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 Chinese (albeit with some Arabic and Persian words inserted) and are distinguished 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 longdistance traders.

Probably because they have been linguistically and politically integrated into Chinese society for so long, Hui have seemed much less “foreign” to their Han Chinese compatriots and much less threatening to successive 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 population; 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; “Talking” is about both Arabic as a liturgical language and Arabic- and Persianinfluenced 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 policy 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 Multiculturalism. 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 the Hui, who are already Chinese speakers but share Islamic ritual and cultural 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 subject 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 encouraged 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.