutual aid in the present world and, in equal measure, redemption in the hereafter. While expanding and strengthening the Jahriyya network across China, these migrations almost inevitably entailed further diversification of the Jahriyya daore. The tonal variances of innumerable local dialects subtly but palpably altered how the resettled Jahriyya murīdūn intoned the Mukhammas and the Madā’iḥ. A Jahriyya follower from Yunnan could easily recognize the daore of someone from Ningxia, while the Xinjiang daore possessed melodic and tonal characters of its own. Few Jahriyya reciters I interviewed were able to verbally explicate these fine differences in a systematic manner, yet all agreed that they were aurally identifiable (though not all of those reciters were equally competent in identifying these differences). The extent of differentiation was difficult to gauge accurately, as to the ear of a novice the differences were almost negligible. Subtle variations in pitch and tempo—for instance, those from southern Ningxia often had a faster daore than those from northern Ningxia, as I discovered in my fieldwork—were not difficult to identify; however, when divergent daores overlapped and partially synchronized with one another in the same physical space, a wonderfully rich polyphony arose. Paradoxically, the same forces that caused their diversification also led to the spatial mingling of heterogeneous daores. Benedict Anderson once spoke of the function of bureaucratic pilgrimage in the formation of an imagined national community in the colony: For even in cases where a young brown or black Englishman came to receive some education or training in the metropole, in a way that few of his creole progenitors had been able to do, that was typically the last time he made this bureaucratic pilgrimage. From then on, the apex of his looping flight was the highest administrative center to which he could be assigned: Rangoon, Accra, Georgetown, or Colombo. Yet in each constricted journey he found bilingual traveling companions with whom he came to feel a growing communality.8

Something similar can be said of the Jahriyya pilgrims, for in their travels they always encountered other fellow disciples who followed their own routes. In the

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small prayer hall often adjacent to the venerable shrine, daores from Xinjiang, Ningxia, Gansu, Yunnan, and even Jilin were brought together without their musical particularity attenuated to fit into a constricted model. People recited as well as listened; they linked distinct daores to different locales and exchanged stories and memories about how a certain saint survived in his new home, how devout families struggled to make ends meet, what was being done in their local community to renovate the tomb, or whether the younger generation were keen on carrying on their fathers’ daore. News from Xinjiang could be passed on to Ningxia, and local controversies in Yunnan were soon known in Gansu.9 While the diversification of daore was integral to the history of Jahriyya, the mingling of heterogeneous daores was almost as old as this diversification itself. The polyphonic soundscape resulting from migration and pilgrimage was thus a particularly condensed acoustic representation of the Jahriyya history since the eighteenth century. Many Jahriyya murīdūn had never performed the ḥajj. It was often said that visiting the tombs of the noble saints would suffice as a suitable substitution. Detractors tended to cite this as a proof of Jahriyya’s “heterodox” understanding of Islam; they thought the dangerous pride of place thus accorded to the saints rather than God risked shirk, the cardinal sin of finding partners for the singular God. But most Jahriyya followers I interviewed had a different explanation. “It was due to poverty,” one of them told me. “Since most Jahriyya murīdūn had no money to make that trip yet still hoped to receive the blessing, the saints allowed them to visit the tombs instead. The murshidūn will intercede on their behalf when the End comes.” This explanation only made partial sense, as many Jahriyya disciples nowadays were undeniably better off financially. Some owned luxury cars; others possessed numerous properties in local administrative seats. Even the older generation had benefited from China’s economic boom since the late 1970s, though rampant inequality meant that some were still struggling below the survival line. However, despite all these nuances one thing was clear: many contemporary Jahriyya murīdūn still did not feel a strong desire to go on ḥajj, and they continued to cherish the centuries-old tradition of tomb visitation. Rather than use the extra money to fund a trip to Mecca, they preferred to spend it on a sturdy vehicle that could carry the whole family on a looping journey that brought them to multiple shrines around the country. Anderson’s argument, mutatis mutandis, applies aptly to the Jahriyya pilgrimage, for although many Jahriyya followers were well aware of the cosmopolitanism of Islam—something that was obvious during the ḥajj—their tomb visitation tended nonetheless to reproduce a more focused communality centered on the Jahriyya. It is crucial to note that this

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communality was not built around a shared daore. On the contrary, the consolidation of communal solidarity was based precisely on a heterogeneous soundscape, mirroring beautifully the very complexity of Jahriyya history itself. In standardizing daore, one necessarily silences this polyvocal history. The cost of acoustic unity would be the erasure of the only aural reminders of those dreadful exiles and heroic perseverance. Worse yet, the standardization process might cause actual social dissension, given that many might object to it, preferring to preserve their own daore passed on to them by their beloved mentors. These controversies form the theme of the next section.

STANDARDIZING THE VOICE: THE DEFIANT SUFI

In the early 2000s a television advertisement entered the living room of millions of Chinese families: a girl of seven or eight, wearing her hair in a slick bun with a light pink butterfly pin, was shown studying at a desk in a brightly lit room. The wide French window opened into a vibrantly green garden, conjuring a life hardly attainable for much of the audience. Contrary to the commonplace that learning to read was a difficult endeavor, the girl was seen utterly at ease with her studies. The digital device that assisted her, a portable pen wirelessly connected to a specially designed book fitted into an electronic board, was later known as dian du bi, “the pen that points and reads.” Its name self-explanatory, dian du bi provided a new possibility for portable learning: one pointed the pen at a word, and the pen would automatically read it out and offer a dictionary explanation. “Point to whatever you don’t understand!” (nali buhui dian nali), the girl advised exuberantly. “So easy [in English]! Now mum will worry no more about my studies!” (mama zai ye buyong danxin wo de xuexi). Her cheerful voice beamed with contrived enthusiasm and precocious pretension. Within a few years dian du bi became less a particular product than a ruling concept for a new and rapidly expanding industry. Pirated reproductions flooded the market, and the target consumer group was no longer confined to school-age children. The opportunity was soon shrewdly seized upon by some Sino-Muslims with a strong entrepreneurial spirit and a small start-up fund. They began to develop what would eventually become a multimillion-dollar business that would have a profound impact on China’s Islamic revival. This was the craze for the Qur’anic dian du bi. It was hard to track down the origin of the idea, as few of these new products were patented; even if they had been, the often loose enforcement of copyright law offered little by way of legal or institutional guarantee

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against the frequent infringements. What distinguished an excellent dian du bi from a mediocre one was the sound quality and the size of its memory card. Few of these Qur’anic dian du bi offered live recordings made by local Chinese Qur’anic reciters. For one thing, outstanding Chinese reciters, often graduates from universities in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria, or Egypt, were few and far between, and flying them in to record for the dian du bi was surely not a costefficient plan if the price had to remain attractive in a fiercely competitive market. For another, the unprecedented availability of high-quality recordings of Qur’anic recitation from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, made possible by the accessibility of high-speed Internet since the early 2000s, rendered the search for local reciters largely unnecessary. By the time of my fieldwork, the industry had matured to such an extent that most Qur’anic dian du bi shared a standard inventory with a list of recitations from at least five different professionally trained and worldrenowned reciters, most of them based in Saudi Arabia. Some young and adventurous Jahriyya Sufis did not wake up to this digital craze well until after I resumed my fieldwork in late 2014. What they faced was both a formidable challenge and a promising opportunity. By then the dian du bi market had become so saturated and the products so alike in the varieties of recitations they contained that new productions of the same model could barely survive, let alone generate a handsome profit. The sound quality of the Qur’anic recitation continued to be refined, but the fact that most such recordings were merely downloads from the same set of Muslim websites rendered most of these products utterly dull and repetitive. Although some Qur’anic dian du bi could encode as many as over twenty versions of the Qur’an—each of them recited by a different virtuoso reciter—the difference lay less in the quality of the sound than in the length one was willing to go to acquire recordings not easily available online. Because piracy was rampant, however, and the legal cost of infringement negligible, the edge of distinction momentarily gained soon vanished, and the field was leveled once more. This conundrum also became an opportunity, for not all designers of the Qur’anic dian du bi envisioned their target customer group in exactly the same way. While it may seem that loading Saudi and Egyptian recitations into the device would give one’s product the largest group of potential customers (some dian du bi even contained Malay translations, indicating that export to non-Sinophone Muslim countries was also intended), this easy presumption does not hold up when we consider the Jahriyya. Given their special Arabic pronunciation and the tight imbrication of such pronunciation with the structured performance of vocal rituals, the popularity of “standard” recitation was significantly limited among the Jahriyya. Moreover, entrenched hostility

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against anything associated with Salafism and Saudi Islam in Jahiyya circles— the old enmity between Sufism and Wahhabism was very much alive among the Jahriyya murīdūn—had further thwarted the appeal of the “standard” recitation. Some ambitious Jahriyya clerics had translated multiple treatises from Arabic into Chinese that explicitly engaged in the sectarian denunciation of Wahhabism. While many ordinary Jahriyya murīdūn were seldom involved in such an intellectualist enterprise, there was nonetheless a general Jahriyya revulsion against contemporary Saudi Arabia. This dismissive attitude manifested itself in an unequivocal rejection of the “standard” Saudi recitation in most, if not all, ritual contexts. “If you recite the Madā’ iḥ with the standard pronunciation,” a Jahriyya ahong once told me, “the host family will stop you right away and throw you out. For that recitation is no longer an ermaili, it will be considered a Wahhabi intrusion.” Somehow, a “standardized” Madā’ iḥ recitation constituted a doubled violation: it desecrated a sacred ritual not by attacking it from the outside but by subverting it from within, and it executed this subversion in so “standard” a manner that it became nearly a satirical meme. It was this very paradox that haunted Rui’s dian du bi business. An aspirational Muslim entrepreneur, Rui quit his clerical training at Hong Le Fu after two years of intensive study. “He wanted to serve Allah in a different way,” one of his peers told me. With a sustained interest in graphic design and an exceptional talent in spotting business opportunities in new computer technologies, Rui hoped to refashion the dian du bi idea for a Jahriyya audience. He wished not to be confined to this audience, however, as that would make his market quite small. This ambivalence drove the entire production process, for he reputedly told Jianguo, his main reciter, to “enunciate as indistinctly as possible” and to “strike a balance between the standard and the Jahriyya pronunciation.” The idea was to make the dian du bi Jahriyya but not too much, so it could appeal to Jahriyya customers without necessarily losing the broader market share. The demand was more than Jianguo or perhaps any Jahriyya reciter could possible handle, as though the massive weight of a profound global politics surrounding recitation and the form of Islam it is thought to represent were brought to bear on the subtle phonetic shifts in Jianguo’s enunciation. “He told me to pronounce as ambivalently as I could,” Jianguo remarked, “but it’s too difficult.” He broke off multiple times in our recording session and had to ask me to delete the previous recording and restart. We listened attentively after each session and assessed, often to our dismay, whether the recording was vague enough to pass for a larger audience. The irony was not lost on either of us. For contrary to what most customers expected from such devices as dian du bi—namely, the refined sound quality and

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clear enunciation of letters—we were working precisely to undermine these advantages. A peculiar dialectic defined our endeavor: we were trying to deceive the listener using the very technology that purported to bring a sense of unmediated and genuine proximity between the listener and the reciter. The success of our deception relied precisely on how much the new technology was able to expose our trickery, for the ambivalent pronunciation must be heard most unambivalently for the trickery to pass unnoticed. Between the pressure to produce a standard Islamic recitation and the demand for a locally relatable Jahriyya daore, Jianguo was given an impossible position to inhabit; his voice fractured because his subjectivity fissured. Hostility toward the standard pronunciation supposedly emanating from Saudi Arabia could be observed among the Jahriyya authority as well. Of the three leading figures—all of them sons of the first guardian, Ma Liesun—the one specifically in charge of clerical training reputedly accused a Jahriyya ahong who tried to emulate the Saudi pronunciation of voicing a bestial cry. “What was that?” he allegedly asked the ahong after the conclusion of an ermaili. “All of us recite in this way where I come from [Xinjiang],” the ahong retorted, perhaps with a slight defiance. “Well, then,” the leader replied, “was that a human voice, or just the meaningless bray of a silly ass [lvjiao]?” The comments had since circulated widely, delivering a warning to anyone who intended to show off their vocal skills. However, it was not entirely true that this particular leader was necessarily opposed to the Saudi pronunciation. He had studied Arabic intensively and had employed more contemporary methods of textual interpretation in drafting his written sermons, published internally among the Jahriyya under the title of canwu (meditation). His theological essays cited the Qur’an and scholarly commentaries in a manner akin to that of other Muslim scholars, even those who were purportedly anti-Sufi. He was not a student of the scriptural hall education ( jingtang jiaoyu), the traditional curriculum that had come under severe attack by reform-minded Sino-Muslims since the early twentieth century.10 Neither could he speak or understand Persian, the dominant language for advanced learning in jingtang jiaoyu. He had even openly deprecated this classical curriculum for its conceived inefficiency and tedium, just as many Muslim reformers had done since the early twentieth century. By the time of my fieldwork, he had already begun to systematically restructure the school at Hong Le Fu. A strict entrance exam was put in place for incoming applicants; they were tested on Chinese literature using the exam papers adopted from ordinary schools in the secular public educational system. He was known to be highly skeptical of the Internet, but aside from that he was anxiously pursuing a new curriculum that would completely overhaul the Jahriyya clerical training.

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Some Jahriyya murīdūn close to him tended to believe that he perhaps did not object to the Saudi pronunciation per se so much as he did its pretentious replication by some Jahriyya murīdūn. What he preferred was a sharper distinction rid of the gray zone in between: either one wholeheartedly commits oneself to the Jahriyya pronunciation, or leaves it out altogether and subscribes entirely to the Saudi standard. The assumption that this sharp distinction was at once possible and feasible—even inevitable—at times took the form of a physiological reductionism. “A Chinese-speaker can never pronounce certain Arabic consonants, such as /r/ [a dental-alveolar tap]. Our tongue simply cannot do it. It is in our genes,” I was once told. Whether the leader was for or against the Saudi pronunciation, he did not in fact approve of its intrusion into the Jahriyya ritual setting. It is thus somewhat ironic to learn that this very leader who once accused others of distorting the Jahriyya pronunciation could not reproduce these sounds himself. He studied Arabic and Islam in Beijing by auditing classes at a prestigious university; he was the leader of an order of which he himself was not a product. He did not master the Jahriyya pronunciation until much later, probably only in the mid- to late 1990s. Even by mid-2010s, some Jahriyya murīdūn said that he was still trying to improve his Jahriyya recitation skills. The attempt to draw a sharp distinction between Saudi pronunciation and Jahriyya recitation was merely the first step, for even Jahriyya recitation was not as streamlined and homogeneous as the leader wished it to be. As mentioned earlier, histories of migration and pilgrimage across vast geographical distances had from the outset brought the heterogeneity of Jahriyya daore to the fore. The more influential a local mosque or regional daotang, the more expansive was its network for attracting pilgrims from afar, and the more aware its followers became of the diversity of Jahriyya daore. With his base at Hong Le Fu, the leader was perhaps painfully aware of the diversity of daore and was not unfamiliar with the polyphony common in Jahriyya prayer halls. In most cases this polyphony took one of two forms, distinguished through the dual coordinates of time and space. The first polyphonic formation comprised disparate daores more or less synchronized in the same session of recitation, with the reciters from different regions taking part in the same ritual. At times the same syllable was given divergent pitches that created an acoustic effect resembling a harmony. To a listener seated in the congregation, the often uncoordinated rise and fall of the voices across the group vividly conjured up an image of the surging of waves in an ocean.11 A reciter in this sea of voices was less a ritual officiant than a Sufi surfer; he had to remain elegantly in balance while performing agile moves on the crests of recurrent waves. Perhaps the idiom that compared the sacred dayi’er to a shivering boat sailing courageously in a vast ocean was not entirely a poetic metaphor drawn from the

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Perso-Arabic literary tradition. It could as well have been a literal and surprisingly apposite description of the impressive aural experiences that gripped a Jahriyya reciter engulfed by the polyphonic ocean of sound. The second form of polyphony displayed a different articulation of voice and space. A few times I observed some Jahriyya pilgrims at Hong Le Fu start their own Mukhammas recitation in a separate quarter at the back of the prayer hall, while those who had finished theirs prior to the second group’s arrival hung around for meditation or chitchat. In principle, more than one Mukhammas recitation could take place in the same space as long as each kept to its own quarter, their sounds interfering with one another but never so assertive as to pose a serious disturbance to others. The spatial ambit of a Mukhammas ritual could be drawn out entirely according to the acoustic range of its sound. In theory, therefore, a prayer hall could be divided into as many quarters as the number of groups it could possibly accommodate at one moment. These groups were invariably reciting the same five stanzas from Mukhammas, yet no two groups would be on the same page or line at the same point in time. Those who had completed their reading were free to exit, while those who had just arrived would face no hindrance in performing their own recitation. Such partition of space by sound, however, was admittedly rare with regard to Mukhammas recitation; it was more commonly observed in the five daily prayers. These diverse forms of polyphony were not equally upsetting to the Jahriyya leader keen on standardizing the recitation. He did not object to the acoustic partitioning of the prayer hall that had become an established practice among Muslim groups around the globe, nor did he disapprove of pilgrimage, which was no doubt an essential component of Sufism. What he did hope to achieve was the complete uniformization of daore across regions and, by extension, across histories. He could tolerate polyphony only to the extent of its being incidental diversions like the tear and wear of an old tape. All differences that could be considered internal to daore, including its melody and the way Arabic was pronounced, ought to be reduced to the minimum and, ideally, completely eliminated. There should be one and only one daore left. The ambition radiated an authoritarian glow, and, like all other authoritarianisms, it spawned the seeds of its own undoing. While critical of what he considered the corrosive impact of modern mass media, the leader was nonetheless amenable to using them cautiously to his own advantage. In an age when the consumption of music even among rural youngsters was defined by such digital gadgets as MP3 players, he launched a somewhat quixotic project to produce a compact disc loaded with all major Jahriyya recitations. He summoned five esteemed Jahriyya ahongs known for their vocal

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virtuosity, three of them acting as reciters, the remaining two playing the roles of adviser and producer. They rented a small recording studio from a local secondary school, as the cost of production in a high-end professional studio was still prohibitive. They were not excessively punctilious about the sound quality; their goal was simply to get the recitation recorded. The ideal, as some Jahriyya murīdūn remarked in almost identical terms, was to preserve the exemplary recitation in its best condition for posterity. “Once all those ahongs who have a different daore die out,” the ahong who acted as the producer said to me, “people will learn from this CD alone. They will be repeating exactly the same daore; only then can you have a genuine unity.” The peculiar optimism of this remark took on a sinister tone once we realized the bizarre irony therein: hidden underneath the intention to perpetuate a standard recitation was a secret wish of death that bode ill for nearly all of the Jahriyya ahongs currently living. Those who had a different daore, thus rendering audible the multifarious histories of migration and exile, had to be wiped out. While these histories would still be taught through texts, their echoes in recitation had to be silenced. The future Jahriyya murīdūn would not be cut off from their history, but they would be forced to remember in a different way. No more would they be able to relate to this history through the polyphony that is the hallmark of contemporary Jahriyya soundscape. From the leader’s point of view, the connection between history and recitation—a connection that has distinguished Jahriyya for over two and a half centuries—has to be severed to accomplish a desired standardization. This ironic ambition would be brought to bear through electronic and digital media, understood as capable of preserving a disembodied voice and extending its reach to perpetuity. However, the attempt backfired epically; it did not work even during production. For one thing, even the three major reciters did not share the same daore. Even if they had tried to minimize the disparities between their daores—and to what extent they had actually tried remained a question in itself—the outcome was blissfully less than ideal. Certain syllables were given three distinct pitches, resulting in a pleasant harmony, though this was precisely what should have been avoided. When I mentioned this detail to some senior Jahriyya ahongs, their response was a mix of subdued chuckles and sighs of frustration. The recording process already portended the eventual failure. “We had to do it twice,” I was told by a reciter who took part in the production, “because at the end of the first attempt when we stood up to exit the studio, the leader discovered that we had in fact been sitting as opposed to kneeling [they were not using chairs but were seated in a dayi’er as though in a prayer hall]. ‘No, we have to do it again,’ he said, ‘the voice is different when you sit instead of kneel.’ He insisted that we follow

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all the rules even for recording, and he thought that the recitation had been compromised because we were not behaving piously [qiancheng].” While this may lead us to the conclusion that reciting for the Jahriyya ahongs was not so much a regional vibration of the vocal cords and the subsequent sculpting of sound in the vocal tract as a global undertaking that enlisted the entire body, a different reading is at least as plausible, for evidently the leader was incapable of telling the difference between a seated recitation and a kneeled one simply by listening.12 If he had been able to, he would have called it off at the outset; on the contrary, the moment of revelation did not arrive until he observed the perceived lapse at the end of the session. His insistence that they start a new session ironically exposed his lack of competence. No participating reciter had expressed in my presence any criticism in this respect; they often spoke of this detail as evidencing the leader’s devotion to perfection. Yet, at that particular moment, do we not detect a slight and never-to-be-mentioned-again embarrassment when the leader adamantly demanded a second run? If the production of a standard recitation in a highly controlled and supervised studio environment had been disturbed by such variances, the widespread circulation of popular recordings provoked even more anxieties on the part of the already fretful leader. Anthropologists have long noted the use of media technologies by indigenous peoples around the world for documentary as well as political purposes.13 In her study of the employment of film and television by the Inuit people, Faye Ginsburg reveals how such media platforms enabled native minorities in Canada to engage in “a broader project of constituting a cultural future in which their traditions and contemporary technologies are combined in ways that can give new vitality to Inuit life.”14 The issue is more than the content or the act itself: “It is not only that the activity of media-making has helped to revive relations between generations and skills that had nearly been abandoned. The fact of their appearance on television on Inuit terms, inverts the usual hierarchy of values attached to the dominant culture’s technology, conferring new prestige to Inuit ‘culture-making.’ ”15 The fact of circulation, in other words, endows the media contents and activities with added value they previously did not possess. Compared to idealized “authentic” portrayals of the indigenous social and cultural world created by outsiders, indigenous media may at times be more susceptible to controversies given the politics involved both in production and especially in circulation and reception,16 and they often have to contend with a prolonged tradition of ethnographic media-making left by early colonial explorers as well as contemporary anthropologists.17 For some of these indigenous creators of media, exoticism and stereotypical primitivism, rather than simply treated as objects of criticism, may be recycled to harness alternative political goals.18

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Much of this work is done with the imagined audience being either nonindigenous settlers in settler colonies (such as in North America and Australia), state authorities, or international human rights organizations and judiciary bodies. The Jahriyya recordings, however, targeted entirely different audiences. The CD produced in the recording studio merely joined a sea of other recordings, many of them professionally produced. Even though the Internet was not available to most Jahriyya murīdūn until only a decade ago, the mediatization of Jahriyya recitation long predated the information age. What Rosalind Morris termed the “media-technological auto-archiving” began in earnest in the 1980s among the Jahriyya, primarily by means of the so-called brick recorders (zhuantou luyinji) or boom boxes, then-rare imports from Japan.19 These recorders were often purchased by Jahriyya followers on their visits to Shanghai or Beijing. Given the recorders’ high prices and the relative poverty of most Jahriyya murīdūn at the time, the money often came from collective donations. Numerous cassettes were made of some major rituals, though few had survived to the present. Of those whose quality was still acceptable (often recorded in the late 1990s and early 2000s), the younger generation of technology-savvy Jahriyya disciples were competing with time to digitize them and restore the original sound quality as best as they could. In numerous Jahriyya mosques I saw dusty plastic bags that contained magnetic tapes and half-broken cassette recorders left unattended at the corner of an otherwise well-kept room. Almost every Jahriyya ahong I knew had a desktop computer, and most owned a laptop. Smartphones were also common possessions. Some, admittedly few, could use professional sound production applications to edit recordings of their own recitation; others had a sustained interest in new wireless microphones and speakers. Once I was invited to a listening session by a young Jahriyya ahong in Yunnan in southwest China. We let ourselves sink into a comfortable couch while sipping tea and tuned our ears to the more or less shrill voices (I would have much preferred a quiet chat) coming out from the barely functioning cassette player, behind which were the dusty tapes he thought “in urgent need of good care.” The discomfiting high pitch and the faster-than-usual pace were the combined outcome of the slowly disintegrating magnetic tape and the unsteady speed of the revolving reel in the player. Halfway through the session, while we were already conversing, with the recitation fading into some sort of background music (my/ our lack of piety was more than obvious), all of a sudden we came to the terrifying realization that the recitation had at some point ceased and turned into an ominous hiss. “The tape has tangled up!” The ahong sprang up from his seat and rushed to save the carefully (or not so much) preserved Jahriyya sounds, only to lament the massive jumble of glittering film stuck in the player. “It will take a

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while to untangle this. Let’s just hope I haven’t destroyed it.” I felt guilty for having convinced him to play it for me in the first place. Most Jahriyya murīdūn I interviewed had their own archives of recitation stored in their computers and smartphones. Some were their own recordings from different periods; a few were recordings of their own recitation, but most were of major Madā’ iḥ ermailis where famous reciters were present. Others were copied from fellow murīdūn’s computers via memory sticks or, more recently, portable hard drives. Internet circulation of these recitations was endemic, mostly on the social media platforms WeChat and QQ—the Chinese equivalents of Facebook and Whatsapp. It was not uncommon to find on the laptop of an enthusiastic Jahriyya follower hundreds of eclectic recordings collected over the years. The spread of smartphones in China, especially of reasonably priced local products rather than exorbitantly priced big brands, had triggered an unprecedented acceleration in the production and circulation of Jahriyya recordings. Unsurprisingly, this development further exacerbated the anxiety of the Jahriyya authority. Suspicious less of the new recording technologies per se than of their potential to give every ordinary follower complete freedom to record and circulate Jahriyya recitation beyond a controlled environment, he was vehement in regulating the use of smartphones, cameras, and digital recorders in ritual contexts. He was even more vociferous in prohibiting unsanctioned photographing when he received faithful followers during ʿĪd. He allegedly smashed the phone of a reverent murīd when the latter tried to capture a precious moment. He gave him a memorable slap in the face and warned others of more severe punishments were it to happen again. This was to no avail, however. Although people grew considerably more cautious about using phones in his presence, shooting ritual scenes on a smartphone or capturing the reciting voices on a digital recorder became so commonplace that at some point the leader himself had to give in to popular pressure (fig. 4.6). Different from the circulation of cassette sermons, these recorded sounds were appreciated primarily for their melodic rendition of Sufi poetry.20 The texts (or the gist of them) were well known, and many listeners themselves had participated in such rituals. Though few Jahriyya murīdūn would treat these recitations as artistic works in their own right, the terms of their judgment —whether a voice was “pleasant to the ear” (haoting) or “bright” (liang) enough to move a large crowd—demonstrated a strong appreciation of the underpinning aesthetic value of the recitation. The portability and ease of recording enabled by smartphones also gave rise to a new mode of listening among Jahriyya voice enthusiasts. Although the headphone jack in the boom box was rarely used and people preferred to listen

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F i gu r e   4 .6 Recording a Madā’ iḥ ermaili on smartphones. Photo by author.

via the speakers, smartphones and MP3 players made individual-centered and earphone-enabled listening ubiquitous, especially among the younger generation. This contrast between two modes of listening resonated with similar shifts caused by contemporary analog and digital technologies in other societies. Radio’s emergence on the national scene in postcolonial states, for instance, has often been a popular topic among anthropologists. Laura Kunreuther’s recent work on radio and the public sphere in Nepal shows how the making of a liberal political subject interested in “raising one’s voice” (āwāj uṭhāune) hinged in part on the narration of intimate personal stories through the airwaves. One example of this connection lies in the harnessing of personal sufferings to grander narratives of development propagated by the Nepali state and the international NGOs. Experiences of ordeals are read as moral as well as sociopolitical lessons that hold the potential of inducing positive social change and empowering the narrator as well as the listener.21 Brian Larkin, in his work on media and infrastructure in Nigeria, presents a different story that reveals how the move from wired radio broadcasts to wireless saucepan specials in northern Nigeria was also a move from public listening, which served the purpose of colonial political propaganda, to a more private type of listening within the domestic arena. The latter, not surprisingly, provoked much anxiety among the British colonials who feared losing their political grip.22 The privatization of listening, in terms of both the content of the programs and the space where such listening is practiced, often

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takes place alongside the emergence and safeguarding of an intimate familial sphere.23 The Jahriyya listening apropos of boom box, given the latter’s technological specifics (e.g., limited volume compared to wired loudspeakers, portability, relative incompatibility with headphones, function as a gravitational point for smallscale collective listening), had much in common with the mode of listening enabled by the modern wireless radio; the fact that many cassette recorders also had a built-in radio attested to this structural affinity. This also means that, when smartphones and MP3 players supplanted the cassette recorder as the major gadgets for studying and comparing Jahriyya recitations, this succession also precipitated a new form of intimate listening. The earbuds were comfortably tucked into the ear canal, the thin cord curled around the auricle and softly caressing the earlobe now and again. Brushing gently against the sensitive spots around the ear, they enabled a more personalized listening that at times even smacked of a certain (self-)eroticism. To what extent this link between listening and sexuality (i.e., between the physicality of sound, the vibration it produced as it passed through the ear canal and hit the eardrum, on the one hand, and the apparently immaterial nature of language and music, on the other) had inflected the reception of the Jahriyya recitation was hard to gauge. It was clear that such intimate listening had further increased the allure of diverse daores among the Jahriyya. Some young devout Jahriyya students told me how they shut themselves in a quiet room, put on their headphones, and listened attentively to the rhythmic breathing that punctuated the recitation of especially gifted Jahriyya reciters. A public recitation where at least hundreds were present was converted into a confidential whisper. The sound quality was far from ideal, as the rustling of clothes and the rasping coughing invariably interfered; however, such ambient sounds also gave a tinge of authenticity and a sense of presence to the recording. Moreover, they created a distancing effect that interrupted the desired intimacy between the aspiring listener and the marvelous reciter. Although earbuds, MP3 players, and smartphones did offer new possibilities for portable listening, and a large number of recitations could now be carried around in a pocket, the act of listening nonetheless continued to be sedentary rather than mobile among most Jahriyya listeners. In their sacred audition they had yet to adopt the mobile mode of listening normally associated with the Walkman and the iPod, the latter often considered an essential gadget for the modern flaneur strolling the streets of postmodern metropolis.24 Widespread circulation of unauthorized recordings and ever closer listening entailed a stronger attachment to the diversity of daore. Evidently deciding to swim against this mighty tide, the Jahriyya leader hoped to secure the authority

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of his CD in his campaign to standardize the recitation. Although he and those who stood by him tended to consider the production of this CD a historic event, it was hardly recognized as such by the general murīdūn, though few would openly challenge him. Given the inextricable imbrication of daore with history, some esteemed senior Jahriyya ahongs at times boldly expressed their disagreement. “Some old ahongs simply refuse to change, and they insist that their students follow them,” I was once told. “For they assert that they have adopted the daore from their mentor, who received it from a murshid—so who are you to say that their daore needs to be altered?” Few seemed interested in recalibrating their recitation after the normalizing recording. One reciter on the CD production team expressed his frustration to me thus: “I was told to teach the standard daore but haven’t been able to. No one listened to me; everyone has a different preference.” Most teachers at Hong Le Fu never studied the “standard” daore presented on the CD, and many of them came from southern Ningxia and therefore had a faster daore where there were more variations in cadence and the Arabic was pronounced slightly differently. There was thus palpable resistance to standardization even at the center of its propagation. Some students who had graduated from Hong Le Fu were allegedly refused clerical jobs in their home communities because their daore, painstakingly trained to reproduce the standard recording at Hong Le Fu, was not acknowledged by their fellow Jahriyya back home; their recitation did not resonate with the local musical and spiritual sensibility. Ironically, the presumably perfect product from the assembly line was loathed precisely by those seeking melodic ritual guidance. The diverse daores that trailed behind the homeless saints now came back to haunt those intent on silencing their unyielding polyphony—those who seemed to prefer a fantasied unity that had never quite existed among the Jahriyya.

AMPLIFYING THE VOICE: THE GENDERED SUFI

The newly available and affordable recording technologies offered by smartphone applications generated significant shifts to the configuration of gender among the Jahriyya, though these shifts were unevenly distributed across different regions and largely denied by many Jahriyya men. In Brian Larkin’s study of radio in Nigeria, one objection raised by the local Islamic authorities to the popularization of new sound technologies focused on whether the mediatized 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

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domestic arena contravened the Islamic separation of the sexes—they (presumably the Muslim men) did not want their wives listening to the voices of unrelated men.”25 Though sex segregation did exist under certain circumstances (see below and chapter 5), neither television nor radio had been subject to such controversy among the Jahriyya. Men’s voices, either in general or specifically in religious contexts, were seldom barred from entering women’s private spaces; devout Jahriyya women were at times encouraged to listen to and emulate the exemplary male recitation. The reverse, however, was not true. It was unanimously held, especially among men, that women should by all means be prevented from taking part in any collective recitation. Women were not allowed to pray in front of men, nor among them; they were to occupy the rear end of the prayer hall. Instead of having their own female imām (the one who leads the prayer), they had to follow the male voice that led the entire congregation. The congregation could include both men and women, but only to the extent that they did not mingle in the hall and kept to their separate quarters. That women had to be consigned to the rear of the hall and excluded from male vision was due to the prevailing view that the very presence of women, regardless of what they said or did, was in itself a seduction: since men were considered to possess unruly sexual desires, women had to be “protected” from the rapacious male gaze.26 However, this protection was achieved by banishing women rather than men to the marginal position; in other words, the responsibility for male decadence had been displaced onto women. This very logic applied to the ban imposed on women’s voice in the ritual recitation. While it might have been easier to cordon off space and confine women’s bodies to specified corners, it proved a great deal more difficult to ensure that their voices had been properly silenced. A drop of female voice, according to some Jahriyya men, would ruin the entire bowl of soup—the soup presumably a metaphor for male collective recitation. Yet it was considerably more difficult to police the ritual soundscape than its landscape, as practically no one was able to tell any modicum of female voice from the dense vocal fabric woven by the male voices. A woman seated at the back, thus securely isolated from the reciting men and conveniently stowed away from their visual field, could have opened her mouth and sounded her voice at any point during the ritual, and no one would have noticed. The ritual could be sabotaged even without the male reciters being aware of it. In contrast to the fear that the voices of male strangers might penetrate the 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 was the opposite scenario that provoked male anxieties: here the male space was under constant threat from the recalcitrant female voices.

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To be sure, that the dominant male voice was constantly under threat did not mean that the Jahriyya women would necessarily take their chances. Lila AbuLughod 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.27 Women’s resistance, therefore, is not exterior to the workings of power. Saba Mahmood subsequently developed this thesis into a more general argument, hence one potentially more susceptible to male appropriation:28 that female agency could be acquired as much by differentially inhabiting norms of patriarchy as by directly confronting and resisting them.29 Such words of caution need be taken seriously. While a small number of Jahriyya women I interviewed did express a desire to take part in male-only recitations, the thought that they could use this chance to sabotage the ermaili never quite crossed their minds. The introduction of new media technologies had yet to trigger a dramatic change in this regard, though it had added an unexpected twist. Once I observed a small group of Jahriyya students at Hong Le Fu listening to a recording on a smartphone. They passed the headphone around, and as each one listened, he grinned, chuckled, or smirked mischievously. I was luckily allowed 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. No one seemed to know the identity of the woman reciter, nor where the recording was made or 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, and the sense of directness was riveting. Some students admired the vocal virtuosity of the unknown female 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; the way one is heard is another. New recording technologies had evidently created new possibilities for women to be heard, but the new opportunities also caused new dangers. Here we have a case, perhaps, of the male gaze at female nudity in Western classical oil painting reproduced in the acoustic register.30 Nonetheless, many women were enthusiastic supporters of mediatization; some were even keener than men to have their recitations recorded and archived.

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But the articulation of voice and gender among the Jahiyya can be observed most distinctively in the live amplification of male recitations during collective rituals. To understand this, we first need to examine how new voice technologies had reconfigured the Jahriyya ritual space. A Jahriyya ermaili was often gauged by two limit modes of listening. At one extreme was the “deep” listening that required directed intention and unflinching devotion.31 It enlisted the whole body, and its aim was a trained comportment that attuned the listener to the recitation. Such attentive listening was rare, though, in most collective ermailis I participated in. It was considered the ideal only to the extent of its frequent breach. I did witness spirited bodily movements and intense emotional reactions from time to time; on one occasion I saw and had the unusually good fortune of being allowed to film a weeping Jahriyya reciter in the course of chanting the gripping Dazan from Madā’ iḥ. Yet a charged moment like this one, though existent in every ermaili, was far from the dominant mode of listening. Both in the prayer hall and outside it, many participants were often casually at ease with themselves. They were not listening so much as overhearing the ermaili. They had traveled from far afield to join the ritual, yet this participation did not necessarily summon them to a rigid state of rigorous listening. Men chatted away and paid no attention until almost the final moment of supplication; women seated outside the prayer hall exchanged news and gossip with their sisters whom they came to know only then and there and perhaps would never meet again; children ran around, weaving through the crowd and chasing one another in games of hide-and-seek. At times a stern male voice yelled through the microphone, trying, often in vain, to quiet the crowd; almost inevitably such a man would wind up reasserting the cliché that most ordinary Jahriyya murīdūn were simply not that pious anymore. But I must stress that this more relaxed mode of listening was not necessarily an indication of a lack in devotion, for those who heard the recitation in this way had nonetheless taken the trouble to drive for days to visit the tombs. They had happily eschewed the comfort of home and traveled long distances purely to participate in the ermaili. Those who were genuinely “impious”—who were they, anyway?— might well have saved themselves the hassle by not coming in the first place. This amounts to saying that for most people taking part in an ermaili, the matter was less how they listened than the fact that they were physically there to listen. To gen (follow) ermaili meant to enfold oneself into its sound, to be encompassed by its voices, even if such voices were treated as a sort of background music. Such listening did not necessarily require that one enter into an altered state of consciousness. Insofar as one could hear the sound of the ermaili, one was already following its lead and gathering the divine favors it invited. After all, most ordinary followers were there merely to gen ermaili; they were not

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the performers, nor did they need to put themselves under stress. For most lay disciples the ermaili was an aural experience, its physical ambit a function of the physicality of its sound. This very fact fueled the enthusiasm for introducing loudspeakers to amplify the male recitation. New sound technologies were seen merely to augment what should have been augmented a long time ago. The use of loudspeakers among contemporary Muslims has drawn much attention from anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. Anne Rasmussen’s interest in the sound of Islam was initially inspired by the electrically amplified call to prayer and Qur’anic recitation in Indonesia.32 Ten years before her study, Tong Soon Lee showed how the shifts in urban landscape and residential pattern in Singapore had given rise to more ethnically heterogeneous communities where the politics of broadcast 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.”33 Such complaints are perhaps ubiquitous in any urban environment where Muslims live among nonMuslims; for the latter, the sound of the call to prayer and the holy Qur’an may be considered an irritating nuisance. Isaac Weiner shows, for instance, how the dispute about the amplified adhān (call to prayer) in Hamtramck, Michigan, drew on often competing interpretations of secularism and pluralism; in such controversies, what counted as “urban noise” was subject to rigorous debates.34 Muslim Americans and Catholic Polish Americans argued over what sounds should be allowed into the public sphere and how, stemming from the Catholics’ anxiety 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 recently termed “techniques of inattention.”35 This is especially vital in places where sounds continue to encode memories of ethno-religious clashes: listening “too attentively” may invoke reminiscences of violence and give rise to new bouts of interethnic violence. In this case a certain mode of shallow listening, and a refusal to engage, work to facilitate rather than undermine interethnic peace. Needless to say, the sustainability of this fragile balance is not guaranteed. Moreover, under certain circumstances some Muslims may prefer not to be listened to. Attentive listening by state agents, for instance, may lead to excruciating interrogation and surveillance.36 These observations speak only partially to the Jahriyya soundscape, however. 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 were in fact discouraged by the Jahriyya authorities. Military clashes with the imperial government and political persecution suffered at the hands of the current regime had rendered many a Jahriyya murīd instinctively cautious in

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their dealings with mediatized public sound. In some places the ancient tradition of having someone beat a woodblock (bangzi)—thus producing a more subdued muffled sound as opposed to a public call to prayer—while walking through the neighborhood to alert people to the dawn prayer and suḥūr (the predawn meal during Ramadan) was still practiced. To be sure, Jahriyya murīdūn still employed public broadcasting to expand the coverage of their ritual voice; the difference lay in how they did this and who the intended audiences were. Hong Le Fu used to have only one low-end loudspeaker mounted on the tilted roof of the prayer hall. On a weekly basis it broadcast barely intelligible sermons prior to the Friday jumuʿa prayer. I could hardly hear the sermons even from my own apartment, which was only a two-minute walk from the daotang 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 ahongs attested, 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 ermaili and reinforce its acoustic appeal within the architectural space of the daotang. The amplification was directed mostly inward; it was designed not so much to draw others as to consolidate a more cogent collective self. This Jahriyya self was constitutively gendered. Though women were seldom barred from the prayer hall, neither was their presence welcomed. While some women did take the liberty to enter the hall, many more chose to remain outside. On innumerable occasions I saw older Jahriyya women voluntarily kneel close to the entrance; they stopped just at the doorstep, such that their refusal to cross the doorway 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 piety (fig. 4.7). “Only a really pious woman would act like this,” a Jahriyya lady in her seventies once told me, and those around her nodded in agreement. The implication was that those who did enter the hall were obviously not as pious. While men could as well be seen following the ermaili outside the hall, most of them treated it as an expedient to be avoided. The Jahriyya men did not enjoy being left out. Those who had to remain outside greatly resented their contingent exclusion; on spotting a tiny opening in the hall, they were lightning-quick to shove others aside and rush in to fill the gap. While technically speaking there was no spatial segregation of sex—both men and women could be seen in as well as outside the prayer hall during any given ermaili—there was still a crystal-clear division of space along gender lines: the physical space outside the prayer hall yet still within the earshot of the male recitation was a quintessentially female space. Many Jahriyya women

F i gu r e   4 .7 Jahriyya women kneeling outside a prayer hall as men streamed in for a ritual. Photo by author.

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occupied this marginal position where the male voice was about to vanish but not yet; they could hear it, but not quite. The introduction of sound amplification exposed precisely this structural ambiguity of the female position. To understand why this has been so, we need to reenter the prayer hall and examine yet again the uneasy fit between the sacred dayi’er and the new technologies of voice. For the female space, as we shall see, was not exterior to the male world; rather, it was a symptomatic representation of that world’s intrinsic incoherence. The female position offered us a special vantage point from which to identify what the voicing males would rather keep silent. At Hong Le Fu there were moments—surprisingly frequent, in fact—when a serene ritual was interrupted by something so out of place one would never have expected it in that setting. A vulgar song that accused one’s “bitch” (niang er men) of overspending and draining the family finances might arise from a smartphone whose owner was prostrating during a prayer, or a tantalizing female voice might stream out from another phone and somberly confide her loneliness, a lament that soon mutated into an invitation. The ubiquity of phones and the curious fact that many of them were not switched to silent mode (or completely off, for that matter) made every ritual, large and small, littered with popular songs. What one had heard looped ad nauseam in the local shops might be reproduced in the prayer hall just at the moment when everyone was silently reciting the Qur’an. The frequency and regularity of such irritating intrusions almost made one suspect that there had been some concerted effort to sabotage the ritual. Warnings were posted outside the prayer hall and verbally issued by the Jahriyya authorities, but few seemed to have paid attention. For a brief period at Hong Le Fu the ahongs tried to block all phone receptions by installing electronic signal jammers. For unknown technical reasons, however, this never worked, and no alternative solutions had been suggested. Almost every Jahriyya murīd I interviewed complained about the lack of devotion such irksome lapses seemed to signal, yet the phones continued to ring loudly during prayers and ermailis. Sufis may enter heaven after death, but in this life they might be as afflicted with hypocrisy as the rest of us are. The lurking presence of phones became all the more insidious when the ermaili was broadcast through an electric amplifier. In chapter 3 I discussed the structure of Madā’ iḥ ermaili, focusing on the division of roles between the lone reciter who reads the rawei (prosaic text) and the subsidiary followers who read beiti and zhewabu (both being poetic compositions that build on the rawei narrative). This arrangement meant that when microphones were initially introduced into the ritual space (first wired, then wireless as soon as the latter became affordable), it was the lone rawei reciter whose voice received priority, while the rest of the voices

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simply fed into the microphones obliquely. The social hierarchy in the dayi’er was thus aurally heightened and conveyed to a wider audience. Only the voice of the rawei reciter was clearly audible to those outside the prayer hall, whose access to the dayi’er, for that matter, was completely mediated by the amplified sound; the voices of the chorus, however, were trapped still within the four walls of the prayer hall. The spatial division between the inside and the outside of the prayer hall—a gendered division at that—was sensorially magnified and rendered more immediately perceptible by the ear. When the rawei reciter had a beautiful and pleasant voice, few would object to this particular arrangement of microphones; but things seldom developed as one wished. One of the major reciters in the Hong Le Fu area, Huansi—whose father was a deceased Jahriyya luminary known to have insistently preserved endangered ermaili practices through difficult times—did not possess an agreeable voice. On the contrary: he could barely follow the melody without routinely falling off-key. His voice was low and husky, his recitation a dull drone that maddened many a Jahriyya disciple. Rather than uplifting, his voice was frequently draining to listen to, 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 was normally expected of an ermaili. However, no one dared suggest replacing him. His status, as most Jahriyya murīdūn I spoke to took care to point out, was earned by his father’s good deeds. When his father passed away in the late 1990s and some wondered who would take his place, the leader allegedly replied with a rhetorical question: “Does he not have a son?” Even if Huansi’s voice was abysmal, that did not undermine his position. The new microphones only made matters worse, for his proximity to the device only exaggerated what he would probably have preferred to conceal or dial down. Previously he might have been able to hide his dreadful voice in the chorus and expected the latter to carry him through and mitigate his incompetence; now even this last line of defense 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 highlight precisely Huansi’s low frequency range. This had the unfortunate consequence of exposing the most awful part of his voice and broadcasting it to a wide audience. 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 frustration. The phones, whether smart or not so much, joined this technological conspiracy to sabotage the collective ritual. Often at the very moment when rawei was

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being recited, the ghostly presence of smartphones was most irritatingly felt because of the hissing static that frequently disturbed the lone male voice. When a call came in, even when the phone was set on silent mode, the electronic disturbances still interfered with the transmission of signals between the microphones and the speakers. It was extremely annoying that the phones producing such disturbances could seldom be identified. Some even suspected—and sometimes rightly so—that the rawei reciter himself was to blame for such interruptions. Ironically, the phones became all the more present when they were set on silent mode. While for some religious believers unanticipated technological mishaps signal divine intervention,37 few Jahriyya followers consider such static a sign of holy presence. Some found it annoying, but many had cultivated a different “technique of inattention.”38 Still others were wondrously oblivious and comfortable checking social media while following an ermaili. As such, they were as much on the producing end as on the receiving end of the mediatized sound. The phones, the wireless microphones, and the electric amplifier colluded to form a loop that was the technological dayi’er of the Jahriyya Madā’ iḥ ritual. Here we can begin to understand the specific articulation of gender and media among the Jahriyya. The gendered division of space was sharpened by mediatization, since the electronic disturbances were perceived most clearly and immediately by those who inhabited the space reserved for women. It was the female position, outside the prayer hall yet still within the earshot of the male recitation—first naked, then mediatized—that provided a special window on the internal ambivalences of the amplified ermaili. Technological mediation gave the Jahriyya women, and those men who happened to share the same position, a nearly unmediated access to the failure of the male voice. But this also came with a price: hindered from voicing their own recitation and discouraged from entering the prayer hall, their silenced voices were returned to them through the loop of the electric media. If the noises muddling the authoritative male voice can be likened to an aural negative, the photographic print was the silent murmurings of Jahriyya women.

3 In this chapter I have examined the mediatization of Jahriyya recitation, focusing on standardization and gendered amplification. To foreground the diversification of Jahriyya daore I began by discussing voluntary migrations and enforced exiles in the history of Jahriyya. Physical displacements had precipitated the expansion of Jahriyya into new territories, giving rise to subtle but continuous variations of daore. The diversification of daore was not by design; rather, it

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accompanied the geographical dispersion of Jahriyya murīdūn. Such dispersion was essential in the constitution of a sacred geography woven by numerous routes of pilgrimage. This also means that, from early on, the divergence of daores and their polyphonic mingling at Sufi shrines occurred almost simultaneously. It was this very polyphony that came to haunt the Jahriyya leader keen on standardizing daore. Because he was not a graduate of the traditional mosque education, he had little sympathy for what he considered the backward curriculum that had dominated the Jahriyya clerical training for over two centuries. Instead of abolishing it, however, he went for a more moderate solution by introducing new materials. The standardization of daore was a vital step in his more general attempt to modernize the Jahriyya education. This standardization was two-pronged: first, it set out to purge the Jahriyya pronunciation of any Saudi influence. The purpose was to sharpen the distinction between the two and to eradicate any gray zone in between. Second, it aimed to eliminate different daores and reduce them to the golden standard of the Hong Le Fu daore. To achieve this principal goal, the leader enthusiastically pursued a plan to record all major Jahriyya recitations on a CD and had copies distributed among the followers. This effort predictably failed. New modes of recording and listening apropos of MP3 players and smartphones breathed new life into the diversity of daore and heightened the fantasy of unmediated intimacy between the solitary listener and the revered reciter. Rather than facilitate standardization, popular mediatization thwarted its success. Gender has been a persistent theme in this chapter. Is it incidental that at the very moment when we are approaching the breaking point of Jahriyya liturgical heterogeneity—that is, when we witness the culmination of the two clashing forces at work throughout Jahriyya history, with diversification of daore undermining yet constantly circumvented by the opposing drive to standardization—we find gender emerging? If variation of practice, as this book has argued, further contributes to the inscrutability of liturgical rituals, which in turn lies at the foundation of what I have called fragile transcendence, then at the very point where the fragility of this weak transcendence seems stretched to its limit, the gender of the abstract saint is thrown into ever sharper relief. Is it plausible that the very operation of abstraction, the very possibility behind that statement I know not where or from whom s/he learned that practice but I suppose s/he learned it from some Sufi saint, is predicated on a gendered bifurcation where the sublimation of the male Sufi depends on the opposing demotion of the female Sufi, thus exposing the very gender politics carelessly (or deliberately, though without the author being fully aware of it) concealed by that apparently innocent forward slash? But hasn’t this chapter also shown ethnographic evidences to the contrary, evidences

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that demonstrate at once the peripherical position of the female Sufi and her structural proximity to the weak spots of a system that has systematically excluded her—evidences that should thus give us pause in making any simple argument in favor of a rigid gender division among the Jahriyya murīdūn? To what extent, and in what way, might the Jahriyya world afford female socialities and female sainthood? While the last question may take more than one ethnography to answer, in the final chapter of this book I place the Jahriyya women more squarely in the limelight and formulate an answer that can only be tentative and incomplete.

5 Labor of Faith

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my child” (wo de wawa a), Sijiuma once said to me, ending a long and winding tale with a sigh. “Who knows the pain I have been through?” She showed me her hands: years of hard labor, at home and in the field, not to mention the harsh climate in Ningxia, had afflicted her skin with severe xeroderma. Cuts took forever to heal; cracks never fully closed. New injuries added to old lesions. The wounds cut so deep that the pink flesh swelled along the seams of the gaping scission. “I cannot dip my hands in water,” she said. “The pain goes all the way to the heart” (zuan xin di teng). “O my child”—she at times repeated this endearment—“in whom shall I confide my pain?” Sijiuma had a daughter, Ping, who usually showed her affection with cutting humor, just the right amount of sarcasm at the right moment and, not uncommonly, exasperation with her mother’s silence and resignation in the face of misery. “You are the one who brought all this on yourself,” she said occasionally, less to blame her mother than to express a deep sense of compassion. An enthusiastic murīd with a father known for his commitment to the Jahriyya cause, Sijiu—who had been married to Sijiuma for over forty years now— volunteered to take responsibility for the daily maintenance of Hong Le Fu. Without the slightest hesitation he continued a tradition his father had long upheld: playing host to many Jahriyya pilgrims who traveled from afar to visit the sacred tombs at Hong Le Fu. He accommodated them in his modest house whenever he could and offered the best food and drink he could afford. His generosity was widely appreciated, yet what underpinned this admirable munificence was seldom noted. It was Sijiuma who usually cooked the meals, prepared the drinks, did the washing up, and returned the dishes to the cupboard—all in the recess of the kitchen while her husband entertained the guests in the living room. She

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could not identify specifically when the skin of her hands began to crack and peel, and despite what she had told me, she continued to dip her hands in water to wash the dishes and laundry. I bought her hand cream when I was away visiting my family, but I never saw her apply the lotion to her hands. Perhaps it was completely unavailing; what was the point of getting someone a tube of hand lotion when her unprotected hands were constantly exposed to water and dust for daily chores around the house and backbreaking labor in the field? Many Jahriyya women bore such a dual burden; in this they had much in common with their non-Muslim sisters. Speaking of the traditional Chinese practice of confining women to the private familial sphere, Elizabeth Croll once observed at the height of second-wave feminism that “if ideally women did one [household affairs] and abstain from the other [public spheres], it was the prerogative of the richer classes to live up to these norms. Among the poor, economic factors interceded to a greater or lesser degree to modify these standards in practice.”1 Surprisingly, from the pre-Communist through the early socialist decades, and well until contemporary times, for many rural women in northwestern China this double burden has remained onerously consistent, though its form has varied historically. Gail Hershatter describes how, in the first half of the twentieth century, owing to a variety of interrelated reasons—incessant war and arbitrary conscription, the need for extra income, bandits and lawlessness in local societies, and so on—men in rural northwestern China often left home to pursue temporary jobs elsewhere.2 Some sent remittances back to their family, but many did not—that is, if they managed to survive at all. Travels taken to evade abduction by bandits could easily end up with enforced conscription by the Nationalist army, and the difference between the two was often negligible. Women and others left behind to fend for themselves (the old, the cradled, the disabled, the diseased) often had to scrape a living off the meager land they owned or, more commonly, rented from a local landlord. While the Communist takeover in 1949 and the subsequent collectivization of rural economy did put an end to widespread kidnapping, the newly established communes soon dispatched their male members to perform sideline nonagricultural work or other paid employment in order to earn the hard cash needed for local economic advancement.3 This strategic decision in part retained the essential role of female labor in rural agriculture—a continuation from the pre-Communist times, albeit in a different guise. In both cases, therefore, rural women in northwestern China were the main domestic and communal labor force. “Seclusion was a sign of privilege,” observes Hershatter (echoing Croll), “one that poor women could not attain.”4 Why do we need to end an ethnography of the (male) Sufi voice with an account of female labor? At first glance, the two could not appear more different:

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voices are intangible and transient, drifting in space, delivering a warm embrace or inducing exhilarating ecstasy; labor is base and heavy, it involves sweat and strains the muscle, and the little pleasure—if any—it generates is quickly drowned in the overwhelming assault of exhaustion. Yet between labor and music, especially vocal music, there always seems to be a remarkable affinity that tunes the movement of limbs to the vibration of sounds. The practical rhythm of reaping wheat with a sickle, or ramming moist earth to erect robust walls for a clay house, inspires many a song that in modern China has been collectively referred to as laodong haozi, the “labor songs.” To this, even the Jahriyya Sufis had a noteworthy contribution. The following was said of siyueba taiye Ma Yide, the fourth saint in the Jahriyya genealogy: When they ploughed the land [to plant the crops], the teachers and the students went after ablution [wuḍū’] to seek the blessings [al-tabarruk] and propitiation [al-istirḍā’] of God. On the day of the harvest they went to the field, each of them carrying a flail. They stood in rows of equal length facing one another. Such is their competition: one row struck their flails on the ground and recited the word lā—which means lā ilāha [there is no god]—loudly [ jahran] with movements of feet [ḥarakāt al-aqdām], and the other row struck theirs, too, on the ground and recited ‘ in, which means illā allāh [but God]. Thus they took turns, and Ḥaḍarat [Ma Yide] joined them. He raised his left foot and chanted lā, and as his right foot fell he chanted ‘ in with the gentle swaying of his blessed shoulder [tamāyul katif al-mubārak]. His two blessed hands instructed [those in the group] to complete the remembrance of all six directions [al-jihāt al-sitt]. The  states of dhikr [aḥwāl al-adhkār] had now spread out, and the morning lights of the secrets [aṣbāḥ al-asrār] had arisen. The sun had been clouded, and difficulty had become easy.5

Idyllic as it was, this evocative vignette—“six directions” was presumably a reference to the characteristic hexagonal hat of Jahriyya—also revealed the gendered articulation of labor and voice: only men were allowed in the dayi’er, and Ma Yide would never have joined a female congregation even if there had been one. The story was set in the early to mid-nineteenth century, when women of impoverished rural families were no doubt an essential source of agricultural labor. Yet we found little mention of the working women in extant Jahriyya historical accounts. Labor entered the picture only as a subservient accompaniment to the pious voice, and when it appeared as such, male labor invariably took center stage, for male labor had a recognizable rhythm and was staged (thus made exceptionally visible) in a way that lent itself to dramatic effects (e.g., on a threshing ground

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where public celebrations were periodically held to mark harvests). This labor was as much presented to be seen as it was an inspiration for collectively performed songs. The very gendered nature of this isomorphic relationship between visibility and audibility is the main focus of this final chapter. Here, instead of approaching either directly—which would likely lead us nowhere—I have decided to describe the sites where both women’s exposure to the public gaze (male and female) and their active assertion of agency (however one chooses to define this elusive term) are articulated and constantly negotiated. These sites of contestation are many and various, but all of them have at their heart women’s labor, often collective labor. How are we to understand their boisterous sociality and their courageous, witty, and frequently humorous participation in rituals whose official soundscape allows no women to be heard?

THE LABOR OF FAITH, THE GENDER OF VOICE

This chapter has two main aims: first, it will revisit the ethnography as it has been so far presented. This review is meant to demonstrate the extent to which the world we have thus far described changes shape once we examine it from a position largely excluded from recitation. With regard to the Jahriyya Arabic pronunciation, for instance, we witness two opposing developments across the gender gap. We already know that the eclipse of Persian in Sino-Muslim religious education started in the nineteenth century and gained momentum in the twentieth.6 More male Sino-Muslims, including some Jahriyya murīdūn, enthusiastically pursued the study of Modern Standard Arabic as a way to learn what they considered the canonical pronunciation of the holy book. This became a genuinely visible trend only in the 2000s, thus taking a whole century to run its course. While Chinese transcription used to serve as the principal linguistic medium for such learning in the 1980s and 1990s—benefiting, that is, from the increase in Chinese literacy, especially among men, after World War II—by the early part of the twenty-first century this came to a definitive end. In its place we found a more “direct” approach, with ever more lay Sino-Muslim men having a good knowledge of the Arabic alphabet and rules of recitation and finding confidence in their phonetic proximity to the conceived centers of Islam in Mecca, Medina, Cairo, or Damascus. The same cannot be said of most Sino-Muslim women. While a minority of them did have some opportunity to study the Arabic alphabet (though in a considerably less systematic manner, for reasons to be explored below), by the late

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2010s many still relied heavily on Chinese transcriptions and transliterations in their Arabic studies, while many men had already moved on. This significant delay was in part the result of uneven advancement of Chinese literacy across men and women since the 1950s, and in part the consequence of disparate accessibility of contemporary learning resources across the gender gap. The ability to read Chinese for the first time made accessible to many rural Sino-Muslim women the large corpus of popular religious manuals and catechistic pamphlets that used to be comprehensible only to literate men. Being able to read Chinese, as opposed to Arabic or Persian, had enabled many women to refashion their relationship to faith at a time when their male relatives had largely renounced Chinese as the main language for learning about Islam. Women’s gain in literacy soon became a conceived loss: men began to see, or hear with contempt, from women what they themselves had long relinquished and condemned to the bin of history. The untimely coincidence of historical contingencies again thrust women back to an imagined past, as though they could never catch up with the grinding wheel of male Islam. Focusing on gender not only helps me reformulate the ethnography thus far; it also raises a new question that impels the ethnographer to draw attention to what might have so far been obscured. In this ethnography the word “voice” has often been used to refer to a specific type of voice. In chapters 1 through 4, the voice examined is almost always a ritual recitative voice. The war over the “correct” pronunciation, the institution of musical sociality in the prayer hall, the pace of Madā’ iḥ as affected by the force of social change, the disputes and negotiations around the standardization of daore, and the mediatization of ritual recitation—almost all of these aspects circle around the ceremonial voice of religious performance. Little attention is paid to voices that do not easily fit into this category: those deemed unimportant, noisy, disturbing, and therefore better silenced. Often we find these voices belonging to the Jahriyya women. Yet women are not always silenced in the Jahriyya world. For one thing, in some Jahriyya communities women have formed congregations of their own and have a space, whether assigned by men or found of their own accord, where they have collectively recited.7 They have gathered for self-teaching lessons, elected their own female teachers, and defended with wisdom and audacity their modest space against male criticism and intrusion. For another, their voices also coalesce around the formal ritual. Every Jahriyya commemorative ritual is an occasion for massive assemblies of followers who then have to be fed and taken care of. Though most murīdūn have no problem paying for their daily meals, most still prefer to eat from the temporary community kitchen set up at the shrine to provide free food and drink for the pilgrims. Food sharing is also considered a way to

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disseminate and absorb blessings: for these murīdūn, a bowl of noodle soup from the shrine kitchen contains as much nutrition for the soul as it does for the body. The word zhanji—“dipping into the [pot of] auspices”—is the term frequently invoked in this context. Divine blessings are passed through food, and consumption, an act that takes in and digests what is external and alien, is vital to the completion of the ritual. The transient sound of male recitation cannot be fully absorbed until captured by and converted into tangible food. It is primarily the Jahriyya women who bear the responsibility for this essential conversion. While men do contribute their labor to ritual preparation, the very material form of female labor—women’s “concrete labor,” to borrow a Marxist term—creates forms of social interaction that we do not observe among the laboring men. It is not so much who works and who does not as specifically how one performs the labor that draws a sharp distinction between the Jahriyya men and women. This gendered difference in concrete labor links up with the gendered ritual voice. Although recitation in formal ritual settings is essential for creating a sense of community among men, and their participation in group labor is only secondary in generating enduring social bonds, the inverse is true for many Jahriyya women. While some women do assemble to recite Mukhammas, the vocal dynamic manifest therein differs significantly from what we have observed of the male congregants: women reciters also sit in a circle, but this circle is seldom referred to as a dayi’er, and, as opposed to reciting as a group and following a rigorous division of roles, each woman chants separately, thus rendering the sharing of the same place purely external to the recitation. At those rare moments when their voices do reach a momentary synchronization, they converge only as the collocation of disparate voices that merely overlap incidentally in time. There is no leader or follower, so no syllable is dropped for others to take over on one’s behalf. Therefore, the endings of the second, fourth, and fifth lines of each Mukhammas stanza are covered by all reciters in the women’s group. Everyone is for herself. To be sure, women do gather, do grow familiar with each other as they assemble daily to chant Mukhammas. In that sense, activities of collective recitation do produce enduring social relations among them. However, the difference between men’s relationship to recitation and theirs cannot be overstated. If the regulated division of roles among different members of the male congregation constitutes a core feature of the Jahriyya daore, as shown in all previous chapters, then one could make the argument that women, despite the bonding they manage to create through daily recitation, are systematically excluded from having a daore. Women chant without a daore; they are barred from having one because no woman is permitted to become a leader in a congregation. Every female is equal to every other. The

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abolition of hierarchy paradoxically precludes the appearance of a female musical solidarity. Equality among women in musical terms only exacerbates the inequality between men and women in exactly the same terms. If such musical solidarity is unattainable for women in the ritual context, it offers itself to the pious and laborious sisters on other occasions. The concrete form of female labor—for instance, sitting around a broad table kneading dough for hours on end—provides ample ground for legitimate socializing with old friends as well as new acquaintances. Some women forge long-lasting friendships even if they meet only once or twice a year, and even if their first meeting was no more than a coincidence because they happened to be sharing the same table while kneading dough or chopping vegetables. The contribution of labor to ritual preparation is usually rotational in that geographically distant Jahriyya communities are recruited according to a multiyear calendar. While preparing for a ritual at Hong Le Fu, a woman from southern Ningxia might find herself seated next to a woman from western Gansu. They might strike up a conversation, enjoy each other’s company, and even wind up visiting each other’s homes as part of a future pilgrimage trip. The Jahriyya men’s transregional communal bond is created through the polyphonic mingling of their diverse daore, and the vocal dynamic in a local dayi’er holds the potential to integrate any male traveler into its acoustic fold and make him feel at home, whereas the tenuous connections that bind Jahriyya women together across vast distances are often the outcome of serendipitous encounters then cultivated and nurtured over the years outside the ritual context. The voices of jolly conversations around the makeshift worktop on which water and flour mix to incarnate and perpetuate the male ritual voice are the voices whereby women enter into a different sort of sounded solidarity. In the following, I elaborate on these observations by first examining how enthusiastic Jahriyya women pursue their studies of daore and what such efforts reveal about their special position in relation to the complex histories of Jahriyya Sufism. I then situate women’s recitation in the context of women’s labor and draw attention as much to the materialities that enable activities of sounding in the first place as to the materiality of sound itself. In order to throw into sharper relief the role of women’s labor in preparing ritual food, I will contrast it to men’s labor, particularly their preparation of guodiezi, “the fruit platter.” To be sure, this distinction is not rigid; the division of labor does not completely trace the line of gender. However, while men are allowed to participate in all forms of labor, the same is not true of women, for I seldom observed women work on guodiezi. Even with regard to those forms of labor deemed quintessentially feminine, menstruating women and women believed to have moral flaws are always excluded.

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It is not incidental that I found the site of female labor particularly revealing for understanding the Jahriyya ritual soundscape. Although I was seldom forbidden from setting foot in the female ritual space for the purpose of research—on one occasion I prayed behind a women’s congregation, to the shock and horror of some men who witnessed it, as such a practice flew in the face of the convention—frequent contact would still be considered extremely inappropriate. Congregations of Jahriyya women were admittedly few and far between. Of the two best-known female congregations I visited, one was in Wuzhong, a midsize city that is a twenty-minute taxi ride from Hong Le Fu, and the other was in the village of Xiaozhai in the southwestern Yunnan Province. The women in Ningxia had some vague idea of the existence of the Xiaozhai congregation, yet the latter, woefully, knew absolutely nothing about the former. Many male Jahriyya murīdūn considered the Xiaozhai women’s congregation alternately as a manifestation of the tolerance and progressiveness of the order with regard to gender relations, or as an early sign of Jahriyya slipping down a moral slope that would eventually lead to its decline. Which view prevailed depended on where one conducted the interview and to whom one spoke. By and large most Jahriyya followers I interviewed held that in Yunnan and Xinjiang one found a more favorable view toward women’s recitation than in Ningxia and Gansu, and, according to my fieldwork, this observation did have some truth to it, but local as well as generational disparities abound, to the point where any generalized assessment runs the risk of obliterating the facts on the ground. If women’s ritual space proves a minefield where one has to tread lightly so as, ironically, to avoid offending men, the occasion where women work as a group to prepare ritual food offers a much-needed relief for the frustrated anthropologist. A delightful coincidence structured my fieldwork in this regard. While these group activities afforded me rare chances to engage Jahriyya women in extensive, open-ended, and at times more personal conversations about their faith and life experiences, I also came to realize that these same occasions might well have been similarly uncommon for the women themselves. Even women from the same village did not usually have abundant time to meet up on a regular basis for socializing. Seasonal agricultural work and endless year-round household chores combined to keep many Jahriyya women, young and old, permanently busy. While men often indulged in joyous banter and epic “tonguebiting” ( jiaoshetou, or “gossiping”) as they pottered around the prayer hall after a service, I was not able to observe any comparable activities among women, except where they gathered to work in collaboration to prepare for a grand ritual from which they knew full well they were excluded. Where I found myself beyond reasonable suspicion and reproach for speaking to women openly, the

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Jahriyya women I spoke to also found themselves more at ease and exempt from male reprimand—even temporarily. Indeed, the collective conviviality could carry everyone away, if only momentarily. Amid this communal joy, women got a bit of breathing space where their unfailing diligence received some meager amount of emotional compensation. It was in this very space that I was able to approach them and conduct interviews.

LEARNING TO RECITE

Muslim women’s relationship with Islamic rituals, either in the mosque or in everyday life, has always been a topic of dispute. Terms such as “oppression” or “resistance” hardly hold any substantive meaning outside specific sociopolitical contexts. Like the word “patriarchy,” they tend to obliterate structural differences among distinct social formations, each of them characterized by a different configuration of power across the lines of gender.8 Speaking of the sociopolitical meanings of the new Islamic veil that had spread across the Middle East and North Africa since the 1970s, for instance, Leila Ahmed warns that, while the donning of a veil may be a gesture to protest sexism and Islamophobia in a society where Muslims are the minority, such meanings can acquire wider purchase only in societies that declare themselves committed to gender equality and equality for the minorities: “They are not meanings the hijab could possibly have in Cairo or Karachi or Riyadh or Tehran.”9 Some scholars may disagree with the last remark, especially given that what counts as gender equality is also notoriously difficult to define outside specific contexts.10 Donning a veil in Cairo for some pietist women is a way to avoid sexual harassment and boost self-confidence, hence contributing to gender equality, but one can also argue that this choice perpetuates the structure of male dominance by displacing responsibility onto women, hence exacerbating gender inequality. However, it is nonetheless true that one can hardly make any generalizing argument regarding the relationship between Islam and gender without risking severe distortions of historical realities.11 Saba Mahmood is not first to argue that the liberal feminist conception of agency may not be applicable to Muslim women living in certain societies, though in proffering this argument primarily to a Western academic audience, she also exposes herself to the danger of bypassing more complex local political dynamics pertinent to activists based in Egypt rather than the United States.12 Fifteen years before the publication of Politics of Piety, Lila Abu-Lughod, following in the

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footsteps of Michel Foucault,13 had already questioned the tenability of the common sense framework of “resistance” that had until then dominated a certain strain of feminist thought. In criticizing what she dubbed “the romance of resistance,” she suggested that “we should use resistance as a diagnostic of power”—in other words, to see sites of feminist resistance not as exterior to structures of power and forming their absolute alternative but as venues where power relations are restructured and reconfigured.14 Power shifts and transforms in the face of resistance, to the extent that all structures of power necessarily include their own undoing, and such partial and insidious subversions are integral to the continuous remaking of power relations. Power incorporates resistance; resistance generates power. Few could have put this in a more eloquent manner than Foucault himself, whose words, published in English in the early 1980s, still ring true for the contemporary moment: When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterizes these actions by the government of men by other men—in the broadest sense of the term—one includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole, there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.) Consequently, there is no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom, which are mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay. In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination).15

Translated into terms that pertain to the Jahriyya women, this particular view of what constitutes power makes plain what may appear counterintuitive at first glance: that the acquisition and enhancement of women’s agency and empowerment could also perpetuate—by reproducing or reconfiguring—structures of male dominance, and that “patriarchy” does not necessarily have to rely on overt and violent forms of oppression. While Muslim women may not need “saving,” local as well as transnational forms of misogyny, Islamic and otherwise, and broader structures of political and economic inequality also necessitate more

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nuanced engagement.16 Just as “oppression” obliterates distinct forms of male domination, “saving” homogenizes heterogeneous strategies of engagement. Many Muslim women around the world and throughout history have never ceased taking part in Islamic rituals, some of which may in fact be strongly gendered, and participation in them may be confined to women. Shīʿī women’s active participation in the Mourning of Muḥarram, the grand ritual commemorating the murder of Imām Ḥusayn during the Battle of Karbala, is common knowledge among anthropologists of Islam.17 Women’s crucial role in preserving and reinvigorating traditions of oratorical arts and poetry in Muslim societies have also been extensively examined by feminist scholars.18 More recently, Rachel Harris has offered an elaborate account of women’s dhikr (remembrance of god) rituals among Uyghur Muslims in northwestern China, which, while providing a secure occasion for women’s performative interpretation of Islam, also contribute to the perpetuation of gender segregation in the local religious context.19 Yet, in highlighting the ritual space specifically reserved for women, Harris’s work also joins a growing body of literature that examines the articulation of gender, ritual, and politics of identity among Muslims.20 We should also note that, in many Muslim societies, women and men are not equally positioned in relation to social and religious reforms that target particular ritual practices deemed “un-Islamic.” While dream interpretation has a prolonged history in Islam, and many male Muslim scholars have played central roles in its continuous popularity, the recent work of Amira Mittermaier shows clearly that in contemporary Egypt, women tend to be more closely associated with such a practice and thus more susceptible to criticism from reform-minded Muslims keen on spreading new forms of piety.21 Eleanor Doumato, in her remarkably detailed work Getting God’s Ear, also reveals how, by condemning as un-Islamic and abolishing ritual performances such as healing by amulets, spirit possession, and celebration of the Prophet’s birthday, political Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia (inadvertently) eradicated the conditions that previously underpinned the socioreligious solidarities among women.22 To be sure, men were also affected by such drastic measures. However, according to Doumato, while men could continue to forge new relations by attending prayer services and sermon lectures in the mosque, such options were largely unavailable to women. The Saudi government’s half-hearted efforts to establish women’s mosques and girls’ schools hardly sufficed in providing ample reliable spaces to protect women’s communities. Eventually, the damage caused by sociopolitical and religious reforms was unevenly doled out along the lines of gender. While consistently androcentric ideology did have a direct role to play, institutional changes that did not necessarily explicitly target women entailed no less harm.

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As in many other Muslim societies, among Sino-Muslims we find no legal consensus regarding the place of women’s voice in rituals. Women’s mosques—and hence women’s independent ritual practices, recitation included—are known to have existed among Sino-Muslims for centuries,23 although, as Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun have shown more recently, to some foolhardy male clerics women’s voices still constitute part of women’s xiuti, “shameful body,” and thus ought to be silenced.24 But, despite widespread male resistance, when Jaschok and Shui conducted their fieldwork in Henan, they found a rich and still flourishing tradition of women’s jingge, or Islamic chants, that include in their contents both religious scripture and more popular morality songs. A somewhat more rigid view of women’s voice prevailed among the Jahriyya murīdūn, though, again, we need to be attentive to the nuances. No Jahriyya men I interviewed believed that women should not learn to recite Mukhammas, Madā’iḥ, or Awrād; on the contrary, many women were encouraged to take part in intensive studies of these texts, and many male Jahriyya clerics were happy to convene courses on a regular basis to teach interested women. The point of dispute was not so much whether women should recite as where and how they ought to do so. Sijiuma, who appeared at the beginning of this chapter, often told me without offering further explication that women were supposed to recite “silently” or “with a low volume” (qiaoqiao di nian), and that they should avoid group gathering (ju zai yiqi). Regarding those women who did recite in a group and were unapologetic about their exuberant voices, Sijiuma hesitated to express open criticism. She laughed it off as an exotic innovation, yet her eyes also glistened with faint curiosity. Sometimes she seemed confused; at other times she simply did not care. If a Jahriyya woman wanted to learn any of the classical recitations, she would have to join a woman-only class. Such classes, despite the perfunctory support shown by men, were few and far between. Their existence depended heavily on whether the local ahong had time—which he often did not, as was shown in chapter 3—and, even when he did, he might be more obliged to teach men rather than women. Yet the local ahong’s was only one of the schedules an enthusiastic Jahriyya woman had to negotiate with if she were to keep up with her studies. A male ahong who used to teach women’s classes in Wuzhong once recounted to me his own experience: the class he taught had to be sandwiched between 9 and 11 a.m. Before nine the women had to prepare breakfast, send the children to school, and clean up. They would not be able to sit down well until after 8:30 a.m. (they often rose before dawn for the first prayer, and their day began immediately afterward). The class had to end before 11 so that they would have ample time to walk home and cook lunch for the little devils back from school. Afternoon was out of the question, as many women had to shop for groceries, and some had to

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take a short nap to refresh themselves for yet more chores in the evening. Even less time was available to those who still had to keep a small plot of land in spring and summer: agricultural labor nowadays is a female burden, since most men, except those too old or too feeble to travel, have taken up work in nearby cities. The paltry return from the land is too trivial to hold back the male laborers. How women learned to recite distinguished them even more from their male family members. In the 1990s some Jahriyya ahongs committed to women’s education used xiao’erjing texts (see chapter 1) in their courses, while many men were already beginning to abandon this classical pedagogy. Even more than xiao’erjing, the use of Chinese transliteration in studying Arabic and Qur’anic recitation—a newly acquired skill among most women—had been severely criticized by reformminded male Muslims since the dawn of the new millennium. Its lack of system, endless variances thanks to local dialects (just as in xiao’erjing, if not worse), and apparently odd stringing together of meaningless Chinese characters rendered such linguistic gymnastics particularly unattractive to men, who now had easier access to popular Arabic learning materials. To be sure, male determination to ditch Chinese transliteration and engage more directly with Arabic did not necessarily mean that their pronunciation had undergone dramatic phonetic shifts. For many the original pronunciation persisted despite all the efforts to the contrary. Relinquishing xiao’erjing and Chinese transliteration led less to a complete alteration of the actual sound than to a reimagined relationship between men and their conceptions of Islam. Although the hostility and suspicion toward Saudi Wahhabism—more an imagined version of it than one based on any reliable information—continued to reign supreme among most Jahriyya men, those of them with an enduring interest in the new methodologies in learning Arabic found no incompatibility between their interest and such deepseated anti-Saudi enmity.25 At any rate, they had happily transcended what they thought was a stage of backwardness, and they no doubt held that now it was the women who were to inhabit this obsolete position. Women’s use of Chinese transliteration was enabled by the steady increase in literacy among rural women in northwestern China. According to data from the World Bank, the rate of literacy among China’s adult women above fifteen years of age rose from only 51.1 percent in 1982, to 68.1 percent in 1990s, to an impressive 92.7 percent in 2010, and eventually, according to the most recent data, to 94.5 percent in 2015.26 Given the uneven distribution of educational resources across disparate regions, the increase in literacy among rural women in China since the 1980s may have been far more dramatic. For the first time in history, more women of humble upbringing could enjoy the pleasure of reading—or, as the state hoped, could better comprehend the political propaganda on television

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and in the newspaper. On the one hand, the expansion of literacy was no doubt a deliberate political move on the part of the Chinese state, which aimed to  strengthen twentieth-century nation-building; on the other, it also gave rise to unanticipated repercussions. One of these repercussions was a new relationship the Jahriyya women had developed with their Sufi learning. In both Ningxia and Yunnan, I found Jahriyya women relying heavily on their knowledge of Chinese in their daily recitation. At the front and on the walls of the women’s mosque in Wuzhong, for instance, one found sticky notes posted to remind the attendees of key Qur’anic verses and incantations frequently used in prayers; these notes mixed Chinese characters with pinyin spellings of syllables that had no corresponding Chinese characters (fig. 5.1). The ad hoc nature of much of this linguistic somersaulting was a clear indication of the kind of multilingual history charted out in chapter 1. In figure 5.1, which shows the Chinese transliterations of two brief panegyric lines recited after the dawn and the afternoon prayers in the months of Shaʿ bān and Ramaḍān, one finds the syllable ḍān transcribed as zuā. The latter is a sound that exists in neither Arabic nor Chinese; it is in Persian and Turkic, rather, that the Arabic ḍ is pronounced as z, and ramaḍān in Persian is thus ramazān (hence zuā). Women’s knowledge of the pinyin system, an essential tool for learning modern Chinese in the postwar years, thus enabled them to conserve and represent the very sounds that would have otherwise been lost to the tide of history as men moved on to new methodologies.

F i gu r e   5 . 1 Chinese transcriptions of the Arabic panegyric recited during the months of Shaʿ bān and Ramadān. Wuzhong, Ningxia. Photo by author.

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Since women were never allowed to join the men in recitation and were thus hindered from honing their vocal skills in a male-majority congregation, they were considerably more reliant on new media technologies. While some women did manage (with substantial effort, for sure) to learn the recitation by listening outside the prayer hall, most women either lived too far from the mosque or were too preoccupied with their chores to come by. Furthermore, one ought to remember that when men were able to attend the prayer services regularly while still enjoying a comfortable family life, this was because women had, whether willingly or reluctantly, borne the brunt of housework. Arriving home after the dusk prayer, his craving for gossip momentarily satiated, the man could reasonably expect a hot meal ready on the table, and freshly brewed tea in a pot set neatly on a tray, clean cups and mugs on the side. Some of these hardworking women also prayed, of course, but in order to strike a balance between religious obligation and family duties, they often had to pray at home. If in many Muslim societies women were relieved of the duty to pray in a mosque—hence, so the argument goes, women are given more freedom than men—here women were in fact compelled to pray at home, because their schedule did not allow them enough time to pray in a mosque. To be physically proximate to the prayer hall and listen live for their own gratification was a luxury only some women could afford. I once met a widow from Xiji in southern Ningxia who came to Hong Le Fu for a short visit. She stayed in her younger brother’s house, which happened to be only a five-minute walk from where I lived. She generously—though shyly— agreed to record for me her own recitation. Despite the wear of age, her voice still beamed with remarkable vigor and stamina. She was unable to recite any 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 where her current study had reached. “She learned just by listening to the voice coming out of the mosque,” her brother said with great pride, either not seeing the irony or simply not considering it ironic. However, for most Jahriyya women keen on learning the recitation, listening to recordings was the only available option. In chapter 4 we saw that the histories of migration and exile had precipitated widespread variations in the Jahriyya daore. Men traveled extensively on pilgrimage; in a prayer hall far removed from home, they reenacted these histories, often inadvertently, through their polyphonic recitation. Things differed for the Jahriyya women: recordings were becoming increasingly indispensable for most of them, and many relied almost exclusively on new media technologies for their daily studies. The daore or, more accurately, its simulacrum—we shall soon see why—that they gradually imbibed tended to be more uniform, and alarmingly akin to the “standard” propagated

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by the Jahriyya leader. If women’s pedagogical approach, using Chinese transliteration to learn Arabic and Qur’anic verses, was deplorably archaic to some men, the daore of their recitation provoked contempt from the same men for its disturbing freshness: it was so “new” and so “standard” that it sounded like unmediated propaganda from the leader. Women’s voices were either irritatingly antiquated or excessively novel; they never sounded “just right.” For those men who incidentally heard women recite—the vast majority of Jahriyya men never bothered to listen—there was more than one reason to object. On one occasion where I was recording a group of women in Yunnan who had graciously agreed to recite the whole of Awrād for me, a man suddenly appeared outside the women’s prayer room, thunderously demanding that they terminate the recitation. Some women retired in silence; others carried on in perfect composure. I later learned that while the women were reciting, a few pilgrims had arrived at the mosque and requested to be fed. With the women absent, the men were simply unable to put food on the table. They were furious, and somehow hearing women recite Awrād at the wrong time of day (Awrād was chanted in full only after the dawn prayer; my request, therefore, put the women in a vulnerable position) gave them a solid reason to feel more infuriated than usual.

UNISON WITHOUT UNIT Y

To be sure, some Jahriyya women were indeed taught by male clerics, yet the men involved in that enterprise often had to beware of a moral slippery slope. An ahong in his late forties once confided in me his own adventure in teaching woman-only classes: “I asked every one of them to leave immediately after the class. No one was allowed to remain behind, not even those with questions.” He said that there had been “rumors” (yaoyan) about illicit rendezvous and sexual liaisons between some male ahongs and their female students. Whether these tales were true or figments of the (repressed?) heterosexual male imagination—women seldom related such stories to me—was perhaps beside the point. The anxiety was real, and no effort was spared to avoid any potential suspicion. This further discouraged male clerics from admitting women into their classes. It also meant that, whenever and wherever possible, most Jahriyya women preferred to study with a woman teacher. One such teacher was Fāṭima, a determined Jahriyya woman in her early seventies when I met her during my fieldwork in Xiaozhai. To some Jahriyya murīdūn, the women’s congregation in Xiaozhai was a wonder, an emblem of female triumph, a feat that signaled the rising status of

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women in an order where women had never been allowed to voice their recitation. To others, it was a scandal, a source of embarrassment that ought to be concealed, left on its own, and allowed to perish. “I once visited them,” a male ahong from Ningxia once recounted his encounter with this congregation, “and I stood outside the prayer hall to listen to them recite for a few minutes. It was rather interesting.” That last comment summed up in a nutshell the often contradictory and ambivalent attitude toward the Xiaozhai women among some Jahriyya men. Fāṭima was undeterred by such male putdowns. She wrote her own textbook and designed her own classes. She used Chinese to scrupulously transcribe the Arabic sounds, and she paid out of her own pocket the expenses incurred from printing out study materials for her students. She had a loyal following. One student of hers, now also a teaching assistant who excelled at leading prayers, spoke to me enthusiastically about how much she had learned from Fāṭima. “Yet some people just thought she wanted to make a name of herself,” she scoffed. “They tried to push her out, but she persisted and clung on.” It was not clear who these people were or why they found in Fāṭima such a formidable foe. But few would disagree that if she had been a man, she might have faced much less resistance. Fāṭima could not expect much help from the male congregation. No financial assistance was ever extended to her; the women were fortunate just to have a room of their own. In contrast to the men, who often had jingzhuo on which to lay their books (see chapter 2), the women reciters at Xiaozhai used cardboard boxes as makeshift bookstands. “Premium peaches” (youzhi mitao), one box proclaimed; “instantly white” (like jiebai), said another, presumably an advertisement for a brand in washing power. Some women scraped the words off the cardboard, leaving patches of white in their place. The spatial layout of the Xiaozhai women’s congregation was distinctly different from what one normally observed among the Jahriyya men (fig. 5.2). Rather than lining the cardboard boxes up into a single row and sitting around them, thus forming something akin to a dayi’er, the women reciters spread out in the front half of their prayer room, still in a circle, each sitting behind her own bookstand. To someone familiar with the male dayi’er, it looked as though the women resigned themselves to a peripheral position, their circle somehow enclosing a second and invisible dayi’er in the middle. The recitation of dhikr (remembrance of God) among the Jahriyya follows specific numerical rules.27 During the chanting of Awrād, for instance, lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh is recited fifty-six times, ʾillā-llāh ten times, and ʾillā thirty-three times.28 In a male congregation the leading reciter keeps count of the requisite repetitions by counting the beads in his tasbīḥ, a rosary usually reserved for this purpose. Numerous times I counted with my own fingers, or used my own tasbīḥ, and almost invariably discovered that the actual number of repetitions seldom followed the designated number (although it is also likely that I was wrong most

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F i gu r e  5 . 2 Women reading Mukhammas in Xiaozhai, Yunnan Province. Photo by author.

of the time). Either the leader made a slight error—Awrād was performed daily before dawn in pitch black, and some participants, understandably, dozed off—or the followers got carried away by the rhythmic chanting of ‘ illā, its beat acquiring ever more intense force as the dhikr approached its end. The actual number of repetitions of ‘ illā, for instance, ranged anywhere between thirty-five and fortyfive, and the other two formulas did not fare much better in this respect. Things work differently among the women reciters. Since there is no leader in the congregation, each woman has to count her own repetitions with her own tasbīḥ. A heightened level of awareness thus obtains among the reciting women. Each participant takes great care to ensure that she performs the correct number of repetitions. While some men, thanks to decades of practice, can work the rosary with only one hand, flipping the beads between their thumbs and forefingers, with the middle finger functioning as a stopper, most women I observed used both hands. There was vocal unison in their collective recitation, yet this unison was largely the outcome of a coincidental coalescence. They tried to merge their recitations into one voice, each adjusting the pace and pitch of her voice in line with others. What was clearly missing, however, was the dynamic between the leader and the led normally observed among the men. Among the women, everyone was a leader as well as a follower. Everyone had a tasbīḥ, so everyone was ultimately responsible only for her own recitation. This dynamic can be heard most distinctly in women’s chanting of Mukhammas. As we saw in chapter 2, Mukhammas is where the Jahriyya daore reaches its

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most elaborate stage, precipitated by an apparently simple division of roles between the leader and the led, a division that quickly spins out to weave a complex vocal fabric. To recall my description in chapter 2, this division takes on a specific form: at the end of the second, fourth, and fifth lines of each stanza, the leading reciter is to omit the last two syllables and switch swiftly to the next line, leaving the followers to fill his shoes as theirs are filled by him in the new line. This dynamic, which alone guarantees a continuous daore, was completely absent in the women’s recitation. There was also considerably less variation in cadence. Most women recited at their highest volume and strived to keep their voices at that level. While this might indicate devotion and commitment, to a trained ear such consistency invariably gave rise to a sense of aural monotony that soon caused aesthetic fatigue. When every participant was equally committed and responsible, the tedious uniformity manifest in the collective voice rendered this recitation utterly tiresome—precisely the opposite of what transpired in a male group. A slight yet significant difference distinguished the women congregation in Ningxia from its counterpart in Yunnan. While the Jahriyya women in Yunnan prayed on their own and were completely cut off from the male congregation, the women in Wuzhong had their prayer room wired up to the main prayer hall, and the voice of the male imām was thus relayed live into their space. The idea was to have women pray in synchrony with the men, though in a separate room. This technological innovation inadvertently exposed a fact that usually remained undisclosed in the male hall: although prayer was often considered an activity centered on voice—the leading imām recited the Holy Qur’an and indicated with set incantations to the followers when to bow and when to prostrate—it in fact relied equally on visual cues. For a Jahriyya murīd committed to praying five times a day, each prayer session was divided into three parts: the compulsory prayer ( farḍ), the essential prayer after the example of the Prophet (sunna), and the supererogatory prayer (nafl). Only farḍ was led by an imām; both sunnah and nafl were performed on one’s own in silence. Between prayers it was the visual cues given by the imām that signaled to the followers when to stand up and begin the next set of prayers. Although both sunnah and nafl were performed individually, there was a tacit agreement among all attendees that everyone should try to finish in the same amount of time. There was no stress on synchrony, as there often had been in collective prayers. Nonetheless, one was expected to complete all of one’s prayers at about the same time as the others did. There was a loose yet lasting expectation for uniformity even when the prayer was not collective in nature. This means something simple only at first glance: that the imām, if he finished his farḍ slightly earlier, had to wait until most behind him in the prayer hall concluded their own prayers before he could stand up to signal the beginning of

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sunna and nafl. And vice versa: when a follower finished his farḍ early, he had to do the same and wait for the cue from the imām. The imām might turn his head and steal a peek to know when to start the next round of prayers (he was sitting with his back facing the followers), and the followers, as I frequently observed, could also signal they were ready by coughing. Despite the frequent acoustic signaling, however, no sound could replace the imām’s visual cues to the worshippers. It was precisely here that the women in Wuzhong faced their major hindrance in following the lead coming out of a speaker: they simply could not know the right moment to stand up for sunna and nafl, since the imām never vocalized the takbīr (i.e., Allāhu akbar) that announced their start. What made this depressing was not simply that they had to rely on guesswork in this regard, but that they were either left in suspension—thinking they might have completed their farḍ too early for sunna, when all of a sudden the male imām let out a long supplication that concluded all the prayers—or had to wait with great patience seemingly indefinitely, when the silence relayed through the speaker must have felt like eternity. This disparity was only exacerbated in Mukhammas recitation. The women did not all finish their prayers at the same time, and as a result, while some might be prepared to launch the Mukhammas chanting following the male vocal cues from the loudspeaker, others might still be performing their prayers. This showed manifestly how a gendered “audio-division” sowed the seeds of discord among women themselves (fig. 5.3).29 When women were required—by men—to follow the broadcast male voice as opposed to tuning in to each other’s recitation so as to enhance a group dynamic, what appeared was a slow but palpable process of “individuation”: between each woman and the broadcast male voice there developed a unilateral relationship that excluded all her female peers. Each woman listened only to the disembodied male voice that emanated from the loudspeaker mounted high on the wall of the prayer room; each woman was ultimately alone in confronting a voice that she merely overheard. This had two opposing consequences. On the one hand, an impressive vocal unison might arise as every participant strove to follow and emulate the faceless imām. When every female voice coincided with the broadcast male voice, they also tended to merge into one among themselves, thus creating a fleeting synchrony. On the other hand, one frequently heard a dispiriting dissonance that clearly signaled the acoustic unraveling of the congregation. For just as the daore quickly unraveled when only a small group of men tried to recite Mukhammas (see chapter 3), so it was precisely when women participants tried to completely synchronize their voices and align them with the voice of the male imām that the group recitation failed to genuinely reproduce the daore essential

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F i gu r e   5 .3 Women in Wuzhong, Ningxia, reading Mukhammas after the last prayer. The amplified male voice was being broadcast from the speaker mounted on the hall. Note that the woman on the far-right side had yet to finish her prayer. Photo by author.

to Mukhammas. So concretely embodied by each woman reciter was that idealized reciter who read the missed syllables on one’s behalf that the essence of Mukhammas daore had been entirely lost on the women’s congregation. In women’s effort to become rigorously accurate in their recitation, and to fulfill individually what only a collective could achieve, there was a vulnerable vocal unison devoid of a dynamic musical solidarity. In the room of their own, recitation did not facilitate the formation of a sounded sociality among the women. On the contrary: group recitation among women seemed to beget the opposite of what transpired among men. To understand how voices—other voices, voices that existed outside rituals—can indeed help to create and maintain long-lasting relationships among women, we have to look elsewhere, and the place where we can find an answer is not far from the male prayer hall.

LABOR OF FAITH 1: WOMEN AND YOUXIANG

In his mid-thirties, the portly Ha ahong had recently divorced his young wife, with their two sons, one seven and the other barely thirteen, now living with him. He did occasionally lead prayers and Mukhammas recitations at Hong Le Fu, but

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given his stout, solid build, his major work seemed to lie elsewhere. He was in charge of the boiler and kept an eye on the water tank essential for the ablution services. He fed coal into the boiler, a job he performed with quiet endurance. When I saw him his hands were often covered in soot, his shirt soaked in sweat and dirt. Over six feet tall and with a throaty voice, he gave out an air of unpretentious simplicity. With a stable income as a respectable albeit low-level Jahriyya cleric, it would not be too difficult for Ha ahong to remarry, though he was also aware that the two children in his custody would probably make many potential brides think twice. “I don’t really care about her looks, or how much money she can make,” he confided in me once, “but she must be willing to stay home, and take care of me and the children. She cannot go out, she must not gossip. I need a woman who really wants to have a life [guo rizi] with me.” Ha ahong also had a theory about gender difference. “There is something that men have but women do not,” he said to me during our first interview. Perceiving my confusion and embarrassment, he continued unperturbed: “It is the knot in the throat [houjie, Adam’s apple].” In contrast to the Western folkloristic belief that a piece of the forbidden fruit had gotten stuck in Adam’s throat, Ha ahong’s comment on houjie veered in the direction of gender disparity. He told me that houjie functioned to prevent men from making illicit and gaudy conversation, while women, missing this essential body part, were free to indulge in such unwholesome talk. To Ha ahong, women in general were by nature loquacious. Their voices in the ritual space had to be silenced because they were by definition garrulous. It was “the knot in the throat,” something that presumably blocked the projection of the voice, that gave men the supreme power to place their recitation high above any women’s chatter. The insertion of the knot, on this view, was almost equivalent to an act of castration: men acquired their voices and became the animal that is heard—the common sense idea that the human is a speaking animal is an inherently male construction, for a speaking animal that remains unheard or not listened to will most likely remain an animal whose speaking would be considered nonsensical brute howls—thanks to a block that paradoxically reduced their ability to speak and recite. Women, on other hand, were stuck in the deep fold of morally suspicious and socially meaningless babbling.30 I examine these so-called babblings of women in this chapter. These were the very voices that some men thought justified the exclusion of women from ritual recitation, and I focus on those exchanges that took place when women engaged each other more intensely as they gathered to prepare the food used to conclude recitations. My interest lies not in describing what they spoke about but in explaining the specific form of labor they were involved in and its social ramifications.

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As we know, there are various types of occasions that generate conversations of varying temporal durations, each of them affording different possibilities for developing social relations. We may greet someone in the morning and move on without waiting for a response; we may bump into an old friend in the street but not be able to talk for long if it is a cold snowy day and there is no place in sight to sit down for tea; or we may spend hours queuing up for a ticket to a popular Chopin concert and out of boredom strike up a conversation with a fellow stranger and randomly start a romance from there. Whether a conversation can carry on and where it will end up eventually rely on any number of factors, and a slight change (e.g., a much shorter queue at the box office) may tip the exchange in a completely different direction. Words and things are thus intertwined, and Jahriyya women’s resounding voices outside ritual recitation—their cheerful laughter, witty banter, and juicy gossip—must be viewed in relation to the particular context of their labor. The social bond women did not manage to cultivate in the prayer room they succeeded in creating outside it, through the mundane conversations animated by the vigor of labor. Yet is not a Sufi supposed to find truth precisely where others see profanity? The food that composes the staple of every ermaili is youxiang, a sort of deepfried dough often consumed with mutton stock. Its exact origin is somewhat of a mystery. Some mentioned, vaguely, that youxiang was one of the foods Prophet Muhammad recommended for his army of warriors in the conquests of Islam’s early years: the dehydration caused by deep-frying and the arid desert climate made youxiang ideal for preservation in prolonged military expeditions. Others offered a dreamier story about an incidental encounter of the Prophet with an impoverished follower, who welcomed the Prophet into his house and was then embarrassed by the fact that he had little food to offer the noble man. The Prophet caught sight of a ball of dough lying on the kitchen table, picked it up, and thrust it into a wok of hot oil on the burning stove (I chose not to point out the obvious inconsistency—what sort of a pauper would own enough oil to fill a wok?). The companion quickly fished it out, and, lo and behold, the floury lump had now become a golden aromatic bannock; to the Prophet’s delight, the deep-fried dough was golden brown, soft on the inside, crunchy on the outside. Thereafter, youxiang (literally “scent of the oil”) purportedly became the food to be consumed after all Islamic rituals regardless of location (which obviously is untrue). Still others believed that youxiang was a metaphorical representation of gold coins— massive ones, that is, more like gold plates—tokens of wealth that spelled forthcoming luck as a consequence of the ritual properly performed. Regardless of its obscure origin, youxiang remains an essential food among the Jahriyya murīdūn (fig. 5.4). While its consumption often follows the recitation,

F i gu r e   5 . 4 The male anthropologist unashamedly contaminating the fruit of women’s hard work. Wuzhong, Ningxia. Photo courtesy Ma Zhiguo.

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its production always precedes it, often by days. Depending on the projected number of participants, the total number of youxiang made for a particular ritual can range anywhere from several thousand to a hundred thousand. Experience over the years has taught the Jahriyya murīdūn at Hong Le Fu to make pretty accurate predictions regarding how much youxiang is needed for crowds of every size. Large quantities of flour are mixed with water and yeast to ensure that the final dough is leavened. The colossal dough is then deposited in a stainless-steel container to rest for a night, covered by electric blankets that supply the moderate heat necessary for leavening. At Hong Le Fu, the job of hauling bags of flour from the warehouse to the communal kitchen was performed by men; likewise, they appeared to have also taken over comparable jobs that required more physical strength. These tasks were often of short duration and finished mostly individually or in pairs. Men also chopped up chunks of raw lamb and beef, some fresh, others frozen, and retrieved from the community freezer. Although this type of work might last longer, men still mostly performed it alone (fig. 5.5). For those men tasked with delivering the finished youxiang to sheltered storage reserved specifically for cooked food, constant movement made extended social interaction with coworkers even less practical.

F i gu r e   5 .5 A lone man chopping beef. Wuzhong, Ningxia. Photo by author.

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F i gu r e   5 .6 Quality control. Wuzhong, Ningxia. Photo by author.

Women’s labor at Hong Le Fu told a completely different story. Kneading dough sounds like a simple enough task, but Jahriyya quality control is epically hair splitting. To ensure that just the right amount of same-sized and equalweighted youxiang were produced from the mother dough, women had to monitor closely the weight of each youxiang they made (fig. 5.6). Despite their years of experience, many women still used a scale to measure each dough before they set out to knead it. Each woman was offered an apron, a face mask, and a pair of protective sleeves, and every helper, regardless of gender and social status, had to perform ritual ablution before taking part. Anyone with known moral flaws was unequivocally shut out. Being allowed to give a hand was therefore a form of social recognition, from which anyone of dubious credence was excluded. (Luckily, they made an exception for the anthropologist on-site.) For the women permitted to help (presumably those of a higher moral caliber), the occasion of labor offered a rare chance for socializing. Numerous hardwood worktops were set up adjacent to each other; plastic stools were distributed. Women sat for hours, kneading doughs, measuring their weight, and laying them down in the metal trays to be carried over to the hot oil boiling on the gas stove. This was not easy work: it required strength and stamina, given how many doughs were to be kneaded and how long the women had to remain seated. This did not necessarily mean, of course, that women sitting next to one another would always start a conversation. For one thing, they had to produce a predetermined amount of youxiang every hour on the hour to meet the daily quota, which was often around ten

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thousand (for a large ritual that needed a hundred thousand youxiang, therefore, the preparation had to start ten days in advance). For another, speaking— especially telling jokes (presumably morally spotless ones) that provoked garish laughter or excessive giggling—was considered potentially threatening to the state of cleanliness after ablution. The emission of inappropriate words in this case was akin to male ejaculation and female menstruation in that it breached the boundary of the body that was established by ritual means. The restraint some women practiced was often identifiable as a reluctance to answer my interview questions, and when they did answer, the reply was often delayed and patchy. Among women themselves, however, the communication was considerably smoother and more cheerful, despite my irksome presence as a minor nuisance. Much conviviality transpired around the kneading table (fig.  5.7). Some women were curious about where their coworkers came from—from which province, which county, or which specific Jahriyya community, who their leading ahong was, whether he was there, how many hands he had managed to bring along, when they woke up in the morning, how long it took them to travel to Hong Le Fu, and so on. For a large collective ritual to commemorate a particularly consequential saint, the food preparation had to begin at least a week in advance. Hong Le Fu, like any other Jahriyya daotang and gongbei, distributed the work on a rotational basis among different communities in the wider Ningxia-Gansu area. The Jahriyya communities in Yunnan and Xinjiang were seldom called on for this undertaking, presumably because of geographical

F i gu r e   5 .7 “Stop fussing about and get lost.” Wuzhong, Ningxia. Photo by author.

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distance. After all, northwestern China was the stronghold of Jahriyya, and there surely was no shortage of dedicated Jahriyya murīdūn in Ningxia and Gansu who would happily contribute their labor. Most of the women I interviewed at Hong Le Fu lived within a twenty-mile radius from the daotang. They hit the road in their rented coach just after the dawn prayer, arrived around 7 or 8 a.m., and set about working as soon as they disembarked from the bus. A smaller number of women would stay overnight or over several nights to carry on working; most, according to my observation, would leave after a day’s work. They would pass their job to a different group of women from a separate community they might have no knowledge of. It was not uncommon for women from multiple villages and communities to work side by side. Rotation of work did not mean allowing only one community in on any given day; on the contrary, the larger a ritual was, the more women of diverse places of origin mingled with one another—simply because more work required more hands. Those murīdūn who worked multiday shifts often came from areas beyond the twenty-mile radius centered on the daotang. The Jahriyya community of Xijitan in southern Ningxia traveled regularly to various daotangs in northwestern China to help with the preparation. Their men slaughtered the animals and chopped up the meat; their women kneaded the dough and deep-fried the youxiang. Most of them found shabby accommodation in or near the place where they worked; some brought their own bedding and slept in the streets. I observed this in Lanzhou in 2015 before the annual commemoration ritual dedicated to the founding murshid Ma Mingxin (fig. 5.8). Many times I came across ʿĀ’isha, a Xijitan native in her late forties. A mother of two sons, she was one of the most enthusiastic and long-term helpers at ermailis. “I once consulted the ahong about whether I should let my older son drop out of school,” she said while scrubbing the interior of a stomach from a bull slaughtered just minutes before. “He said I shouldn’t. He said I should try all I could to keep him in school. He was right.” She was often reticent and restrained; when she did speak her voice was soft, and she had a way of talking—slow, hesitant, yet quietly persistent—that made one wonder what she had been through. She often looked at me with a melancholic smile. Once, after a ritual in Lanzhou, through a bustling crowd I spotted her leaning in silence against a column by the principal imām’s office, looking distraught. I approached her and asked what had happened. “I lost my badge,” she answered, almost sobbing. Every helper (every reciter, for that matter) was given a badge by the event organizers to identify who they were, where they came from, and whether they could be admitted into certain spaces. ʿĀ’isha had a badge that said “staff” (gongzuo renyuan), which she had worn proudly for a week; then it was lost in the hustle, perhaps stolen by somebody keen

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F i gu r e   5 .8 A few hours’ sleep before the ritual begins. Lanzhou, Gansu. Photo by author.

on keeping a souvenir. Suppressing my own desire, as an anthropologist, to collect such items, I gave her mine. Her eyes lit up. “Thank you ahong, thank you! You are such a good person, thank you!” She continued to bow to me as I walked away from her to catch my bus. Her joyful smile returned, even only momentarily, to ease the look of fatigue that had shrouded her face for days.

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Dough-kneading and gut-scrubbing were not the only occasions where women could be engaged in conversation. The making of youxiang, because of its essentially religious nature, tended to impose more restrictions on women’s socializing in the course of work. By contrast, women involved in rinsing and cutting vegetables were often allowed more leeway (fig. 5.9). Gregarious ladies in their seventies complained loudly about their scheming and lazy daughters-in-law; they also berated their sons mercilessly for being impotent weaklings and easy prey for their manipulative wives. Younger ones made fun of each other’s physical clumsiness and commented on one another’s outfit. This work, often performed outdoors, was considerably less intense than in the stifling kitchen where the youxiang were being deep-fried: one even occasionally caught in the air outbursts of exuberant laughter. When the women flipping youxiang in the deep wok came out for a break, they often joined their sisters in the courtyard. Seeing me filming them with a camcorder, they often asked me to take a group photo of them with the people they were particularly fond of (fig.  5.10). Embarrassing anecdotes related by one were quickly taken up by others and inflated into fullblown scandals that became extraordinarily entertaining. On one occasion a woman from a community close to Hong Le Fu told a story in which she, in her sixties and still completely illiterate, mistook a male restroom for a lady’s room. She walked in unawares, only to recognize her embarrassing mistake when she saw men urinating in front of bowls. Her friends roared with laughter, and I saw a few wiping tears from the corners of their eyes. She blushed, but soon regained her bearings. Turning to me, she said, “I could have gone to college, you know.” Others nodded in agreement. “Then life would have been very different.”

F i gu r e   5 .9 Peeling onions. Wuzhong, Ningxia. Photo by author.

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F i gu r e   5 . 10 “Come and shoot us a nice photo; we want to be on posters.” Wuzhong, Ningxia. Photo by author.

LABOR OF FAITH 2: MEN AND GUODIEZI

If youxiang is an indispensable offering that straddles the sacred and the profane, its consumption by ritual officiants and participants satisfying both physical and spiritual needs, guodiezi tilts more heavily toward the sacred. Guodiezi, or “fruit platter,” is normally composed of assorted fruits and delicacies sedulously arranged on a salad plate (fig.  5.11). With no exception, all Jahriyya rituals I attended were followed by the sharing of guodiezi. According to those proficient in the undertaking, its centerpiece was three dates, though my observation showed wide variations regarding the number of dates used. The origin of the practice was said to date to the mid-eighteenth century, when the first murshid, Ma Mingxin, was vying for followers with rival orders. It was said that, to distinguish himself from his Sufi predecessors in northwestern China, who charged exorbitant fees and requested lavish meals for ritual officiation, he vowed to make his a path for the destitute. On one occasion when a poverty-stricken family that invited him was embarrassed about having practically nothing to offer him, Ma Mingxin looked around in their decrepit garden and picked three tiny dates from the ground. “These will do,” he said, showing the dates to his followers. “Behold,” he instructed, “in the future, insofar as a family can offer anything more than these, you shall not refuse to perform their ermaili.”

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F i gu r e   5 . 11 Guodiezi. Wuzhong, Ningxia. Photo by author.

A set of rules coordinate the “fixing” (ding) of guodiezi. As one places the three dates at the center of the plate, one has to recite yā Allāh, yā Muhammad, and yā Shaykh, each for one date, in that order. According to a popular Jahriyya manual, eight sorts of fruits and nuts in addition to the dates were required to finish the guodiezi, though my interviewees also admitted that in certain circumstances

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fewer types of fruit were available, in which case “seven sorts will do, but one needs at least five.”31 The complete list runs as follows: dried persimmon, unroasted walnut, apple, peach, banana, Persian olive, (dried) plum, and grapes (or peanuts). The affixing of each item to its appropriate position in the plate is accompanied by the incantation linked to that position (fig. 5.12). All fruits are not of equal status. According to some senior Jahriyya murīdūn—the knowledge is not esoteric, but there is no consensus with regard to detail—the persimmon is of prime stature, second only to the dates. Therefore, when the guodiezi is presented to the reciters at the end of the ritual, the persimmon should always be facing the leading ahong, the most respected member of the cast. The unroasted walnuts take third place, and among the rest there is no clear hierarchy. Many self-proclaimed ritual connoisseurs insisted to me that, though various items might be missing from the guodiezi, the dates and the persimmons were absolutely irreplaceable; some even included the walnuts in this list of essentials. Yet, according to my observation, while the dates—of diverse varieties and qualities—were always present in a guodiezi, both persimmons and walnuts seemed dispensable. Contingency dictated what went into the guodiezi, and the participating reciters, surely not without some grumbling, could still swallow the compromise and let it pass. Some families’ guodiezi were a chaotic collection of assorted fruits, so sloppily arranged that the stacked pile collapsed even before it

F i gu r e   5 . 12 Incantations for guodiezi. Photo by author.

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was presented to the ahongs. Liberties were taken to replace most of the eight types of fruits listed in the popular manual. Some such substitutions tried to keep a consistent color palette, replacing some fruits with others of a similar color; others seemed to have done away with any criterion whatsoever except local availability and reasonable cost. It is not an overstatement to say that during my fieldwork I observed as many different iterations of guodiezi as I did rituals of recitation. Each family differed in this regard, and even at Hong Le Fu daotang, the contents of the guodiezi consumed after each ritual varied widely according to what fruits were available in the local farmer’s market that particular month. The fixer of guodiezi is invariably a man. Women’s exclusion is tacitly acknowledged and taken for granted; I never heard it challenged either openly or privately. Men work in small groups of, on average, three to four people to assist the main fixer. Some slice the apples and peaches; others peel the oranges and bananas. It takes more time to pick out the small twigs mixed in the raisins purchased from the local market. The fresh walnuts, creamy white and tender in texture, need be thoroughly rinsed and drained. The dates, the indisputable centerpiece, sometimes have to be steamed, softened to just the right degree so they will melt in the mouth of an old ahong who has lost the teeth to chew but not the will to eat. However, in my experience, the timing for fixing the guodiezi was somewhat bizarre: very often the men in charge did not start the work until well after the ermaili had already begun. At Hong Le Fu the fixer normally fixed the guodiezi in a room adjacent to the main kitchen and separate from the prayer hall. He performed his job while the sound of Madā’ iḥ resounded through the packed daotang compound. Small talks and brief instructions were exchanged between him and his volunteer helpers, who were often respected senior males from the local community. I was allowed to observe but not to assist, even when it seemed they could use an extra hand, presumably because of their fairly legitimate suspicion of my mores as a rootless, roaming anthropologist in his early thirties. For a ritual set in a family, the fixer did his work either in the same room where the recitation was taking place or in an adjoining room separate from the kitchen. What I found puzzling was that the fixer, silently reciting the requisite incantations while affixing each fruit to its appropriate position in the plate, seldom ceased speaking to those around him. He might comment on the size of the dates (“These are too small. I can barely see them!”), the shape of the apple, the color palette of the guodiezi, or he might ask about a particular family member who was absent. He did not pause his work while speaking, nor did he seem to be in a rush or appear particularly pious—if by “pious” we mean observing complete silence. He was dedicated and relaxed at one and the same time. At one family

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ritual a fixer—an admittedly reputable Sufi in the Hong Le Fu area—was in the same room as the reciting dayi’er while he was preparing the guodiezi. He chatted away boisterously with his helpers, none of whom bothered to hold the door and shut it lightly behind them as they entered and exited the room. The noise from the door banging thunderously against the frame, irritating as it was, never disturbed the continuous flow of the reciting voices. The room seemed to have split in twain, each embraced by its own distinct soundscape. It may be a bit of a stretch to consider the work involved in the fixing of guodiezi a form of labor. Compared to the kneading of dough and the hauling of bags of flour, fixing guodiezi appeared considerably less demanding physically. The fixer stayed indoors and walked only a little; he could stand or be seated while doing his work. He had a small retinue of assistants who usually performed the baser work, leaving him to perform the final touch. The physical exertion of his labor was minimal, yet he was accorded the highest respect. Because of the sedentary nature of his job, the fixer also had more time on his hands and was thus more inclined to converse, as long as the content of the conversation did not trespass the moral limit. In the hierarchy of labor, the male fixer wore the crown; his importance was in reverse proportion to the amount of physical labor involved. This excursus into the setting of guodiezi enables us to clarify the specific nature of women’s labor in the preparation of ritual food, and the way such labor facilitated the making of social relations outside the marked context of recitation. Although the fixing of guodiezi requires patience and extraordinary scruple, the entire process lasts on average no more than one to two hours and can be considerably shorter if necessary. It starts as the ritual begins and must end before the ritual is concluded. The number of the guodiezi needed, even for a ritual that included a hundred thousand pilgrims, barely exceeds ten. It is not supposed to be shared with all and sundry; rather, it is reserved for the reciters and the notables. Surely no one is forbidden from partaking of it if they happen to get hold of some remainders, yet few outside of the inner circle can gain access to the coveted platters. Most pilgrims simply do not know where to find the guodiezi, and, by the time they do, the platters might have already been divided up by the reciters behind their back. Guodiezi is food for the elite in both its preparation and its consumption. Only some are allowed to make it, and even fewer are granted the privilege to enjoy it. I was often allowed to slip into the select group to take advantage of the generosity of elite Jahriyya murīdūn who, seeing me photographing and filming the process of ding guodiezi, simply could not bring themselves to ignore me when they presented the fruits to the revered ahongs. For an anthropologist, having no sense of shame and a thick skin always helps one go far, for better or worse.

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If guodiezi points us to the unstated yet persistent structure of hierarchy among the Jahriyya, youxiang seems to convey a strong message of égalité. The sheer amount of it distributed after each ritual attests to this equalizing tendency. Everyone is given at least one piece, and some are given two, even three. The Jahriyya pilgrims are not the only beneficiaries of this generosity; as a matter of fact, neither are the Muslims. During my fieldwork, some non-Muslim Han in the neighboring area also partook of the celebration, and tradition had it that interested Han were given more youxiang, either as a show of goodwill or as a way to draw them closer to Islam.32 In the olden days, when poverty and starvation were endemic among the ordinary peasantry, youxiang could be a rare source of nutrition (recall the frequency of rituals performed at Hong Le Fu discussed in chapter 3), for it was made with flour and oil, both of which would have been beyond the means of those in abject penury. For many Jahriyya murīdūn, youxiang represented an important legacy of piety and openness—a much-needed antidote to the arrogance one found among some Muslims keen on condemning others to the blaze of hell. Youxiang seemed to hold out a hope of universalism that crossed the divisions of class, gender, ethnicity, and religion. Some Jahriyya murīdūn objected to this openness, their bitter acrimony revolving around the suspicion—which was partly founded—that some Han had come for the food alone, and this, according to them, compromised the efficacy of the ritual. Others found this view absurd and pathetic; they argued that, as long as the crowd was properly channeled and the danger of stampede avoided, the more the merrier. In contrast to guodiezi, which followed an elitist exclusionary logic in its making and sharing, youxiang held out the hope for further expanding Jahriyya’s spiritual and social world. A handful of non-Muslim Han had become friends with some Jahriyya murīdūn and attended Jahriyya recitations regularly. They enjoyed the conviviality, even though food had largely become secondary, since their economic condition had improved significantly over the last couple of decades. This contrast leads us to an important observation: that the product of men’s labor (guodiezi), an item of food central to the efficacy of the recitation, serves precisely to shrink the Jahriyya world, closing it in by instituting a clear hierarchy, whereas the product of primarily female labor (youxiang) precipitates its expansion. The fruit of female labor—a form of labor that is acknowledged, though only secondarily—becomes the means by which Jahriyya can cross the boundaries drawn by religion and ethnicity. Jahriyya has acquired the outlook of a certain philanthropic cosmopolitanism thanks to what women are able and willing to offer. It is as though the vibrant conviviality that transpires in women’s time-consuming dough-kneading is so powerful and infectious that it passes

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through the youxiang and springs forth to enchant others regardless of their religious affiliation and ethnic belonging. Men’s work in the fixing of guodiezi is restrained by detailed rules. They might talk among themselves and joke with a subdued sense of humor. They might smile, but they seldom laugh. The men that assist the main fixer seldom exceed three in number, and they always go about their work in a quiet room away from the bustling pilgrims. By contrast, the making of youxiang is considerably less puritanical. The broad and sturdy worktops employed for the kneading of doughs are placed either in a large airy kitchen, or outdoors under the shade of trees where curious pilgrims and cheerful children can sit, observe, and partake of the joy. In the path leading up to the ritual finale, the Jahriyya world revolves around the jolly voices of the laboring women.

3 In this chapter, I have explained the necessity of disambiguating the different types of voices that have been subsumed under the same category in all previous chapters. The voices of recitation mostly belonged to men. One can hardly write an ethnography of Jahriyya Sufism without noticing that this order, and SinoMuslim communities in general, are strongly androcentric. The fact that gender has so far remained marginal in the study of Islam in China thus reflects the deepseated structural patriarchy that warps the field as a whole. But this is not to say that all Sino-Muslim women are necessarily “oppressed,” or oppressed in the same way. Between their being silenced in formal rituals and open male oppression lies an entire gamut of positions and situations where the fine line between female agency and male dominance is often muddled. The women I interviewed did at times express grievances: some wished to learn the recitation through lessons that were more rigorous while others bemoaned lost opportunities and dreamed of what could have happened had they been given a chance. Yet few of these women would go so far as to claim that they had been “oppressed” (mansplaining alert!). They complained, yes, but before long moved on to something else: they talked about their travels and pilgrimages, their contribution of labor over the years, where they were in their own studies, which male ahong had the most captivating voice, the stories they had heard about the mothers and grandmothers of past saints and leaders, and so forth. Being denied a voice in recitation did not hinder them from being empowered by other means. And the reverse is no less true: possessing a sense of empowerment did not necessarily mean that women were challenging the structure of male dominance. The two could run parallel to each other, or they could be mutually reinforcing. A

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stronger sense of female agency could indicate a more intense subjection to the structure of male domination. The ultimate question, then—which the ethnographer cannot and probably should not answer—would be, Shall we remain content with a perhaps deceptive feeling of empowerment, or shall we work to overthrow a structure of inequality, feel powerful, and thus be subject to relations of power in a different way? Needless to say, this question, when posed separately from specific contexts, makes little sense. The Jahriyya women had their own views on joy and sorrow, their own ways of dealing with subjection and resistance, and their own visions for piety and obedience. Who is the anthropologist to say what they should or should not aspire to? What the anthropologist can do, and what I have been trying to do in this chapter, is to reveal the variety of female voices that were excluded from the official ritual performance yet persisted despite such systemic exclusion. Some of these voices, as I have shown, still belonged to recitation. Women formed independent study groups, partly because they had to set their own schedules around household chores, and partly because most male clerics were either too busy or too fearful of being implicated in tall sex scandals. Many women also relied heavily on new recording technologies. They listened to recorded recitations, paused and replayed whichever sections they found difficult to reproduce. They mostly used Chinese transliteration to assist their studies rather than reading directly from Arabic, a practice that was quickly becoming obsolete among men, who were moving on to more modern forms of pedagogy characterized by a more direct engagement with Arabic—though such engagement did not necessarily create a wider acceptance of the “standard” Arabic pronunciation among Jahriyya men. The old sound had yet to surrender to the conquest of the new voice coming from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Indonesia. Men’s ambivalent attitudes toward women’s learning—both contempt and admiration, often mixed and hesitant—was in this case symptomatic of the ambiguity among men themselves, for they heard in women’s voices what they both loved and despised—that is, the old sound that was still central to their recitation but had been under attack from reformist Muslims keen on standardizing the sound of the holy book. Men’s disputed relation to history manifested itself in the disputations surrounding women’s recitation. What clearly distinguished women’s from men’s recitation was the specific dynamic in the reciting congregation. I have not described women’s performance of Madā’ iḥ ritual because no women I knew had been allowed to lead such a ritual, nor take part in one as reciters. Though some women had learned to recite Madā’ iḥ from recordings, they had never received an invitation to exercise their skills in an actual ritual. Needless to say, what one learned individually in a quiet environment was a far cry from what transpired in a real congregation—a point

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illustrated in much detail in chapter 3. Because of this exclusion of women from Madā’ iḥ, in this chapter I have turned to women’s recitation of Mukhammas. I came across only two women’s congregations where this recitation was performed on a regular basis. Women’s recitation was invariably excluded from the networks of pilgrimage that brought diverse daores into one prayer hall. Considerably less polyphony could be heard in women’s congregations. Despite the high volume and the undiminishing enthusiasm, an exhausting monotony seemed to shroud the women’s voices. Worse yet, since no woman was allowed to lead the collective recitation, the division of roles essential to the preservation of daore was largely absent in women’s congregations. Here every reciter was on an equal footing with everyone else, and everyone’s recitation was reduced to an individual practice. The voices merely overlapped. Some women tried to produce a deliberate synchronization, an effort that only led them further away from the Jahriyya daore. The kind of social bonding among men that was derived from the  musical structure of recitation was almost completely missing among women. They did indeed recite, and they cherished the modest space they managed to wrest away from men, yet so unstructured were their voices that they possessed no daore at all. Some men referred loosely to “women’s daore” while remarking on their recitation; such references were rare, however, and they seldom cast that daore in a positive light. It is in the realm of labor, rather, that we find women’s voices acquiring a life of their own. At this point I pushed the limit of what counted as “voice” to include those voices outside the ritual context, which often appeared irrelevant to the animated recitations. I examined the material conditions that gave rise to women’s social interactions around the male recitation. The main focus was on the concrete form of women’s labor. How they worked and how long it took them to finish the work had a direct impact on whether and how deeply they could engage each other in conversations. Kneading dough for youxiang stood out as the major form of labor in facilitating continuous communication among women of diverse communities brought together to supply service. The friendships created in such contexts could be transient, but they could also persist and last for years—in some cases, for decades. While the network of pilgrimage was largely androcentric, in the rotation of labor service women’s transregional links were continuously renewed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this female network was considerably more fragile and precarious; many women themselves were not aware of its significance, or even its existence, in contrast to men’s heightened awareness of pilgrimage. By comparing men’s fixing (ding) of guodiezi and women’s making of youxiang in the last section of this chapter, I also revealed the extent to which women’s contribution of labor in fact enabled an expansion of the Jahriyya world

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across ethno-religious boundaries. Youxiang helped to transform collective recitation into a certain kind of cosmopolitan philanthropy regardless of religion and ethnicity. One should not overstate this openness and generosity, for the number of non-Muslim beneficiaries was admittedly small, and a deep-seated distrust of the Han still prevailed among many Jahriyya murīdūn. Frequently referencing ethnographic materials presented in previous chapters, and placing them in a new light, this final chapter also shows how gender is not one perspective among others when we explore the nuances of Jahriyya Sufism. I make this argument not on the general level—to do so would require a different method, one that anthropological fieldwork, an essentially inductive approach, may not be able to provide—but based specifically on the ethnography I have presented in this book. This is also why, rather than dealing with gender straight away at the beginning of the book, I postponed it and let it gradually emerge through the thicket of ethnographic description. This, to me, is a dual commitment both to the perspective of gender and to the methodology, as well as to the craft of writing, that bears the name of ethnography. For ethnography is not only about the presentation of a different world; it is also about relating to that world, implicating oneself in that world, and wandering through its intricacies without hastening to extract data for the sake of whatever theory one is momentarily infatuated with. For the Jahriyya murīdūn, salvation lies in sound; for the anthropologist, redemption relies partly on a form of ethnographic writing that tells mundane stories without pursuing illusive coherency or fetishizing alluring fragments. The Jahriyya world, like any other, is a skein of twisted threads, with its own fair share of conflicts, contradictions, and commotions. If this ethnography has at least managed to succeed somewhat in revealing these complexities while also leaving space for the voices of the Jahriyya men and women, then the anthropologist may entertain a (false) sense of relief and momentarily come to terms with his notorious desire to observe and write about worlds that differ from his own.

Epilogue Ethnography and the Future of the Jahriyya Sound

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e have traveled a long distance, and the final bit of the journey might have seemed anticlimactic (supposing there has been joy and excitement along the way). The order of presentation in this ethnography almost exhibits a cumulative involution: starting from the grandiosity of empires and nation-states and the remarkable linguistic interpenetration that gave rise to the current Jahriyya sound, we moved progressively into more minute and apparently trivial details. Thus, in the end, it seems, a story of the transnational sensorium of Islam concludes beside the worktop on which women knead dough for the unassuming youxiang. The decrease in scale appears to mirror the diminishing of significance; an epic story, unable to sustain itself, eventually collapses and reveals its bare bones. Something as broad as the global politics of Islam is finally reduced to something as trifling as the banter and laughter of a group of women who could not even read, and whose voices were unequivocally excluded from formal recitations. Yet what is ethnography if not in part an attempt to lay bare the profane foundations of seemingly imposing histories and structures—so imposing their contours begin to blur, and their dazzle does not enhance but rather hinders understanding? No decent anthropologist would like their ethnography to be considered reductive in any sense of the word, yet there still remains that lofty anthropological ideal that, by examining ostensibly simple facts of everyday life, we can come closer to a more tangible knowledge of the world-historic changes that often lie beyond our immediate grasp. In the exercise of ethnographic writing, this often entails an inversion. Fieldwork usually begins with meticulous observations and documentations of small details, with the wider picture not emerging into view—if it ever does—until much later. In writing, however, one

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must reverse this order: one must begin by demonstrating the general relevance of what one is to describe and illustrate why anyone would want to read a book filled to the brim with seemingly useless ethnographic trivia. All nonfiction writing may have to follow this rule; only the most arrogant of authors would presume that, whatever he writes and however he writes it, his work will always be avidly read, from cover to cover, by his imagined fan(atic)s. Writing is less a monologue than an invitation to a dialogue—or, better, to a public conversation. For an anthropologist, the danger is always of excessively bending one’s ethnography to fit into the newest theoretical fad, thus making one’s work an easy object of appropriation that feeds into the self-perpetuating, and increasingly self-absorbing, reproduction of theories that interest only a small group of anthropologists who happen to control some scarce resources. Between adopting new perspectives to help one think more deeply and differently and using the same perspectives to declare allegiance to certain “camps” that wield temporary power in a volatile academia is a fine line many junior anthropologists are finding increasingly difficult to toe. Unfortunately, such difficulty is only aggravated by the ferocity of competition in the academic job market. The lack of a sense of security can creep into the prose; between the neoliberalization of universities and the current state of anthropological writing, there may be a structural link the exact nature of which still awaits the perceptive gaze of a daring anthropologist. It takes time—perhaps a lifetime, for some—to realize for whom one writes. No doubt the intended audience of professional academics is first and foremost one’s fellow academics. We need to meet the academic standard set by our respective discipline and speak to the theories that interest most at that particular moment. For an anthropologist today, this may be harder than it sounds, for the discipline is making multiple (or multiply denotated) turns, and theories supersede one another at a speed exciting to some, confusing to others, and irrelevant to the rest. Many times a few young Jahriyya murīdūn who could read English sent me messages on social media asking about the progress of this book. “Please could you send us a copy once it is completed,” they requested with typical Jahriyya courtesy. Those who could not read English but were no less enthusiastic inquired about the prospect of a separate Chinese version or at least a Chinese translation of the English edition. Given the widespread Islamophobia that has led to the suppression of most books about Islam in the Chinese publishing industry, this prospect now is woefully slight. The interest of young Jahriyya murīdūn in this book does not merely reflect a general curiosity about their depiction by an outsider anthropologist who pompously claimed that he had a PhD in observation. Shortly after I left in the summer of 2015 and sometime in 2016, Hong Le Fu was hit by an overwhelming

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governmental clampdown that would continue to the present. Nearly all students from Xinjiang were dismissed and sent home with no prior warning, their contact information deleted by their once intimate classmates and Sufi mentors. “We had to, not just for our own safety, but more importantly for theirs, too,” a senior Jahriyya cleric told me with remorse in August 2018. A school that used to contain over two hundred students was thus reduced to half its previous size, and for more than two months in the spring of 2018, the madrassa was closed down under pressure from the local government. A tall flagpole planted in a whitewashed concrete pedestal was erected in 2016 outside the gate of Hong Le Fu, flying the national red five-stars high above the entrance (fig. epi.1). Colorful if dreary propaganda murals were painted on all exterior walls of the Hong Le Fu compound; all depictions of crescents and domes, initially signs representing Islam with the aim of promoting ethnic and religious harmony, were scratched off and painted over with what could only have been hasty strokes (fig. epi.2). While beyond a shadow of a doubt politics has now taken an abrupt downturn for the Jahriyya murīdūn, the extent of its impact cannot be overstated. For when I showed figure Epilogue.2 to a young Jahriyya cleric, he was positively surprised; he knew about the original murals, which were the work of the local government, but had no idea of the scratching and repainting, which he suspected was the work of the same officials who had been thrown into panic and fright. Meanwhile, as officials fretted about stepping over an invisible red line and unwittingly killing off their political career, the madrassa at Hong Le Fu reopened, and students continued their studies undisturbed.1 Yet something vital has indeed changed. The large-scale dismissal of students in 2016 has left an enduring mark on the Jahriyya soundscape at Hong Le Fu. Had they not been dismissed, by the time of my visit in August  2018 these students would have undergone five to six years of continuous training. Considerably more experienced in their recitation, by now they should have been able to lead such rituals as the daily chanting of Mukhammas with impressive discipline and vigor. Their untimely departure proved disastrous: the young students recruited after their dismissal—now the majority in the student body—are barely able to keep up the daore. It is surprising to witness that, in a matter of three years, the time needed for reciting the same five pages of Mukhammas has shrunk from an average of twenty minutes to a mere ten. In 2015 I spent a considerable amount of time learning the Jahriyya recitation myself in order to conduct what is often referred to in anthropology as “participant observation”; in 2018, when I returned to Hong Le Fu with the same daore—the one I absorbed in 2015 and practiced by listening to field recordings—I found myself at a complete loss. My breath was cut short at places where I thought the duration should have lasted longer, and the daore structure I described in great detail in chapter 2 had nearly disappeared.

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F i gu r e ep i . 1 The red Five-Stars flying high at Hong Le Fu. Photo by author.

Encompassed by these new voices, still fresh in their lack of extended training, I could not help but wonder what those older students, now dispersed, must be doing at that particular moment. Perhaps they, too, were reciting Mukhammas, each in his own home, to the scent of a burning incense stick planted firmly in a brass bowl, or else they were tilling the soil, locking up the corner store, or merely

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F i gu r e ep i . 2 Harmony sans domes and crescents. Photo by author.

lying in bed scrolling on their smartphones. But their voices remained with me, in my recordings as well as in my own voice. “And when the Prayer is finished, then may ye disperse through the land, and seek of the Bounty of Allah: and celebrate the Praises of Allah often (and without stint): that ye may prosper” (Qur’an 62:10). Indeed may they prosper. In some rather unappealing way, then, my recordings and the present book have become a source for many Jahriyya murīdūn to learn about what was little more than unworthy common sense only five years ago. The pace of change is flabbergasting. Only two now remain of the nearly twenty senior clerics who used to teach at Hong Le Fu in 2015, all the rest having left for various reasons, mostly to chair local mosques in rural villages. Looking back now, many Jahriyya murīdūn agreed that 2015, the time of my fieldwork, represented the last golden days of Hong Le Fu before clampdowns were enacted and even teachers had to be disbanded. The few students who still recognize my face—those who in 2015 were freshmen and in 2018 were seniors—lament that they made slight errors while recording recitations for me in 2015, and that now there is no way to remedy it, since those along with whom they performed the recitation have long been dismissed.

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Surely all ethnographies need be documentary in one way or another; such, after all, is the minimum requirement for all nonfiction writing. Yet writing about a population such as Muslims, living under a regime notorious for its political whimsicality, can considerably intensify a sense of urgency, even a compulsion to document practically everything one comes across. In Ningxia, most buildings of a conceivably Islamic style have been hurriedly demolished and rebuilt to evince loyalty to an increasingly chauvinistic state unabashed in its celebration of a fabricated Han culture. Street placards with Arabic translations, ubiquitous only a few years ago, have been painted over or replaced as though Arabic was never present. What I did not consider worthy of documentation in 2011 has now been wiped out, with practically no trace left behind. Political manipulation of memory is a constant in human history, and to someone who grew up in a self-proclaimed socialist country, this should not have been surprising. However, when in a space of three years a whole world seems to have been turned upside down and inside out—those who work with Uyghur Muslims may have a great deal more to tell—one is nonetheless astounded by the unrestrained violence of a political power that now claims to be a force of peace on the international stage. Although Sufism continues to hold its appeal among many Sino-Muslims, most Sufi orders are facing rapid decline. Daotangs and mosques are allowed to crumble and collapse; the few worshippers left in the once-majestic halls lament the passing of the golden eras. With neither visionary leaders nor steady streams of income, some formerly influential orders begin to give and eventually dissolve. They are assimilated into other Sufi orders or even into a non-Sufi denomination. In the face of such threats, it is understandable why some orders decide to shore up and standardize extant ritual practices and go to such lengths as to deliberately establish new rituals to sustain their distinction. Jahriyya is no exception in this regard. It is also clear that not all are able to keep up with the quick evolution of the Jahriyya sound. I remember once spending an hour or so with a young Jahriyya student after a Mukhammas recitation. We trailed behind as everyone else was exiting the dimly lit prayer hall and eventually decided to stay. He said he wanted to confide in me something he was uncomfortable sharing with others. He did not beat around the bush. “I always get the daore wrong,” he said. “How?” I probed, then suggesting that he recite into the zoom H5N I had just used to record the group recitation. The moment he opened his mouth, I realized instantly that he was truly not managing it: he had a woefully disagreeable voice. It was low and hoarse, and he had no sense of key whatsoever. “I must get it right.” His voice trembled with terror. “Otherwise no one will hire me.” He wanted to speak to me because he thought that I, an “expert in music,” should be able to

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offer some professional advice. I wished I could, but all I was able to do was lie and comfort him by saying, “Well, it’s not that bad, in fact,” bolstering this unabashed falsehood with my nonexisting degree in musicology. Lies piled up quickly, but I did not and still do not know what else I could have done. His voice was in fact better than Huansi’s (see chapter 4), yet he did not have a father nearly as eminent as the latter’s. The boy was slim and looked ill nourished; his sallow face gave off a soft glow of melancholy in the dark moonlight streaming in the open window of the Hong Le Fu daotang. I never spoke to him again; he did not come back to me. This ethnography has told numerous stories and left many more untold. Some of these stories may strengthen the argument I make in this book while others may appear tangential or superfluous. Perhaps in contemporary academia, given its reliance on quantitative assessment and its general preference for succinct articles packed with information driven by a clear argument, ethnography as a form of nonfiction writing is inevitably at a great disadvantage. But if anthropology, as some of its practitioners suggest, calls for “an ontological commitment” to one’s “subjects,” then we may have to seriously reconsider the current condition of some of the anthropological prose.2 Jargon and neologisms are as much political devices employed to solidify hierarchies and effectuate exclusions as they are rhetorical devices used to establish vain authority and conceal disciplinary crisis. In many ways this present ethnography has succumbed to this same trend; after all, it is a product of contemporary anthropology written by a novice. Yet in long-winding tales, much as in long-winding fieldwork, there is something that cannot be exacted from simple note-taking performed by a camera-equipped fieldworker parachuted into a place, keen on efficiently collecting publishable data in a limited time period. Stories of specific persons and locales, precisely because of their apparent particularity, are where universality is to be sought, while academic jargon and spurious theories are manifestations of particular complacencies disguised as universalist claims. Many Jahriyya murīdūn would disagree with their depictions in this book; others have already refused to see me again. I have befriended many and antagonized perhaps even more, especially by revealing my views on gender and by raising the possibility that Jahriyya might have owed more in its teaching to Central Asia than to Yemen. Ontological commitment to one’s interlocutors is not equivalent to identification with them, and at times genuine respect demands unflinching disagreement. Whatever I have and have not written in this ethnography, the Jahriyya murīdūn will continue to tell their own stories and raise their own voices in recitation, in defiance of political suppression and Islamophobic slander.

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F i gu r e ep i .3 Sijiu. Photo by author.

Of the many faces I have seen of the Jahriyya, Sijiu’s has been the saintliest (fig. epi.3). What fascinated me above all was his laughter while narrating the harrowing stories of the destruction of tombs at Hong Le Fu in the late 1950s. Where one would have expected grievance and bile, one received in their stead humor and a quietly optimistic sort of resilience. Such resilience holds the future of the Jahriyya sound; in such resilience, too, is the hope that in the end, after all is said and done, all Jahriyya murīdūn and all Muslims in China will be able to practice their faith with dignity, free from arbitrary intervention and political violence. On this note of perhaps misguided optimism I end this ethnography.

Notes

Introduction 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

All Qur’anic excerpts in this book are from The Meaning of the Holy Qur’ān, trans. ʿAbdullah Yūsuf ʿAli (Beltsville, MD: Am, 1989). While the plural form of dawr is adwār, in this book I have chosen to use dawr for both the singular and the plural form. This is how the Jahriyya use it: while the word has a clear Arabic origin, its transliteration has been so assimilated into the Chinese language that its grammatical marker for pluralization has dropped in daily parlance. Abū Ḥāmid al- Ghazālī, Iḥiyāʾ ʿUlūm Ad-Dīn (Revival of the Religious Sciences), trans. Fazl-UlKarim, vol. 2 (Karachi: Darul-Ishaat, 1993), 235. Some of the recordings can be accessed at Sounding Islam in China, http://www.soundislamchina .org / (accessed March 24, 2021). More will soon be made available through the British Library, which has offered to store the recordings in a permanent archive for future scholarly and public reference. See Grace Martin Smith and Carl W. Ernst, eds., Manifestations of Sainthood in Islam (Istanbul: Isis, 1993); and Katherine Pratt Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). The classical argument regarding the institutional evolution of Sufi orders is, of course, in J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). For a comprehensive account of the history of women’s place in Islam, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). It should be noted that laorenjia as a Chinese term is in general gender neutral; it is widely applied to elderly women as much as to elderly men. However, in the context of Sino-Sufism, the term almost invariably designates a male saint. There have been prominent female figures in Jahriyya, but to my knowledge none of them have been elevated to the position of laorenjia. In this sense one can say that the Jahriyya as well as those other Chinese Sufis who share the same nomenclature have appropriated a largely gender-neutral Chinese term and made it less so in the context of Sufism. No more need be said about taiye (great-grandfather); the term is self-explanatory. Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), 60.

24 6 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

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The Chinese word ahong, a general title for Islamic clerics regardless of rank and role, is derived from the Persian word ākhūn, which means “preacher” or “tutor.” The word is widely used among Sinophone Muslims. See, for instance, Tong Soon Lee, “Technology and the Production of Islamic Space: The Call to Prayer in Singapore,” Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (January 1, 1999): 86–100; Andrew J. Eisenberg, “Islam, Sound, and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship on the Kenyan Coast,” in Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experiences, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 186–202; and Isaac A Weiner, “Calling Everyone to Pray: Pluralism, Secularism, and the Adhān in Hamtramck, Michigan,” Anthropological Quarterly, no. 4 (2014): 1049–77. Birgit Meyer, ed., Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Birgit Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies, and the Question of the Medium,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, ed. Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 309–26; Birgit Meyer, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Anderson Blanton, Hittin’ the Prayer Bones: Materiality of Spirit in the Pentecostal South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Patrick Eisenlohr, Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83; Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Eisenlohr, Sounding Islam, 9. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. See Wael B. Hallaq, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Wael  B. Hallaq, Sharī’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, 2nd  ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006); Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Scott Alan Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (Oxford: Oneworld, 2010); Muhsin Hendricks, “Islamic Texts: A Source for Acceptance of Queer Individuals into Mainstream Muslim Society,” Equal Rights Review 5 (2010): 31–51; Everett Rowson, “The Effeminates of Early Medina,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 4 (1991): 671–93; Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500– 1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). ʻAbd Allāh Aḥmad An-Naʻīm, Islam and the Secular State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Adam B. Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10. This introduction will not provide a general overview of the diverse theories that anthropology, sociology, and religious studies have offered in the study of ritual in the past century. In this regard the reader is referred to the extraordinary work of Catherine Bell. See Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

I n t ro d u c t i o n 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

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Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). See, for instance, Jeanne Favret-Saada, The Anti-Witch (Chicago: Hau, 2015). Frits Staal, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26, no. 1 (1979): 22; see also Frits Staal, Rules Without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). “Indifference, n.1,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed April 21, 2021, https://www.oed .com/view/Entry/94446?isAdvanced=false&result=2&rskey=eEAc84&. See Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert  C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 24–51; and José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly 25, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 23. See Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Amy Gutmann and Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Asad, Genealogies of Religion. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1–39. William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Both Habermas in “Notes on Post-Secular Society” (25–26) and Stathis Gourgouris in Lessons in Secular Criticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, 33–34) have identified a probably symptomatic convergence of some left-wing postsecularists and more conservative, even militant, Christians and Muslims in provincializing secularity and casting secular politics in disrepute. A series of at times heated exchanges took place in late 2000s on the forum Immanent Frame, hosted by the Social Science Research Council (https://tif. ssrc.org /category/ book-blog / book-forums /secular_age/, accessed March 24, 2021). The forum receives its name from an eponymous concept in Charles Taylor’s monumental work A Secular Age. For debates that paved the way to these exchanges, see David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). An issue of boundary 2 published in the summer of 2004 and edited by Aamir Mufti—“Special Issue on Critical Secularism,” boundary 2 31, no.  2 (2004), with essays from Gourgouris, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said, among others—provides an alternative perspective on critical secularism. See also Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Akeel Bilgrami, ed., Beyond the Secular West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), both of which take the discussion of secularism beyond the Western context. The impact of the debate on China and East Asian studies is still largely Asadian in that the focus is often on the introduction (or imposition) of the Western Protestant conception of religion to East Asia. See, for instance, Jason Ananda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); and Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank, Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” 23. Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism, 20.

24 8 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

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Weiner, “Calling Everyone to Pray.” While Uyghur Sufism has most certainly influenced the Jahriyya in various manners, its examination deserves copious monographs in its own right. The following brief account is only of those Sufi orders most popular among the Sinophone Hui—or Dungan—Muslims in China, to which group the Jahriyya belong. For studies of Uyghur Islam, see Rachel Harris, “The Changing Uyghur Religious Soundscape,” Performing Islam 3, no. 1–2 (May 1, 2014): 103–24; Rachel Harris, “ ‘The Oil Is Sizzling in the Pot’: Sound and Emotion in Uyghur Qur’anic Recitation,” Ethnomusicology Forum 23, no. 3 (2014): 331–59; and Rachel Harris and Rahilä Dawut, “Mazar Festivals of the Uyghurs: Music, Islam and the Chinese State,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11, no.  1 (January 1, 2002): 101–18. Tong Ma, Zhongguo Yisilan Jiaopai Yu Menhuan Shilue [A brief history of the Islamic denominations and Sufi orders in China] (Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Publishing House, 1983). Tong Ma, Zhongguo Yisilan,107. Devin DeWeese, “Yasavī ‘Šayhs’ in the Timurid Era: Notes on the Social and Political Role of Communal Sufi Affiliations in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Oriente Moderno 15 (76), no. 2 (1996): 173–88. Devin DeWeese, “The Mashā’ikh-i Turk and the Khojagān: Rethinking the Links Between the Yasavī and Naqshbandī Sufi Traditions,” Journal of Islamic Studies 7, no. 2 (1996): 181. DeWeese, “Yasavī ‘Šayhs’ in the Timurid Era,” 174. See J. Christy Wilson, Apostle to Islam: A Biography of Samuel M. Zwemer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1952). Samuel Zwemer, quoted in Marshall Broomhall, Islam in China: A Neglected Problem (London: Morgan & Scott, 1910), ix–x. Broomhall, Islam in China, 147–66. J. F. Fletcher, Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), 4:75–96, 11:1–46. See Itzchak Weismann, The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2007). Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 50; Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 87. For a critical review of the concept of “fundamentalism” in religious studies, with a focus on the traditional monotheistic traditions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), see Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt, Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014). Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Jahriyya poetry in this book are my own. A. J. Arberry, The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957), 91–97. See J. C. Bügel, “Qasida as Discourse on Power and Its Islamization: Some Reflections,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, Vol. 2: Eulogy’s Bounty, Meaning’s Abundance, An Anthology (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 451–74; Renate Jacobi, “The Origins of the Qasida Form,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, Vol. 1: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings, 21–34; Salma Khadra Jayyusi, “The Persistence of the Qasida Form,” in Qasida Poetry, vol. 1, 1–19; Stefan Sperl, “Qasida Form and Mystic Path in Thirteenth Century Egypt: A Poem by Ibn al-Farid,” in Qasida Poetry, vol. 1, 65–81; and Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, “Introduction,” in Qasida Poetry, vol. 2, 1–62. E. R. Leach, “Ritualization in Man in Relation to Conceptual and Social Development,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences (1934–1990) 251, no. 772 (1966): 404.

I n t ro d u c t i o n 52. 53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

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John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 5. Especially Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–30; and Michael Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function,” in Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. John  A. Lucy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 33–58. Stanley J. Tambiah, “A Performative Approach to Ritual,” Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1981): 113–69; Stanley J. Tambiah, Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Jean La Fontaine, “The Power of Rights,” Man 12, nos. 3–4 (1977): 421–37; Emily Ahern, “The Problem of Efficacy: Strong and Weak Illocutionary Acts,” Man 14, no. 1 (1979): 1–17. Compare to Victor W. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982); E. Bert Wallace, Ritual, Religion, and Theatre (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013); and Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, The Performance of Healing (New York: Routledge, 1996). Stanley J. Tambiah, “A Performative Approach to Ritual,” Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1981): 19. For another critique that also dwells on the difference between performance and the performative, see Rosalind Morris, “All Made Up: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 567. Morris shows how theories of performance in anthropology are often linked to ritual studies, and in what way the anthropological theory of performance differs markedly from theories of the performative in contemporary gender and sexuality studies, where, following the work of Judith Butler—specifically Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999)—there is a tendency for the performative to acquire a liberal sense of voluntarism which anthropology and social theory have long been wary of. Stanley J. Tambiah, “The Magical Power of Words,” Man 3, no. 2 (1968): 202. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” in Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 198. Nils Magnus Holmer, The Complete Mu-Igala in Picture Writing a Native Record of a Cuna Indian Medicine Son (Göteborg: Etnografiska Museet, 1953); Nils Magnus Holmer, Inatoipippiler: Or, The Adventures of Three Cuna Boys (Göteborg: Etnografiska Museet, 1952); Nils Magnus Holmer, Mu-Igala, or The Way of Muu: A Medicine Song from the Cuna Indians of Panama (Göteborg: Etnografiska Museet, 1947). Carlo Severi, The Chimera Principle an Anthropology of Memory and Imagination, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: Hau, 2015), 232. See, for instance, Ruth Finnegan, “How to Do Things with Words: Performative Utterances Among the Limba of Sierra Leone,” Man 4, no. 4 (1969): 537–52. See Harvey Whitehouse and Jonathan A. Lanman, “The Ties That Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion, and Identification,” Current Anthropology 55, no.  6 (2014): 674–95; and Adam  B. Seligman et  al., Ritual and Its Consequences. See Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 103; and Joel Robbins, “Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology: A Reading and Partial Reformulation of Rappaport’s Theory of Ritual,” Current Anthropology 42, no. 5 (2001): 591–614. Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 151. Humphrey and Laidlaw, Archetypal Actions of Ritual, 152.

250 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

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Elizabeth  A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 89–98. Humphrey and Laidlaw, Archetypal Actions of Ritual, 153. Maurice Bloch, “Symbols, Song, Dance, and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?,” European Journal of Sociology 15, no. 1 (1974): 55–81. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 143–51; and Rodney Needham, Exemplars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 166–70. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī (Hong Le Fu, Ningxia: self-published, n.d. [ca. 1930s], 4–5. Xinghua Li and Jinyuan Feng, Zhongguo Yisilanjiao Shi Cankao Ziliao Xuan Bian [Selected reference works for the history of Islam in China] (Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Publishing House, 1985), 619. Alexander Stewart, Chinese Muslims and the Global Ummah: Islamic Revival and Ethnic Identity Among the Hui of Qinghai Province (New York: Routledge, 2016); Mohammed Turki A Al-Sudairi, “Adhering to the Ways of Our Western Brothers,” Sociology of Islam 4, nos. 1–2 (April 15, 2016): 27. Li and Feng, Zhongguo Yisilanjiao, 773. Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 137. Songhua Ma, Zheherenye Jianshi Qianwen (Wuzhong: Zheherenye Yixue, 2013), 73. Songhua Ma, Zheherenye Jianshi Qianwen, 74. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 106. William Smith, Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions (New York: Routledge, 2017). William Albert Graham, “Islam in the Mirror of Ritual,” in Islam and Comparative Religious Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 87–109; Marion Katz, “The Ḥajj and the Study of Islamic Ritual,” Studia Islamica, nos. 98–99 (2004): 95–129. See Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Some Religious Aspects of Islam: A Collection of Articles (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 17–37, 106–29; and Juan Eduardo Campo, “Authority, Ritual, and Spatial Order in Islam: The Pilgrimage to Mecca,” Journal of Ritual Studies 5, no. 1 (1991): 65–91. Graham, “Islam in the Mirror of Ritual,” 101; see also Campo, “Authority, Ritual, and Spatial Order,” for an opposing view. Marion Katz in her “The Ḥajj and the Study of Islamic Ritual,” for instance, has also shown how many often contradictory explanations of ḥajj can be found even in the same piece of evidence in classical Islamic literature. Her study of ṣalāt—the Muslim daily prayers—in Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), is equally enlightening. John R. Bowen, “Salat in Indonesia: The Social Meanings of an Islamic Ritual,” Man 24, no. 4 (1989): 600–619; Katz, Prayer in Islamic Thought. See, for instance, Shahab Ahmed’s monumental work What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Yuanzhang Ma, Shagou Shicao (Yinchuan: Lvse Huoyan Gongzuoshi, 2000). Daore is the Chinese transliteration of dawr and is commonly used by the Jahriyya. In this book I use dawr and daore interchangeably, and the latter more frequently where ethnography so requires.

1. Archaeology of Sound 1. 2.

Anne  K. Rasmussen, Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 39. Michael Frishkopf, “Mediated Qur’anic Recitation and the Contestation of Islam in Contemporary Egypt,” in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, ed. Laudan Nooshin (London: Ashgate, 2009), 75–114.

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6. 7. 8.

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Adapted from Yusuf Ali’s translation with minor changes. See also Michael Sells, “Sound and Meaning in ‘Sūrat al-Qāriʿa,’ ” Arabica 40, no. 3 (1993): 403–30 for an extended discussion of the sound structure of this chapter. Michael Sells, Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations (Ashland, OR: White Cloud, 2007), 16. The most important and comprehensive source in the English language so far on the vocal artistry involved in Quranic recitation continues to be Kristina Nelson’s The Art of Reciting the Qurʼan, rev. ed. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001). It is also essential to note that, while Classical Arabic prosody is largely quantitative in that it is based not on a stress system but on the alternation between short and long syllables, the Qur’an also employs rhymes extensively— either internally or at the end of a distich, a literary device called sajʿ that antedates the Qur’an’s revelation. For sajʿ, see Devin J. Stewart, “Divine Epithets and the Dibacchius: Clausulae and Qur’anic Rhythm,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 15, no. 2 (June 1, 2013): 22–64; and Devin J. Stewart, “Sajʿ in the ‘Qurʾān:’ Prosody and Structure,” Journal of Arabic Literature 21, no. 2 (1990): 101–39. Frederick M. Denny, “Exegesis and Recitation: Their Development as Classical Forms of Qur’ānic Piety,” in Transitions and Transformations in the History of Religions: Essays in Honor of Joseph M. Kitagawa, ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Theodore M. Ludwig (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 113. See also Frederick M. Denny, “Qur’ān Recitation: A Tradition of Oral Performance and Transmission,” Oral Tradition 4, nos. 1–2 (1989): 5–26; and Frederick M. Denny, “Islam: Qur’ān and Hadith,” in The Holy Book in Comparative Perspective, ed. Frederick M. Denny and Rodney L. Taylor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985). Brinkley Morris Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 26. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Oral Transmission and the Book in Islamic Education: The Spoken and the Written Word,” Journal of Islamic Studies 3, no. 1 (1992): 9. For a recent, rather exhaustive study of the various ṣuḥuf and qirāʿāt of the Qur’anic text, see Shady Hekmat Nasser, The Transmission of the Variant Readings of the Quran: The Problem of Tawatur and the Emergence of Shawadhdh (Leiden: Brill, 2012). An accessible and articulate introduction to this question can be found in Nicolai Sinai, The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 30–34. For histories of the Jahriyya, see chapters 3 and 4 in Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998). See also Jonathan Lipman, “Head-Wagging and the Sounds of Obscenity: Conflicts over Sound on the Qing-Muslim Frontiers,” Performing Islam, nos. 1–2 (2014): 45–59; Dru Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 48–52; Michael Dillon, China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlement, and Sects (Richmond: Curzon, 1999), 121–25; Anthony Hayden Garnaut, “The Shaykh of the Great Northwest: The Religious and Political Life of Ma Yuanzhang (1853–1920)” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2011); and Calvin Ching, “Ethnic Tensions Between the Han and the Hui: The Neo-Sufi Jahriyya Movement of Ma Hua Long of the Late Qing Period (1862–1871),” Illumine: Journal of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society Graduate Students Association 9, no. 1 (2010): 66–82. For a more recent history of the Jahriyya written in Chinese that draws extensively on Chinese historical records, see Yang Xuelin, Zheherenye (Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Publishing House, 2010). Some, if not all, histories of the Jahriyya produced by different Jahriyya factions tend to be tarnished by their sectarian inclinations, though they may yet contain essential information. See, for instance, Ma Guobin, Xuanhuagang Zhi (Lanzhou: Gansu People’s Publishing House, 2005). I am leaving out numerous unpublished histories composed by contemporary Jahriyya authors, since their reliability is still more questionable. Most works on the nineteenth-century Muslim rebellions in China have a section or two on Jahriyya; see Wen-chang Chu, The Muslim Rebellion in Northwest China, 1862– 1878: A Study of Government Minority Policy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1966); Chung-fu Chang,

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12. 13. 14.

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Qingdai Xibei Huimin Shibian [The Hui incident in northwest China] (Taipei: Linking, 2001); and Wenyuan Gao, Qingmo Xibei Huimin Zhi Fanqing Yundong [The Anti-Qing revolt of the Hui in northwest China] (Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Publishing House, 1998). Such vernacular criticisms are endemic, especially among younger Sinophone Muslims. On one occasion one such proud reformist related to me a story he had heard regarding a Saudi funder who “came to Ningxia with trunks of money to give away,” and who, on hearing the Jahriyya recitation and presumably being shocked by its non-Arabic traits, turned on his heels and fled, wondering, “How can this be Islamic?” Jianguo, knowing that my interest at the time lay in the excavation of the possible origins of the Jahriyya Arabic pronunciation, remarked with audible relief, “Now we finally have a chance prove that our pronunciation is not erroneous!” While his confidence in my work is clearly misguided, and this chapter in no way fulfills his wish, his remark at the time seemed directed at a general criticism so pervasive there was no need to identify any specific denigrator. See, for instance, Jonathan Lipman’s introduction to the volume Islamic Thought in China: SinoMuslim Intellectual Evolution from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). The same inclination exists in a wide range of work on Islam in China; see, for instance, Kristian Petersen, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Roberta Tontini, Muslim Sanzijing: Shifts and Continuities in the Definition of Islam in China (Leiden: Brill, 2016); James D. Frankel, Rectifying God’s Name: Liu Zhi’s Confucian Translation of Monotheism and Islamic Law (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011); and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University East Asia Center, 2005). Alī B. Uthmān al-Jullābī Al-Hujwīrī, Kashf Al-Maḥjūb, rev.ed., trans. Reynold Alleyne Nicholson (Karachi: Darul-Ishaat, 2004), 88. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī (Hong Le Fu, Ningxia: Self-published, n.d. [ca. 1930s]), 13. Such disciplinary common sense in linguistic and cultural anthropology needs no extensive belaboring, especially since an elaborate discussion of this point will render the text unnecessarily cumbersome. Interested readers are thus referred to, for instance, Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40; Susan Gal, “Multiplicity and Contention Among Language Ideologies,” in Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, ed. Bambi  B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 317–31; James Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); Susan Gal and Judith  T. Irvine, “The Boundaries of Languages and Disciplines: How Ideologies Construct Difference,” Social Research 62, no. 4 (1995): 967–1001; Michael Silverstein, “Whorfianism and the Linguistic Imagination of Nationality,” in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Paul V. Kroskrity (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2000), 85–138; D. Rutherford, “Frontiers of the Lingua Franca: Ideologies of the Linguistic Contact Zone in Dutch New Guinea,” ethnos 70, no. 3 (2006): 387–412; and Bambi B. Schieffelin and Rachelle Charlier Doucet, “The ‘Real’ Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalinguistics, and Orthographic Choice,” American Ethnologist, no.  1 (1994): 176–200. For the politics of Classical Arabic and the invention and consolidation of Modern Standard Arabic, see Kees Versteegh, Pidginization and Creolization: The Case of Arabic (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1984), 17–77; Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 93–113, 173–88; Karin C. Ryding, “Modern Standard Arabic,” in The Semitic Languages, ed. Stefan Weninger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 846; Dagma Glaβ, “Creating a Modern Standard Language from Medieval Tradition: The Nahda and the Arabic Academies,” in The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook, ed. Stefan Weninger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011),

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16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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835–44; and Mustafa Shah, “The Arabic Language,” in The Islamic World, ed. A. Rippin (New York: Routledge, 2008), 261–77. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 12–13. William Albert Graham, “The Earliest Meaning of ‘Qur’ān,’ ” in Islamic and Comparative Religious Studies (New York: Ashgate, 2010), 129, emphasis original; see also, in the same volume, “Qur’ān as Spoken Word.” Graham’s monumental Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) offers a general discussion of the oral aspects of scripture in the history of religion. Abdul Aḥad, Manāqib Al-Awliyā’ (Yinchuan: Self-published, 1910), 8. A massive body of work has been published on these two related topics. While this book has not taken a performance studies approach, my ethnographic description has been informed and inspired by them. See, for instance, Arthur Gribetz, “The Samā’ Controversy: Sufi vs. Legalist,” Studia Islamica, no. 74 (1991): 43–62; Leonard Lewisohn, “The Sacred Music of Islam: Sama in the Persian Sufi Tradition,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 6 (1997): 1; Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Islam and Music: The Legal and the Spiritual Dimensions,” in Enchanting Powers: Music in the World’s Religions, ed. Lawrence E. Sullivan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 219–35; ʻAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad Ghazzālī, and James Robson, Tracts on Listening to Music: Being Dhamm al-Malāhī (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1938); Jean During, “Revelation and Spiritual Audition in Islam,” World of Music 24, no. 3 (1982): 68–84; Regula Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Deborah Kapchan, “Learning to Listen: The Sound of Sufism in France,” World of Music 51, no. 2 (2009): 65–89; Deborah Kapchan, Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Laura Lengel, “Performing in/Outside Islam: Music and Gendered Cultural Politics in the Middle East and North Africa,” Text and Performance Quarterly 24, nos. 3–4 (July 1, 2004): 212–32; Rachel Harris, “The Changing Uyghur Religious Soundscape,” Performing Islam 3, nos. 1–2 (2014): 99–114; Harris, “ ‘The Oil Is Sizzling in the Pot’: Sound and Emotion in Uyghur Qur’anic Recitation,” Ethnomusicology Forum 23, no. 3 (2014): 331–59; Rachel Harris and Rahila Dawut, “Mazar Festivals of the Uyghurs: Music, Islam, and the Chinese State,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11, no. 1 (2002): 101–18; and Richard K. Wolf, “The Poetics of ‘Sufi’ Practice: Drumming, Dancing, and Complex Agency at Madho Lãl Husain (and Beyond),” American Ethnologist 33, no. 2 (January 1, 2006): 246–68. See Arthur Gribetz, “Samā’ Controversy: Sufi vs. Legalist,” Studia Islamica, no. 74 (1991): 43–62; J. During and R. Sellheim, “Samāʿ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd. ed., ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs, https://referenceworks.brillonline.com /entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/*-COM_0991(accessed May 12, 2021); Lewisohn, “Sacred Music of Islam”; and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987), 51–62. See Duncan  B. MacDonald, “Emotional Religion in Islām as Affected by Music and Singing,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1901): 195–252. Lois Ibsen Al Faruqi, Islam and Art (Islamabad: National Hijra Council, 1985), 179. Nasr, “Islam and Music,” 222. Nelson, Art of Reciting the Qurʼan, 33. al-Ghazālī, Iḥiyāʾ ʿUlūm Ad-Dīn [Revival of the religious sciences] (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1982), 2, 268–306 . Abu Nasr Sarraj and Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, The Kitāb Al-Luma’ Fi’ l-Tasawwuf of Abū Nasr ’abdallah b. ’Ali al-Sarrāj al-Tusi: Edited for the First Time, with Critical Notes, Abstract of Contents, Glossary, and Indices (Leiden: Brill, 1914), 73, 285.

254 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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Anna M. Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 115. On some occasions, an author may deliberately decide to transcribe Arabic sounds as they hear it in order to preserve the vividness of a local dialect. This is especially the case with poetry; see, for instance, Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). T. E. Lawrence—the famous “Lawrence of Arabia”—with his characteristic sarcasm offers another example of the politics of Arabic linguistic sounds. In preparing for an abridged version of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1926, Lawrence deliberately refused to abide by any “scientific system” of transcription. “Arabic names won’t go into English, exactly,” he wrote, “for their consonants are not the same as ours, and vowels, like ours, vary from district to district. [But] I spell my names anyhow, to show what rot the systems are.” Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London: Penguin, 1962), 19. In thus transcribing and in defying consistency, Lawrence unequivocally showcases his political identification with his Arab interlocutors. For a discussion of this episode, see Brinkley Morris Messick, “Notes on Transliteration,” in Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, ed. Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 177–96. Charles A. Ferguson, “Diglossia,” word 15, no. 2 (January 1959): 325–40. C. F. Hogg, “Mahommedanism,” Chinese Recorder 23 (February 1892): 59. Compare to Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman, eds., Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 6. Hogg, “Mahommedanism,” 59. Pinyin in square brackets added by the author. Hogg, 61. Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ ing China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 140. Vladimir Bobrovnikiv, Amir Navruzov, and Shamil Shikhaliev, “Islamic Education in Soviet and Post-Soviet Daghestan,” in Islamic Education in the Soviet Union and Its Successor States, ed. Michael Kemper, Raoul Motika, and Stefan Reichmuth (London: Taylor & Francis, 2009), 119. Devin DeWeese, “Persian and Turkic from Kazan to Tobolsk: Literary Frontiers in Muslim Inner Asia,” in The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, ed. Nile Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 142, 152n27, n28, n29. I also thank the erudite and always generous Alexander Jabbari for compiling a list of Ṣarf-e Mīr’s manuscripts and works similar to it in nature. This systematized education is often referred to as jingtang jiaoyu, or “scriptural hall education” in common English translation, its founder being the Sino-Muslim scholar Hu Dengzhou (d. 1597 CE). While instruction in Arabic is surely an essential component of this system, I do not intend to provide a detailed discussion of this education in this chapter or in this book. Interested readers are referred to Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “Taking Abduh to China: Chinese-Egyptian Intellectual Contact in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Global Muslims in the Age of Steel and Print, ed. James L. Gelvin and Nile Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), 249–67; Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “ ‘Nine Years in Egypt’: Al-Azhar University and the Arabization of Chinese Islam,” hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity, and Identities 8, no.  1 (2008): 1–21; John Chen, “Islam’s Loneliest Cosmopolitan: Badr Al-Din Hai Weiliang, the Lucknow– Cairo Connection, and the Circumscription of Islamic Transnationalism,” ReOrient 3, no. 2 (2018): 120–39; John Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China: Chinese Muslim Elites, Guomindang NationBuilding, and the Limits of the Global Umma, 1900–1960” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018); John Chen, “Re-Orientation: The Chinese Azharites Between Umma and Third World, 1938–55,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, no. 1 (May 31, 2014): 24–51; and Wlodzimierz Cieciura, “Chinese Muslims in Transregional Spaces of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Beyond in the Twentieth Century,” Review of Religion and Chinese Society 5,

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40. 41. 42.

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no. 2 (December 7, 2018): 135–55. Publications in Chinese on jingtang jiaoyu and Hu Dengzhou are too numerous to list, and most of them rely on a key historical source: Zhao Can’s Jingxue Xichuanpo [Genealogy of the transmission of classical scholarship], an edition of which is now assembled in Qingzhen Dadian, vol. 20 (Hefei: Huangshan Shushe, 2005), 1–105. Shiqian Pang, “Zhongguo Huijiao Siyuan Jiaoyu Zhi Yange Ji Keben,” Yugong 7, no. 4 (1937): 101. This is the first primer in what is often referred to as Lianwuben, or “five books in one,” a collection that includes the three works aforementioned. I have failed to trace down the exact origin of this first primer, and I have not been able to discover the name of its author—if it indeed is the work of one author alone. Fulong Ma, Ma Fulong Aheng Zishu (Hong Kong: Cornerstone, 2010), 219. Ma, Ma Fulong Aheng Zishu, 220. Regarding Ma Jian and his co-Azharites as well as other Sino-Muslim intellectuals of the early to mid-twentieth century, see Zhenzhong Li, Majian Zhuan, 2nd ed. (Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Publishing House, 2017); Zihua Wang, Majian Zhuan (Kunming: Yunan University Press, 2018); Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “Taking Abduh to China: Chinese-Egyptian Intellectual Contact in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Global Muslims in the Age of Steel and Print, ed. James L. Gelvin and Nile Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), 249–67; Benite, “Nine Years in Egypt”; Cieciura, “Chinese Muslims in Transregional Spaces”; Wlodzimierz Cieciura, “Bringing China and Islam Closer: The First Chinese Azharites,” Middle East Institute, April 28, 2015, https://www .mei .edu/publications/ bringing-china-and-islam-closer-first-chinese-azharites; Chen, “Islam’s Loneliest Cosmopolitan”; Chen, “Re-Orientation”; and Yufeng Mao, “A Muslim Vision of the Chinese Nation: Chinese Pilgrimage Missions to Mecca During World War II,” Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 2 (January 1, 2011): 373–95. It is also essential to note that since the mid-seventeenth century, there have been at least three Persian textbooks authored by Sino-Muslim scholars for the purpose of Persian language instruction in the madāris. They are, in chronological order, Minhāj al-Talab by Chang Zhimei (d. 1670 CE), Kimiyā’ al-Fārsī by Ma Lianyuan (d. 1903 CE), and Ṣafawat al-Maṣādir wa Qawāʿ id al-Fārsī by Hu Songshan (d. 1955 CE) and Hu Xueliang (d. 1960 CE). In his recent “Luelun Jingtang Jiaoyu de Sanzhong Bentu Bosiyu Yufa Jiaocai” (unpublished manuscript, 2019, 3), Hu Long describes a particularly famous manuscript of Minhāj al-Talab by an anonymous scribe, who, while copying the main text, also provided interlinear annotations. These annotations combine Persian, Arabic, and xiao’erjing—a practice known as fengjiaoxue (meaning “wind mixed with snow”)—thus displaying the very translingual feature this chapter examines. Many of these annotations are abbreviations of technical terms in Persian and Arabic grammar; a student who has studied the Arabic primers and Ṣarf-e Mīr may well have enough Arabic and Persian to move on to Minhāj alTalab—with the guidance of an experienced teacher, of course. Yingsheng Liu, Xiaoerjin Yanjiu, 3 vols. (Lanzhou: Lanzhou University Press, 2013); Florian Sobieroj, “Standardisation in Manuscripts Written in Sino-Arabic Scripts and Xiaojing,” in Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic Script in 12 Manuscript Cultures, ed. Dmitry Bondarev, Alessandre Gori, and Lameen Souag, Studies in Manuscript Cultures (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 177– 216; Florian Sobieroj, “Arabic Manuscripts on the Periphery: Northwest Africa, Yemen and China,” in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, ed. Jörg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev, and JanUlrich Sobisch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 79–112. Yingsheng Liu, “Guanyu Woguo Bufen Musilin Minzu Zhong Tongxing de Xiaojing Wenzi de Jige Wenti” [Several questions about Xiaojing], Huizu Yanjiu [Hui studies], no. 44 (2001), 20–21. Yingsheng Liu, “Xiaojing Wenzi Chansheng de Beijing” [The historical background of Xiaojing], Xibei Minzu Yanjiu [Northwest studies of nationalities], no. 38 (2003): 62; Yingsheng Liu, “Huizu Yu Qita Yixie Xibei Musilin Minzu Wenzi Xingchengshi Chutan” [On the script used by the Hui and other Muslim groups in northwest China], Huizu Yanjiu [Hui studies], no.  45 (2002): 6;

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Yingsheng Liu, “Cong Huihuizi Dao Xiaojing Wenzi” [From the Huihui script to Xiaojing], in Yuanshi Ji Minzushi Yanjiu Jikan [Studies on Yuan and nationalities history], vol. 14 (Nanjing: Nanfang, 2001): 153–54. Liu, “Huizu Yu Qita Yixie,” 6; Zhu Yin, “Jingtangyu Yu Xiaoerjin” [Jingtang language and Xiaoerjin], in Zhongguo Yisilan Yanjiu [Studies of Islam in China] (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1996), 150–53. Zhongyi Han, “Xiaojing Pinxie Tixi Jiqi Liupai Chutan” [The Xiaojing script and its variations], Xibei Di’er Minzu Xueyuan Xuebao [Journal of the Second Northwest University of Nationalities], no. 67 (2005): 10–11. A full description of its phonetic system can be found in Yuanlong Chen, “Huizu Xiaojing Wenzi Tixi Yanjiu” (The Xiaojing script Among the Hui], Minzu Yuwen [Languages of the nationalities], no. 1 (1992): 27. This is a basic premise in structural linguistics. See N. S. Trubetzkoy, Principles of Phonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Chen, “Huizu Xiaojing Wenzi Tixi Yanjiu,” 30; Zenglie Feng, “Xiao’erjin Chutan” [A brief study of Xiao’erjin], Alabo Shijie [Arab world], no. 1 (1982), 46. One edition of the pamphlet—there are many different editions sharing overlapping contents— that came to my possession during my fieldwork, for instance, has the follow question: “Shiwei datianxian de mingzi shi shenme?” (What are the names of the ten prime angels?) Anonymous, Xinyang Wenda (Xining, Qinghai: n.p., n.d.), 14. Here the word for “what” is shenme, as opposed to the sha/sa we read in Qawāʿ id. Shenme is considerably more formal and is rarely used in daily speech. Another manifestation of this interpenetration is the odd grammar of the Chinese used in traditional scriptural hall education. This Chinese has often been referred to as jingtang yu, “language of the scriptural hall,” indicating its use primarily for religious instruction. For a systematic study of jingyang yu using a jingtang yu translation of the Qur’an as the main source, see Huifen Ma, Jingtangyu Hanyi Gulanjing Cihui Yufa Yanjiu (Beijing: Zongjiao Wenhua Chubanshe, 2011). Rian Richard Thum, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 18. Mawlana Ali ibn Husain Safi, Beads of Dew from the Source of Life (Rashahat Ain al-Hayat), trans. Muhtar Holland (Oakland Park, FL: Al-Baz, 2001). For critical studies of Rashaḥāt, see Devin DeWeese, “Yasavī ‘Šayhs’ in the Timurid Era: Notes on the Social and Political Role of Communal Sufi Affiliations in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”; and “The Mashā’ikh-i Turk and the Khojagān: Rethinking the Links Between the Yasavī and Naqshbandī Sufi Traditions,” in Studies on Sufism in Central Asia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 6:173–88, 7:180–207. Aḥad, Manāqib Al-Awliyā,’ 11. Abū Bakr Muḥayyidīn Muḥammad Ibn cArabī, Al-Futūḥāt al-Makiyya, trans. A. J. Arberry, vol. 3 (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-cIlmiyya, 1999), 552–53; Aḥad, Manāqib Al-Awliyā,’ 111–12. Aḥad, Manāqib Al-Awliyā,’ 30. Zhanye, Mannageibu (Ningxia: Self-published, n.d.), 17. There are a number of other contemporary hagiographies that have not received official endorsements or have not been as widely available. All the hagiographies discussed in this chapter are acknowledged as reflecting historical truth by the Shagou/Maqiao branch of the Jahriyya. I have not relied heavily on, for instance, Ma Guobin, Xuanhuagang Zhi (Lanzhou: Gansu People’s Publishing House, 2005), a collection of historical records assembled from Zhangjiachuan, Gansu, where another branch of the Jahriyya, though close to that at Hong Le Fu, is based. Zhangjiachuan is where the seventh Jahriyya saint, Ma Yuanzhang, found his footing after he fled Yunnan at the height of the Muslim rebellion; thus Xuanhuagang Zhi is mostly focused on Ma Yuanzhang and his followers. Neither have I drawn on the multiple hagiographies composed in the Banqiao tradition such as Jahriyya Banqiao, Xinling de Dengta (Wuzhong: Self-published, 2010), or Banqiao

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62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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Daotang, Zheherenye Shi [History of the Jahriyya] (Yinchuan: self-published, 2012). Even my use of contemporary Jahriyya sources is far from exhaustive. In 2013 a textbook titled Zheherenye Jianshi Qianwen [A thousand questions about the history of Jahriyya] was published; its author, Ma Songhua, was aiming to offer an accessible summary of Jahriyya history in the form of catechism for Jahriyya clerics under training. Around the same period another author, Ma Xin, penned Zheherenye Renwu Zhi (Gansu: self-published, 2010), documenting the lives of some prominent Jahriyya murīdūn often uncovered in most Jahriyya hagiographies. A third source that circulates primarily in electronic form is Qingzong Yaolue (Wuzhong: n.p., 1990), by Ma Jisi, father of Ma Songhua, the author of Zheherenye Jianshi Qianwen. The reason for my limited use of these sources are twofold. First, as I mentioned earlier, this chapter is not aimed at providing another history of Jahriyya. Such histories have been done in both English and Chinese, and I do not intend to replicate previous work. Second, most of these sources are written in Chinese and focus predominantly on later periods, especially the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and are thus only of limited value if our purpose is to examine early Jahriyya’s transnational genealogies. Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī has been examined elsewhere, with a stress on its hagiographical narrative. See Sobieroj, “Standardisation in Manuscripts”; and “The Chinese Sufi Wiqāyatullāh Ma Mingxin and the Construction of His Sanctity in Kitāb Al-Jahrī,” Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 70, no. 1 (2016): 133–69; as well as Nathan Montgomery, “Gathering Pearls of Desert Dew: Sufi Perspectives on the History of Sino-Islam” (master’s thesis, Indiana University, 2017). As has become clear, my interest in this section has been less about the content of the book than the clues it offers us regarding Jahriyya’s saintly pedigree outside China. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 4–6; Farīd al-Dīn cAṭṭār, Tadhkirat Al-Awliyā’ [Memory of the saints], ed. Reynold Alleyne Nicholson (London: Luzac, 1905), Persian text, 2–6. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 4–5. Joseph Fletcher, “The Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China,” in Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, ed. Jonathan Lipman (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), xi, I 1–46. Fudong Ye, Naigeshibandiye de Yuan Yu Liu (Hong Kong: Islamic Cultural Association, 2009), 157. Fletcher, “Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China,” 25; Itzchak Weismann, The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2007) 70. See Martin van Bruinessen, “After the Days of Abū Qubays: Indonesian Transformations of the Naqshbandiyya-Khālidiyya,” Journal of the History of Sufism, no. 5 (2007): 225–51; Martin van Bruinessen, “The Tariqa Kahlwatiyya in South Celebs,” in Excursies in Celebs (Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 1991), 251–69; Martin van Bruinessen, “The Origins and Development of the Naqshbandi Order in Indonesia,” Der Islam, no. 67 (1990): 150–79; Mohammed Hussain Ahmad, “Abudul Samad al-Falimbani’s Role and Contribution in the Disclosure of Islamic Knowledge in Malay World,” Journal of Malay Islamic Studies 2, no. 1 (November 20, 2018): 11–22; and Francis Robinson, “The Islamic World: World System to ‘Religious International,’ ” in Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750, ed. Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 111–35. John Voll, “Linking Groups in the Networks of Eighteenth Century Revivalist Scholars: The Mizjaji Family in Yemen,” in Eighteenth-Century Renewal and Reform in Islam, ed. Nehemia Levtzion and John Voll (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 69–92; Dina Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandīs in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005); Dina Le Gall, “Forgotten Naqshbandīs and the Culture of Pre-Modern Sufi Brotherhoods,” Studia Islamica, no. 97 (2003): 87–119. One notable point is that the Mizjājī scholars laid extraordinary stress on ḥadīth scholarship, which is not at all surprising given their revivalist inclination. Ma Mingxin, however, was never celebrated as such by the Jahriyya, and there has never been, so far as I know, a ḥadīth-centric Sufi approach among the Jahriyya. Even if there had been a stress on ḥadīth

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72. 73.

74. 75.

76. 77.

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scholarship in the days of Ma Mingxin, this is not reflected in any Jahriyya hagiography that I know of. The extent of Jahriyya’s genuine involvement in the eighteenth-century Islamic revival, especially the scope and depth of its connection to the Indian Ocean, still remains to be examined. Garnaut, “Shaykh of the Great Northwest”; Jonathan Lipman and Thomas Wide, “Spiritual Genealogies of Gansu: Chains of Transmission in the Jahrīya and Khafīya Turuq,” in Islam and Chinese Society: Genealogies, Lineage, and Local Communities, ed. Jianxiong Ma, Oded Abt, and Jide Yao (London: Routledge, 2020), 32–46. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 6. See Devin DeWeese, “An ‘Uvaysī’ Sufi in Timurid Mawarannahr: Notes on Hagiography and the Taxonomy of Sanctitu in the Religious History of Central Asia,” in Studies on Sufism in Central Asia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 4:4; and Banqiao Daotang, Zheherenye Shi, 6–8. Henri Marie Gustave d’ Ollone, Pierre Gabriel Edmond de Fleurelle, Henri Eugène de Boyve, and A. Vissière, Recherches Sur Les Musulmans Chinois (Paris: E. Leroux, 1911), 292–93. For a detailed biographical study of Murād Ramzī, see Abdulsait Aykut, “The Intellectual Struggle of Murād Ramzī (1855–1935): An Early Twentieth-Century Eurasian Muslim Author” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015). I thank Alexander Jabbari for referring me to this work. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 10. Compare this to another khatm al-Khawājagān provided by an early twentieth-century Egypt-based Naqshbandī master in Weismann, Naqshbandiyya, 5. For a wide-ranging study of the Mujaddidiya in South Asia and beyond, see Waleed Ziad, “Traversing the Indus and the Oxus: Trans-Regional Islamic Revival in the Age of Political Fragmentation and the ‘Great Game,’ 1747–1880” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2017). See also Waleed Ziad, “From Yarkand to Sindh via Kabul: The Rise of Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi Networks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, ed. Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 125–68; and Waleed Ziad, “Transporting Knowledge in the Afghan Empire: A Case Study of Two Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi Manuals,” in Afghanistan’s Islam, ed. Nile Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 105–26. Murād Ramzī, Dhayl Kitāb Al-Rashaḥāt (Lebanon: Dar al-Kutub al-cIlmiyya, 2008), 509. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 10; Murād Ramzī, Dhayl Kitāb Al-Rashaḥāt, 562. The specific content of Jahriyya’s khatm in part consists of the following: (1) recite al-Fātiḥa (first chapter of the Qur’an) seven times; (2) bless the Prophet a hundred times; (3) recite chapter alSharḥ seventy-nine times; (4) recite chapter al-Ikhlās a thousand times; (5) recite al-Fātiḥa seven times; and (6) seal the khatm by blessing the Prophet a hundred times. A 1930s Indonesian katm al-Khwājagān manual that also draws on Maktubāt contains the same practices. See Muhammad Khairi Mahyuddin, “Khatam Al-Khawjakan in Naqshabandi Mujaddidi Ahmadi Taught by Shaykh Islam Wan Sulaiman Wan Sidek (D.1354h/1935m),” International Journal of Business and Social Science 7, no. 7 (2016): 123. This possibility was suggested by a Banqiao Jahriyya ahong, and in making the suggestion he was being deliberately polemical, since this translation of Reshiha’er, so far still the only one available, was the work of a group of Maqiao/Shagou Jahriyya ahongs in the early 1990s. He offered no evidence to back up this claim, was unable to provide me with a copy of the original Rashiha’er and did not tell me whether he had read the original text or his suggestion was based only on hearsay. I thus have no way to check the verity of this claim. Long Hu, “Yongyuan de Alin—Ma Fulong,” Huizu Yanjiu [Hui studies], no. 94 (2014): 115n4. This claim and what follows are drawn from personal communication with Hu Long. For the decline in Persian knowledge among Sino-Muslims, see also Masumi Matsumoto, “Secularization and Modernization of Islam in China: Educational Reform, Japanese Occupation, and the Disappearance of Persian Learning,” in Islamic Thought in China: Sino-Muslim Intellectual Evolution

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81. 82.

83.

84.

85.

86. 87.

88. 89. 90.

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from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jonathan Lipman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 171–96. See Garnaut, “Shaykh of the Great Northwest”; and Guobin, Xuanhuagang Zhi. For a wide-ranging study of the transnational migrations across the Indian Ocean, focusing on the eminent Ḥaḍārima, see Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). His inter-Asian vision, which no doubt grows out of his study of the Ḥaḍārima, is articulated in Engseng Ho, “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies,” Journal of Asian Studies 76, no. 4 (November 2017): 907–28. For a recent study that examines the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean through the figure of Fadl ibn Alawi—a sayyid, or a descendant of the Prophet Muḥammad—see Wilson Chacko Jacob, For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). Incidentally, this latter study resonates in interesting ways with Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), especially where Li discusses the globe-trotting Ḥaḍramī Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (29–52). Ma Tong, Zhongguo Yisilan Jiaopai Menhuan Suyuan [Origins of the Islamic denominations and Sufi orders in China] (Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Publishing House, 1986), 114, 222. This same route is endorsed by a recent Banqiao Jahriyya hagiography: Daotang, Zheherenye Shi, 16. For a brief biography of Muḥammad Tabādkānī, see Jo-Ann Gross and Asom Urunbaev, eds., The Letters of Khwāja ʻUbayd Allāh Aḥrār and His Associates (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 81–82. The same volume contains five of his letters (227–34). While the published Jahriyya silsila leaves out this one detail—thus we have no way to ascertain where it first appeared in the Jahriyya archive, or when it might have been added—the laqab of Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Zayn is said to be ʿAqal Makkiyya, “the intellect of Mecca” (Garnaut, “Shaykh of the Great Northwest,” 353). This is the very laqab of the shaykh who bequeathed to the Naqshbandiyya-Khufiyya murshid Ma Laichi his ‘ijāza, or certificate that licenses its holder to transmit the Naqshbandiyya teaching, according to Shiren Ding, “Zhongguo Menhuan Jiaopai de Lailongqumai,” June  21, 2015, http://m .chinaislam .net .cn/cms/zjjy/yjdt/rdyj /201506/0621U012015.html. The well-documented rivalry between Ma Laichi and Ma Mingxin needs no repeating, and whether this addition to the Jahriyya silsila (again, unattested in the published Arabic nisba we just examined) is either a later invention or an earlier record scraped in the early twentieth century to essentialize a Jahriyya-Khufiyya division less rigid in the eighteenth, is a question with no certain answer at this point. Aḥad, Manāqib Al-Awliyā,’ 53. Alexandre Papas and Wei Ma, “Sufi Lineages Among the Salar: An Overview,” in Muslims in Amdo Society: Multidisciplinary Approaches, ed. Marie-Paule Hille, Bianca Horlemann, and Paul K. Nietupski (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015), 119–23. It is also essential to note at this point that the combination of Qādiriyya and Naqshbandiyya is as much a definitive feature of the early Jahriyya as it is of the teaching that Ma Laichi allegedly adopted from his shaykh in Mecca. See a Chinese translation of Ma Laichi’s ‘ijāza in Shiren Ding, “Zhongguo Menhuan Jiaopai de Lailongqumai,” where this syncretism is explicitly stated. However, I have been unable to compare Ding’s translation to the original Arabic text. In Ding’s translation the word qādiriyya appears only in parenthesis, and he offers no explanation as to whether this is in the original text or only a later interpretation. Fletcher, “Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China,” 13–15. Fletcher, 14; Papas and Ma, “Sufi Lineages Among the Salar,” 110–12. Nile Green, “Introduction: The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900),” in The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, ed. Nile Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 4, emphasis original. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12–13.

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

See also Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). The paradoxical position of women is particularly evident in this example, for the “immoral” income was accepted, yet this acceptance was at once acknowledged and denied, as this money was diverted and dumped on the women. The man had both taken and not taken the money; he condemned what he nonetheless had chosen to do with a clear conscience and would probably do again in the future. Another contributing factor is the institution of the heterosexual family. The man, by recourse to such disavowal, was not an “individual.” He incarnated the entire family for which he served as the head. The immoral income was mediated by the family and converted by virtue of this mediation into “family income,” which then could be used up by the women. The man accepted the money, yet he was exonerated because it was not he but the family who spent it. The institution of family created the condition, in this case, for men to project their own contradiction onto women. A word of explanation is here needed regarding the term daotang. While so far in this book I have used “Sufi lodge” and the Persian word khānaqāh interchangeably to denote the venue where Sufis congregate and engage in recitation and other rituals, neither term is used widely by the Jahriyya murīdūn themselves—even though khānaqāh does appear multiple times in their Arabic hagiographies. Daotang (literally “the hall of Dao,” and thus obviously a name with a strong association with local Chinese traditions, whether Daoism or Confucianism, and likely a combination of both) is the term invariably employed by most if not all Jahriyya murīdūn in designating their places of Sufi worship. Since this chapter is where we begin to delve deeper into the ethnographic world of Jahriyya, from this point on daotang will appear more frequently in place of “Sufi lodge” and khānaqāh, though the latter two, for reasons of continuity with previous chapters, will still be used here and there. Earle H. Waugh, The Munshidīn of Egypt: Their World and Their Song (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), 96–156; see also Earle H. Waugh, Memory, Music, and Religion: Morocco’s Mystical Chanters (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005). Anna M. Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 252. See Nicholas Harkness, “Voicing Christian Aspiration: The Semiotic Anthropology of Voice in Seoul,” Ethnography 16, no. 3 (September 2015): 313; and Nicholas Harkness, Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). For a recent review on the study of voice in anthropology, see A. Weidman, “Anthropology and Voice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014): 37–51. Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966). For a more recent replication of this classical thesis, see Adam B. Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For a genealogy of dawr in the Persian musical tradition, see Jean During, “Dawr,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), vol. 8, fasc. 2, 153–59. To be sure, the word is used largely as a general term rather than to refer to specific musical or poetic traditions. Chengzhi Zhang, Xinling Shi (History of the soul) (Guangzhou: Huacheng, 1991), 26–27; translation mine. A village in Tongxin, in southern Ningxia about a hundred miles from Hong Le Fu. In the text the name is spelt as ṣuwagiyāchā, with two Persian letters. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī (Hong Le Fu, Ningxia: Self-published, 1930s),134–35. A comparison of the original to its Chinese translation shows a notable point. In the Chinese text the people of the community are called hawandi, glossed in a parenthesis as meaning jiaomin, “people

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of religion.” The word, probably derived from the Persian word havādār (friend, lover), has no corresponding term in the original text, unless the Jahriyya translators had misread the first part of huwa mudarris al-madrasa (He is the teacher of the school) and combined huwa and mudarris into haw(v)ādār. However, it would seem like rather a considerable leap, adding two long alifs, which were simply missing in the original text, and completely ignoring other letters (like mīm and sīn in mudarris). Besides, there is a word in the original text that does correspond to jiaomin semantically and grammatically: (al-)anām, “the humankind.” While it is not entirely appropriate here—qawm (people) would have been more apposite—it makes more sense in the context and in grammar than the haphazard havādār. However, I have indeed heard Sinophone Muslims in Ningxia use this word (or another of a similar sound, which no one had been able to write down for me) to denote a community of believers. It is thus likely that the Jahriyya translators merely employed a commonly used term, despite its obscure origin, and twisted the original text to justify this usage. Havādār is not Arabic, nor is it Chinese, so it is interesting to observe how linguistic interpenetration can manifest itself precisely in the process of translation. The Chinese translation can be found in Xuezhi Ma, Zheherenye Daotong Shizhuan, vol. 1 (n.p.: n.p., 1997), 119–20. Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 306–8. For an English translation, she Nabih Amin Faris, “Al- Ghazzali’s Epistle of the Birds,” Muslim World 34, no. 1 (1944): 46–53. Farid Al-Din Attar and Peter Avery, The Speech of the Birds: Concerning Migration to the Real, the Manṭiqu’ṭ-Ṭair (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1998); see also Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), chapter 6. Reference to this opposition in the Qur’an can be found in 6:120, 57:3, 57:13, especially in 57:3, where it is said that “He [God] is the First and the Last, the Evident(ẓāhir) and the Immanent (bāṭin): And He has full knowledge of all things.” We need to note that the ẓāhir/exoteric and bāṭin/esoteric distinction, when applied to the reading of Qur’anic and other classical texts, ought to be distinguished from the difference between muḥkam (solid, fundamental, accurate, precise, well-contrived) and mutashābih (obscure, not clearly intelligible). Classical interpretations of the latter distinction, building on Qur’an 3:7, often focus on the importance of referring the obscure (mutashābih) passages to the clear, fundamental (muḥkam) ones for explanation and stress, again following the Qur’an, that only God knows the hidden meaning of the obscure verses. Those pursuing the obscure meanings are deemed prone to guile and misguidance, unlike the Sufis, who seek knowledge and truth of the inner (bāṭin) world. Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, “Introduction,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, Vol.  1: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings, ed. Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 61–62; P. F. Kennedy, “Takhmīs,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs, https://referenceworks .brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/*-COM_0991(accessed May 12, 2021). Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mantle Odes: Arabic Praise Poems to the Prophet Muhammad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 269; Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “From Text to Talisman: Al-Būṣīrī’s ‘Qaṣīdat al-Burdah’ (Mantle Ode) and the Supplicatory Ode,” Journal of Arabic Literature 37, no. 2 (2006): 148; Lyndon Harries, “A Swahili Takhmis,” African Studies 11, no. 2 (June 1952): 59–67. Gregor Schoeler, “Musammat,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, and Ch. Pellat, https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia -of-islam-2/*-COM_0991(accessed May 12, 2021). We need to note, however, that, precisely during the period of my fieldwork, and possibly as a result of my own inadvertent intervention, more Jahriyya Sufis, especially young students, had become more open to the idea that Mukhammas and Madā’ iḥ were less “books” than genres of panegyric

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20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

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poetry. One student, for instance, succeeded in finding another mukhammas on the Internet on his smartphone, which he showed me and other senior clerics, who were positively surprised. Given that I have continued to share with my Jahriyya interlocutors my research findings, this shift, once started, will probably not cease. For the persistence of the oral tradition in the transmission of knowledge, see Arthur  F. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 26–28; Nasr, “Oral Transmission and the Book in Islamic Education: The Spoken and the Written Word,” Journal of Islamic Studies 3, no. 1 (1992): 1–14; and Jonathan Porter Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “From Sīrah to Qaṣīdah: Poetics and Polemics in al-Būṣīrī’s ‘Qaṣīdat al-Burdah’ (‘Mantle Ode’),” Journal of Arabic Literature 38, no. 1 (2007): 7. See Geert Jan van Gelder, “Badīʿ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed., ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse /encyclopaedia-of-islam-3 (accessed May  12, 2021); and Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the ʻAbbāsid Age (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 5–37. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “Toward a Redefinition of ‘Badīʿ’ Poetry,” Journal of Arabic Literature, no. 12 (1981): 16. Stetkevych, “Toward a Redefinition of ‘Badīʿ’ Poetry,” 20–21. Stetkevych, 21. Muḥammad al-Tabādkānī al-Ṭūsī, “Mukhammas” (Hong Le Fu, Ningxia: Self-published, n.d.), 60. al-Tabādkānī al-Ṭūsī, “Mukhammas,” 4. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, “Arabic Poetry in the Post-Classical Age,” in Arabic Literature in the PostClassical Period, ed. Roger Allen and D. S. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 23–59; Muhammad Lutfi Al-Yousfi, “Poetic Creativity in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in Arabic Literature in the Post- Classical Period, ed. Roger Allen and D. S. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 60–73; Sperl, “Qasida Form and Mystic Path in Thirteenth Century Egypt: A Poem by Ibn al-Farid,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa: Eulogy’s Bounty, Meaning’s Abundance, An Anthology, ed. Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 65–81. Compare to Benjamin D. Koen, Beyond the Roof of the World: Music, Prayer, and Healing in the Pamir Mountains (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Stetkevych, “From Text to Talisman,” 151, originally from Muhammad ibn Shākir al-Kutubī’s Fawāt al-Wafayāt 3: 368–9. Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 187, quoted in Mubarak, al-Madā’ iḥ, 163ff. Stetkevych (Mantle Odes, 269n2) has also pointed out that takhmīs has been the commonest form of expansion on al-Burda, and conversely, an overwhelming majority of mukhammas are derived from al-Burda. Stetkevych, Mantle Odes. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, “The Persistence of the Qasida Form,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, Vol. 1: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings, ed. Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 7; Renate Jacobi, “The Origins of the Qasida Form,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, Vol. 1: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings, eds. Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 25–26; Annemarie Schimmel, “Epilogue,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa: Eulogy’s Bounty, Meaning’s Abundance, An Anthology, ed. Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 476. For discussions of qaṣīda in early Arabic poetry, see James E. Montgomery, The Vagaries of the Qaṣīdah: The Tradition and Practice of Early Arabic Poetry (Cambridge: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 1997).

2 . T he Sacred Circle 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

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Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 116–17. Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (Maulana), Discourses of Rumi (Richmond: Curzon, 1993), 226. Stetkevych, Mantle Odes, 88. Stefan Sperl has also discovered that al-Burda shares the same rhyme as a mīmiyya of al-Mutannabī’s; see Stefan Sperl, “Al-Buṣīrī,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, Vol. 2: Eulogy’s Bounty, Meaning’s Abundance, An Anthology (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 470–71. For a translation of al-Fāriḍ’s mīmiyya, see ʻUmar ibn ʻAlī Ibn al-Fāriḍ, The Mystical Poems of Ibn Al-Fāriḍ (n.p.: E. Walker, 1956), 96–97. al-Tabādkānī al-Ṭūsī, “Mukhammas,” 4. al-Tabādkānī al-Ṭūsī, 5–7. al-Tabādkānī al-Ṭūsī, 7–8. For a recent history of Herat, see C. P. W. Gammell, The Pearl of Khorasan: A History of Herat (London: C. Hurst, 2016). We also need to note that by the time of al-Tabādikānī, Persian qaṣīda had superseded Arabic qaṣīda in its influence on Islamic mystic literature. See J. C. Bügel, “Qasida as Discourse on Power and Its Islamization: Some Reflections,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, Vol. 1: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 464–67; and Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, “Introduction,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, Vol. 1, 17–18. Qur’an 67. This chapter has thirty verses. The burden of the reader/reciter is known in the Islamic tradition, though it often accrues to the “preservers” (ḥāfiẓūn) of the Qur’an—that is, those who have memorized the whole Qur’an. The burden of such preservation is manifested in how important it is to keep one’s memory sound through constant practice. Abū Zakariyyā al-Nawawī once related a ḥadīth which states that “whoever recites the Qur’an and then forgets it, he will meet God the Mightiest and the Most Exalted on the Day of Resurrection and he will appear a leper [ajdhamu, i.e., he will have been so mutilated as to have lost a hand or an arm or some other limb].” See Yaḥyā bin Sharf al-Dīn AlNawawī, Al-Tibyān Fī Ādab Ḥamalati-l-Qur’ān (Damascus: Maktab al-Mu’ayyid, 1991), 67. See also Gade, Perfection Makes Practice, 84. Musa Furber of Qur’anic recitation; the relevant ḥadīth can be found on page 33, where ajdhamu is translated as “disfigured.” See Furber, Etiquette with the Quran, trans. Musa Furber (n.p.: Starlatch, 2003). We saw in chapter 1 that in Sufism, the practice of listening, or samāʿ, is particularly prominent as a form of esoteric training employed to enhance ecstasy and facilitate the ultimate self-annihilation within God. Even the author of the Jahriyya Mukhammas, Muhammad Tabādkānī, was known to have been a patron of Central Asian Sufi music. See Thomas W. Arnold, Painting in Islam: A Study of the Place of Pictorial Art in Muslim Culture (New York: Dover, 1965), illustration 48, facing 128. However, Jahriyya’s listening practice involved neither the use of musical instruments nor an intricate discipline that regulated how one should listen. See Regula Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 82, also mentions that although the Nashbandiyya order banned musical performances, it did allow the recitation of mystical poetry without the accompaniment of musical instruments. A similar dialectic between “failure” and belief—or, more accurately, between doubt and belief— can be found in Carlo Severi, The Chimera Principle an Anthropology of Memory and Imagination, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: Hau, 2015), 241–43; and Michael Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic,” in Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 121–55. See, especially, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1988); and Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Tavistock: Tavistock, 1988). For some of the representatives of this consequential theoretical trend, see Talal Asad, Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason (New York: Columbia

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University Press, 2018); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and, to a slightly lesser degree, Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). For a recent replication of the same argument in religious studies, see Donovan O. Schaefer, The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). In fact, even belief is often more complicated, and thus more interesting, than some theorists in this tradition seem to believe. For alternative theorizations of belief in anthropology and beyond, see Michel de Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 192–202; Michael Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic,” in Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 121–56; and Severi, Chimera Principle, especially chapter 3. Joel Robbins, “What Is the Matter with Transcendence? On the Place of Religion in the New Anthropology of Ethics,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 4 (2016): 767–81. Birgit Meyer, “How to Capture the ‘Wow’: R. R. Marett’s Notion of Awe and the Study of Religion,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 1 (2016): 7–26; see also William Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Amira Mittermaier, “Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities Beyond the Trope of SelfCultivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, no. 2 (2012): 247–65; Amira Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

3. Tempo of Time 1.

2.

3. 4.

For suku, see Guo Wu, “Speaking Bitterness: Political Education in Land Reform and Military Training Under the CCP, 1947–1951,” Chinese Historical Review 21, no. 1 (May 1, 2014): 3–23; Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 137–49; Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 28–55; and William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). Abu cAbd Allāh Muḥammad bn cAlī bn al-Ḥasan al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, Kitāb Khatm Al-Awliyā’ (Beirut: al-Maṭbaca al-Kāthūlīkiyya, 1965), 337. Translation from John O’Kane and Bernd Radtke, The Concept of Sainthood in Early Islamic Mysticism: Two Works by Al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi—An Annotated Translation with Introduction (Surrey: Curzon, 1996), 101–2. Al-Tirmidhī, Kitāb Khatm Al-Awliyā,’ 344. Translation from O’Kane and Radtke, Concept of Sainthood, 109. Michel Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints: Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ʻArabī (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993), 116–27. See also Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chapter 16. Most interestingly, and probably reflective of the exotic role China often holds in the minds of classical Muslim scholars and mystics, Ibn ʿArabī says China is where the last child— “the seal of the children” (khātim al-awlād)—will be born, after whom “no child will be born in the [human] species.” Born with him will be a sister; she will exit the womb first, and then the last child will make his entry into the world. See Abū Bakr Muḥayyidīn Muḥammad Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ

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5.

6. 7.

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Al-Ḥikam, vol. 1 (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-cArabī, 1946), 67, for a fascinatingly eerie description. While some Sino-Muslim clerics do study Ibn ʿArabī, I have never heard anyone mention this episode. Abu al-Alā ʿAfīfī, The Mystical Philosophy of Muḥyid Dín-Ibnul ’Arabí. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 77–85; Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Ṣūfism of Ibn ʻArabī (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 131–35; Alexander Knysh, Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 96; Gerald T. Elmore, Islamic Sainthood in the Fullness of Time: Ibn Al-ʻArabī’s Book of the Fabulous Gryphon (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 131–62; Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Sufi Doctrine of the Perfect Man (Edmonds, WA: Near Eastern, 1984). Of course, the grand master also claims that he himself is a seal—in this case, the seal of the Muhammadan Sainthood. He proves this by providing an elaborate and extended answer to all the enigmatic questions al-Tirmidhī raised as a test for all those who in posterity had the guts to claim for themselves a place in the Sufi pantheon. The answers, along with the questions, constitute one of the longest chapters (chapter 73) in Ibn ʿArabí’s magnum opus, al-Futūḥāt al-Makiyya. See Abū Bakr Muḥayyidīn Muḥammad Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyah, al-Ṭabʻah 2, vol. 3 (Beirut: Dar Ṣādir, 2007), 49–162. A select translation of chapter 73 can be found in Ibn al-ʻArabī, The Meccan Revelations, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz, trans. William C. Chittick and James Winston Morris (New York: Pir, 2002), 43–44, 112–24. Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints, 122. Al-Hujwīrī, Kashf Al-Maḥjūb, 2004, 44. For the original that includes both an Arabic version of this saying and its Persian translation, see Alī B. Uthmān al-Jullābī Al-Hujwīrī, Kashf Al-Maḥjūb (Lahore: Maktaba Nuriyya al-Radawiyya, 2013), 42. Many Sufis are critical of their own times and tend to believe that the best of times has long passed. Some go so far as to claim, based on a ḥadīth, that two hundred years after the death of the Prophet, “if someone gave birth to a puppy, that was better than giving birth to a human child.” See Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 7. Ernst and Lawrence give this example to buttress their argument that such deprecations often coexist in the same period with lively Sufi discourses that build on previous works and lay claim to ever more sublime mystical accomplishments. In other words, the general view of a historical decline in piety—incidentally shared by some Sufis, later fundamentalists/reformists, and early Western Orientalists—should be taken with a grain of salt. For the invention of Sufism in Oriental scholarship, see Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), 1–18. For a critique of Ernst, see Knysh, Sufism, 20–34. The literal meaning of taiye in Mandarin is “great-grandfather.” It was used among the Jahriyya to refer to saints and esteemed elders. An equivalent of taiye in the South Asian context, for instance, might be baba. It should also be noted that among some Sino-Muslims in China the word baba also used to refer to Islamic shaykhs. In the city of Zhengzhou (capital of Henan province), for instance, there is a rather unassuming mausoleum dedicated to a mysterious Islamic saint said to have traveled to China from the Arab world in the imperial times. The mausoleum is named baba mu, “tomb of the baba.” Of its origin legends abound and facts are scarce. In 2011, when I was conducting fieldwork in Zhengzhou, the elegant pavilion of baba mu was overshadowed by high-rises and surrounded by a colossal construction site. A massive Walmart stood in its vicinity on the land that used to be a Muslim graveyard. Evidently many Muslims in Zhengzhou had chosen to bury their beloved around baba mu. The practice exhibited a strong, though unacknowledged, Sufi influence, for among many Sufis, the Jahriyya included, physical proximity to the saints, in life or after death, is a preferred way to place oneself under the latter’s auspices. For a detailed discussion of baba mu in Zhengzhou, see Guangtian Ha, “Religion of the Father: Islam, Gender, and Politics of  Ethnicity in Late Socialism” (PhD diss., New York, Columbia University, 2014), 134–39.

266 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

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See also Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Miami, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971). For a discussion of ideas of time in Persian Sufism as pertains to walāya/sainthood, see Gerhard Böwering, “Ideas of Time in Persian Sufism,” in The Heritage of Sufism: Classical Persian Sufism from Its Origins to Rumi, ed. Leonard Lewisohn, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999), 199–233. Ma Zhenwu’s body was entombed in the cemetery of Hong Le Fu. Not long thereafter even more radical political persecution engulfed Ningxia. The decomposed body was disinterred from the grave, exposed to daylight, and left to the morbid appetite of the vultures. “There were many people there to bear witness to the historic moment,” Sijiu recalled. “I was behind the crowd. I tried to steal a glimpse from between people’s legs. I saw nothing except a copper button, and something of a hat. People swarmed to wrest a piece from the remains of the murshid.” Yet the bones were littered around the site and were eventually collected by a pious murīd under the cover of a dark night. He used his manure basket to hide the bones and had buried them in the backyard of his own house. Today Ma Zhenwu’s tomb is still in that family home. Katherine Pratt Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), xi. J. Knappert, “Mawlid, or Mawlūd,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd. ed., ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, https://referenceworks .brillonline .com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3 (accessed May 12, 2021). Marion Holmes Katz, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3–5. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mantle Odes: Arabic Praise Poems to the Prophet Muhammad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 72. Katz, Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, 7; Ernst, Shambhala Guide to Sufism, 69–70. In his ethnographic study of Shīʿī Muslims in Karachi, Vernon Schubel describes a particular use of narrative: the reading of miracle stories (muʿ jizat kahanis) is often linked to making spiritual vows. “Generally it is the case that a favor is asked of the holy person and the intention is made to read a particular story . . . along with the distribution of sweets . . . when the request has been granted. Sometimes the story is read beforehand, with the assumption that the vow will be fulfilled.” See Schubel, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shiʻ i Devotional Rituals in South Asia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 37. A similar practice exists in Chinese popular religion under the name of huanyuan, “to pay off the [the debts incurred by fulfilled] wishes.” I know no comparable practice among the Jahriyya, though I have heard of its existence among other Muslims in China. Arthur F. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Chapel Hill: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 41, originally from Amīr Khurd’s Siyar al-Awliyā.’ See also Mohammad Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (New Dehli: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2003), 125. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī (Hong Le Fu, Ningxia: Self-published, 1930s), 20. I have not been able to find out more details about this reputedly Salar magic. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 21. One interesting detail to note is that in Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, when the first occasion was recounted the phrase “a saddle” is yak pusht, in Persian rather than Arabic. The book offers no clue whatsoever as to why Persian as opposed to Arabic was used in this particular case, especially given the fact that the entire book was composed predominantly in Arabic. However, it is likely that, in eighteenth century, this rather obscure type of magic was so designated by the Salars themselves and was merely noted down as is by the author of Reshiha’er, which was in turn reproduced verbatim in Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī. Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey (New York: New American Library, 1955), 150–51. While the same quote, especially the last sentence, has been widely

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23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

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used to illuminate the nature of the murīd’s personal allegiance to his murshid. See, for instance, Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 103–4; and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 30. I have been unable to track down its exact origin in Al-Ghazzālī’s work. For widespread pro-Alid sentiment among Muslims in South Asia, see Schubel, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam, 6–10. For Alid piety in Southeast Asia, see Chiara Formichi and Michael Feener, Shi’ ism In South East Asia: Alid Piety and Sectarian Constructions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For modern attempts by Sinophone Muslims to resist explicit Shīʿī influence, see Jianping Wang, “The Opposition of a Leading Akhund to Shi’a and Sufi Shaykhs in MidNineteenth-Century China,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 3, no.  2 (January 20, 2015): 518–41. Raphael Israeli, “Is There Shi’a in Chinese Islam?,” in Islam in China: Religion, Ethnicity, Culture, and Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002), 147–68. See Mohammed Turki A Al-Sudairi, “Transnational Shi’ism in Southern China and the PartyState’s ‘Hawza’ Diplomacy,” Middle East Institute, May 11, 2019, https://www.mei.edu/publications /transnational-shiism-southern-china-and-party-states-hawza-diplomacy. It is clear that what used to be a commonplace with regard to the interpenetration of Sunnī Sufism and Shīʿī piety in ordinary devotion is now being used to bolster a new imaginary of transnational Shīʿī network—to be celebrated or vilified, depending on one’s own political position. Al-Sudairi has also offered an informative report on how this new imaginary undergirds a paranoid transnational battle for Saudi Arabia to overthrow Iranian’s global influence. See Mohammed Turki A. Al-Sudairi, “China as the New Frontier for Islamic Daʿwah: The Emergence of a Saudi China- Oriented Missionary Impulse,” Journal of Arabian Studies 7, no. 2 (July 3, 2017): 225–46. Ma Hualong, the fifth Jahriyya saint in the silsila, bears the name sayyad al-shuhadā,’ “chief of the martyrs,” and is compared to Ḥusayn in Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī. See Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 170, 195. In the same hagiography shortly thereafter, Ma Hualong is also compared to Prophet Muhammad, while one of his grandsons, Ma Jincheng, is compared to both Ḥasan and Ḥusayn. See Ma Mansūr, 200. See Kamran Scot Aghaie, ed., The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi’ i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 119. For Shīʿī narratives on women martyrs and women’s participation in muḥarram rituals, see Kamran Scot Aghaie, ed., The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi’ i Islam (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). “Madā’iḥ” (Hong Le Fu, Ningxia, n.d.), 14–15. “Madā’iḥ,” 16–17. See, for example, Ibn Isḥāq, Al-Sīrat al-Nawawiyya (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004), 17. Anna Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 11–14. Imam Jacfar ibn al-Ḥasan al-Barzanjī, Mawlid Al-Barzanji: A Paean on the Blessed Prophet’s Birth, trans. Muhammad Isa Waley (n.p.: Manaqib, 2009), Arabic text, 6–7. The edition of al-Anwār I used is Abū al-Ḥasan Aḥmad ibn cAbd Allāh al-Bakrī, Al-Anwār Wa Misbāḥ al-Surūr Wa-l-Afkār Wa Dhikr Nūr Muḥammad al-Muṣṭafā al-Muḥtār (Beirut: Dār alKutub al-cIlmiyya, 2007). For a detailed analysis of the text and its various manuscripts deposited in libraries around the world, see Boaz Shoshan, Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 23–29. “Madā’iḥ,” 31–32. “Madā’iḥ,” 39–42; Al-Bakrī, Al-Anwār, 11–12; Shoshan, Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo, 24. While the plots are similar in Madā’ iḥ and al-Anwār, the wording is largely different across the

26 8

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37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

l

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two texts, and al-Anwār is a great deal more elaborate and literary. In Madā’ iḥ the language is much less descriptive; it treats these events in such a fleeting manner that calls to mind the Qur’an’s analogous treatment of biblical events. Katz, Birth of The Prophet Muhammad, 56, 72, mentions that from the fourteenth century onward mawlid texts were adapted for devotional performances, and since the fifteenth century these texts of modest length—so they can be finished in one sitting—have been a staple for wedding celebrations. Katz, 74, 234n44. Carl W. Ernst, “An Indo-Persian Guide to Sufi Shrine Pilgrimage,” in Manifestations of Sainthood in Islam, ed. Grace Martin Smith and Carl W. Ernst (Istanbul: Isis, 1992), 44. See also Ignaz Goldziher, “The Cult of Saints in Islam,” Muslim World 1, no. 3 (1911): 302–12; and Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 68–71. Daotang, “the hall of dao,” is the Jahriyya term for the Sufi residential hospice. See chapter 2, n2. This very personalized connection with the shaykh is one of the definitive features of Sufism and constitutes another proof of the way personal allegiance figures at the heart of Sufi practice, though in different Sufi orders this connection may assume different forms and give rise to quite difference consequences. See Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet, 29–54, 131–46; and Knysh, Sufism, 137–63. Chengzhi Zhang, Xinling Shi [History of the soul], 2nd ed. (Beijing: Self-published, 2012), 109–10. The decision to use chicken is at times more than economic. Once I was told the following story by an elderly Jahriyya: since chickens eat assorted grain, they are able to clean up all the food dropped by the deceased when the latter was alive. As such, chickens are the animals that eventually effectuate the closure that death is supposed to bring about. Arguably this view is rooted in a sedentary agricultural form of life. While the slaughtering of a cow is almost invariably interpreted as an act dedicated to the worship of God, here the slaughtering of chicken seems to serve the purpose of saving the departed. The slaughtered chicken is a servant, an assistant, and a travel companion of the deceased; it closes the circle and sends the dead on their way. One can thus even argue that, for those who do subscribe to this belief, the slaughtering of a chicken is an act of mourning par excellence, since it inscribes a proper closure. While many Mawlid rituals also require the participants to stand up and recite, this happens mainly at the point where the text begins to narrate the birth of the Prophet, a culminating moment for the whole ritual. The reason for such standing is either reverence—it is thought that the Prophet or his spirit joins the recitation at this moment—or joy at his birth. See Katz, Birth of The Prophet Muhammad, 128–39. The same rule applies to the series of Madā’ iḥ rituals conducted after the death of a family member. On wu ri, the fifth day after death, one starts with the opening section, and on sishi ri, the fortieth day after death, one closes with Wanzan, no matter where one dropped off last time. Xinghua Li and Jinyuan Feng, Zhongguo Yisilanjiao Shi Cankao Ziliao Xuan Bian [Selected reference works for the history of Islam in China], 2 vols. (Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Publishing House, 1985), 775. See Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank, Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 129. Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). See especially Wael Hallaq, Sharī’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

4 . His M ast er’s Voice 50. 51. 52.

m

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For one such report on Ma Zhenwu, see Daoren Han, “Fengjian Zhidu Yu Zongjiao Xinyang Ziyou (Feudalism and Freedom of Religion),” Ningxia Daily, August 14, 1958. Chengzhi Zhang, Xinling Shi, 19–84. For overviews of this massive campaign see Anna Ahlers, Rural Policy Implementation in Contemporary China: New Socialist Countryside (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Elizabeth J. Perry, “From Mass Campaigns to Managed Campaigns: ‘Constructing a New Socialist Countryside,’ ” in Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, ed. Elizabeth J. Perry and Sebastian Heilmann (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 30–61.

4. His Master’s Voice 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

See also Tong Soon Lee, “Technology and the Production of Islamic Space: The Call to Prayer in Singapore,” Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (January 1, 1999): 86–100; R. Murray Schafer, Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1994). See Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (July 29, 2013): 327–43; Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Anderson Blanton, Hittin’ the Prayer Bones: Materiality of Spirit in the Pentecostal South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Rachel Harris, The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 45–66; Nathan Light, “Cultural Politics and the Pragmatics of Resistance: Reflexive Discourses on Culture and History,” in Situating the Uyghurs Between China and Central Asia, ed. Ildikó Bellér-Hann, M. Cristina Cesàro, Rachel Harris, and Joanne Smith Finley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 60–61. See Nile Green, “Migrant Sufis and Sacred Space in South Asian Islam,” Contemporary South Asia 12, no. 4 (December 1, 2003): 493–509; and Rian Thum, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). There is also a large body of anthropological literature on pilgrimage, much of which deals with Christianity. See, for instance, Edith Turner and Victor Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Simon Coleman and John Elsner, eds., Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage (New York: Berghahn, 2003); Simon Coleman and John Elsner, Pilgrimage: Past and Present in the World Religions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); and John Eade and Michael  J. Sallnow, eds., Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (New York: Routledge, 1991). For work on Muslim pilgrims, see Dale F. Eickelman and James P. Piscatori, eds., Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Christian Bawa Yamba, Permanent Pilgrims: The Role of Pilgrimage in the Lives of West African Muslims in Sudan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). Wenyuan Gao, Qingmo Xibei Huimin Zhi Fanqing Yundong [The Anti- Qing revolt of the Hui in northwest China] (Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Publishing House, 1998), 207–8; Chung-fu Chang, Qingdai Xibei Huimin Shibian [The Hui incident in northwest China] (Taipei: Linking, 2001), 110, 202; Chengzhi Zhang, Xinling Shi [History of the soul], 2nd  ed. (Beijing: Selfpublished, 2012), 176. One of the best-known Jahriyya figures in this regard is Niu ahong, or al-ʿālim al-baqrī, as his name appeared in Manāqib, who offered voluntarily to do the prison terms on behalf of the third murshid, Qutb al-ʿĀlam. For his story, see Abdul Aḥad, Manāqib Al-Awliyā’ (Yinchuan: Self-published, 1910), 120–21.

270 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

l

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Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī (Hong Le Fu, Ningxia: Self-published, n.d. [ca. 1930s]), 198. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 114. Compare to James T. Siegel, The Rope of God (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). See, for instance, Frankel, Rectifying God’s Name; Petersen, Interpreting Islam in China; and Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (London: Harvard University Press, 2005). Compare to Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 264–68. This straightforward reading may be favored by a certain strain of anthropology in the 1990s that claimed to have adopted a phenomenological approach. See, for instance, Thomas J. Csordas, “Somatic Modes of Attention,” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2 (May 1993): 135–56; Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18, no. 1 (March 1990): 5–47; and Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2002). While I do not disagree with this reading, nor the phenomenological approach at large, I find its application here potentially contributing to the common bias that anthropologists are a gullible bunch, which, to be fair, is not entirely untrue. However, it is also important to acknowledge the diverse paradigms that scholars of this tradition subscribe to. For a recent review, see Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomonological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 87–102. Meg McLagan, “Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 90–111; Charlene Makley, “The Sociopolitical Lives of Dead Bodies: Tibetan Self-Immolation Protest as Mass Media,” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 3 (August 10, 2015): 448–76. Faye D. Ginsburg, “Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 43. Ginsburg, “Screen Memories,” 44, emphasis original. Terence Turner, “Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye  D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 75–89. Rosalind C. Morris, New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures (New York: Avalon, 1994); Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby, Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). See, for instance, Harald E. L. Prins, “Visual Media and the Primitivst Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 58–74. Rosalind C. Morris, “A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 389. Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Laura Kunreuther, Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 181–85. Larkin, Signal and Noise, 64–68.

5 . L a b o r o f Fa i t h 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

m

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Debra Spitulnik, “Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception Through Zambian Radio Culturte,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 337–54; Rudolf Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). See, for instance, Michael Bull, Sound Moves: IPod Culture and Urban Experience (New York: Routledge, 2007); “Investigating the Culture of Mobile Listening: From Walkman to IPod,” in Consuming Music Together: Social and Collaborative Aspects of Music Consumption Technologies, ed. Kenton O’Hara and Barry Brown (New York: Springer, 2006), 131–49; and Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000). Larkin, Signal and Noise, 55. Maria Jaschok and Jingjun Shui, “Sound and Silence in Chinese Women’s Mosques: Identity, Faith, and Equality,” Performing Islam 3, nos. 1–2 (2014): 61–84; Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), 211–36. Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 42. See Guangtian Ha, “The Silent Hat: Islam, Female Labor, and the Political Economy of the Headscarf Debate,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no.  3 (February  14, 2017): 743–69. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 45–64. See also Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Anne Rasmussen, Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Lee Tong Soon, “Technology and the Production of Islamic Space: The Call to Prayer in Singapore,” Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (January 1999): 89. Isaac Weiner, “Calling Everyone to Pray: Pluralism, Secularism, and the Adhān in Hamtramck, Michigan,” Anthropological Quarterly, no. 4 (2014): 1049–77. Brian Larkin, “Techniques of Inattention: The Mediality of Loudspeakers in Nigeria,” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 4 (2014): 989–1015. Andrew Eisenberg, “Islam, Sound, and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship on the Kenyan Coast,” in Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experiences, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 200–201. Blanton, Hittin’ the Prayer Bones, 11–35; compare to Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). Larkin, “Techniques of Inattention.”

5. Labor of Faith 1. 2. 3.

Elisabeth Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 15. Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 43–54. Hershatter, Gender of Memory, 130.

272 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

l

5 . L a b o r o f Fa i t h

Hershatter, 37. Ma Mansūr, Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī (Hong Le Fu, Ningxia: Self-published, n.d. [ca. 1930s], 41. See Masumi Matsumoto, “Secularization and Modernization of Islam in China: Educational Reform, Japanese Occupation, and the Disappearance of Persian Learning,” in Islamic Thought in China: Sino-Muslim Intellectual Evolution from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jonathan Lipman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 171–96. See Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own (Richmond: Curzon, 2000). Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 157–210. Leila Ahmed, Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 213. For the new Islamic veil, see also Arlene Elowe Macleod, Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). For instance, Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Samah Selim, “Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject,” Jadaliyya, 2010, http://www.jadaliyya .com /pages/index /235/book-review_politics -of-piety_the-islamic-revival(accessed April 6, 2021). Especially Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208–26; and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 42, emphasis original. Foucault, “Afterword,” 790. Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). See, for instance, Kamran Scot Aghaie, ed., The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi’ i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011); and Mary Hegland, “Shi’a Women’s Rituals in Northwest Pakistan: The Shortcomings and Significance of Resistance,” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2003): 411–42. See Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (University of California Press, 1986); and Deborah Kapchan, Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). Rachel Harris, “The Changing Uyghur Religious Soundscape,” Performing Islam 3, no. 1–2 (May 1, 2014): 103–24. For instance, Catharina Raudvere, The Book and the Roses: Sufi Women, Visibility, and Zikir in Contemporary Istanbul (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 2002); and Deborah Kapchan, “Learning to Listen: The Sound of Sufism in France,” World of Music 51, no. 2 (2009): 65–89. Amira Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Eleanor Abdella Doumato, Getting God’s Ear: Women, Islam, and Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own (Richmond: Curzon, 2000). Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun, “Sound and Silence in Chinese Women’s Mosques: Identity, Faith and Equality,” Performing Islam 3, nos. 1–2 (2014): 61–84.

Ep i l o gu e 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

m

27 3

For a brief history of Salafism in China, see Mohammed Turki A. Al-Sudairi, “Adhering to the Ways of Our Western Brothers,” Sociology of Islam 4, nos. 1–2 (April 15, 2016): 27–58. World Bank Data Bank, accessed July 19, 2020, http://databank .worldbank .org /data/reports.aspx ?source=2&series=SE.ADT.LITR.FE.ZS&country=CHN. Among the Jahriyya, the word dhikr, rather than denoting all recitations aimed at remembering God, was often used to refer specifically to the rhythmic chanting of lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh, “There is no god but God.” I have followed that local convention in this ethnography. It is said that before the martyrdom of Ma Hualong each of the three phrases was recited thirty-three times; the total number, ninety-nine, was a numerical representation of eternity. After Ma Hualong’s martyrdom, on the other hand, the Jahriyya murīdūn chant lā ilāh illā allāh fifty-six times, in order to commemorate the fifty-six days of torture Ma Hualong endured in a jail before he was executed. Illā allāh, accordingly, is now shrunk to only ten times. It is said that before Ma Hualong was put to death, his executioner, adding insult to injury, laughed and asked, “Now that you are about to die, you should know that no one will ever remember you again. Your whole family have been exterminated. Tell me, Ma Hualong— who will be your descendants and sing your name?” “All who recite lā ilāh illā allāh [There is no god but God] will be my descendants; they will sing my name,” he said before being subject to lingchi, a dreadful torture that sliced the flesh of the victim to inflict a slow and painful death. On lingchi, see Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). This is said to be the origin of the change to Jahriyya’s dhikr. Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 163– 64. Chion’s argument addresses the implications of the audiovisual dissonance in film; here I use the same concept to highlight a comparable dissonance along gender lines. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 72–140; Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 25–69. Yinchuan Xiaodong Mosque, Zaxue [Miscellaneous studies] (Yinchuan: Self-published, 2013), 194. Just as in South Asia, where Islam combines with other religious traditions to draw in a mixed multireligious crowd on the occasion of major celebrations, in China a Sufi tomb could become a local pilgrimage site for people of diverse religious convictions regardless of its specific affiliation with Islam. For one specific example, see Tristan G. Brown, “A Mountain of Saints and Sages: Muslims in the Landscape of Popular Religion in Late Imperial China,” T’oung Pao 105, nos. 3–4 (November 11, 2019): 437–91.

Epilogue 1.

2.

At the time of this writing, the school has closed yet again to observe the social distancing rules enforced by the government to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. While China is slowly reopening in May 2020, the school has yet to be allowed to reopen. When and whether this will take place remains to be seen. Tim Ingold, “Anthropology Contra Ethnography,” hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 1 (June 11, 2017): 23.

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Index

c

Abdul al-Qādir Jīlānī, 62–63 Ahong, 76, 80, 110–12, 115–16, 119, 127–29, 186, 189, 191–92, 222–24, 228, 232, 246n10; Akhūnd, 81; Ayyūb, 52–53; Banqiao, 258n79; compact disc, 177–80; Dahuzi, 5; Daore, 82, 97, 174–75, 184; family ermaili, 148–55; Guodiezi, 228–30; Liaojing, 135–40; Niu in Manāqib, 269n6; women, 207–12, 216–17; Xiao’erjing, 56–57; Youxiang, 141–44 Al-Barzanji, 123, 267n32 Al-Hujwīrī, 40, 60, 108, 252n12, 265n7 Al-Tabādkānī al-Ṭūsī, Muhammad, 19, 69, 88–91, 259n84, 263nn37–40, 263n43 Anderson, Benedict, 253n16, 259n91, 270n8; sacred language, 42–43, 71; bureaucratic pilgrimage, 170–71 Awrād, 2, 31, 43, 81, 86, 207, 211–13

Badīc, 84–87, 262n22, 23, 24 Banqiao, 256n60, 258n71, 259n83; Shagou, Maqiao, 16–17 Ben Guangyin Taiye, 110, 130–31; Ma Zhenwu, 109 Bianliang Taiye, Ma Jincheng, 167 Burda, Qaṣīda al-, 80, 83, 86–90, 101, 117, 261n16, 262n21, 262n31, 263n36 Daotang, 77, 141–42, 149–54, 189, 222–23, 229, 241–42, 256n60, 258n71, 259n83; Dayi’er, 126, 135–38; Ermaili, 131–34, 139, 162; explanation, 260n2, 268n39; Madā’iḥ, 117, 130; pilgrimage, 168, 176

Daore, 79, 175, 238, 241; Dayi’er, 80; Madā’iḥ, 154–56; Mukhammas 34, 94–104, 112–14, 213; standardization of, 200; variations of/ heterogeneity of/diversification of, 161–64, 170–72, 176–78, 183–84, 193–94; voice, 81–83; women’s, 201–2, 210–11, 214–16, 234 Dawr, 1, 245n2, 260n7; Daore, 80, 83; Meccan and Yemeni, 30; variations in, 28 Dayi’er, 77, 98, 102, 112, 161, 191; boat, 166, 176; Daore, 79–80; Daotang, 126, 135–39; explanation, 34, 76; family, 139–40, 154; gender, 198, 201–2, 212; Guodiezi, 230; Nietie, 115; recording, 178; Tabār, 93–94; voice, 191–93 Dhikr, 2, 45, 77, 80, 198, 212, 267n33; Jahrī, 15, 43, 69, 273nn27–28; women’s, 206, 213; vocal, 16, 18 Dian du bi, 172–74 Ermaili, 126, 142, 160, 168, 218, 226, 229; broadcast, 161–62, 189, 191; change to family, 148–55; daotang, 132–40; explanation, 80; guo (pass) and gen (follow), 130, 166–67, 187–88; madā’iḥ, 131, 141, 159, 182; names given to, 143–44; phone, 193; voice, 192; Wahhabi intrusion, 174–75; women, 186 Fletcher, Joseph, 18, 62, 69–70, 248n44, 257n64, 257n66, 259nn88–89 Guangyin, 110, 129; Ben- Taiye, 109–10, 130, 131; explanation, 109; gen (follow), 166 Guodiezi, 202, 226–34

292

l

I n dex

Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 41, 63–65, 70–71, 120, 167, 250n71, 250n75, 252n13, 257nn61–63, 258n70, 258n74, 258n77, 260n10, 266n19, 266n21, 267n26, 270n7, 272n5; borrowing from Sufi hagiographical canon, 60; Naqshbandiyya revival and decline of Persian, 67–69; voice, 81 Jingdan, 75–76 Jingtang jiaoyu, 175, 254n37, 256n47, 256n53 Khatam, 47–48, 258n78 Khātim: al-anbiyā’, 48, 107; al-awlād, 264–65n4; al-walāya, 107 Khatm, 48, 66, 258n77; al-awaliyā’, 264nn2–3; al-khwājagān, 66–67, 258n74; al-mansūb, 65; al-Qur’an, 48; al-walāya, 107 Khojā Āfāq, 70 Khojāgān, 248n39, 256n55 Laorenjia, 5, 245n8 Liao jing, 135, 137, 139–40 liturgical, 5, 8, 60, 65–68, 86, 140–41; ritual, 9–13, 21, 23–27, 29, 31–35, 38, 74, 164, 194; text, 2, 20, 42, 117, 123; variation, 156 loudspeaker, 33, 35, 162, 183, 188–89, 215, 271n35 Ma Hualong, 19–20, 166–67, 267n26, 273n28 Ma Liesun, 107, 152, 175 Ma Mingxin, 59, 108, 120, 143, 165, 168, 170, 223, 226, 257n61, 259n85; fundamentalist, 18; Persian, 58, 68; Qādirī and Naqshbandī ṭarīqa, 63–64, 70; Shīcīsm, 121; Turkic, 73; Yemen, 43, 62, 69, 106, 257n68 Ma Zhenwu, 106–9, 142, 152, 155, 266n12, 269n50 Mada’ih, 35, 83, 86, 102, 154–55, 159, 170, 181–82, 187, 191–93, 200, 207, 229, 261n18, 262n31, 267nn28–29, 267n34, 268n44; Madīh (singular form), 77, 84; Mawlid, 118, 121–26, 267–68n35; recitation, 102, 110–17, 126–136, 139–41, 143–44, 149, 153, 162, 174; women’s, 233–34 madrasa, 71, 260n10; Jahriyya, 1–2, 39, 50, 238; Persian, 72; Xiao’erjing, 57 Maktubāt, 66–67, 258n78 Manāqib al-Awliya’, 58, 67, 69, 253n18, 256nn56– 58, 259n86, 269n6 Mawlid, 117–26, 266n14, 267n32, 268n36, 268n43

mediatization, 161–62, 186, 194; of Jahriyya recitation, 156, 160, 180, 193, 200 Menhuan, 248n36, 259n83, 259n87; difference from Sufi “orders,” 16; explanation, 14 Mizjājī, 53, 69, 257n68 Mukhammas, 69, 78,105, 159, 170, 261n18, 262n31, 263n37, 263n43; comparison with Mada’ih, 112–13, 115–16, 126, 130, 134, 162; Daore, 34, 94–104, 238, 241; Ma Hualong ataytu, 19; polyphony, 177; Qasīḍa al-Burda, 20, 80, 83–91; ritual, 21, 91–93; Takhmīs, 20, 83, 86, 87, 89–90, 261nn15–16, 263n31; women, 186, 201, 207, 210, 213, 215–16, 234 Murād Ramzī, 64, 66, 258n73 Murīd (pl. murīdūn), 9–10, 19, 26–28, 31–32, 58, 60, 74, 78–79, 114, 133–34, 136, 143, 149, 152, 156–57, 188–89, 191, 200–1, 214, 228, 230, 235, 237–38, 240, 242–43; Arabic, 199; linguistic makeup, 71–77; migration, 162, 165–67, 170, 194; Mukhammas, 82–86, 91–95, 113, 115; murshid, 5–6, 35–36, 43, 104–11, 116, 119–21, 127–29, 138, 155, 162; Naqshbandiyya, 14–16, 18, 43, 64–68; recitation, 98, 101–3, 154, 161, 164, 174, 176, 178, 180–81, 184, 192; Salar, 69; Tajwīd, 39–40; tomb visitation, 171, 187; women, 195–96, 203, 207, 211, 223; Youxiang, 218–20, 231 Murshid, 8, 14, 104, 119–20, 127, 131–32, 137, 167; Dawr, 30, 184; founding, 18, 43, 143, 223, 226; guide, 5–6; Jahriyya, 17, 59, 70, 139, 165; last, 92, 106–11, 152, 266n12; Murshidūn (plural form), 14–16, 29, 33, 35, 65, 67–68, 72, 105, 116, 129, 138, 155, 162, 164, 171; NaqshbandiyyaKhufiyya, 259n85; personal allegiance to, 121, 266–67n22 Naqshbandiyya/Naqshbandī, 43, 57, 119, 248n39, 256n55, 257n64, 257n66–68, 258n74–75, 259n85, 259nn87–88, 262n20, 266n18; Central Asia, 15–16, 58, 69, 70; Jahriyya nisba, 62–64; Mujaddidī, 65–66; revival, 67–68; Yemen, 14, 18 Nietie (niyya), 128, 150–52, 154; Ermaili, 130, 135; explanation, 115; Guo, 140, 143 Persian, xiii, 5, 18, 33, 40, 57–58, 60–61, 69–70, 73, 81, 91, 120, 228, 246n10, 253n19, 254n36, 257n62, 260n2, 262n19, 263n40, 265n7, 266n11, 268n38; cAjamī, 40–41, 43; Arabo-,

I n dex 47–49, 83; in classical Sino-Islamic curriculum, 52–54, 175, 199, 255n43, 272n6; in Hādha al-Kitāb al-Jahrī, 64–68, 260n10, 266n21; Mukhammas, 85–86, 89, 96; Persianate, 16, 112, 164, 258n75, 259n90; Persographic as opposed to Persophonic, 71–72; women’s knowledge of, 200, 209; work on Arabic morphology, 49, 51 pilgrim/pilgrimage, 45, 66, 152, 176–77, 194, 196, 200, 202, 210–11, 252n11, 255n42, 268n38, 269n4, 273n32; Guodiezi and youxiang, 230–32; Ma Mingxin, 69; Ma Wanfu, 28; networks, 164, 167–71, 234 polyphony, 2, 184, 194, 210; in prayer halls, 170, 176–78, 202; women’s congregation, 234 pronunciation, 31, 41, 55, 77, 154, 174, 199–200, 208; Arabic, 10, 29, 34, 40, 42–44, 46, 52, 112–13, 161, 173, 233, 252n10; Persianized, 53, 72; Saudi, 175–76, 194 Qawācid al-Naḥw wa-l-Icrāb, 54, 56–57, 256n52 Reshiha’er/Rashaḥāt, 58, 64, 66, 69, 258n79, 266n21 ritualization, 19, 21, 23–27, 32, 35, 156, 248n51 sainthood, 13, 19, 28, 119, 245, 265–66, 268n38; abstract, 3–9, 27, 34, 77–79; Daotong (pedigree of dao), 106, 129; female, 195; seal to, 107–11, 152; Sufi, 33, 81 Samāc, 45–46, 72, 78, 81, 253nn19–20, 263n43 Ṣarf-e Mīr, 49, 51, 57, 254n36, 255n43 secular, 4, 11–13, 43, 57, 86, 175, 246n19, 247n21, 247nn26–27, 247nn31–33, 264n46; secularism, 11, 13, 188, 246n11, 247n30, 271n34; secularity, 12; secularization, 258n80, 272n6

m

293

Shagou, 250n86; pai (branch), 16–17, 256n60, 258n79; taiye, 109, 130, 133, 168 Shisan Taiye, 166; Ma Hualong, 19–20, 166, 267n26, 273n28 Silsila, 6, 15–18, 38, 57, 62–63, 155, 259n85, 267n26 smartphone, 35, 82, 159–60, 162, 180–84, 186, 193, 240, 261n18 standardization, 174, 193, 233, 241, 255n44, 257n61; Daore, 161, 164, 172, 177–78, 184, 194, 200 Tadhkirat al-Awliyā’, 60–61, 81, 257n62 Taiye, 167, 245n8; Ben Guangyin, 109–10, 130–31; Bianliang, 167; Chuanchang, 167; explanation, 5, 265n9; Shagou, 109, 130, 133, 168; Shisan, 166; Siyueba, 76, 81, 198 Tajnīs, 85–86, 101 Tajwīd, 39–40, 42, 44 transcendence, 3–4, 6–8, 10–13, 19, 21, 24, 27–28, 31, 33–36, 73, 77–79, 104, 112, 119, 155–56, 194, 264n48 Wilāya/walāya, 5, 67 Xiao’erjing, 54–57, 60, 208, 255nn43–46, 256nn47–49, 256n51 Xiaozhai (in Yunnan), 203, 211–13 Yasaviyya, 15–16, 248nn38–40, 256n55 Yemen, 14, 18, 30, 43, 62–63, 69–70, 106, 124, 242, 255n44, 257n68 Yihewani, 29 Youxiang, 36, 140, 143–44, 154, 216, 218, 220–23, 225–26, 231–32, 234–36 Zayn, Muḥammad ibn, 43, 62, 69, 259n85

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University

Selected Titles (Complete list at: weai.columbia.edu/content/publications) A Third Way: The Origins of China’s Current Economic Development Strategy, by Lawrence Chris Reardon. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World, by Arthur M. Mitchell. Cornell University Press, 2020. Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China, by Nicholas Bartlett. University of California Press, 2020. Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form, by Christopher Laing Hill. Northwestern University Press, 2020. Arbiters of Patriotism: Right Wing Scholars in Imperial Japan, by John Person. Hawaii University Press, 2020. The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, by Benno Weiner. Cornell University Press, 2020. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China, by Arunabh Ghosh. Princeton University Press, 2020. Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, by Andrew B. Liu. Yale University Press, 2020. Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism, by Tatiana Linkhoeva. Cornell University Press, 2020. Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900–1940, by Eugenia Lean. Columbia University Press, 2020. Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand, by Duncan McCargo. Cornell University Press, 2020. Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border, by Sören Urbansky. Princeton University Press, 2020.