An Islamic History in Southern Xinjiang: Everyday Devotions

The focus here is not on “Islamic history,” in a broad sense but on an Islamic history—that of the people living in southern Xinjiang, China in the early part of the twentieth century. I look at what it meant to be a Muslim in what is normally considered to be a periphery of the Islamic world. In Xinjiang, Islam was a way of conceptualizing and, more importantly, inhabiting and negotiating the world in which people found themselves. I suggest understanding Islam among the population of Xinjiang as a series of social patterns that were anything but motionless. Rather, they were negotiated from moment to moment by diverse individuals, each Muslim, but none in exactly the same way. Perhaps the only constant was that Muslim was a marker of identity.

To supply an example of this, I turn to texts from the region. Even a cursory examination of the most common genres reveals the way in which Islam permeated everyday life and was negotiated from moment to moment—at least ideally. Perhaps there is no better example of this than a genre of text that is called risālah. These “trade manuals” are the single most ubiquitous text from the region in the early part of the twentieth century and represent a key part of the body of historical sources that are available for the study of this time. They essentially tell craftsmen how to make their trade meritorious, and this is always done in a self-consciously Islamic manner. I suggest that these texts are key for understanding the people who used and transmitted them and explore their place in local society, while remaining aware of the ways in which they may have served as a link to a much broader, transnational Islamic community.