Pure and True: The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims

261 Pages·2022·18.355 MB·English

by  David R. Stroup

StudieS on ethnic GroupS in china
Stevan Harrell, Editor
Pure and True
the everyday politicS of ethnicity
for china’S hui MuSliMS
David R. Stroup
univerSity of WaShinGton preSS
Seattle
Pure and True was made possible in part by a grant from the
Donald R. Ellegood International Publications Endowment.
Copyright © 2022 by the University of Washington Press
Composed in Warnock Pro typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
26 25 24 23 22 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publisher.
Photographs are by the author. Maps are by Eve McGlynn.
univerSity of WaShinGton preSS
uwapress.uw.edu
library of conGreSS cataloGinG-in-publication data
Names: Stroup, David R., author.
Title: Pure and true : the everyday politics of ethnicity for China’s Hui Muslims /
David R. Stroup.
Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2021] | Series: Studies
on ethnic groups in China | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2021018886 (print) | lccn 2021018887 (ebook) |
iSbn 9780295749822 (hardcover) | iSbn 9780295749839 (paperback) |
iSbn 9780295749846 (ebook)
Subjects: lcSh: Hui (Chinese people)—China—History. | Hui (Chinese people)—
China—Interviews. | Hui (Chinese people)—China—Ethnic identity. | Hui
(Chinese people)—China—Religion. Minorities—Government policy—China—
History. | Muslims—China—History. | Islam and state—China—History. |
China—Ethnic relations.
Classification lcc DS731.H85 S77 2021 (print) | lcc DS731.H85 (ebook) | ddc
305.800951—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018886
lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018887
This paper meets the requirements of anSi/niSo Z39.48-1992 (Permanence
of Paper).
To my parents, Kandy and Dan Stroup
Contents
Foreword by Stevan Harrell ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
introduction
Modernization and Hui Ethnicity in Urban China 3
chapter one
“God Is a Drug”: Ethnic Politics in the Xi Jinping Era 31
chapter tWo
Choosing: Citizenship, Faith, and Marriage 52
chapter three
Talking: Arabic Language and Literacy 73
chapter four
Consuming: Islamic Purity and Dietary Habits 97
chapter five
Performing: Islamic Faith and Daily Rituals 111
concluSion
Drawing Lines between Devotion and Danhua 128
epiloGue
Ethnic Politics during the “People’s War on Terror” 157
Appendix A: Interviewees 167
Appendix B: Mosques/Islamic Places at Case Sites 175
Appendix C: Migration Inflow at Case Sites, 2006–2016 177
Glossary of Chinese Terms 179
Notes 187
Bibliography 215
Index 237
viii
Foreword
Stevan harrell
What does it mean to be Muslim in today’s China? For Uyghurs, Kazakhs,
and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, it means daily confrontation with
state terror. Aside from the 10 percent or more of members of those ethnic
nations that are incarcerated, the rest of the population faces the daily
humiliation and bother of constant electronic and biometric identity checks,
live-in visits by Han Chinese attempting to reform their customs of daily
life, and constant reminders that their language, culture, and religion are
primitive, poisonous, and detrimental to China’s national unity and its place
in the world.
To the ten million or so Hui Muslims portrayed in David Stroup’s Pure
and True, the Chinese Communist regime has been gentler—so far—if not
exactly or always benign. Hui communities have long spoken mostly Chi-
nese (albeit with some Arabic and Persian words inserted) and are distin-
guished from the majority Han primarily by their religion and the dietary
and lifestyle customs that go along with it. Hui people are descendants of
Muslim traders who began settling permanently in East Asia during the
Ming dynasty (though they were there much earlier), who over the centuries
have acculturated to Chinese ways to various degrees. Hui people now live
both in concentrated rural areas, mostly in western China, and in urban
enclaves in almost all of China’s great cities. In recent times, many Hui have
played prominent parts in China’s military, literary, academic, political, and
business elites; others have been farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, and long-
distance traders.
Probably because they have been linguistically and politically inte-
grated into Chinese society for so long, Hui have seemed much less “foreign”
to their Han Chinese compatriots and much less threatening to successive
ix
regimes than have the Turkic Muslims of Xinjiang. Still, Hui are separate:
they pray to one God every Friday; they abstain from eating pork, which is
the main protein source of Han diets; and the more devout among them do
not smoke or drink. For this reason, Jonathan Lipman titled his history of
the Hui—the third book in the Studies on Ethnic Groups in China series—
Familiar Strangers.
David Stroup’s Pure and True provides a window into what being Hui
was like between 2014 and 2016 in four of China’s large cities: Beijing, where
Hui are a small but visible minority; Jinan, Shandong’s capital, where the Hui
quarter is smaller and less well known; Yinchuan, the capital of the Ningxia
Hui Autonomous Region, where Hui are a large minority of the urban popu-
lation; and Xining in Qinghai, where Hui share the city with large numbers
of Han, Tibetans, and Mongolians.
Stroup divides his account according to different ways of being Hui in
these four cities. “Choosing” is about identity, kinship, and marriage; “Talk-
ing” is about both Arabic as a liturgical language and Arabic- and Persian-
influenced Chinese as everyday speech; “Consuming” is about dietary habits
and how they divide Hui from Han and other pork-consuming ethnic groups;
and “Performing” is about religious and ritual life, both in the mosque and
at home. In all these aspects of Hui life, the influence of the Chinese state
interacts with attempts at community autonomy. On the one hand, state pol-
icy toward China’s minority ethnopolitical groups, or shaoshu minzu, of
which the Hui are one, mandates multiculturalism and inclusion, as Susan
McCarthy laid out in an earlier volume in this series, Communist Multicul-
turalism. Even the constitution of the People’s Republic guarantees religious,
cultural, and linguistic rights to all the minority minzu. On the other hand,
in recent years, especially since Xi Jinping’s ascension to power, increasingly
influential voices have expressed worry that multiculturalism and limited
ethnic autonomy can inhibit national unity and promote “separatism” or
“splittism.”
Worries about splittism are primarily directed to the Turkic Muslims of
Xinjiang and to the Tibetans, understandably since these are occupied
nations rather than the “minority groups” with which they are classified.
And indeed recent moves to curtail local languages in schools and promote
acculturation to Han ways have been most severe in those two occupied
territories. Other groups that have posed no threat to Chinese unity, who
consider themselves to be Chinese by nationality but separate from Han
culturally and linguistically, have not felt the brunt of recent policies as
much as have the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs. But where does this leave
x foreWord
the Hui, who are already Chinese speakers but share Islamic ritual and cul-
tural practices with the Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and other Turkic peoples?
When Stroup was conducting his field research from 2014 to 2016, these
ambivalent policies left the Hui mostly alone. They were subject to prejudice
from the majority and to suspicion from the authorities, but they could still
go about their daily lives of choosing, talking, consuming, and performing
and, as long as they did not explicitly follow strict orthodox versions of
Islamic piety recently introduced from the Middle East, they were not sub-
ject to any kind of real repression. These relatively multiculturalist policies
were not only beneficial to the Hui communities themselves but allowed
Stroup to gather the rich textual and visual data that document the ways in
which Hui could be both ethnic and modern.
Sadly, these days seem to be coming to an end, as Stroup shows in the
afterword to this book. Since Xi Jinping declared his People’s War on Terror
in 2017, mainly as an excuse to repress all forms of potential opposition
among Uyghurs and Kazaks, the Hui have been caught, to various degrees,
in the penumbra of those repressive policies. Mosques have lost their domes
and their loudspeakers; Arabic calligraphy on restaurant storefronts has
been painted over; even moderate forms of Islamic dress such as headscarves
have been discouraged if not outright forbidden; the state has even encour-
aged people to drink more liquor.
It is in this period of saddening and hopefully temporary repression that
Stroup’s account of what things were like not so long ago acquires both its
poignancy as a reminder of what might have been and its scholarly value
as a record of what was. We are delighted to introduce Pure and True as the
twenty-fifth volume of Studies on Ethnic Groups in China.
foreWord xi