This panel examines the Chinese Muslims (Hui) as modernity and the modern state affected the construction of their individual and collective identities, especially through the process of history-making. It is as true for Chinese Muslims as for other Chinese that modern, collective identity lies partly in defining and narrating the past. In the 20th century the creation of a "Hui" history has been rendered problematic by the condemnation of all things "feudal," especially religion, which alone distinguishes the Hui from their non-Muslim neighbors. Two papers clarify large-scale integrative forces at work before and after 1949: Ben-Dor focuses on the role of Hui historians in "inventing" minzu as a crucial valence of Sino-Muslim identity, and Gillette describes Hui reaction to "women’s liberation" as a modern trope and the state’s valorization of that theme as an integrative strategy in multi-ethnic China. The other two papers introduce individual cases to illustrate and complicate the Hui historical tradition by probing into the minds of intellectuals, one around the 1911 revolution and one at century’s end. Both Ma Yuanzhang (a Sufi shaykh) and Zhang Chengzhi (a novelist) self-consciously attempt to place the Hui within Chinese history, rendering them significant in the building of the Chinese nation-state. The panel will introduce new sources and new insights on the problem of being simultaneously Chinese and Muslim, bringing historical, anthropological, and literary methods to bear. We will all analyze Hui interactions—both cooperative and resistant—with the hegemonic paradigms, narratives, and institutions of modern China.

Zvi A. Ben-Dor, University of California, Los Angeles

This paper shows how Chinese Muslim intellectuals responded to the challenge of nationalist discourse among the Chinese intelligentsia during the first half of the 20th century (1904–1940s) by constructing their own history as a "national minority" history. I argue that these intellectuals were confronted with a twofold problem: on the one hand, they had to maintain their own distinct identity as Hui, and on the other, they had to avoid excluding themselves from the broad history of the Chinese Nation, which was being written at the same time. Their efforts were carried out through a dialogue, direct and indirect, with Han Chinese historians.

The paper identifies two distinct factors in the process. First, I contend that the cultural activities of Protestant missionaries who collected materials on the Hui served as a "model" of historical writing for Hui historians. I suggest that Hui historians borrowed not only facts about the Hui from missionary writings but also the conceptual framework within which to place them. To a certain extent, the Protestant missionaries were the "inventors" of Hui nationality. Second, this paper points to the Chinese Islamic religious, historical, and philosophical writings of the 17th and 18th centuries as sources of inspiration and information for the 20th-century Hui intellectuals.

Maris Boyd Gillette, Haverford College

This paper investigates a common trope, "women’s liberation" that residents of the Xi’an Muslim district use to discuss their revolutionary past. It describes how Xi’an Hui, borrowing concepts from official propaganda and approved history, employ women’s lives to encapsulate the changes that their own lives have undergone since the early 20th century. I argue that official histories make personal experience of radical social transformation comprehensible, providing a meaningful framework within which a narrator can locate specific experience. Yet experience and memory are unruly—residents’ memories and characterizations of "women’s liberation" show the limitations of the Chinese government’s monolithic, unidirectional modernization narrative. In relaying their stories, Xi’an Muslims indicate that "women’s liberation" was not unambiguously positive. While memories and assessments of "women’s liberation" differ along gender and generational lines, many older residents and younger men criticize the post-liberation era by talking about their perception that women’s lives have manifested a collective decline—in the quality of interpersonal relations, labor patterns, religious observance, and morality.

Jonathan N. Lipman, Mount Holyoke College

Ma Yuanzhang (1853–1920), an imam born and educated in Yunnan, became the leader of the Jahriyya suborder of Naqshbandi Sufis in the 1880s, the dangerous years following the Qing’s successful suppression of the "Muslim rebellion" in Gansu. Upon him fell the task of reviving the faith and organization of tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of followers. He undertook this mission through conventional means—visiting and comforting Jahri communities in a number of provinces; rescuing the kinfolk of fallen leader Ma Hualong; mastering Arabic texts and calligraphy; and providing a safe headquarters at Zhangjiachuan, in eastern Gansu.

But Ma Yuanzhang also had to lead the Jahriyya in New China, the rapidly changing world of late Qing and early Republican cultural and political chaos. To that end, he also studied the Chinese canon, became an accomplished Chinese calligrapher, and wrote numerous celebratory couplets (duilian), poems, and prose prefaces. These hitherto unexplored texts reveal a man striving to bring sense and security to his people by integrating them successfully into Chinese culture without eliminating their religious distinctiveness. He unified two models of the Perfected Man, that of the Muslim Sufi (seeker after unity with the Divine) and the Confucian Sage (seeker after human-heartedness and integrity), a possibility articulated in 17th–18th century Confucian-Muslim texts. In this dual mission he succeeded to the point that Gansu non-Muslims, who had feared the Jahriyya under his predecessors, called him shanren, a Good Man.

Xinmin Liu, Wesleyan University

This paper seeks to outline the trajectory of Zhang Chengzhi’s self-making by way of reclaiming his ethnic roots as a Chinese Muslim (Hui). While chronicling the oral and oracular history of the Jahriyya Sufis in Xinling Shi (History of the Soul, 1992), Zhang interjects the historical narrative with a personal nostalgic memoir that reveals his own struggle against the lures of a grand historical narrative and his efforts to refashion a new ethnic identity out of an explicit collective subjectivity. Rather than simply discarding the one and embracing the other, Zhang finds it necessary to mediate between them by seeking the intuitive and the personal, contesting the official and the hegemonic, and interacting with the defiant and the resistant. By so doing, he unsettles the positivist mode of historiography and enacts instead a vigorous interplay between cryptic memory and secular records, oral and written histories, folklore and official verdicts.