Guangtian Ha's The Sound of Salvation is one of the most important books to have appeared in recent years with respect to the study of Islam/Muslims in China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Ningxia and marshaling an impressive array of sources indicative of the author's wide-ranging linguistic mastery and knowledge, the book provides an in-depth account of the histories, ritual modalities, and soundscapes of the Jahriyya Naqshbandi Sufi order. Situated mainly in Northwest China (with offshoots in Yunnan and the Northeast), the Jahriyya—literally the “loud ones” in Arabic—have long attracted scholarly attention due to their entanglements with the so-called Muslim rebellions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 Fixated on their violent or confrontational encounters with the imperial authorities, a considerable portion of the literature on the Jahriyya has looked at topics ranging from their interactions with the Qing courts to the martyrological and spiritual dimensions of their devotional and hagiographic writings.2 Others have engaged with the Jahriyya through the prism of its most famous living follower, Zhang Chengzhi, author of History of the Soul (1991), a fictional account of the order's turbulent past.3The Sound of Salvation is sensitive to the weight of this history; indeed, a key argument of the book is that the Jahriyya tradition embodies a fragile transcendence born out of this legacy of sustained political persecution and suffering. Yet in terms of its scope and areas of interest, this is a rich ethnographic and historical work that goes well beyond the prevailing treatments of the existing scholarship. This is especially evident in that its primary focus is on the sonic universe inhabited by Jahriyya adherents themselves. This approach in and of itself is not unique but rather places the book within a wider ethnomusicological trend that has gained momentum over the past decade regarding the study of Islam and Muslims in China. (Ha can be counted among its catalysts.)4 Exemplified by the works of Maria Jaschok, Rachel Harris, and Mu Qian, among others, this trend has brought renewed appreciation to how the production and consumption of sound—the human, instrumental, and environmental—are laden with meanings and relationships of spiritual, political, social, and even economic import.5Divided into five chapters, The Sound of Salvation opens with a scrutinizing read of early Jahriyya sources to explore the order's idiosyncratic pronunciation of Arabic in its liturgy, casting light in turn on the order's genesis at the intersection of multiple linguistic, cultural, and pedagogic worlds over the span of two centuries (chapter 1). Building on this excavational work of Jahriyya sound, chapters 2 and 3 offer a valuable and much-needed ethnographic account of the ritual performances—and vocalizations—of two widely used Jahriyya sacred liturgical texts, the Mukhammas and the Mada'ih (both of which are panegyrical works about the Prophet Muhammad), and their ritualistic illustration of Ha's notion of disembodied sainthood. Ha constantly interweaves this analysis with nuanced discussions on how China's political and economic upheavals have reshaped the recitational expression of these texts (most notably, the Mada'ih); in essence, he recovers elements of the Jahriyya's relatively unknown (and little written about) historical experiences in the Maoist and post-Maoist eras.Ha then shifts our attention to the more recent past (chapter 4), zooming in on the multiple forces that have reshaped Muslim solidarities in China since the 1980s, including the relaxation of government religious controls on the religious sphere; the influx of new influences, resources, and modalities from the wider “Muslim world”; the mass adoption of recording and communicational technologies; and urbanization's disruptive effect on mosque communities. As has been the case with other currents in Sinophone Islam, these discordant developments have had a disorienting effect on the Jahriyya and its soundscape. In this relatively long yet fascinating chapter, we find a wide range of topics, such as the elusive attempts of the order's authorities in Wuzhong to standardize liturgical pronunciation, how the post-Maoist religious economy has “hastened” the tempo of liturgical recitation, and the controversial intrusion via popular media like QQ and WeChat of female voices into ritual audio spaces long confined to male reciters. Chapter 5 expands on the question of gender, exploring how women have sought to reproduce—at a distance—male-dominated recitations while also drawing attention to their roles in sustaining Jahriyya rituals through their labor (i.e., the making of youxiang, a deep-fried bread consumed by attendees).The epilogue brings us back to the current moment, where Ha reflects on the debilitating impact the party-state's post-2016 restrictive and (to borrow from Max Oidtmann) Chinafying religious policies have had on the Jahriyya and the broader Islamic landscape of the Northwest.6 It becomes immediately apparent from the vantage point of the “new normal,” as Ha himself acknowledges, that The Sound of Salvation emerges as a vital document of a Jahriyya sonic universe that is now under assault. The value of this work is heightened by how it may very well be part of the last batch of multisited ethnographies to appear concerning Islam/Muslims in China, at least for the foreseeable future, and among which one can include Rachel Harris's Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam (2020) and David Stroup's Pure and True (2022).7 In all, The Sound of Salvation is an engaging and beautifully written work that will be of interest to both general and specialist audiences and across various fields, disciplines, and theoretical paradigms.
Mohammed Alsudairi (Tue,) studied this question.