Islam by smartphone: reading the Uyghur Islamic revival on WeChat

ABSTRACT

The official Chinese view of the Uyghur Islamic revival is overwhelmingly dominant. Because of the extraordinary measures taken to shield from international view the actual developments in the region and to silence Uyghur voices, we lack a clear sense of what it is to be a Muslim in contemporary Xinjiang. This article explores debates within Uyghur society about faith, politics and identity as they are revealed through the social media platform WeChat. It aims to disrupt the dominant narratives and enable new understandings of the changing patterns of religiosity and violence in the region. It focuses on the use of social media to access affective experiences of religion, projects of self-fashioning, and the new geographies of knowledge and experience formed as Uyghurs turned to the readily available scripts circulating in the wider Islamic world and adapted them to a very local sense of crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Uyghur
• China
• Islamic revival
• social media
• anashid

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Darren Byler, ‘Images in Red: Han Culture, Uyghur Performers, Chinese New Year’ (https://livingotherwise.com/2018/02/23/images-red-han-culture-uyghur-performers-chinese-new-year/).

2 See Millward (2009) for a balanced account of the incident, and Harris and Isa (2011) for a discussion of the Uyghur online discourse surrounding these events.

3 Although some authors (e.g., Smith Finley 2013, 236) describe an Islamic ‘renewal’, I prefer to use the term ‘revival’ to situate it in the broad context of the global movement to return to orthodox practice and scriptural tradition which began in the 1970s (see also Huang 2009, 47).

4 The most credible on-the-ground accounts of the campaign can be found in reports produced by the Uyghur Human Rights Project. See the dramatically titled but solidly researched China’s Iron-Fisted Repression of Uyghur Religious Freedom (Washington, DC: UHRP, 2013).

5 News report in China Daily on the crackdown. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014crackdownterrorists/.

6 See also the discussion by David Brophy at https://www.thechinastory.org/2015/02/little-apples-in-xinjiang/, and Rachel Harris at http://www.soundislamchina.org/?p=1053.

7 Report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project, Washington, DC, 2015: http://docs.uyghuramerican.org/pdf/Legitimizing-Repression.pdf; report by the World Uyghur Congress, Munich, Germany, 2016: http://www.uyghurcongress.org/en/wp-content/uploads/WUC-2016-Report-Human-Rights-in-East-Turkestan.pdf.

8 Audio and video files and images discussed in this article can be accessed on the website for the Leverhulme Research project ‘Sounding Islam in China’: http://www.soundislamchina.org/?p=1222.

9 Similar themes can be found in interviews with Uyghur women conducted by Huang (2009, 39).

10 Smith Finley also reports hearing remarks of this nature from Uyghur women she knew. ‘Take away the criminals and terrorists by all means, we are happy for you to do that! But don’t tar us all with the same brush’ (personal communication, August 2017).

11 Audio file: http://www.soundislamchina.org/av/Jihad_tablikh.mp3.

12 This theme linking responsibility for Chinese oppression of the Uyghur nation to group failure to follow ‘correct’ Islamic practice confirms the continuation of a trend already emergent in 2004. See Smith Finley on Islam as a vehicle for personal and national reform (2013: 281–84).

13 Audio file: http://www.soundislamchina.org/av/Jin_tablikh.mp3.

14 Audio file: http://www.soundislamchina.org/av/Anamgha_yezilghan_xet.mp3.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by AHRC Grant AH/K008331/1 and a Leverhulme Trust Research Project grant as part of the project Sounding Islam in China (http://www.soundislamchina.org/).