Pen of the Jahriyya: A commentary on The History of the Soul by Zhang Chengzhi

Abstract

China’s leading Muslim writer, Zhang Chengzhi, published in 1991 an historical novel about a Sufi Islamic community, entitled The History of the Soul. The novel covers the two hundred years leading up to 1919, the year of the May Fourth Movement that is conventionally considered as the beginning of modern Chinese history. During this period, the Sufi community that is the subject of Zhang’s novels, called the Jahriyya, was involved in a series of violent clashes with the Qing imperial state. The author weaves through his historical narrative of a Chinese spiritual community the story of his own spiritual crisis, which he underwent in the 1980s and finally overcame through his encounter with the Jahriyya.

Literary Liberation of the Tibetan Past: The Alternative Voice in Alai’s Red Poppies

“…The effort to suppress alternative historical narratives that pertain to ethnic minorities is not confined to the Tibetans and Uyghurs. An example that extends to another minority involves the controversial historical novel History of the Soul (Xinling shi, published in 1991), by the famous Hui writer Zhang Chengzhi, which recounts the bloody history of the Sufi Islamic Jahriyya community in northwest China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Liu, 1997Liu, , 1998Liu, , 2000Zhang, 2000Zhang, /2001Xu, 2002;Garnaut, 2006). According to one source, during the 1990s the book was "briefly banned in Xinjiang and Ningxia" (Ying, 2005: 20).…”

“…The stereotypes of barbarism and backwardness do not relate in China exclusively to Tibetans but to most of the ethnic minorities that live in the country. For the Zhang, 2000Zhang, /2001Xu, 2002;Garnaut, 2006), the Mongol musician Teng Ge'er (Baranovitch, 2001: esp. 359-77); and the Uyghur musician Askar (Baranovitch 2003b: esp.…”