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Writing in Palimpsests: Performative Acts and Tactics in Everyday Life of Chinese Muslims

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Emergent Religious Pluralisms

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Abstract

Over the past decades, religious pluralism has been used as a heuristic tool to better understand the multiple modalities of religious interactions and expressions around the world. Inspired by the overarching theme of an ‘emergent religious pluralism,’ this chapter offers a critical examination of the religious pluralism in the everyday life of Hui Muslims in contemporary China. It is not an explication of different faiths coexisting in a liberal society, but an exploration of the relationship between an authoritarian state and its Muslim minority regarding the question of religious diversity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Chinese historians and ethnologists such as Ma Tong and Yao Dali also argue that the self-awareness of being Hui Muslims could be dated back at least to the mid- or late Ming Dynasty in pre-modern China . Before the Qing Empire took over the ‘new territory ’ of Xinjiang in the seventeenth century, the term hui hui was a generic term in reference to all the Muslims in China regardless of their racial or linguistic features. In the first half of the twentieth century, Hui people (hui min), including the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, were regarded as one of the five major racial groups with other four groups as Manchu, Han, Tibetan and Mongolian.

  2. 2.

    Another group of early Muslims in China arrived in Guangzhou and Quanzhou via the Indian Ocean. But the warlords and peasant rebellion led by Huang Chao in late Tang Dynasty killed most foreign merchants (including Jews and Muslims ) in cities like Xi’an , Guangzhou and Quanzhou.

  3. 3.

    This term ‘creative accommodation ’ is borrowed from Nilüfer Göle in her seminar EuroIslam hosted by the New School in New York during summer in 2018.

  4. 4.

    The quotation comes from The Holy Quran (1997) by Sahih International. Three American women who converted to Islam made this beautiful translation of the Qur’an , published by the Dar Abul Qasim Publishing House, Saudi Arabia.

  5. 5.

    Interviews with Yahyaa Jin, conducted in several sittings in April and May 2016.

  6. 6.

    Interview with Ma Guiping on 7 September 2017. Supplementary information from other teachers and students in the local IA .

  7. 7.

    The event was well attended and recorded in video footages by an independent Muslim social media content producer in Xi’an . She shared the footage with me under the permission of Yahyaa Jin.

  8. 8.

    Interview with Ma Guiping on 7 September 2017.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Jing Wang

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  1. Jing Wang
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  1. Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Great Park, Windsor, UK

    Jan-Jonathan Bock

  2. Georgetown University, Qatar, Doha, Qatar

    John Fahy

  3. CRASSH, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Samuel Everett

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Wang, J. (2019). Writing in Palimpsests: Performative Acts and Tactics in Everyday Life of Chinese Muslims. In: Bock, JJ., Fahy, J., Everett, S. (eds) Emergent Religious Pluralisms. Palgrave Studies in Lived Religion and Societal Challenges. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13811-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13811-0_4

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