Chinese Muslims and the Global Ummah: Islamic Revival and Ethnic Identity among the Hui of Qinghai Province by Alexander Blair Stewart (review)

Caffrey / Book Reviews   85 Chinese Muslims and the Global Ummah: Islamic Revival and Ethnic Identity among the Hui of Qinghai Province Alexander Blair Stewart London-New York: Routledge, 2017. 221 pages. Alexander Stewart has written an ethnographic monograph on the religious aspects of Muslim life in Qinghai Province, China, that is a substantial contribution to the small but incisive body of work on China’s Muslim peoples. The book is made up of an introduction, a review of the history of Islam in China leading up to a focus on two “revival movements” of twentieth-century China (Salafiyya and Tabligh Jama’at), and then five chapters utilizing individual informants as examples of particular kinds of being Chinese Muslim—including religious professionals, missionaries, new converts, and Muslims from several strataofQinghaisociety.Especiallyintheselastfivechapters,theauthorprovides a wealth of description and example that will be of use to scholars of Chinese Muslims. If a single argument for the text must be enunciated here, it is that “Islamic revival is an avenue by which individuals can express their identity in a way that subtly and safely contradicts the materialist rhetoric of the Communist regime and piously wrests some degree of autonomy from parents, ancestors, and religious authorities” (p. 58). This is a worthy argument, and there is much to like about the book. Perhaps the great strength of this book is the ethnographic material that has thus been made available to the general scholarly community. It’s attention to what the author calls “Islamic revival” is the first real treatment in English of the embodied ideas of the Salafiyya movement in China, and the first analytical consideration I have seen of the Tabligh Jama’at practices in China at all. In fact, chapter five, which gives an excellent ethnographic account of “performing the path” of the Tabligh Jama’at, is a serious contribution to knowledge for this fact alone. The author was wise, I think, to focus his interests on these two communities; and the tenacity with which he pursued these two interests is to be commended. Several times while reading the narrative segments in which the author recounts his own behavior, I was reminded of similar experiences I had while conducting my own fieldwork among Chinese Muslims. The detailed ethnographic writing Stewart provides gives us a nearly unprecedented look into the theological (or at least the popular conceptions of the theological) components of Muslim self-fashioning in that small subset of Chinese Muslims in Qinghai who concern themselves with this type of thing. 86  Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, Vol. 1.2 The author takes the not unusual step of selecting key individuals among his informants to stand in as indicators or exemplars of the kind of ideals he wants to demonstrateasbeingavailableandcontributingtoChineseMuslimidentification of self and situation in the world. There are a few problems associated with this techniqueingeneral(likeafailuretoacknowledgestructuralconcernsduetothe methodological individualist focus), but the approach works for what Stewart wants to do. Each figure appearing in the narrative is seen as an agent alive to the fact of his (it is almost always a he) engagement with Islamic theology in some manner. His choice of mosques as his field sites and ritual practice as his method is an interesting one that has its costs in the end, but that approach was nonetheless productive. There are a few aspects of the work that give me pause. There is not much in thewayofcontextualizingtheethnographicsitesinvolved.Nomaps,littlehistory, and almost nothing of the socio-historical or political-economic environment in which these ethnographic informants exist to illuminate this monograph. Obviously, this is a choice made due to space limitations and interest focus, but since the activities of these people are being recorded and made much of amidst the neoliberal revolution in China, I find it distracting at times to have not given some sort of relative situational coordinates for Chinese Muslims locally and nationally. Even citing the existing work on the subject would have given something of this context, but that is mostly absent. The author chooses instead to focus on the “Islamic landscape” (p. 5) to the exclusion of any Muslim—by which I mean socio-politically human—topography. This choice to examine theological influences can easily be...