Framing the Global

Rachel Harris

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253051370
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is experiencing a crisis of securitization and mass incarceration. In Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam, author Rachel Harris examines the religious practice of a group of Uyghur women in a small village now engulfed in this chaos. Despite their remote location, these village women are mobile and connected, and their religious soundscapes flow out across transnational networks. Harris explores the spiritual and political geographies they inhabit, moving outward from the village to trace connections with Mecca, Istanbul, Bishkek, and Beijing. Sound, embodiment, and territoriality illuminate both the patterns of religious change among Uyghurs and the policies of cultural erasure used by the Chinese state to reassert its control over the land the Uyghurs occupy. By drawing on contemporary approaches to the circulation of popular music, Harris considers how various forms of Islam that arrive via travel and the internet come into dialogue with local embodied practices. Synthesized together, these practicies create new forms that facilitate powerful, affective experiences of faith.

1

SOUND, PLACE, AND RELIGIOUS REVIVAL

Snapshots in Sound from Xinjiang

The massive development of recent decades in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China has brought rapid advances in infrastructure, the wholesale extraction of natural resources, and large-scale Han Chinese immigration into a region until recently dominated by Turkic Muslim peoples, the most numerous of whom are the Uyghurs. This development has wrought huge changes, not only in the landscape but also in the soundscape. By 2012, coal mines and oil refineries had come to dominate the desert landscape, and heavy trucks thundered up and down the new highways transporting minerals and building materials. In Xinjiang’s provincial cities, bulldozers rumbled over demolition sites and mud-brick shacks crashed to the ground, fracturing precarious communities of Uyghur rural migrants. The thudding of pile drivers echoed around the high-rise residential developments that were shooting up in their place. In the manicured town squares, the evening soundscape became carnivalesque. Groups of Han Chinese women performed American line dancing or Chinese yang’ge dancing to techno soundtracks that competed with tinny music from children’s fairground rides. In the Muslim graveyard in Ürümchi, there was an audible hum from the electricity pylons and the mass of wires that passed overhead; relatives complained that the noise was disturbing the sleep of the dead. In the Uyghur villages of the rural south, the roar of motorbikes had all but replaced the groan of the donkeys, and the nights throbbed to the sound of water pumps as farmers took advantage of cheap electricity to pump water to their cotton fields. The village loudspeaker, that supreme sonic marker of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, was once again filling the village streets with a mixture of popular songs and news of the latest political campaigns.

What can attention to sound contribute to our understanding of the patterns of social and religious change, and the extreme political upheavals that have affected Uyghur communities in Xinjiang and in the Central Asian states? How do social and ideological transformations entwine with the soundscape? The sonic snapshots just sketched give fleeting impressions of the diverse ways in which local people in Xinjiang experienced development, Han migration, and state propaganda in 2012. The sounds of development are ubiquitous, but they signify different things to different listeners. They might be a welcome marker of private achievements: a new home or a good cotton crop. Equally, the sounds might index the destruction of a family home and loss of a way of life or the bulldozing of ancestral graves to make way for a new tourist destination. The heat and noise of the public squares marked not only the increasing number of Han Chinese migrants but also their increasing confidence to claim and dominate public space in this border region.

Equally important for an understanding of the soundscape are the sounds that are not heard, sounds that do not circulate in the public sphere. In this majority-Muslim region, no call to prayer resounded from the village mosque, and the women’s religious gatherings that lie at the heart of this book were conducted behind closed doors and windows to muffle the sound of recitation and protect the participants from unwanted attention by the local police. By 2018, the government campaign to “cleanse” Uyghurs of the “virus” of Islam was in full swing. Western journalists who traveled to the region commented repeatedly on the silence of local people in response to their questions. This silence, born of the fear of incriminating oneself through a careless word, had permeated every aspect of daily life. The very use of the Uyghur language in public was labeled an unpatriotic act, one that might lead to the speaker’s detention in the new network of internment camps or “reeducation centers,” as the authorities termed them. Meanwhile, the public soundscape was dominated by organized demonstrations of Uyghurs’ love for the Chinese motherland and the Chinese language and culture: mass performances of revolutionary songs, song-and-dance shows, and street parades celebrating the Chinese New Year.

Researching Religious Revival in China and Central Asia

Over the past three decades, Islamic revival movements and revivalist trends have had a profound impact across the former Soviet Central Asian states and China. Within Uyghur society, this religious revival is best understood as rooted at the local level. In part, these trends can be read as a response to the relaxing of the tight controls on religious life under Soviet rule and during China’s “revolutionary period” of the 1950s–70s. At this level, they represented a revitalization of family and community religious traditions, but they also responded to the increased mobilities and contacts and access to global flows of knowledge that became possible in the 1980s. Thus, they must also be understood as part of the transnational spread of Islamic revival movements with their emphasis on a return to “orthodox” practice and the scripturalist Islamic tradition and on forms of ethical self-cultivation. It is this broad and diffuse revival movement that the Chinese government has depicted wholesale as “religious extremism” and sought to crush through the intense securitization of the Xinjiang region and the mass internment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims.

My research on this topic is based on fieldwork across borders, working with Uyghur communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China (also known by Uyghurs as East Turkistan) and in the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Between 2006 and 2012, I was able to spend several extended periods living in a village in southern Xinjiang, working together with my Uyghur husband, Aziz Isa, to whom I am indebted for his many contributions to this study. Where I write “we” in this book, it refers to our family fieldwork team. During this period, we took part in religious and family rituals and we recorded the oral histories of women who lived in the village. The women had their own individual reasons for engaging with my research. They requested copies of my videos so that they could watch and assess the power of their rituals. They had little experience of tailoring their life stories for the consumption of outsiders, and I found that their oral histories were always recounted with particular audiences, such as their families or friends, in mind. Rabiya Acha, whose story follows this introduction, asked us to pass on the recording we made to her children after her death. She wanted to impress on them the suffering that their mother had endured over a lifetime in the village.

Because of the increased tensions in Xinjiang after 2012, we were unable to continue work there and began to spend time with Uyghur communities across the border in eastern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. For at least a hundred years, Uyghurs have been migrating westward out of the homeland (wätän), following the trade routes across the Heaven Mountains (Tängri Tagh or Tian Shan) and settling in the region now encompassed by the nation-states of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Uyghurs arrived here in larger numbers in the 1950s, fleeing from the first wave of communization under the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and arriving in what was then a relatively settled Soviet system (Clarke and Kamalov 2004; Harris 2012). In the period that we conducted fieldwork in the Central Asian states, between 2014 and 2015, the relationship between Islam and the state was less oppositional than it was in Xinjiang, and it was easier to attend religious gatherings and schools and conduct interviews that revealed a spectrum of views and often sharp debates within the Uyghur community over the influx of new religious practices and ideologies.

In Xinjiang, the situation throughout my research period has been marked by escalating violence and an anti-religious-extremism campaign that has included mass arrests, sweeping securitization of the region, new forms of discrimination against Uyghurs, and intensified restrictions on religious life. As access to the field became increasingly difficult and potentially dangerous for my local associates, I turned to other forms of data gathering, mainly via the internet and social media platforms, and I listened in on a rich array of mediated expressions of piety and discussions on the nature of faith. I am keenly aware of the ethical challenges posed by this method of research (Fiesler and Proferes 2018) and the potential harms to profiled users, given the sensitivity of much of this material. Under the increasingly severe sanctions on religious expression, foreign connections, and social-media use, it has been impossible to gain individual permission to use these sources, but I have taken every care to anonymize this material and protect my sources from harm.

As state sanctions against religion grew more punitive, my research was inevitably drawn toward a consideration of the relationship between religious revival and the state. A key question addressed in this book, following developments in the anthropology of the state (Sharma and Gupta 2006; Reeves, Rasanayagam and Beyer 2013), is how the Chinese state is discursively reproduced and materially constituted through everyday social practice among Uyghur communities in Xinjiang. In this region, the state is generally understood as a powerful and monolithic entity, an ever-present force that is deeply implicated in the minute texture of everyday life (Gupta 2006). The state is experienced through the constant admonitions of propaganda campaigns; through direct intrusions into daily life in the form of security checkpoints and police visits; as a constant check on private discourse in the form of an imagined listening ear; in everyday bureaucratic practices such as the issuing of “convenience cards,” without which people may not travel outside their home towns; and in ritual and symbolic performances such as mass performances of revolutionary songs and organized celebrations of the Chinese New Year on the streets of Khotan.

In China and in Central Asia, notions of tradition and cultural authenticity are used as tools of governance, and there is little middle ground within the opposition that is drawn between idealized national traditions and foreign religious extremism. Muslims in China have striven to align themselves with government initiatives in heritage, development, and tourism. In some cases they have represented their revivalist moves to the outside world as a tourist-friendly cultural renaissance (Hillman 2004), in other cases as examples of “spiritual civilization,” but gaining acceptance of such efforts is not always easy. Uyghurs, as marginalized cultural others, have been less able to position themselves advantageously in these shifting fields than have the Hui Chinese Muslims. Religious practice in China occupies an uneasy ground between tolerance and criminalization and is subject to constant shifts in policy. One important effect of state-imposed constraints on debate and restrictions on the flow of information is that lived experience is privileged over debate as a site for religious revival, and thus sounded practice and other sensory media assume particular prominence.

The book arises from the interdisciplinary research project “Sounding Islam in China.”¹ The project drew on ethnographic research with special attention to sound in order to cut through the polarized nature of the contemporary political debates, to provide insights into the lived experience of Islam in China, and to enhance our understanding of how transnational trends in Islam are locally reproduced, negotiated, and reconfigured. This book pursues a set of related questions: How does a distinctively Uyghur Islamic soundscape reflect the rise of new forms of Islam? How do these new religious modalities circulate within Uyghur society, and how do people listen to them? Thus, I am interested not only in how these sounds reflect new realities but also how they help to construct new ways of being Muslim and being Uyghur. In the later chapters of this book, responding to the fast-changing events in the region, I turn my focus to the ways in which state campaigns seek to remodel the soundscape and to discipline the embodied practices of its citizens: unmaking Muslims.

As Jonathan Lipman (2014) has argued, Muslims in China reverse the normative Chinese geographies of inside and outside (nei/wai). The geography of the “Middle Kingdom” (zhongguo) places imperial rule at its civilized heart and relegates the barbarians (including the Uyghurs) to the outer regions beyond the Great Wall. Chinese Muslims, on the other hand, both historically and today, regard the Middle East as their heartland, the source of correct practice and authentic religious sound, and thus they situate themselves on a different periphery. Uyghurs are outsiders from both perspectives. Living in China’s northwestern borderlands, they are accustomed to the mainstream Chinese notion that they reside “outside” or “beyond the pass,” while China proper is situated “within the mouth” (kouli) of the Gansu corridor, “inside” the Great Wall. As Muslims, they regard themselves as far from the Muslim heartlands, distant from the birthplace of Islam, the source of “true Islam” and models for living a proper Muslim lifestyle.

Lives lived in political borderlands are typically marked by tensions between outside and inside, between center and margin, and the Uyghur Islamic soundscape is inscribed in conditions of tension and conflict. Uyghurs, positioned on the borderlands of both Chinese culture and Islamic culture, must constantly engage in the cultural work of absorbing new ideologies and practices, synthesizing and recreating them in the light of local social and political realities and cultural norms. Thus, the notion of the Uyghur Islamic soundscape entails a series of interlocking themes related to the transnational flows of Islamic ideologies and practice and notions of geographical inside and outside, national borders, and gendered divisions of sacred space.

Uyghur Islam in the Twentieth Century

In order to understand the rapid and sometimes violent changes that are the subject of this book, it is important to grasp the nature of religious belief and practice in the region prior to the major political and social upheavals of the mid-twentieth century and to understand the way that the relationship between Uyghur Muslims and the Chinese state has been forged over the decades of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. Several authors have helped to piece together a picture of Islamic faith and practice in the region before the People’s Republic was founded in 1949. Ildikó Bellér-Hann’s (2008) historical ethnography of Uyghur society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries draws on local textual sources and the accounts of Russian and European travelers in the region. It builds a detailed picture of Islamic practice embedded in local custom, calendric and life-cycle rituals, and relationships of mutual obligation within Uyghur communities. Community life was also dominated by Islamic structures: religious schools (mädräsä), sharia courts, and the mosque community (jäma’ät).

Studies of local pilgrimage practices build up a picture of a distinctively local form of Islam, inflected by Sufi traditions and regional historiography. Rian Thum (2014) draws primarily on local textual sources in Turkic and Persian languages in his study of Uyghur Islam before the twentieth century. Thum considers the role of a range of texts in daily life, including manuals used for teaching basic knowledge of Islam in the region’s religious schools and the prayer manuals carried by individuals both as handbooks and as talismans, often compiled specifically for members of particular crafts and guilds. Central to Thum’s account are the hagiographies (tazkira) that were written to be recited by pilgrims at the tombs of the saints. Uyghur pilgrims traveled considerable distances across the region to ask favors of the saints or to reaffirm their faith and also to understand more of their history and identity, performing local circuits of pilgrimage around the shrines that dotted the Taklamakan desert in a period when the hajj was an unimaginable dream for the vast majority.

None of the foregoing should be taken as an indication of a monolithic “traditional” Uyghur Islam as a backdrop against which contemporary reformist trends can be measured (Rasanayagam 2006). The history of Islam in this region is one of contestation and change, from the bitter legacy of power struggles between branches of the Naqshbandi Sufi order throughout the eighteenth century (Thum 2014; Brophy 2018) to the early twentieth century revival movement of the Uyghur Jadidists who, influenced by movements in Ottoman Turkey and in Russian Central Asia, first sought to modernize a national form of Uyghur Islam by introducing new styles of education (Brophy 2016).

Under CCP rule, religious practice in Xinjiang came under a tightly organized system of state controls and carefully defined rights. The Islamic Association of China was formed in 1953 to coordinate relations between the party, the Muslim masses, and overseas Muslims and to represent the rights of China’s Muslims, who were divided into distinct ethnic categories (Hui Chinese-speaking Muslims, Uyghurs, and other smaller groups: e.g., Salar, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajik, Tatar). A 1953 meeting laid out the aims of the Islamic Association: to interpret Islamic law in accordance with Party policy, to develop regulations to implement Party policy on Islam, and to train and oversee officially sanctioned religious clerics. It was also responsible for producing and ratifying religious scholarship and developing the educational curriculum for China’s ten officially approved Islamic institutes, including one in Xinjiang.

The PRC constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but CCP policy—which takes precedence over state law—specifies that only “normal” religious activities receive state protection. This stipulation allows government officials to decide which practices qualify as “normal,” and therefore legal, and which are “deviant,” and thus illegal (Erie 2016, 12). In practice, this policy has brought about a situation where constant negotiations are required, at all levels of government from the neighborhood to the national, to decide whether a particular practice should be regarded as normal or illegal. This situation has disadvantaged Uyghur Muslims, whose marginal position within Chinese culture has made their religious practice especially prone to be viewed as deviant.

During the first few years of CCP rule in Xinjiang, the Party adopted a relatively cautious and tolerant approach toward Islam. Sharia courts and the offic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Sound, Place, and Religious Revival
• 2. Affective Rituals in a Uyghur Village
• 3. Text and Performance in the Hikmät of Khoja Ahmad Yasawi
• 4. Style and Meaning in the Recited Qur’an
• 5. Mobile Islam: Mediation and Circulation
• 6. Song and Dance and the Sonic Territorialization of Xinjiang
• 7. Erasure and Trauma
• References
• Index
• About the Author