Dialectic of Embodiment: Mysticism, Materiality and the Performance of Sufism in China

PI 3 (1+2) pp. 85–101 Intellect Limited 2014

Guangtian Ha University of London

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

Abstract Keywords This article attempts to contribute to the study of religious – particularly Sufi Islam Islamic – structuring of the body from two perspectives: on the one hand, it pays Sufism attention not merely to the disciplinary dimension of the Jahriyya Sufi training in Jahriyya northwest China, but also to the specific processes that build this training around embodiment the corporeal acts of ritual consumption. On the other hand, this article also exam- mysticism ines how the structuring of embodiment specific to Jahriyya Sufism is intrinsi- sainthood cally 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

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1. This article is based within the space of ethical and performative practice. It argues that the dimension upon fieldwork of the symbolic and the sublime, irreducible to the practical, bears its own specificity conducted between 2011 and 2012, and an that demands our analytical attention. ongoing ethnographic project among the Jahriyya Sufis in China’s Ningxia Hui For a pious Jahriyya Sufi in China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region,1 the Autonomous Region that began in late 2014. configuration of the spatial body in a regulated ritual space must be supple- I thank The Wenner- mented by a careful calculation of the flow of time. A demanding disciplinary Gren Foundation procedure is intensely sustained under the panoptical gaze of a presumably for Anthropological Research, Social omniscient god. Those intent on completing and perfecting daily prayers with Science Research the weekly .sala-t al-jum’ah (Friday prayer) often have to decide in advance Council, the Department of where they should sit in the hall in order to imbibe the edification of the Anthropology and routinized sermon. They must remain still in their position once a decision is Weatherhead East made, and the obligatory show of respect – for the lecturing imam as well as Asian Institute at Columbia University, for God – requires that they sit with legs firmly crossed for however long the and The A.M. sermon might last (it often lasts 30 minutes, with a highly formalized Arabic Foundation for their khutbah recited separately after the Chinese language sermon). The time left generous financial . support during the for standing up and in line with others in preparation for the collective prayer 2011–2012 period. My after the preaching concludes is inconsiderately – perhaps intentionally – ongoing ethnographic project is funded short. It is often the case that, not until seconds after the imam has already through the ‘Sounding begun to recite the holy Qur’an, most followers would be able to raise their Islam in China’ hands for the intonation of takbı-r that officially marks the commencement of collective research programme based at the prayer. the music department Where one sits – and stands up – often determines how much time one of SOAS, University would have to get ‘in line’. An experienced Sufi often knows how to pick a of London. I thank Dr Rachel Harris for her pivotal position so little movement is needed when such adjustment would insightful comments inevitably delay others. The secret, as some devout Jahriyya disciples told me, and extraordinary editorial help. Needless is to sit two rows behind the imam and near the central axis that divides the to say, all errors remain prayer hall into two equal halves – sitting too near to the imam (e.g. in the mine. first row) would be an exhibition of disrespect and arrogance, while sitting either too far back or too far to the side would considerably increase the time for adjustment. One has to pick the golden spot – a secret not many know – in order to receive in full the blessing of merciful God; one has to calculate each step with much care so that the demandingly short interval will not deter one’s effort in pursuing God’s pleasure. A good Sufi must be a good planner, and felicitous discipline calls for the method of analysis (i.e. breaking down the whole procedure into discrete elements) to which both space and time must be subjected. The formulation of the intricate rules that structure the pious body of a Jahriyya Sufi bears a particularly significant relationship to the specific notion of time that threads throughout the world of Jahriyya Sufism. Allegorically corresponding to the foundational tenet of Islam that Prophet Muhammad is the final and ‘sealing’ prophet in a long and not-fully-known sacred genealogy, the Jahriyya order insists that their own silsila ended after the eighth genera- tion of its murshid (‘guide’, leading saint or sheikh of the order) passed away in 1960. Continuity of the order was violently disrupted as time (guangyin) was forever ‘frozen’. This notion of guangyin (literally ‘shine and shade’, poeti- cally describing time as the alternation between day and night) is marked in the order’s memory in terms of the eras of each of the previous murshid. The tumultuous era defined by the continuous presence of successive saints and the spread of the mystical truth are now in the past; yet the trail of this past

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extends into the future. One ‘waits’ for the End, suspended in a period that 2. Studies of Sufism often concentrate upon somehow follows upon the closure of time itself. ‘Now’ is perceived by many the complex and rich pious Jahriyya followers to be ‘faster’ than it was before – after all, the world sense-scape of ritual will eventually (perhaps soon) end, as promised in the Qur’an and confirmed performances that induce trance and by the passing of the eight generations of Jahriyya murshid. The evanescent ecstasy among their temporality of the present is only reinforced by the sealing of sainthood (i.e. pious participants. the end of the genealogy). This strong eschatology is the organizing force that For recent work in this regard, see structures the world in which the pious Jahriyya body is inevitably embedded. Harris 2014; Kapchan ‘I don’t care what others say and do’, a Jahriyya Sufi in his 70s remarked to 2007; Hagedorn 2006; Spadola 2008; Wolf me, ‘I do as it was done in the guangyin of the last murshid’. 2006; Frembgen 2012; This article explores the specific structuring of embodiment that links with Kirkegaard 2012. this strongly eschatological conception of time, one that greatly intensifies the disciplinary power of religious 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, I argue 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. The figure of the murshid has not disappeared as much as it has acquired its apotheosis in the negation of its corporeality. The rules laid down by the spiritual masters obtain the strongest of their disciplinary power by virtue of this logic of absence: death paradoxically reveals the gaze of the murshid to be that of the all-seeing divine, while also doubling, supple- menting and recharging the force of God. The ‘guide’ is not merely a medium that bridges the profane and the sacred. The force of God constantly needs to be supplemented and reinvigorated, and its intensification depends both upon the extension of the Sufi silsila and its definitive sealing. In locating the Jahriyya body within this dialectical conception of sainthood and divinity, this article shifts our attention from the topic of Sufi ecstasy and trance to a more careful tracing of the pious body, a body that not merely recites and chants, prays and preaches, listens and voices, but is also reconfigured through practices of carnal consumption.2 The body spans and spreads, penetrates and absorbs. It eats and digests, converting food instilled with piety into acts that perform reverence. Consumption is not external to the training but forms an indispensable part of it, yet how one eats and what ‘eating’ is in this particular context necessarily undergo critical shifts. Chi (吃), the conventional Chinese term for eating, is replaced by koudao (口道, ‘to [imbibe] Dao with mouth’) when it comes to ritual dining: a practice that is framed primarily by the specific categories of food prepared and the exacting procedures strictly observed in the course of preparation. Consumption may also follow unconventional patterns: certain kinds of food might be wrested away from their commonplace use, transformed in their material form, and re-integrated into a different system of consumption. However, bodies are not merely regulated and arranged according to specific rules of Sufi training. Neither are they dissected into separate biologi- cal components bound together solely by the somatic system of circulation when we look at them through the prism of consumption. A pious Jahriyya body stiffens and acquires its irreducible integrity under the penetrating gaze of the disembodied murshid. The power of the divine gaze and its omnipres- ence are epitomized by a famous story attributed to the first and founding murshid of the Jahriyya order:

Once upon a time, our maola (‘mawla-’) said to his followers: ‘I now give each of you a pair of pigeons. Take them out and slaughter them where

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3. The satire hinges upon you cannot see me.’ They took them and walked out of the daotang a particular attribute presumed to mark the (道堂, ‘hall of Dao’). All of them, except Galandar, killed the birds right incredulous: daodao at the first turn of the road that led to the daotang. They returned with describes a state of the corpses, with only Galandar still carrying the live birds. Our maola discursive overflow, an insatiable desire to asked: ‘Did you all kill the pigeons?’ ‘Yes we did.’ Thus they replied. ‘I speak and narrate, an did not.’ Galandar’s voice stood out. ‘Why did you not?’ ‘Oh maola!’ He uncontrollable impulse said, ‘you wanted me to slaughter the pigeons where I cannot see you. to communicate. The quotidian critique of But wherever I go, I can see your dignified face’. fetishism points to a (Zhanye 1910s: 18) particularly interesting connection between magic and language. A pious Jahriyya body is exposed to a hyper-visibility that organizes the body 4. It is beyond the scope into a synthesized whole. The more the body is divided in the process of of this article to training, the more it is re-assembled and aggregated into a phenomenological discuss extensively the totality that is subjected to a gaze that sees and addresses, pierces and freezes. multiple explications of the gaze in philosophy, The intensity of the gaze culminates precisely in its detachment from any psychoanalysis and concrete corporeal embodiment. Sufi mysticism does not necessarily imply film studies. I have the concealment of substantive secrets or ecstatic annihilation of the self in an relied heavily upon the work of Maurice enraptured state of union with the divine. The very Chinese term for mysti- Merleau-Ponty (1975) cism, shenmi zhuyi (神秘主義), is sometimes treated with suspicion despite and Jacques Lacan (1998) in theorizing the the fact that it is otherwise commonly used as self-designation among the structure of the divine Jahriyya followers. ‘Shenmi (神秘) carries a sense of secrecy’, a young Jahriyya gaze in Jahriyya Sufism. Sufi once told me, ‘as if we were in a heretical group, deliberately conceal- ing what we are and do from others; as if we pursued something ridiculous and nonsensical’. He linked the word shenmi to shenshen daodao (神神叨叨), a derogatory and satirical term used to describe cultic and fetishistic practices that are thought to fascinate only the ignorant and credulous.3 Mysticism in contemporary Jahriyya has less to do with secrecy than with the revelation of all secrets, or the end of all those who are able to ‘keep’ the secrets. The apotheosis of secrecy is located in its own dialectical negation. It is not concealment as much as a fundamental given-to-be-seen that defines the Jahriyya training of the multi-sensorial and consuming body. To take Jahriyya Sufism as an example that complicates contemporary anthropological discussions of religious performance, we must attend to this critical dialectic of embodiment by tracing the sensorial itinerary of the somatic on the one hand, and demonstrating the inscription of the bodily by the structure of the divine gaze on the other.4

Voice, embodiment and anthropology of the ethical The analysis of body in Jahriyya Sufism does not give equal weight to its different sensorial dimensions. Emphasis is differentially distributed across the surface of the body, and a hierarchy of the senses, which particularly privileges listening and voicing, defines the Jahriyya training. However, it is less the act of sermon listening than the focus on the materiality of the reciting voice – its pitch, volume and timbre – that sustains the disposition of the Jahriyya ethical comportment (cf. Hirschkind 2006; Frishkopf 2009). Since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century, China’s Jahriyya Sufism has been marked by its characteristic combination of opposites: on the one hand, its name Jahriyya is derived from the word jahr, meaning ‘making public’ or ‘making loud’. In contrast to other more conventional forms of Central Asian Naqshbandiyya Sufism that are generally believed to practice the silent dhikr (‘remembrance of God’; but see Lipman in this issue), Jahriyya,

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though claiming a genealogical affiliation with Naqshbandiyya, is known for 5. ‘However, some Jahriyya mosques, its impressive melodic vocalization of dhikr, chanted in collective settings that despite this general further amplify its acoustic effects (Fletcher and Manz 1995; Fletcher 1972). rule, do have minarets However, it is largely (certainly not exclusively) because of this emphasis built and loudspeakers installed on them. But on public practice – even an intrusive public-ness made particularly powerful the use of magnified by the (male) voice at its strongest in volume and often highest in pitch – that voice is often limited to Jahriyya Sufism came under heavy attack in its early days from almost all sides. the Friday sermon and collective prayer rather As Lipman discusses in this volume, its enemies ranged from older Sufi orders than on a daily basis’. among China’s Muslims in the eighteenth century to imperial authorities intent on suppressing possibly destabilizing ‘new teachings (xinjiao, 新教)’ at the margin of their precarious rule. The history of suffering and resistance, and the tragic defeats that often resulted in massive murder and exile at the hands of the imperial rulers, are built into the ritual soundscape of Jahriyya. In stark contrast to the dramatic vocalization of dhikr inside the prayer hall, the sound of the adhan (call to prayer), which is frequently broadcast through loudspeakers installed on the minarets of many mosques in China and worldwide (Eisenberg 2013; Lee 1999), for the Jahriyya is often confined within the spatial limit of the daotang. The architecture of the Jahriyya mosque is marked by the conspicuous absence of minarets, an absence that was initially a result of compromise and camouflage but has become something of a cherished ‘tradition’.5 The contemporary Chinese state has further reinforced this tension. The death of the last murshid of Jahriyya in 1960, the departure that sealed the genealogy of sainthood, was given added weight by the treatment of the deceased master at the hands of the Communist revolutionary forces that swept across China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). His decomposed body was dug out and burned in 1967 as a way to express the ‘indigna- tion’ of the proletariats and the peasants after their political and ideological enlightenment. The violence of the disruption of the continuous silsila was intensified by the actual violence of the revolutionary history. Paradoxically, however, the superimposition of state violence is subsumed into the cosmo- logical violence of the definitive closure of the corporeal genealogy, and it feeds into the overvaluation of sainthood – its symbolization and sublimation. Trauma in the socialist period is integrated into a longer historical narrative, as a Jahriyya follower in his mid-60s commented as he recalled witnessing the burning of the Papa of the Contemporary Guangyin (ben guangyin taiye, 本光陰太爺), as the last murshid continues to be remembered: ‘This is our destiny. We are preordained by Allah to be the victim and to suffer. This is our road, whether we want it or not. It was like this, and it will be like this’. The Jahriyya voice is caught between this pair of opposites. Its dramatic vocalization within the prayer hall is hedged in and framed by the silence that governs the self-representation (or its refusal) of Jahriyya to the outside world. The kind of ‘Islamic soundscape’ traced by the Jahriyya voice is therefore mark- edly different from the mediatized expansion of the pious sermon in some Muslim worlds. Charles Hirschkind, for instance, in his examination of the practices of cassette sermon listening in Egypt, demonstrates admirably how the auditory experience of ethical listening, framed by the spread of modern mass media, helps hone the affective dispositions and emotional comport- ments that may at specific moments crystallize into more explicit political actions. He is particularly interested in the specificity of listening as a sensorial operator, and how listening in a state of boredom and relaxation – either in a cab or while drinking tea – may produce subconscious effects that form the backdrop for more conscious political interventions (Hirschkind 2006).

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A more specific focus on practices of ethical listening that straddles the conventionally religious and the popularly musical can be found in the work of Anne Rasmussen. She shows masterfully the complex ramifications of Arabic music genre and recitational styles in Indonesian Islam, particularly its spread among extraordinary women reciters who are not excluded from public performance (Rasmussen 2010, 2001; for the role of Muslim women in collective ritual performances, see also Doumato 2000; Harris 2014; Kapchan 2009). The interpenetration of the musical and the Islamic has also been well explored in the work of Virginia Danielson, who shows that the making of Umm Kulthum, the illustrious Egyptian singer celebrated as ‘the voice of Egypt’, was rooted in the rich tradition of Islamic vocal artistry directly related to the recitation of the Holy Qur’an (Virginia Danielson 1997). To be sure, the interest in the bodily and the sensorial among anthro- pologists of Islam is derived largely from a broader transition in the anthropological study of religion that shifts our attention from a historically specific notion of ‘belief’ to ethically oriented practices that displace the religious from the supposedly self-contained subjective consciousness. Though the impact of this turn is felt far beyond a single discipline, much of this examination in the field of anthropology derives its critical power from the foundational work of Talal Asad, particularly his now-influential critique of the intellectual limits and colonial undertones of the Protestant conception of religion. This conception is thought to privilege an abstract and disembodied ‘belief’ over the bodily affects, dispositional comportment and material objects that necessarily mediate religious practices. Taking his cue from Marcel Mauss’s work on prayer and the Aristotelian concept of habitus (Mauss 2003; Bourdieu 1990), Asad links this anthropological insight to a broader conceptualization of the modern politics of religion. He demonstrates how the construction and definition of religion as pertaining exclusively to the private domain of individual ‘belief’ is intrinsically linked to the specificity of the modern western vicissitudes of Church – State rela- tions, and how a trans-historical conception of religion has functioned to bolster secular political ideals. The epistemological essentialization of religion as ‘belief’ not only reproduces the old – often western Christian – division of mind and body, but also lends support to the political effort at sustain- ing a public space that is supposed to be immune to the influence of faith. The discursive and sociological construction of the secular, according to Asad, is therefore co-constitutive with the essentialization of religion and its privatization as individual ‘belief’ (Asad 2003, see also Asad 1993; Scott and Hirschkind 2006). This powerful argument has triggered a proliferation of literature on the politics of secularism and prompted some theorists to ‘de-transcendentalize’ the secular and to shift focus from the subjective to the ethical (Gourgouris 2013; Bilgrami 2011; Warner et al. 2010; Mahmood 2009, 2006, 2005; Connolly 1999). The body becomes in this new academic tradition a site of enquiry with the potential to subvert a range of binary oppositions that are deemed to define western modernity: the religious and the secular, the public and the private, mind and body, reason and passion, the liberal modern West and the conservative traditional rest. However, this shift to the bodily and the sensorial, as a way to displace and historicize the western conception of ‘belief’ is nonetheless inadequate as a way to understand the world of Jahriyya Sufism despite the critical role played by ritual practice and bodily training in this world.

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As Katherine Ewing has observed in regard to the often-contested 6. It is said among the Jahriyya followers that discourses on pir even among members of an intimate family in Pakistan in a dayi’er is ‘a circle the 1990s (1997: 1), a rich profusion of discourses also revolve around ritual for the praise of Allah minutiae among Jahriyya Sufis. Multiple – at times contradictory – interpre- (zanzhu de quanzi)’ and ‘a garden in the tations abound, and multiplicity is not merely tolerated but at times encour- Heaven’ (Wang aged. No one has the definitive authority to decide how the pious body should 2009: 7, 12). Those be analysed and configured; no one can be sure that they know what others who have cleansed themselves in may know, though all claim their knowledge is inherited from the eras of the preparation for dayi’er saints. Below the surface of a ‘shared’ world, an incessant segmentation char- must abstain from speaking, as silence acterizes the discourses on the ritual procedures of Sufi practice. The rigid- is here prescribed ity with which a devout Jahriyya disciple insists upon the rules supposedly as a necessity for adopted from ‘the past’ is paradoxically framed by a heterogeneous discursive maintaining ritual purity. field that he – and seldom she – cannot and must not negate. This discursive heterogeneity is deeply rooted in the centrality of mysticism, as can be seen particularly in the often equivocal interpretations of ritual practice.

Performing the mystical: Panchi Shanpan Every Wednesday night at the Jahriyya Sufi Banqiao daotang in China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a particularly important ritual is solemnly and exactingly performed among a group of Sufi sitting in a rectangular circle known as dayi’er.6 The ritual is marked by a dignified silence, except for a few vocal recitations of commonly used expressions in praise of God (e.g. al-h.amdu li-lla-hi rabbi l-a-lamı-n, ‘All the praises be to Allah, the Lord of all worlds’). This voiced praise is chanted in long and melodious tones, often accentuated at the beginning (the word ‘Allah’ is invariably vocalized), and the voice gradually diminishes as the reciter moves to the end of the sentence. In accompani- ment of each of these highly conventionalized utterances, a pebble will be dropped in a small wooden box by the particular reciter from whom the words emanate. The perceptible change of volume in the vocal recitation creates a strong rhythm followed closely by the very hand that drops the pebble as the recitation is vocalized – one raises the pebble at ‘al-hamdu’, and the sound of the pebble touching the bottom of the wooden box nicely complements the silence as one reaches the end of ‘li-lla-hi’, as ‘rabbi l-a-lamı-n’ rarely emerges above the threshold of the audible. There are altogether 100 such white pebbles, all of the same size and well polished due to years of repetitive ritual usage. It is firmly believed by the Jahriyya Sufi that these pebbles were initially brought to China and passed down through a line of saints by their first and miraculous master Ma Mingxin, whose legendary journey to the Yemen in the mid-eighteenth century is thought to lie at the fountainhead of the mystic teaching of Jahriyya Sufism. The pebbles fulfil a particularly critical function in Panchi Shanpan, as the ritual is named, knowingly after the Persian word for Thursday, Panj Shan Beh (the sunset on Wednesday is thought to indicate the beginning of Thursday). Every drop of pebble in the wooden box, in tandem with the partially vocal praise of Allah, marks the completion of a set number of praises and Qur’anic recitations. The number of people sitting in the rectangular dayi’er may vary, but insofar as all the pebbles are distributed (not necessarily evenly) among those who participate in the rite, the total number of praises and recitations would remain constant. The silent nature of the ritual makes this counting function of the pebbles particularly important – no one else can know how many times one has recited certain verses and whether one has performed

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7. For the philosophical the required steps crucial for the collective consummation of the rite. The illuminationism of Suhrawardi, see sound of the pebble dropping – a crisp and clear sound breaking through the Suhrawardi (1999). For solemn silence that engulfs the dayi’er – is the only sign that indicates to other Al-Ghazali’s reading participants that one has indeed performed one’s designated role. This sharp of light in connection to Sufi mysticism, contrast in sound punctuates the progression of the ritual and is an integral see Al-Ghazali part of it. (1998). For general All details of this ritual are seen by Jahriyya followers to possess cosmic introductions to the Islamic theological and mysteries that deserve lifelong meditation. Laoma, a devout Jahriyya disciple philosophical tradition who had been a participant of the ritual for over 30 years, was still unsure of of illuminationism, see Nasr and Leaman (1996: the exact meanings of many apparently nonsensical arrangements that are 465–96) and Nasr and nonetheless critical components of Panchi Shanpan: Razavi (1996: 125–71). The rite was performed at night, and we have the daotang so well lighted as if it were daytime. But still, two candles will be placed on the table around which the dayi’er is seated. We don’t read anything, and the hall is already bright. Why this redundancy? Why this emphasis on light to the point where it seems to be unnecessary?

Laoma’s bewilderment cannot be dissipated by recourse to an explanation that compares light to philosophical and theological illumination, a typical interpretation that takes its cue from the ancient tradition of Islamic illuminationism often attributed to Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1155–1191) and Al-Ghaza-lı- (1058–1111).7 It is not the light itself as much as the redundancy, the apparently unnecessary doubling, that he finds puzzling and curious. If the desire for light and illumination is a commonplace among most Sufis, the detail of redundancy cannot be subsumed completely under this desire (unless it is defined by a fundamental insatiability): we need light, but why so much? And what light do we want if this redoubling supplementation is seen as an intrinsic attribute of this light itself (i.e. light not supplemented is not and can never be bright enough)? Furthermore, since ‘we are not reading’, why do we need this light when it seems to be of little use and when all members of the dayi’er close their eyes and rhythmically move their bodies as they silently perform their recitations? Why so much light in a ritual that could well be conducted in darkness, when, in fact, it is conducted precisely at nighttime? Repetition and supplementation function not merely to point to the possible insatiability of the desire for light and illumination among the Jahriyya Sufis. It also effects an enframing that produces the condition for mystification – light would not be rendered into a sign seen by Laoma to possess immense representative power without the apparently redundant doubling that pulls the light as a familiar trope in Sufism out of the familiarity by which it is often explained. The pure representability of light as a sign emerges precisely at the moment when Laoma starts to wonder why so much light is needed in Panchi Shanpan. The same theme of ostensible supplementation can also be observed in the ritual use of the white pebbles. Although their total number is 100, only 99 are actually used in punctuating the silent recitations, and the remaining one is always dropped before those in the dayi’er officially initiate Panchi Shanpan. One member will divide the pebbles as all others quietly get prepared for the rite, and he kisses the one pebble to be dropped beforehand in the same way the Quran is often kissed. But why, if this extra and somewhat superfluous pebble has every time to be dropped before the rite, did not the miraculous master Ma Mingxin leave it out in the first place and only pass the remaining

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99 to his pious followers? Why did he choose to keep this apparently useless supplement? I asked Laoma these questions. Somehow cornered, he did not reply to them directly. Instead, he set out to offer me a story:

There was once a Sufi master with three students. The master was approaching his death and he summoned his students to his death- bed. They were lost as much as sad. ‘Where should we find our next teacher?’ They asked. And the master, breathing softly, gave his instructions: ‘I have 17 sheep. Such a man as can divide these sheep in the following way will be your next teacher: he can give 1/2 of them to the oldest of the three of you, 1/3 to the middle one, and 1/9 to the young- est.’ Now, do you know how this can be done?

After a short silence during which I was trying to figure out whether he was merely posing a rhetorical question, Laoma continued,

You add one and make it 18. 1/2 of 18 is 9, 1/3 6, and 1/9 2. 9 plus 6 plus 2 is 17, not 18. Now where is that extra one? Has the new master indeed added it? But how could he divide the 17 sheep without adding that extra one? Where is it after the division is completed? Do you know? Can you know?

My questions were not answered as much as reposed. They were shot back to me in a manner that only deepened the degree of curiosity to the point where the very answerability of these questions begins to constitute a question in itself. In the same way the candles enframe light and the extra pebble enframes the remaining 99 ‘useful’ ones, the remarkable allegory recounted by Laoma also enframes my questions and effectively assimilates them into the internal logic of the weekly Panchi Shanpan marked by apparent redundancy, repetition and supplementation. This constant movement of enfolding that is centred upon the black hole that is the Sufi master opens up an enormous space that conditions the emergence of interpretive multiplicity. The opera- tion of mystification does not in this context entail the closure of narrative but on the contrary activates its potentially endless proliferation. More than one set of rules governs the training of the Jahriyya body and the performance of the Jahriyya rituals. No one can claim to know all such rules, and even those who know some cannot offer authoritative interpretations of the rules they are bound to follow. The body performs that which the mind does not and cannot assimilate. Mysticism defines the coordinates of the discipline of the pious Jahriyya body.

Silent piety Though Jahriyya is often defined by its followers as marked by loud dhikr, silence, confined largely within the context of individual self-cultivation, also constitutes a crucial component of its training, as can be seen particularly in the significance attributed to niantou (念頭, short incantations distributed to individual Sufis, silently recited as a way of self-cultivation). The alternation between silence and voice, between what can be sounded and what must remain below the threshold of the audible, and between language as exposed to public appropriation and language privatized as belonging to individual self-cultivation, defines the practice of niantou among Jahriyya followers.

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8. Though it is beyond the In addition to performing the five daily prayers following the designated scope of this article to discuss extensively the schedule, a committed Sufi disciple often has to engage in highly personalized internal fissions within obligations. One such obligation – and the easier one compared to zuojing the Jahriyya order, it is (坐靜, ‘meditation’, often involving weeks or even months of seclusion nonetheless important to note at this point devoted completely to praying and continuous remembrance of Allah, with a that some of its small amount of food and water) – is to recite niantou almost incessantly for branches, particularly one’s entire life. Niantous are short incantations that establish an exclusive the Banqiao order, still claims the presence of connection between the murshid and his disciples on a purely individual basis. a corporeal murshid. The sealing of the sacred genealogy has rendered it impossible for any current Jahriyya disciple to establish such a connection with a corporeal murshid, but the structure of this link, particularly its exclusivity predicated upon highly private communication with the divine medium, is not attenuated.8 A hierarchy in terms of spiritual cultivation nonetheless exists among the Jahriyya Sufis, and instructions, certainly less authoritative, are still sought from those deemed closer to the ultimately unreachable God. The subsequent discussion, therefore, uses the term murshid less to designate an actually existing saint than to name a disembodied position that is merely approximated by contemporary Jahriyya leaders. The sealing of sainthood has not abolished the existence of niantou – one accepts the instruction from a living teacher, yet the gaze that penetrates one is detached from the corporeal master. The specific content of a niantou could be a common expression used in - - prayers or in praise of Allah and the Prophet (e.g. Allahu akbar, Al-h.amdu li-llahi, or even the Shaha-dah), sections of Quranic verses, or any other words and sentences that the murshid prefers to pass on to his disciples. Female followers, noticeably, are not excluded, but they are confined to this highly personalized individual self-cultivation and continue to be assigned a marginal position (not completely excluded) in male-centred collective rituals. The critical point is that each disciple is taught a particular niantou by the teacher that belongs to him or her exclusively. No one else knows the content of the niantou, and it is strictly forbidden that disciples reveal their niantous either among themselves or to the outside world. Verbal exchanges in this respect are invariably prohibited as gross violations that could seriously compromise the result of one’s cultivation and render oneself suspicious as to the sincerity of one’s intention. The exclusivity of niantou, however, is not based upon its content. It is completely possible that two disciples who know each other fairly well share exactly the same niantou. The murshid might also distribute the same set of niantous to different disciples so there are always people who recite the same niantous. The individualization of a niantou for each disciple is effected only by an imposed secrecy that strictly forbids communication. Although most disciples may know that his or her niantou is not unique in its content, it is nonetheless made unique by the exclusive line that binds the disciple to the murshid. It is specifically he or she that recites, and the niantou, as an incanta- tion shared with many others, is nonetheless subtracted from the world of language and rendered unique despite its content. The murshid or his delegate also dictates when one should recite the niantou (e.g. at what time during the day, whether before or after certain prayers), how many times one should recite it at each specific time point, how fast one should progress, and when it might be the time to add more obligations. Each disciple has his or her own schedule that may or may not be the same as those of others. There does not exist – and must not exist according to the principle of individuation and secrecy – an established procedure or a written manual that outlines a general training process that can be applied indifferently to anyone.

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The prohibition against the publication of niantou is reinforced by another concern that cuts deep into the nature and function of it in the system of Sufi self-cultivation. Honglefu, a central daotang of Jahriyya, located in the rural outskirts of the city of Qingtongxia in Ningxia, holds a training school of around 300 students. Both tuition and accommodation are free of charge – the funding comes exclusively from the donation of Jahriyya followers (the annual expenses, as I was told, are around two million RMB). The programme lasts six years and teaches basic Arabic, Quranic recitation and interpretation, H. adı-th, Islamic jurisprudence, and classics that belong exclusively to the Jahriyya order. ‘But we are not taught niantou’, a student told me, ‘the old teachers here no longer teach that’. He continued,

They used to teach that to students, but now they have stopped. There are so many temptations (youhuo, 誘惑) in this world, and many students prefer to do something else than to be a real Sufi. If the teachers continue to teach niantou, what if the students cannot persevere in their recitation according to the procedure laid down for them? To know the niantou without practicing the recitation is tantamount to sinning while knowing that one is committing sin. The teachers know we cannot do it, and we also know we are not ready for it. So they won’t teach, and we don’t want to learn. This is good for all of us: they won’t commit sin for teaching niantou to those who could not recite, and we won’t commit sin for learning what we cannot bear.

‘In Jahriyya’, another student in his fifth year kicked in, ‘knowing and practicing are one and the same thing (zhixing heyi, 知行合一). You don’t really know until you can actually do it. If you cannot do it, then you knowledge is imperfect’. The actual act of recitation, therefore, is an intrinsic component of niantou. It both substantiates and individualizes niantou for the self-cultivation of a Sufi. A niantou remains in principle an anonymous text that is still appropri- able by anyone until the moment it is singularized by the silent recitation of a particular Sufi disciple, made unique by his or her own voice that could be heard only by him or herself. An un-singularized niantou, i.e. one that is not incessantly recited and not given a particular life by one’s own irreplaceable voice, becomes at once the mark of one’s sin – and this sinning is irrevoca- ble, since one can never again extricate oneself from the snare of ‘imperfect knowledge’. The subtraction of niantou from the general world of language in which open communication and anonymous appropriation reign supreme depends for its life essentially on the living voice of the reciting Sufi. The real test for a Sufi hinges precisely upon this tension between the anonymity of language and the singularity of niantou. This is the very burden passed to a Sufi disciple by his or her murshid.

Consuming the magical The pious Jahriyya body is not merely regulated according to meticulous rules that govern its actions of voicing. It is no less inscribed by a complex system of consumption. Consumption, as a form of action that incorporates and transforms that which is consumed, is intrinsic to the Jahriyya training. To locate the body within this layered network woven by the production and distribution of specific categories of consumables, we need to attend to the concrete materialities that undergird the Jahriyya ritual world.

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Though commodification has largely redefined the coordinates of the Jahriyya world in making monetary donations more common than they were before the 1990s, many Jahriyya followers continue to make their contribu- tion in kind. Rather than cash, they often donate large quantities of oil and flour (to a lesser degree meat, fresh vegetables and dairy products) to the mosques and daotangs, which, apart from the amount they consume themselves, often transport these donations to the central daotang where there is a larger demand. That oil and flour are the two most popular items has directly to do with their functions associated with ritual performance. Almost every ritual – either those grand commemoration rituals involving a large number of followers or annual familial rituals commemorating deceased relatives – is followed by a communal meal. Youxiang (油香), a kind of fried pancake used invariably as the staple food eaten with mutton or beef stock on ritual occa- sions, is an indispensable component of the Sufi cuisine, and the two major ingredients of it are precisely oil and flour. One major character that distinguishes the making of youxiang is the strict stipulation as to the specific ritual steps one needs to follow in order to meet the demands of the communal meal. In addition to cleansing oneself completely before touching the utensils and the ingredients (ghusl, or the ‘full ablution’, in contrast to wud.u-, the ‘partial ablution’, performed before the five daily prayers), every subsequent step is framed by recitations of particular Quranic verses (or, as is more often the case, sections of them) and other commonly used expressions in the praise of Allah and the Prophet. Different Sufi orders may choose different verses or sections of them and may also break up extant verses and re-mix them in particular ways. Some, like the Jahriyya, might even choose to use non-Quranic verses extracted from their own textual sources. These recitations elevate the youxiangs thus made above the mundane world of daily consumption and render them into ‘clean’ food qualified to fulfil the function of being consumed after a ritual performance. After each Panchi Shanpan held every Wednesday night at Banqiao daotang in Wuzhong, not only are youxiangs consumed on the spot with fentang (粉湯, a kind of mutton broth made from the sheep slain particularly for the weekly ritual, with cucumbers, carrots and firm jellies made from potato starch put in to add to its texture), they are also distributed among the participants in packs that also contain chunks of boiled mutton seasoned with peppercorn and star anise. This sharing beyond the immediate ritual context is an integral part of the communal sociality conjured by the collective rituals. It is often described as an act of zhanji (沾吉), or ‘sharing the auspiciousness’, implying that those who have not participated in the actual ritual but have consumed these youxiangs and mutton will also have accrued to them the exceptional mercy and blessing of God resulting from the correct performance of the ritual. One has to consume these foods before they spoil and with a pious heart. Even those ‘lapsed Muslims’ who might not obey the Islamic restriction on the consumption of alcohol in their daily life would not risk eating these youxiangs and mutton with alcohol. There is an additional use of youxiang that perhaps shows in the most convincing way the partially sacred character of this apparently mundane food. Many rural followers dehydrate the youxiangs given them after major commemoration rituals at the central daotang and grind them into fine powder with a small family mill used for food preparation. When sickness hits some- one in the family, some of these powders are sprinkled in a glass of water

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to make the latter into an elixir thought to possess an extraordinary healing 9. Though the Qadiriyya power. The ‘auspiciousness’ of the ritual is believed to be preserved in the order in China claims a completely different granular particles of the youxiangs, and the abstract saintly genealogy is now genealogy than that activated through these minute grains of flour. To a certain extent, what was asserted by Jahriyya and some branches previously contributed to the daotang (the donation in kind) is transformed of Qadiriyya still and consecrated by the collective ritual practice and then returned with this have a living saint, it extra magical power that saturates each particle of the ground youxiangs. It is nonetheless shares a similar pattern of ritual as if one could not fully absorb the ‘auspiciousness’ unless the youxiangs are consumption with the fully broken down into the smallest pieces possible whose charm can then be Jahriyya order. On the magnified by being dissolved in water. complex historical relationships between Youxiang, though perhaps one of the most important food items with ritual different Sufi orders significance in Jahriyya Sufism (and other varieties of Islam in China), is not in China, see Fletcher (1995, 1972) and Lipman the only substance whose powdered form is given such magical value. The (1997, 1981). articulation of materiality and sacredness in a Sufi order can at times entail surprising epiphanies for those who have not completely grasped its literality. Luojie, who was from a Qadiriyya family in the rural county of Tongxin in Ningxia, spent much of her adult life away from home.9 Critical of the credu- lity she often attributed to ‘people of the mountain (shanliren, 山裡人)’, she nonetheless proceeded to recount to me an impressive experience of hers that pertained to the fetish of a different kind of powdered substance among her own order, namely, the dirt from the sacred tombs of the saints:

When I was small, whenever I got sick, my family would take some dirt, sprinkle them in water and let me drink it. They told me the dirt was from the tomb of my great grandfather (who was himself a saint). Over the years, I took this for granted, but always thought that the dirt might come from a designated site in the tomb – for instance, from upon the surface of his tombstone. Or I thought it might be just a meta- phor, and the dirt I drank was not actually dirt, but perhaps something else altogether which was just called ‘dirt.’ The powder might be from the plants that grew near the tomb, or it might have been made from other edible substances that may be related to my great grandfather. I thought there should have been some ritual procedures involved in making these powders. But NO! One day when I was walking with my paternal uncle (bofu) past the tomb, he told me to wait a minute and he needed to ‘take some dirt.’ I saw with my own eyes that he scraped some dirt just off the wall of the tomb – I mean, literally, really, just dirt! I asked him, ‘Really? This is what I have been drinking since I was a kid? Just dirt, scraped off the wall?’ ‘Of course. What did you think it was?’ he replied as if I should have known all along.

Luojie’s surprise comes from the apparent lack of ritual framing by means of which the ‘actual dirt’ can metamorphose into ‘magical substance’ that can cure sickness. No specific procedures were followed on the spot and no spatial distinctions were made as to where the dirt should be extracted. She had thought that the ‘dirt’ might still bear a character of edibility and might thus still qualify as a kind of ‘medicine’ not fundamentally different from the herbs and spices often used in the Chinese medicinal world. Both the anticipa- tion of ritual procedure and the assumption of edibility are efforts to frame the ‘dirt’ in a way that could render it acceptable to the imaginary to which Luojie subscribed, before that unexpected moment when she saw her uncle scraping dirt off the tomb’s wall. For her, it is not the materiality of dirt as much as the

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sudden and unmediated manifestation of the literality in the articulation of materiality and sainthood that struck her in her face. The dirt, precisely because of its inedible material character and its supposed distance from the world of human consumption, does not merely ‘express’ the sainthood of the interred Sufi master as much as it imposes its magical power upon the world in such a way as to induce amazement and epiphany. ‘Dirt’ is just that, dirt – it is certainly already integrated into the Sufi world and has arguably already been transformed by being associated with the deceased murshid. But this magical metamorphosis and its particular efficacy also presuppose that the specificity of its materiality is not reduced by this transformation: it is and must continue to be ‘actual dirt’ in order for its magical efficacy to acquire its most fantastic power both in healing sickness and, perhaps more importantly, in producing the kind of epiphany which gripped Luojie at that impressive moment. Wonder and magic are enfolded into the consuming body and take effect through the very act of consumption, which, rather than destroy the condition of worlding (cf. Arendt 1958), actively (re)produces a world saturated with fascination. The sabulous body of the ground youxiang and the tomb dirt assumes its enchanting power despite – or precisely because of – their granular mode of existence that does not dissolve them into separate particles as much as it gathers them together under the gaze of the disembodied murshid. The analysis of the Jahriyya body – its division into distinct parts and segmentation according to specific rules of conduct – follow a similar dialectical pattern: the body of the pious is at the same time the body of the ground youxiang. The consuming and the consumed converge in their material mode of existence, as if the Jahriyya world were tied together in its two ends.

In conclusion This article takes as its subject the bodily performance of Jahriyya Sufism in China. Rather than focusing exclusively upon the procedure of discipline and recapitulating the now familiar argument regarding the role of the ethical in framing religious experience, I have extended and complicated this anthropological intuition in two directions. On the one hand, I have shown how the pious body is not merely a recipient of intervention. Nor is it only the object written over by a rigid set of rules that are shared among all. Not only are the rules prolific and constantly proliferating, but the body is actively involved in the production of enchantment. It is inscribed by a broader material world that is not devoid of the magical and the wondrous. The body that consumes conditions and to a large degree completes the body that recites and listens. The sharing of youxiang, particularly the passion that invests this ritual sharing, is an indispensable – though hardly mentioned – component of every pious performance of Jahriyya Sufism, as if the absence of consumption constituted a lack that rendered the voices of the pious weak and ineffective. To a certain extent, the Jahriyya voice is substantiated by the acts of consumption. The consumed grits of youxiang are saturated by the voice of the devout Sufi disciples, and they give shape to the apparently impalpable voice that is to be absorbed – not just listened to – by the followers. I have tried to locate the mystical within the material, and the material within the mystical. On the other hand, this mutual implication of the apparently mundane and the seemingly sacred is deeply rooted in the centrality of a specific kind of mysticism that defines contemporary Jahriyya. This mysticism is not predicated

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upon the actual existence of a saint who is presumed to embody and contain the mystery of divine revelation and intercession. On the contrary, mysticism in Jahriyya Sufism acquires its supreme intensity precisely through the insist- ent absence of a corporeal saint and the sealing of the Sufi genealogy. The historical circumstance that happened to befall the Jahriyya followers at the time of this sealing – the tragic fate suffered by the decomposed body of the last murshid at the hands of the impassioned revolutionaries when China was swept across by the gust of the Cultural Revolution – renders this sealing all the more violent and abrupt, paradoxically strengthening its forceful grip upon later generations of Jahriyya disciples. The state is not absent in the dramatic story that narrates the recent past of Jahriyya, but neither is it an independent source of impact. The memory of the state is reworked and assimilated into the undercurrents of Jahriyya Sufism. Somewhat unexpect- edly, it feeds back right into the core of Jahriyya. State violence, a temporal violence at that, acquires its own apotheosis in the sacred violence of the trun- cation of Sufi genealogy.

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Suggested citation Ha, G. (2014), ‘Dialectic of embodiment: Mysticism, materiality and the performance of Sufism in China’, Performing Islam 3: 1+2, pp. 85–101, doi: 10.1386/pi.3.1-2.85_1

Contributor details Guangtian Ha is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Music, SOAS, University of London. He is now working as a member of a collective project entitled ‘Sounding Islam in China’ and is conducting fieldwork among the Jahriyya Sufis in China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. Contact: Department of Music, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, London, WC1H 0XG, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Guangtian Ha has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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