The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China by Guangtian Ha (review)

Reviewed by: The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China by Guangtian Ha Chuen-Fung Wong Guangtian Ha, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 312 pp. US$35 (pb). ISBN 978-0-231-19807-3 The subject of this very fine ethnography is the sacred soundscape of the Jahriyya哲合忍耶 ("the loud ones," from the Arabic jahr, "speak aloud"), a major Chinese Sufi order (menhuan 門宦) known for their practice of "loud" zikr group chanting, as opposed to the older "quiet" zikr chanting of their rival Khufiyya 虎夫耶 order. The Jahriyya was founded in the mid-eighteenth century by the Chinese Sufi master Ma Mingxin 馬明心/新 (1719–1781), who had previously spent fifteen years studying in Yemen and returned to China in 1761 to found the sect. Jahriyya murshidūn (masters) and their murīdūn (disciples) are known for their melodious ritual recitation performed while sitting in a dayi'er打依爾 (Arabic: dā'ira) circle. The "naturally pleasant polyphonic harmony" (p. 2) of Jahriyya chanting is what attracted the author Guangtian Ha, himself a Chinese Muslim (Hui 回), to this research.1 The fieldwork was conducted during the 2010s in the northwestern Chinese province of Ningxia among the religious community identified with the Sufi worship site called Hong Le Fu 鴻樂府. In this first book-length ethnography of the Jahriyya, Ha aspires to reconcile transnational Islamic orthodoxy with this "vernacular" Chinese Sufi tradition. His analysis focuses on the liturgical and everyday sounds of the Jahriyya Sufis—singing/chanting, listening, and other acts of sound production and consumption—to understand the "use of the human voice in the cultivation of mystical truth" (p. 3). Such mystical truth is realized in ways that often mark Jahriyya sacred life as deviant from—and, according to some, inferior to—the orthodoxy of global Islamic communities. This is exemplified by their reluctance to learn the "standard" Arabic recitation style and contempt for uniformization efforts among contemporary reform-minded leaders (chapter 4); the non-obligatory nature of hajj (often substituted by visiting the local tombs of noble saints; p. 171); and their general ignorance about the origins of ritual practices and sainthood, among others. Throughout the ethnography, Ha writes to restore a sense of religious and liturgical legitimacy to the heterogeneous Jahriyya practices by explicating their historical trajectories and social logics in a gendered sacred world. The theoretical foundation that undergirds the book's five main chapters is what Ha calls "fragile transcendence": a "weak" form of sublimation that relies less on the authoritative texts (and their authoritative interpretation) and unified practices that characterize "strong transcendence," which is commonly "associated with a conventional monotheistic belief in personified deity" [End Page 153] (p. 3). The outcome of this "fragile transcendence" is a deep sense of uncertainty and ambiguity among Jahriyya followers, which "resists the drive for homogeneity in ritual practice and explanation," and a general hesitation about the idea that "one must know for certain what one is doing to be a Jahriyya Sufi" (p. 10). Such ambivalence, according to Ha, has accommodated different ritual practices not only between the Jahriyya and Islamic orthodoxy but also among the Jahriyya communities spread across China as a result of exiles and forced migration over the past two centuries or so. The first chapter reconstructs the multilingualism of early Jahriyya history through an "archaeological" approach to the sound of liturgical recitation. Through close readings of three Jahriyya hagiographies—the earliest of which dates back to the early nineteenth century and the latest to the 1930s—Ha excavates the "linguistic multiplicity and phonetic interpenetration" of these chanted Sino-Islamic sacred texts, which, Ha argues, have always been mediated with Persian, Turkic, and Chinese terms and pronunciations in their recitations. According to Ha, the perceived impurity of the Jahriyya's Arabic pronunciation—often denounced by reformers and outsiders alike as corrupted and substandard—is indeed a testament to their complex and layered multilingual history. This unites the Jahriyya with non-Arab Muslims, the "so-called 'ajam, or the 'barbarians' who cannot speak the elegant tongue of the Holy Qur'an" (p. 40), at the "margins of the Islamicate world, where...