Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam

Abstract

Rachel Harris's latest contribution, Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam, offers a rare and insightful look at the ever-changing Uyghur sonic environment in recent years. Her analysis shows how the constant adaptation of spiritual, religious, and social practices among Uyghurs is intimately tied to the presence and absence, as well as the circulation and restriction, of sound. The book deepens our understanding of the aggressive censorship and control the People's Republic of China imposes upon Uyghurs while it explores Uyghurs’ religious and spiritual practices. Its original approach also provides precious insights into one of the biggest humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century.Through this work, Harris displays her skills as an excellent ethnographer. Her capacity to gather and examine a wide range of data and guide readers through complex religious, sociopolitical, and historical contexts is remarkable. As in her previous publications, this book is based on fieldwork Harris conducted with several different Uyghur communities located in China's Northwestern Uyghur Region, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. She also collected a large amount of digital data as part of her remote ethnography.Her descriptions of these communities are punctuated by rarely observed women's religious practices and rituals as well as interviews she conducted with practitioners. Through her depiction of zikr (remembrance), as performed by women from these communities, Harris reveals an intimate part of Uyghur religious and spiritual tradition: the central role of the büwi (a religious woman's title) in Uyghur villages, making a trenchant analysis of the concepts of womanhood, ritualized weeping, and spiritual performance as a sort of emotional labor performed by büwis on behalf of the community.In examining how religious texts have circulated among Uyghurs in these different regions for the last two decades, Harris argues that the circulation of published or hand-copied texts is strongly facilitated by ritual practices and their musical performances. She suggests that scholars reexamine the binary relationship between oral and written tradition to portray a more fluid, contextually dependent reality. In Harris's view, it is not only important that we study how printed versions of these texts get passed around among the pious, but it is also necessary to observe the tracks of the transaction. Harris describes how these texts were copied, printed, and modulated under different political agendas and how they were then appropriated by women in small villages during their Sufi gatherings.Harris devotes one particularly compelling chapter to the ways in which Islamic recitation has shifted in the Uyghur region and beyond. Recordings and digital media have introduced new, more Middle Eastern-style sounds, which are then embodied in daily practice. The digital circulation of such recordings affects social behaviors in public spaces. Harris expertly documents the power dynamic that this simultaneously new and old style of recitation has created in the region, situating Uyghur Islam in a global context and highlighting how contemporary Uyghurs have reconnected to the rest of the Islamic world.Yet, even unperformed, nonpublic, or hidden sounds of spirituality are part of the Uyghur Islamic soundscape that Harris seeks to understand. To investigate these silenced sounds, Harris turns to digital spaces, including the Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app WeChat (Weixin in Chinese and Undidar in Uyghur), as the medium for her fieldwork. Unlike many other internationally known messaging apps, the Chinese government permits Chinese citizens to use WeChat because it was developed by Tencent, a tech company based in the People's Republic of China, and is thereby subject to the dictates of the Chinese Communist Party. WeChat is also one of the main ways Uyghurs in the diaspora can communicate with family and friends still in China. It has been an important platform for researchers to gather information about what is happening within Chinese borders when on-site fieldwork is not allowed. Harris collected a variety of data through this app, including religious sounds, texts, and images, and analyzed posts from inside the region. She then compared them to reactions from diasporic Uyghur communities. In so doing, she established a work method that successfully enabled her to examine the digital space created by Uyghurs and document the changing political situation vis-à-vis Islamic practice in the Uyghur region. The research tools and methodology she outlines in this book are a valuable resource on remote ethnography that many researchers in the field can utilize in the future.Harris also chronicles how the Chinese government reacted to the audible and digital religious soundscape of the region. Since 2016, the Chinese government has violently oppressed Uyghurs, as well as Kazakh and Kyrghyz people, in the name of the war on terror. Academic literature has extensively documented how high-tech surveillance, mass incarceration, and political education systems are deployed to create an ongoing humanitarian crisis in the region. Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam goes a step further, deconstructing how sound, music, and dance have played a role in the Chinese government's projects of (sonic) territorializations. Song and dance are used as tools to reengineer the minds of the people and to control and occupy sonic spaces; in the chilling example of “Little Apple,” government authorities force even religious figures (Imams) into publicly performing a rather childish pop dance. Harris clearly shows how such methods are used to police and remodel Uyghurs’ bodies and minds while at the same time eradicating religious sound.Despite this oppression, however, Harris ends her book on a rather optimistic note. She compares the current situation to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, noting that Uyghur society experienced a cultural and spiritual awakening in the years that followed.I personally enjoyed reading Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam, filled as it is with citations from a variety of research contexts. Harris has provided a meaningful bridge between Uyghur Islamic soundscapes and a broader global context. And she has shown herself adept at engaging both as an academic and a human as she “listen[s] through the layers” (217).