Chinese Ways of Being Muslim

Chinese Ways of Being Muslim
Author: Wai Weng Hew
Publisher: Nias Monographs
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9788776942106

"Many recent works on Muslim societies have pointed to the development of ‘de-culturalization’ and ‘purification’ of Islamic practices. Instead, by exploring architectural designs, preaching activities, cultural celebrations, social participations and everyday practices, this book describes and analyses the formation and contestation of Chinese Muslim cultural identities in today’s Indonesia. Chinese Muslim leaders strategically promote their unique identities by rearticulating their histories and cultivating ties with Muslims in China. Yet, their intentional mixing of Chineseness and Islam does not reflect all aspects of the multilayered and multifaceted identities of ordinary Chinese Muslims – there is not a single ‘Chinese way of being Muslim’ in Indonesia. Moreover, the assertion of Chinese identity and Islamic religiosity does not necessarily imply racial segregation and religious exclusion, but can act against them. The study thus helps us to understand better the cultural politics of Muslim and Chinese identities in Indonesia, and gives insights into the possibilities and limitations of ethnic and religious cosmopolitanism in contemporary societies." -- Provided by publisher.

The Many Ways of Being Muslim

The Many Ways of Being Muslim
Author: Coeli Maria Barry
Publisher: SEAP Publications
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2008
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780877276050

"This collection brings together for the first time 22 short stories by nine Muslim Filipinos written over nearly seven decades, beginning in the 1940s. Muslims are a minority in the predominantly Catholic Philippines and the integration of Muslims into this nation has been uneven. As the stories in this anthology reflect, there is no simple or single way to capture the complex ways Muslims from different backgrounds - but especially those from the college-educated middle classes - interact with and help define contemporary Filipino identity and intellectual life. Few Muslims have seen their work anthologized in major short story collections in the Philippines: this anthology, possibly the biggest assemblage of Muslim Filipino fictionists, is intended to give readers in the Philippines and elsewhere a chance to read and enjoy their writings." --Book Jacket.

Ethnographies of Islam in China

Ethnographies of Islam in China
Author: Rachel Harris
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2021-01-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0824886437

In the late 1970s Islam regained its force by generating novel forms of piety and forging new paths in politics throughout the world, including China. The Islamic revival in China, which came to fruition in the 2000s and the 2010s, prompted increases in government suppression but also intriguing resonances with the broader Muslim world—from influential theoretical and political contestations over Muslim women’s status, the popularization of mass media and the appearance of new patterns of consumption, to increases in transnational Muslim migration. Although China does not belong to the “Islamic world” as it is conventionally understood, China’s Muslims have strengthened and expanded their global connections and impact. Such significant shifts in Chinese Muslim life have received scant scholarly attention until now. With contributions from a wide variety of scholars—all sharing a commitment to the value of the ethnographic approach—this volume provides the first comprehensive account of China’s Islamic revival since the 1980s as the country struggled to recover from the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution. The authors show the multifarious nature of China’s Islam revival, which defies any reductive portrayal that paints it as a unified development motivated by a common ideology, and demonstrate how it was embedded in China’s broader economic transition. Most importantly, they trace the historical genealogies and sociopolitical conditions that undergird the crackdown on Muslim life across China, confronting head-on the difficulties of working with Muslims—Uyghur Muslims in particular—at a time of intense religious oppression, intellectual censorship, and intrusive surveillance technology. With chapters on both Hui and Uyghur Muslims, this book also traverses boundaries that often separate studies of these two groups, and illustrates with great clarity the value of disciplinary and methodological border-crossing. As such, Ethnographies of Islam in China is essential reading for those interested in Islam’s complexity in contemporary China and its broader relevance to the Muslim world and the changing nature of Chinese society seen through the prism of religion.

Familiar Strangers

Familiar Strangers
Author: Jonathan N. Lipman
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2011-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295800550

The Chinese-speaking Muslims have for centuries been an inseperable but anomalous part of Chinese society--Sinophone yet incomprehensible, local yet outsiders, normal but different. Long regarded by the Chinese government as prone to violence, they have challenged fundamental Chinese conceptiosn of Self and Other and denied the totally transforming power of Chinese civilization by tenaciously maintaining connectios with Central and West Asia as well as some cultural differences from their non-Muslim neighbors. Familiar Strangers narrates a history of the Muslims of northwest China, at the intersection of the frontiers of the Mongolian-Manchu, Tibetan, Turkic, and Chinese cultural regions. Based on primary and secondary sources in a variety of languages, Familiar Strangers examines the nature of ethnicity and periphery, the role of religion and ethnicity in personal and collective decisions in violent times, and the complexity of belonging to two cultures at once. Concerning itself with a frontier very distant from the core areas of Chinese culture and very strange to most Chinese, it explores the influence of language, religion, and place on Sino-Muslim identity.

Pure and True

Pure and True
Author: David R. Stroup
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2022-02-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295749849

The Chinese Communist Party points to the Hui—China’s largest Muslim ethnic group—as a model ethnic minority and touts its harmonious relations with the group as an example of the party’s great success in ethnic politics. The Hui number over ten million, but they lack a common homeland or a distinct language, and have long been partitioned by sect, class, region, and language. Despite these divisions, they still express a common ethnic identity. Why doesn’t conflict plague relationships between the Hui and the state? And how do they navigate their ethnicity in a political climate that is increasingly hostile to Muslims? Pure and True draws on interviews with ordinary urban Hui—cooks, entrepreneurs, imams, students, and retirees—to explore the conduct of ethnic politics within Hui communities in the cities of Jinan, Beijing, Xining, and Yinchuan and between Hui and the Chinese party-state. By examining the ways in which Hui maintain ethnic identity through daily practices, it illuminates China’s management of relations with its religious and ethnic minority communities. It finds that amid state-sponsored urbanization projects and in-country migration, the boundaries of Hui identity are contested primarily among groups of Hui rather than between Hui and the state. As a result, understandings of which daily habits should be considered “proper” or “correct” forms of Hui identity diverge along professional, class, regional, sectarian, and other lines. By channeling contentious politics toward internal boundaries, the state is able to manage ethnic politics and exert control.

China's Muslim Hui Community

China's Muslim Hui Community
Author: Michael Dillon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2013-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136809333

This is a reconstruction of the history of the Muslim community in China known today as the Hui or often as the Chinese Muslims as distinct from the Turkic Muslims such as the Uyghurs. It traces their history from the earliest period of Islam in China up to the present day, but with particular emphasis on the effects of the Mongol conquest on the transfer of central Asians to China, the establishment of stable immigrant communities in the Ming dynasty and the devastating insurrections against the Qing state during the nineteenth century. Sufi and other Islamic orders such as the Ikhwani have played a key role in establishing the identity of the Hui, especially in north-western China, and these are examined in detail as is the growth of religious education and organisation and the use of the Arabic and Persian languages. The relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the Hui as an officially designated nationality and the social and religious life of Hui people in contemporary China are also discussed.

Hui Muslims in China

Hui Muslims in China
Author: Gui Rong
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2016-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9462700664

Introduction to Hui ethnic diversity in China As yet very little academic research has been done into the Hui people, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group in China. With particular attention to the Yunnan district community, this collection of contributions skilfully presents a wealth of information on Hui Muslims and introduces readers to the issues of Hui ethnic diversity in China. Reviewing the many aspects of the religious, educational and cultural life of Hui Muslims in China, the authors provide an ethnography in which becomes clear how traditional institutions and everyday life are adapted to local customs with respect to the Islamic identity. At the same time, the relationship between the China Republic and the Hui, an official minority of China, is discussed thoroughly. Contributors: Lesley R. Turnbull (New York University), Liang Zhang (Yunnan University), Ross Holder (Trinity College Dublin), Aaron Glasserman (Columbia University), Frauke Drewes (University of Münster), Chuang Ma (Yunnan Open University), Yu Feng (Yunnan University), Suchart Setthamalinee (Puyap University)

Islam and Asia

Islam and Asia
Author: Chiara Formichi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107106125

An accessible, transregional exploration of how Islam and Asia have shaped each other's histories, societies and cultures from the seventh century to today.

Interpreting Islam in China

Interpreting Islam in China
Author: Kristian Petersen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190634340

During the early modern period, Muslims in China began to embrace the Chinese characteristics of their heritage. Several scholar-teachers incorporated tenets from traditional Chinese education into their promotion of Islamic knowledge. As a result, some Sino-Muslims established an educational network which utilized an Islamic curriculum made up of Arabic, Persian, and Chinese works. The corpus of Chinese Islamic texts written in this system is collectively labeled the Han Kitab. Interpreting Islam in China explores the Sino-Islamic intellectual tradition through the works of some its brightest luminaries. Three prominent Sino-Muslim authors are used to illustrate transformations within this tradition, Wang Daiyu, Liu Zhi, and Ma Dexin. Kristian Petersen puts these scholars in dialogue and demonstrates the continuities and departures within this tradition. Through an analysis of their writings, he considers several questions: How malleable are religious categories and why are they variously interpreted across time? How do changing historical circumstances affect the interpretation of religious beliefs and practices? How do individuals navigate multiple sources of authority? How do practices inform belief? Overall, he shows that these authors presented an increasingly universalistic portrait of Islam through which Sino-Muslims were encouraged to participate within the global community of Muslims. The growing emphasis on performing the pilgrimage to Mecca, comprehensive knowledge of the Qur'an, and personal knowledge of Arabic stimulated communal engagement. Petersen demonstrates that the integration of Sino-Muslims within a growing global environment, where international travel and communication was increasingly possible, was accompanied by the rising self-awareness of a universally engaged Muslim community.

How I Survived a Chinese "Reeducation" Camp

How I Survived a Chinese
Author: Gulbahar Haitiwaji
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1644211491

The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention­—the biggest since the time of Mao. Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the 'reeducation' camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell. These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders. The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.