Islamic “Authenticity” on China’S Peripheries
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LOCALIZING THE TRANS/NATIONALLY MODERN IMAGINARY: ISLAMIC “AUTHENTICITY” ON CHINA’S PERIPHERIES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Lesley Rose Turnbull August 2014 © 2014 Lesley Rose Turnbull. ii iii LOCALIZING THE TRANS/NATIONALLY MODERN IMAGINARY: ISLAMIC “AUTHENTICITY” ON CHINA’S PERIPHERIES Lesley Rose Turnbull, Ph.D. Cornell University 2014 Due to increasing liberalization following China’s economic reforms, record numbers of Chinese Muslims have gone abroad to other parts of the Muslim world for study, religious pilgrimage (hajj) or work. Such direct interaction with the rest of the Muslim world has shaped how Hui- Muslims in China understand, imagine, and articulate their Islamic identity through nationalism, modernity, and Chinese state sovereignty. This dissertation asks how what I term the “transnationally modern” – that is, the imagined and experienced connections between China and the rest of the world that have emerged since China’s “opening up” in 1978 – is complicit in producing particular forms of Hui-Muslim religious “authenticity” in China. How, after decades of isolation, do Muslims in China legitimate their versions of Islam? I delve into this question by comparing two groups of Hui-Muslims in Yunnan Province: the urban, secular elite in the provincial capital Kunming, and the rural, religious elite in the Muslim enclave of Shadian. I examine how Muslims in each of these communities reconstructed their religious “authenticity” after the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. In particular, I show how their proximity to urban centers of power and their embeddedness in dominant capitalist modes of production shaped the kinds of ethno-religious authenticity they produced. Drawing on two years of ethnographic field iv work and textual research in Yunnan, this study reveals the ways in which imagined connections with transnational Islam are localized within communal, regional, and national spaces. By attending to the ways in which Islam is uniquely localized in Yunnan, this research destabilizes both “Islam” and “China” as totalizing, monolithic forces that, whether through orthodox religious authority or through governmental disciplinary techniques, impose identities and practices on the peoples who participate in those worlds. Ultimately, I seek to illustrate the creative agency of socio-cultural actors. Additionally, this project broadens the debates on Islam, shifting academic literature on Islamic identity from an Arabocentric focus to a global one. By doing so, I re-situate Chinese Muslims within the broader global context, and show how they are connected to the rest of the Muslim world. This research further contributes to current debates about the consolidation of power at the margins of the Chinese state, the perceived threat of Muslim transnationalism, and the relation of historical narratives to concrete practices. v BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Lesley Rose Turnbull received her B.A. in Anthropology and History from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. She completed an honors thesis in Anthropology that was based on field work she conducted in Yunnan in 2003. Titled “Marketing Difference: Dai/Han Ethnic Relations in a Tourist Paradise,” it focuses on ethnic relations between the Han and the Dai in Xishuangbanna, specifically through ethnically-driven sex-tourism. Turnbull received her M.A. in Anthropology at Cornell University in 2010. vi For my father, and in memory of my mother. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I feel fortunate that I have so many people to thank for support, kindness, and help with this dissertation. Most of all, I thank the kind and generous people of Kunming and Shadian who welcomed me into their homes and lives, and answered my (sometimes intrusive) questions. Without these pseudonymous interlocutors my research would have been impossible. I also thank Lu Yuan, my longtime teacher and friend, without whose help I would never have secured research permissions in Yunnan (and certainly not in Shadian), as well as her late husband Sam Mitchell, who convinced me to return home from the field even though I was reluctant to leave. I am grateful to the institutions that funded my field work and language studies, namely the Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad and the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships. Elizabeth Edmondson deserves much thanks for administering the Fulbright Hays grant. I am also grateful to the teachers at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies, especially Xu Wei for her friendship and for facilitating meetings with other scholars in Beijing. I thank the staff of Olin Library, Kroch Asia Library, and Mann Library for kindly notifying me when it was closing time, and for their consistent help with even the most obscure bibliographic questions. I thank the staff of the Cornell University Department of Anthropology, especially Donna Duncan, who has helped me in countless ways throughout the years. I also thank Kurt Jordan, who was Director of Graduate Studies during my last few years at Cornell, for his empathy while I finished writing. My chair Steven Sangren and my other dissertation committee members, Magnus Fiskesjö and Viranjini Munasinghe have consistently raised stimulating questions, pushed me in new directions, and guided me through this long process. I thank them for their years of support and patience. Julia Chuang commiserated with me during our overlapping periods of field work, for which I am grateful. Thank you also to Colette Fu and Zainab Khalid for accompanying me to viii rural field sites and providing a change in routine. In particular, Zainab’s astute insights into non- Chinese Islamic practices have significantly informed my own interpretation of Islam in Yunnan. I thank Matthew Erie for organizing the Islam in China workshop at Cornell, as well as all of the participants for their helpful comments, particularly Jeanette Jouili, whose thought- provoking questions helped me re-shape chapter two. Without the help of my writing groups at Cornell, it’s doubtful I would have ever finished writing. I thank the members of those groups – Miishen Carpentier, Amanda Flaim, Inga Gruß, Edmund Oh, and Yuanchong Wang – for providing substantive feedback on drafts and encouragement. I also thank my long-distance writing partners Yang Wang, Elliott Gibbons, Don Xu, and Amir Hampel for their morale- boosting and detailed comments, especially in the early stages of writing, and I thank Li Fen for help with translations. This dissertation is far more interesting because of the many conversations I have had with the people named above and with Aimee Douglas, Kevin Caffrey, Wendy Leutert, and especially Kevin and Leaf Carrico. Berk Esen read the entire first full draft and provided questions and comments throughout, as well as emotional support during the writing process. Finally, without the love and support of my mother, my father, and my stepmother, this would have been an impossible journey. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch vi Acknowledgments viii List of Maps and Figures xi Chapter One Introduction 1 Chapter Two In Pursuit of Islamic ‘Authenticity’ 53 Chapter Three Rupture and the Restoration of the Urbanized Subject 82 Chapter Four Yunnanese Hui Conflict Narratives 127 Chapter Five Yunnanese Hajj Narratives of Trans/National Unity 194 Chapter Six Conclusion 242 References 250 x LIST OF FIGURES AND MAPS Map of Muslim Distribution in China 18 Yunnan’s Location within China and Southeast Asia 20 Map of Yunnan Province 21 Toynbee’s World Map of “Civilization” 26 Postcard of Yunnanese Hui Woman 30 Kunming and its Outskirts 118 Kunming City Center 120 China Muslim Hajj Pilgrimage Registration Form Translated Version 236 Original 238 xi Chapter One Introduction “It was the will of Allah”: Islamicizing Anti-Japanese Sentiment One morning in May 2011, about a month after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, I visited one of the eleven mosques in the rural Muslim enclave of Shadian, Yunnan Province. With the largest mosque in China, Shadian is reportedly one of its wealthiest Muslim towns, and residents there, like many other pious Yunnanese Muslims, typically donated more than the requisite annual zakāt. Pious Muslims throughout Yunnan regularly described the importance of helping less fortunate non-believers, particularly impoverished ethnic minority groups within Yunnan, but also pinkun (impoverished) and kelian (pitiful) non- Muslims worldwide. When disaster struck in Africa or in India, they told me, Muslims were the first to send aid. When the Wenchuan earthquake struck Sichuan in 2008, Muslims in Yunnan were (according to said Muslims), among the first to send volunteers and donations. At the same time, Yunnanese Muslims strove to improve the living conditions of their fellow minority- nationalities, like the Miao near Shadian who “even lack roads.” Such generous acts were said to facilitate and signify the spiritual transcendence of those who performed them. According to my interlocutors, these pious Muslims recognized the oneness of Allah, and transcended political borders through their faith. As I entered the mosque that morning in May, a small contingent of Hui-Muslim interlocutors in tow, I immediately noticed that graphic photographs of the Tōhoku disaster covered the lower half of the lengthy bulletin board that divided the main courtyard. Before I 1 read the texts pasted above