Reply to 1994

Abstract Chinese Islam has been tamed into reticent submission in recent years, losing its existence as a formation of the Schmittian political—the ability and will to declare its friends and enemies. Three decades ago, however, a national bestseller was adamantly exalting the virtues of jihad and shahid (Islamic martyrdom). This paper investigates the intellectual context of the early 1990s, in which a battered national zeitgeist of egalitarianism was on the way out while other political ethics were settling in and vying for dominance. Engendering a revivalist radicalism, Zhang Chengzhi in the 1990s unmistakably articulated a Schmittian political in Chinese Islam. By analyzing the affective registers in Zhang's famous essay “The Truly Human Human Is X” and his literary masterpiece The History of the Soul, this article demonstrates that Zhang's fabulation of an affect of “devotional sincerity” relies on the ritualization of martyrdom through the crucible of unjust violence. In this formulation, martyrs are elevated as “certified agents” who embody the subjunctive vision of an “ought to be” world. This article concludes that the “devotional sincerity” in Zhang's mediation of Chinese Islam was not the brave frontrunner of an epic of heterodoxy; rather, it was an offspring and retardataire of Maoist proletarian orthodoxy.