1/31/2022 | New Books in Asian Studies: The Sound of Salvation with Guangtian Ha

In this upcoming edition of the 2022 New Books in Asian Studies series, the Sigur Center will host a discussion of The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China with author Guangtian Ha, Assistant Professor of Religion at Haverford College. The event will be moderated by Eric Schluessel, Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at GW.

The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the “loud” (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants.

The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation. Guangtian Ha examines how the use of voice in liturgy helps the Jahriyya to sustain their faith and the ways it has enabled them to endure political persecution over the past two and a half centuries. He situates the Jahriyya in a global multilingual network of Sufis and shows how their characteristic soundscapes result from transcultural interactions among Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Chinese Muslim communities. Ha argues that the resilience of Jahriyya Sufism stems from the diversity and multiplicity of liturgical practice, which he shows to be rooted in notions of Sufi sainthood. He considers the movement of Jahriyya vocal recitation to new media forms and foregrounds the gendered opposition of male voices and female silence that structures the group’s rituals.

Spanning diverse disciplines—including anthropology, ethnomusicology, Islamic studies, sound studies, and media studies—and using Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources, The Sound of Salvation offers new perspectives on the importance of sound to religious practice, the role of gender in Chinese Islam, and the links connecting Chinese Muslims to the broader Islamic world.

The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China can be purchased from Columbia University Press.

Speaker

Guangtian Ha is Assistant Professor of Religion at Haverford College. Prior to joining Haverford, he was a postdoctoral research fellow and research associate at SOAS, University of London. He is the co-editor of The Contest of the Fruits (MIT, 2021; with Slavs and Tatars) and Ethnographies of Islam in China (Hawai’i, 2020; with Rachel Harris and Maria Jaschok). He received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University.

Moderator

Eric Schluessel is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Land of Strangers, his first monograph, uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to explore the ramifications of a project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing empire to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Schluessel’s current project, Exiled Gods, delves into Han Chinese settler culture and religion to illuminate the history of a diasporic community of demobilized soldiers and their descendants that spanned the Qing empire. Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, Schluessel is also completing a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang. Ongoing research builds off of this and other manuscript, documentary, and memoir sources to reconstruct an economic history of Xinjiang from below. Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana in Missoula and spent the 2018–2019 academic year as a Mellow Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.