Dialectic of embodiment: Mysticism, materiality and the performance of Sufism in China

This article attempts to contribute to the study of religious – particularly Sufi Islamic – structuring of the body from two perspectives: on the one hand, it pays attention not merely to the disciplinary dimension of the Jahriyya Sufi training in northwest China, but also to the specific processes that build this training around the corporeal acts of ritual consumption. On the other hand, this article also examines how the structuring of embodiment specific to Jahriyya Sufism is intrinsically linked to a strongly eschatological conception of time that greatly intensifies the disciplinary power of training. Rather than reduce the question to one of ritual rigidity or nostalgia for spiritual grandeur lost to a past presumed to be perpetually unchanging, the article argues that the specifically Jahriyya eschatology, marked by the insistence upon the sealing of the sacred genealogy, dialectically sublimates sainthood, elevating it from the concrete and corporeal to the symbolic and sublime. This symbolization and sublimation is located at the centre of Jahriyya mysticism and forms the definitive drive that structures the pious Jahriyya body. Based upon this ethnographic discovery, this article challenges the current tendency in anthropological and religious studies of Sufism and Islam that locates the body completely within the space of ethical and performative practice. It argues that the dimension of the symbolic and the sublime, irreducible to the practical, bears its own specificity that demands our analytical attention.