Maria Jaschok

Shui Jingjun Shui

This is a study of Chinese Hui Muslim women's historic and unrelenting spiritual, educational, political and gendered drive for an institutional presence in Islamic worship and leadership: 'a mosque of one's own' as a unique feature of Chinese Muslim culture. The authors place the historical origin of women's segregated religious institutions in the Chinese Islamic diaspora's fight for survival, and in their crucial contribution to the cause of ethnic/religious minority identity and solidarity. Against the presentation of complex historical developments of women's own site of worship and learning, the authors open out to contemporary problems of sexual politics within the wider society of socialist China and beyond to the history of Islam in all its cultural diversity.

The History of Women's Mosques in Chinese Islam

Jingjun Shui

What enables women to hold firm in their beliefs in the face of long years of hostile persecution by the Communist party/state? How do women withstand daily discrimination and prolonged hardship under a Communist regime which held rejection of religious beliefs and practices as a patriotic duty? Through the use of archival and ethnographic sources and of rich life testimonies, this book provides a rare glimpse into how women came to find solace and happiness in the flourishing, female-dominated traditions of local Islamic women’s mosques, Daoist nunneries and Catholic convents in China. These women passionately – often against unimaginable odds – defended sites of prayer, education and congregation as their spiritual home and their promise of heaven, but also as their rightful claim to equal entitlements with men.

Islamic Mosques & Daoist Temples, Catholic Convents & Chinese Virgins

Women, Religion, and Space in China

Ping-Chun Hsiung

Cecilia Milwertz

In the process of helping women to help themselves, female activists have assumed a decisive role in negotiating social and political transformations in Chinese society. This is the first book that describes and analyzes the new phase of women's organizing in China, which started in the 1980s, and remains a vital force to the present day. The political and social changes taking place in contemporary Chinese society have, surprisingly, received scant attention. This volume enriches our understanding of the working of grassroots democracy in China by exploring women's popular organizing activities and their interaction with party-state institutions. By subjecting these activities to both empirical enquiry and theoretical scrutiny, a rigorous analysis of the exchange, dialogue, negotiation and transformation among and within three groups of political actors - popular women's groups, religious groups and the All China Women's Federation - is concisely presented to the reader.This book will be of tremendous interest to students of Chinese Studies, Political Science and Gender Studies alike.

Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers

Chinese Women Organizing

Suzanne Miers

This collection reveals many forms of servitude that Chinese women have endured, and the avenues of escape open to some of them. The authors are anthropologists, historians and sociologists, but the book is enriched also by contributions from the participants - a social worker, a mui tsai, and a colonial civil servant. The chapters are based on original documentary or oral research and personal experience, and, throughout the book, the voices of the women, their owners and their missionary rescuers can be clearly heard.

Submission, Servitude, and Escape

Women and Chinese Patriarchy

Guangtian Ha

Rachel Harris

Imagining Transnational Communities: Conflicting Islamic Revival Movements in the People's Republic of China / Alex STEWART -- The Ban on Alcohol: Islamic Ethics, Secular Laws, and the Limits of Ethnoreligious Belonging in China / Ruslan YUSUPOV -- Religion, Nationality, and "Camel Culture" among the Muslim Mongol Pastoralists of Inner Mongolia / Thomas WHITE -- Displaying Piety: Wedding Photography and Foreign Ceremonial Dresses in the Hui Community in Xi'an, China / Yang YANG -- Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos: Piety, Tradition, and Self-Fashioning / Rachel HARRIS and Rahile DAWUT -- Marketing as Pedagogy: Halal E-commerce in Yunnan / Michael C. BROSE and SU Min -- Women's Qur'anic Schools in China's Little Mecca / Francesca ROSATI -- Equality, Voice, and a Chinese Hui Muslim Women's Songbook: Collaborative Ethnography and Hui Muslim Women's Expressive History of Faith / Maria JASCHOK and SHUI Jingjun, with GE Caixia -- The Gender of Sound: Media and Voice in Jahriyya Sufism -- Guangtian HA -- Translocal Encounters: Hui Mobility, Place-Making, and Religious Practices in Malaysia and Indonesia Today / HEW Wai Weng -- Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas / Elke SPIESSENS -- "Force Majeure": An Ethnography of the Canceled Tours of Uyghur Sufi Musicians / MU Qian, with Rachel HARRIS -- "Travelers" in the City: Precariousness and the Urban Religious Economy of Uyghur Reformist Islam / Darren BYLER.

Ethnographies of Islam in China

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.

Maria Jaschok

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