Performing Islam - Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2014

A famous Naqshbandī Sufi, Ahmad Kāsānī Dahbīdī, surnamed Makhdūm-i A’zam, had great influence on Islamic practices and thought in the Chinese part of Central Asia as early as the late sixteenth century when his descendants, known as Makhdū-mzāda, conducted missionary campaigns in the Tarim basin. Among the 30 or so treatises that he wrote, two are of particular interest for understanding Islamic soundscapes. The first work is entitled Risāla-yi dhikr, or Treatise on Recitation, and describes the devotional repetition of the profession of faith (shahāda). The second text is devoted to the practice of spiritual audition (samā’). This Risāla-yi samā’iyya is basically a defence of Sufi musical performances. A close reading of the texts shows that the master nourished the ambition to promote a profound and encompassing vision of Sufi practices, which would educate and, at the same time, enlarge his circles of disciples. Despite the later divisions among the Makhdūmzāda branches, and the heated debates on forms of dhikr and samā’, Ahmad Kāsānī’s teaching was an inaugural act that has left a deep legacy for the Sufi soundscape of Xinjiang.

On both the southwestern and the northwestern frontiers of their expanding empire, the eighteenth-century Qing dynasty (1636–1912) ruled over considerable numbers of Muslims. This article examines two legal cases in which Muslims sued other Muslims in a secular Qing court to resolve issues of Islamic practice that involved sound. The southwestern (Yunnan) Qalandar case (c.1710) pitted conventional imams and Sino-Muslim elites against ‘wild Sufis’ from India and northwest China. The northwestern (Gansu) litigation (1760s–1780s) was brought by two Sufi orders that claimed to practice different rituals: one silent and one vocal. In both cases, the Qing officials found themselves adjudicating accusations of Islamic heterodoxy, which they decided by analogy to Qing legal definitions of Confucian heterodoxy. Using new materials for the Gansu case, the article concludes that one of the Sufi orders manipulated the Qing officials’ ignorance of Islam, the Arabic language and Islamic sound to win a conflict that thereafter divided the region for more than a century.

The evolution from early beginnings of Muslim women’s religious education in China, in the seventeenth century, when women were provided with rudimentary Islamic instruction, and taught from behind screens, to the emergence of more permanent women’s mosques (qingzhen nüsi) in the course of the nineteenth century, constitutes the historical background to an exploration of the relationship among silence, speech, voice, gender and power. Starting as informal gatherings in ad hoc, transitional spaces, dynamic and complex institutional sites developed to serve multiple functions and purposes, giving in the course of time rise to richly expressive cultures of sentiment and sound, piety and fear. The article seeks to problematize the coming-to-voice of Chinese believing women within the interlinking frameworks of aural ethnography and cross-cultural feminist theory. Written and audio-visual materials provide the sensory text for the author’s evocation of tangible surroundings, silenced and fleeting sensations, and for the historicizing of women’s lives lived at the intersection of Islamic/Confucian moral codes of jie – as feminine purity enshrouded, segregated and silenced – and modern claims for voice and gender equality.

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.

Recent studies in the anthropology of Islam have called for a new understanding of the relationship between global forms of Islam and local priorities, new ideologies and everyday religious experience. This article addresses these concerns in the context of Uyghur society in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China where communities are increasingly engaging with transnational currents of Islamic ideology, and increasingly under pressure from the state which conflates religiosity with anti-state activity and extremist terrorism. The article focuses on Islamic media, in particular at the ways in which rural Uyghur women experience and reproduce globalized forms of Islamic media. It aims to understand how the most marginalized sectors of society are engaging with these changing religious ideologies and practices. The theoretical frame draws on notions of the ‘soundscape’, which explore the ways in which sound, practices of listening and perceptions of sound, may be central to making sense of the world around us.