Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam

Rachel Harris

Description

http://www.soundislamchina.org/

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
Interlude 1: Rabiya Acha's Story
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
Interlude 2: Tutiwalidu (They'll Arrest You)
5. Mobile Islam: Mediation and Circulation
6. Song-and-Dance and the Sonic Territorialization of Xinjiang
7. Erasure and Trauma
References

Sujets

• Rituals
• Religious
• Philosophie et théologie
• MUSIC
• Musulmán
• Multiple signal classification
• General officer
• Ethnomusicology
• Muslim
• Religion
• General
• Practice
• Muslim ben al-Hajjaj
• Islam
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253051370
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

FRAMING THE GLOBAL
Hilary E. Kahn and Deborah Piston-Hatlen, series editors

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2020 by Rachel Harris
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Harris, Rachel (Rachel A.), author.
Title: Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam / Rachel Harris.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2020. Series: Framing the global Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020006281 (print) LCCN 2020006282 (ebook) ISBN 9780253050182 (hardback) ISBN 9780253050205 (paperback) ISBN 9780253050199 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Muslims China-Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu-Social conditions. Muslim women-China-Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu-Social conditions. Uighur (Turkic people)-China-Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu-Social life and customs. Uighur (Turkic people)-China-Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu-Music. Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu (China)-Ethnic relations. China-Ethnic relations.
Classification: LCC BP63.C52 X554 2020 (print) LCC BP63.C52 (ebook) DDC 297.082/09516-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006281
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006282
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This book is dedicated to Rahile Dawut: inspirational scholar, teacher, and friend .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1 Sound, Place, and Religious Revival
Interlude 1 Rabiya Acha s Story
2 Affective Rituals in a Uyghur Village
3 Text and Performance in the Hikm t of Khoja Ahmad Yasawi
4 Style and Meaning in the Recited Qur an
Interlude 2 Tutiwalidu (They ll Arrest You)
5 Mobile Islam: Mediation and Circulation
6 Song and Dance and the Sonic Territorialization of Xinjiang
7 Erasure and Trauma
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A S THIS BOOK GOES TO PRESS, THERE IS still no sign of relief from the radical policies of social reengineering in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China, which have seen more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities incarcerated in massive detention camps and subjected to coercive regimes of reeducation and forced labor. The religious rituals described in this book have been labeled violent extremism, everyday expressions of faith have been outlawed, and places of worship have been destroyed. All this has taken place under a thick veil of secrecy. Uyghurs in Xinjiang live under extreme forms of high-tech surveillance, and contact with the outside world is strictly controlled. For several years now, I have had no news of the well-being or whereabouts of the Uyghur village women who welcomed me into their homes and taught me about their faith.
The projects of reengineering and deracination currently underway in Xinjiang have targeted the landscape and the soundscape, its inhabitants minds and bodies, the living and the dead. Cities and villages are being razed and rebuilt in ways that facilitate surveillance and control and promote assimilation. Far from being a reasonable and necessary response to violent extremism as the Chinese government claims, these measures add up to a comprehensive policy of cultural erasure that has targeted Uyghur language and culture, uprooted communities, separated children from parents, and incarcerated leading Uyghur artists and intellectuals.
Among them is my long-term collaborator, Professor Rahile Dawut of Xinjiang University, who has been detained without charge since November 2017. I have shared many productive and inspiring conversations with Rahile over the years. She has been a constant model for me, for her extraordinary generosity as a colleague, her evident passion for her research, and her tireless work as fieldworker and academic mentor. The injustice of her ongoing detention is a constant personal reminder of the need to speak out about the destruction of the culture she loved, and the cruel and dehumanizing treatment of the people with whom we both worked.
Another key figure in this project is my husband, Aziz Isa, without whom this book would not have been written. He has been my constant collaborator for the past decade: travel companion, fixer, interpreter, interlocutor, and frequent coauthor. Like so many Uyghurs in the diaspora, he lives with terrible uncertainty for the safety of his relatives, and he has responded with courage and resolve. I owe my thanks also to our daughters, who have grown up with this project. We ve been through some scary moments together, but they seem to have survived intact and even developed a taste for travel, and I think that now they understand what it s all about.
A huge thank-you to my magnificent colleagues who have contributed in various ways to this book. To my fellow ethnographers of Uyghur culture for their excellent and engaged scholarship: Ildik Bell r-Hann, Darren Byler, Joanne Smith Finley, Rune Steenberg, Rian Thum, and many more. To photographer Lisa Ross for her extraordinary images and commitment to the cause. To my fellow ethnomusicologists for their support and motivation over the years: Stephen Jones, Ted Levin, Laudan Nooshin, Anne Rasmussen, Martin Stokes, Abigail Wood, Owen Wright, Xiao Mei, and Zhou Ji, to name just a few. To my old (but young) friend and coconspirator Rowan Pease, who heroically read the whole manuscript; to Angela Impey, Richard Widdess, and Darren Byler (again), for their helpful comments on individual chapters. To Jennika Baines at Indiana for her careful curation, and to my anonymous readers whose feedback helped enormously to strengthen and shape the final manuscript.
Thanks also to the young Uyghur scholars who are a constant source of strength and hope, especially Mukaddas Mijit and Aynur Kadir; to all my collaborators on the Sounding Islam in China project, which helped frame this book, especially Maria Jaschok, Ha Guangtian, Mu Qian, and Ruard Absaroka: it s been a massive pleasure working with you. My thanks are also due to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust for their generous support of this project. Audio and video recordings relating to this book and much more can be found on the Sounding Islam in China project website, http://www.soundislamchina.org .
Some of the material that appears in this book has been published elsewhere, but all of it has been substantially reworked and revised. Parts of the introduction and chapter 5 appear in Performing Islam and Central Asian Survey ; parts of chapter 2 appear in Ethnomusicology Forum ; and parts of chapter 6 appear in World of Music .
Finally, my enduring gratitude and love to all our Uyghur friends, hosts, and interlocutors, whose names I do not record here for obvious reasons. They taught me so much about different ways of being in this world. Although they are not named, their voices appear throughout this book, and I hope I have respected their intentions and beliefs in the way I have shaped my narrative around the stories they so generously shared with me. Allagha Aman t!

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 r mchi, 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 ideol