Musulmans de Chine: Une anthropologie des Hui du Henan (review)

The past several years have seen a burgeoning academic interest in Chinese Muslims, part and parcel both of a general academic trend focused on so-called "minority" peoples and of a growing interest specifically within Chinese studies in overturning long-standing models of interpretation that assume the existence of a monolithic "Chinese" entity and overlook much of the cultural complexity of Chinese society. Within the discipline of history, for example, such scholars as Jonathan Lipman have written extensively on Chinese Islam, while anthropologists such as Dru Gladney and Maris Gillette have also focused specifically on the Muslim communities of China.

What little attention had in the past been lent to the Muslims of China came largely from Western missionaries, who, particularly in the nineteenth century, came to regard China's Muslim communities as likely fertile grounds for the dissemination of Christianity. These missionaries—who viewed Chinese Muslims as anomalous, fundamentally alien in China—set the tone, until very recently, for documentation of the Hui, as China's Muslims are collectively termed today.

Recent scholarship, however, attempts a different approach, one that does not have as its point of departure the assumption that the presence of Islam in China is an anomaly that must somehow be accounted for. The work of these scholars suggests that the "Chineseness" of the Hui is not necessarily undermined by their status as Muslims.

Gladney was perhaps the first of this new brand of scholars, documenting in his book four distinct types of Chinese Muslim communities, ranging from the urban communities of the east (who follow virtually no precept of Islamic law, yet retain an identity as Muslims) to the groups of devout rural Muslim villagers who are found in the northwest. Gladney's work did much to erase the essentializing view that held that China's Muslims could be understood and viewed as a homogeneous group, artificially grafted onto Chinese society. Maris Gillette's work on the Muslims of Beijing has furthered this new view, by minutely documenting the subtle ways in which Muslim identity is lived and understood in the setting of one of China's most important contemporary urban centers.

We now have another important anthropological work to add to this trend, Elisabeth Allès' Musulmans de Chine: Une anthropologie des Hui du Henan. Allès' book makes contributions of both a methodological and an interpretive sort. Methodologically, her study is valuable in that it provides an examination of the several types of Chinese Muslim communities in one central eastern province, Henan. Henan, which has a large concentration of Chinese Muslims (the third largest of any Chinese province), is home to some of the earliest Chinese Muslim settlements, dating from the Tang period on. While other works have provided a useful broad overview of all of China's Muslims (Gladney's, for instance) or a detailed snapshot of one community (Gillette), Allès' study surveys an entire province, locating within it both the diversity and the commonality of the Muslim population.

It is on the interpretive level, however, that Allès' book is most interesting, for she wades fearlessly (if not always successfully) into the troubled waters of "identity" and the question as to whether or not China's Muslims are, at heart, most fundamentally Chinese or Muslim or at one and the same time both. In her conclusion, Allès asks of Chinese Islam: "Syncrétisme ou juxtaposition?" She observes that "On a pu être tenté dans le passé de considérer l'islam chinois comme la manifestation d'un syncrétisme" (p. 289). To view Chinese Islam as fundamentally syncretistic, argues Allès, is a mistake. Instead, she proposes that it is rather a "juxtaposition," one that does not in its combination of elements pose problems for its members, but only for its observers: "Là où l'observateur étranger s'attendrait à trouver des tensions, la coexistence des él...