DISKUS

Chinese Hui Muslim Women At Home:
tradition, dignity and modernization in a global context

Maria Jaschok
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
Queen Elizabeth House
3 Mansfield Road
Oxford OX1 3TB
Oxford OX

Not all traditions have value and some are contrary to human rights and must be combated. One must distinguish between necessary tolerance and blindness to degrading treatments and violations of human rights. For freedom of religion not to be contrary to women’s rights the right to difference inherent in the former must not become a right to indifference to the condition of women. [1]

What is ‘home’ to Chinese Hui Muslim women in a globalizing world into which China has emerged as an economic and political superpower, a major player in multilateral organizations and in exclusive gatherings of major global economic actors? Indeed, how is the ‘global’ imagined and negotiated in the local communities of ethno-religious minority groups which constitute the Muslim population in China ? [2] If globalization, as R. Robertson defines it, are ‘both the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’, [3] how does the spiritual home of Muslim women, the fang [4] of a given women’s mosque, shape the consciousness of their immediate environments and of ‘the world as a whole?’ It is here, in the identification with the mosque as defining raison d’être of their communal distinctiveness, and otherness, that continuities of Islamic faith and Muslim traditions are made, and remade. In the words of Kim Knott, ‘… people construct such sites or environments through their imaginations, memories, actions, and speech’ [5] – as simultaneously the changing world around them presses on them with the full weight of patriarchal disapproval and State engendered secular development ideology. But the presence of women’s traditional places of worship and education makes all the difference to Muslim women whose pride in their centuries-old tradition engenders dignity and, because of legitimately occupied social space, historical and legal rights. These sites may be heavily contested but have also allowed for resistance to arise, if subtle or concealed. Moreover, in recent years voices have emerged which are adding to secular mainstream discourses over the nature and future of societal developments the previously unheard perspectives of religious believers.

The Establishment of the Beijing Niujie ( Ox Street ) Women’s Mosque

Let me begin with the story of a women’s mosque in the heart of China’s capital Beijing, in what was once the flourishing Lao Huiqu (Old Muslim Quarter) where settled for hundreds of years China’s most populous Muslims, the Hui Muslims. This former lively quarter of old courtyard residences, halal meat butchers, jewellery and pawn shops, sweet-stalls and eating houses, not to forget numerous mosques, was flattened by the tidal wave of commercial re-development. Nowadays, souvenir-shops, restaurants, modern high-rise apartment buildings, the Beijing Islamic College (State-controlled) and, of course, the Niujie Da Libaisi, the Ox Street Old Mosque, both a site of worship and ablution (watched over by the mosque branch of the China Islamic Association) and a Chinese government assembled window-display to the world, attracts local and international tourists as well as visitors from Muslim countries, in particular from the Middle East.

In place of the old: the redeveloped Hui Quarter, Beijing [6]

Something new has recently been added beyond the Ox Street Mosque, referred to by local Muslim women as the ‘men’s mosque.’ [7] A women’s mosque has been built, separated from the men’s mosque by a narrow lane, connected by a series of side-doors which enable believers to go from one to the other. The side gate carries the new inscription Nü libaisi (women’s mosque), using the same term as is used to refer to the (men’s) Niujie libaisi (Ox Street Mosque).

New women’s mosque (2007) Niujie ( Ox Street ), side gate

This new women’s mosque is built on a large scale, beautifully roofed, tiled, ornamented, carved and furnished; it looks like a traditional Confucian lineage hall (as do most mosques in certain parts of China). It comprises a reception room, ablution rooms, classrooms and the large prayer hall where a woman shifu (caretaker) watches for violations of proper Islamic conduct. And she is not shy to reprimand in stern tones! The wall which frames the main gate features the inscription which once identified the old women’s mosque in Shouliu Lane , using the generic term for [women’s] mosque, Nü Qingzhensi. Closed down in 1958, it was never reopened – unlike the men’s mosque nearby. The former women’s mosque served first as a factory, then as a kindergarten. [8]

Main-gate of new Beijing women’s mosque, leading into inner courtyard

The considerable cost of this project was underwritten by the City government authorities with some support from the local Muslim community. On the other hand, initiative for this mosque came in large part from local female believers who for many patient years had petitioned the China Islamic Association, the male leadership of the Ox Street Mosque and even the All-China Women’s Federation to restore to them their historical right to a women-only site of prayer, congregation, education, and counsel – led by their own female ahong. In response, local Muslim women were exhorted to pray at home. Those who insisted on performing rites of ablution and prayer outside the home were directed to the backroom of the Ox Street (men’s) Mosque where a small room and a rather cramped ablution room were available for their use. No woman ahong was present. Indeed, for many years, each time I visited, I asked the same question (the question asked by local Muslim women), and I was informed that, first of all, a women’s mosque was bound to be build, quite, quite soon, and, second, that the conditions under which the Muslim diaspora in China had produced women’s mosques in central China (where they were, and are, present in the greatest numbers) and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the country, no longer obtained. Although historically, it was then argued, such innovation may have been a necessity, even a hao bidaerti (a laudable innovation which educated women, thus family and society, at a time when the Islamic faith and Muslim identity were in crisis) [9] , recent re-connection of Chinese Muslims with the ‘true faith’ of their forefathers, I was informed, meant that such practice was now seen as huai bidaerti (aberration from Islamic orthopraxy) and best put to rest. Given such resistance in Beijing ’s Muslim community, what happened to allow for the construction, on such a grand scale, of an Islamic site of worship for the exclusive use of women? What does this mosque tell us about the relations of the Chinese State , popularly perceived as hostile to religious practices, with its Muslim population? What does it tell us about State management of a policy of peaceful co-existence of ethnic and religious minorities on which the Party-State prides itself on? How does gender politics come into this complex interplay of religion, politics and development discourses?

Global Islam, but also Chinese State policies towards its minorities and specifically toward minority women, has shaped Muslim women’s opportunities for negotiating a widening of collective aspirations. Changing conceptions and growing realizations of the strength of their voices in local public life, whilst influenced by wider forces, are at the same time nourished by reconnection with their own indigenous traditions, and a growing pride in the uniqueness of their achievements as both Muslim women and as Chinese Muslims.

In many ways the history of the Beijing women’s mosque might be seen as emblematic of religious women’s strength and vulnerability. The ‘hidden transcripts’ [10] of many years of silenced religious practice have been locked more deeply into concealment as the State demonstrates the reach of its power in a display of opulence. An Islamic place of worship serves to masque the reality of power as it shows its liberal treatment of religious minorities and, moreover, of advocacy of women’s rights in the sphere of Islam. Where elsewhere Islam might be associated with repression of women, the women’s mosque in the heart of the Chinese capital tells us, in China Muslim women are at least assured of the legal entitlements open to all Chinese women. It might also be argued that the forces of political Islam are given the message that the State will not tolerate subversion in any form, including that which applies to the (foreign-influenced) impact of Islamic law on any aspect of social and gender life. Simultaneously, the highly visible State-approved site for women’s religious worship signals an effective response to criticism from the ‘West’ over China ’s record on human, religious or women’s rights. [11]

‘Religious experience in global contexts’

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In this depiction of a single religious site, a newly-built women’s mosque subsidized by an assertively secularist Communist Party-State, preparing to welcome ‘the world’, including Muslim world, for the Olympic Games in 2008, and in the face of at best luke-warm support from China’s Islamic patriarchy, I am drawing on a number of themes and issues arising from the intersections of competing claims to women’s affinity and belonging. The core questions concern inter-connectedness of Muslim diaspora communities with the ‘homeland’, Mecca as part of the highly politicized region of the Middle East (which for Muslim women in China represents the West). Furthermore, with the opening of China to multilateral world systems, the intensification of competition between rival meaning systems for ‘hearts and minds’ of target populations through development projects and local investments have confronted female-led institutions with uncertainty over their future role in society, even over their very survival, but has also granted opportunities for voicing claims to rightful identities.

Together with the sociologist Shui Jingjun, who comes from a Hui Muslim family in central China , I have since 1994 conducted research into the genesis and evolution of Islamic female-led institutions in China , using ethnographic research and oral history in an area where written sources are scarce. [12] We discovered the historical challenge to Islamic patriarchy by female believers which has become institutionalized into complementary, but sometimes also oppositional, practises and traditions. We did not uncover theological debates and challenges nor the ‘double readings’ involving the sort of paradigm shifts through which women and gender studies elsewhere prodded and provoked mainstream scholarship – ‘shaking of foundations, a radical remapping of our intellectual and academic landscape, and a repositioning of bodies of knowledge that relate to religion,’ to quote from Ursula King’s observations on the impact of feminism on the study of, and practices in, world religions. [13] Little trace of women’s imprint may be found in texts whether in mainstream or marginal discourses on Islam in China . [14] Instead, it is at the local level that we uncovered evidence of how women religious leaders and ordinary believers have en-gendered readings, sermons, assemblies, places, events and rituals to express aspiration and to respond to changing needs, for the benefit their families and communities. Merry Wiesner-Hanks says, ‘Religions provide myths, symbols, and narratives that express desires for transcendence, redemption, salvation, liberation, and wholeness, but that also enforce inequalities, oppression, separation, and hierarchies. The relations between profoundly transformative and deeply conservative aspects of any religion play themselves out at the local level, but often with references to values that are perceived as unchanging and divinely ordained.’ [15] Tensions between ‘transformative’ and ‘changing’ aspects of Islam have sharpened over the years as local communities of believers came under pressure to align themselves with aggressive secularist development policies of the Chinese Communist Party when simultaneously other sources of development were becoming available, importantly also from the Middle East.

The impact of competing religious and secular transnational development organizations on local identity is not sufficiently understood the anthropologist Bertram Turner says. [16] According to Turner, the competition between certain development organizations which put forward ‘ideals of the western way of life’ (notions such as development, democratization, good governance, sustainability, and so on), on the one hand, and on the other hand, transnationally active Islamic movements advocating development based on return to Islamic roots, needs looking at more closely. His argument is that such ever intensifying competition for local development can have positive consequences for local communities such as we research (whether in Gansu , in Xinjiang or in Henan ). Such competition, he maintains, grants local communities choice by giving them alternative models of development which they can accept as appropriate or reject. It has made for the phenomenon of ‘empowered legal agency’ (Turner) of local Muslim communities as rival funding organizations compete for their allegiances through funding assistance.

Consider the nature of such approach in connection with an international research consortium in which I am currently participating through my research in China ’s Muslim communities. The title of the research consortium’s project, ‘Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts. Gender, Poverty and Democratisation from the Inside Out’ (WEMC) [17] suggests the complexity, let alone sensitivity, of issues we raising over competing value and meaning systems in which such concepts as ‘Empowerment’, ‘Gender’, Democracy’ and the implicit concept here of exercise of and control over individual (women’s) agency have specific and embedded significance. [18] Both religious (Islam) and secular development aid are global forces which contribute to the shaping of this complex international society in which States and non-State actors compete for allegiance. Their relationship and respective origins suggest dichotomy of interest, values and objectives. Religious ideals versus secular policy programmes, afterlife versus this-worldly concerns; recuperation of asala (blueprint of Islamic life) versus unilinearity of material progress; scriptural sources versus development manuals and millennium development goals (MDGs). But that there are no simple binaries of either/or approaches is shown in the growing number of research projects, conferences and publications which are addressing the widening participation of religions organizations in development work – engaged in a broad spectrum of work ranging from HIV/AIDS to street children to domestic violence. [19] Indeed, religious and secular organizations are intimately intertwined. It can be argued as Bertram Turner has done (the anthropologist just cited) that current development work with its global institutional outreach in all spheres of political, social and economic as well as cultural life has many colonial resonances and that both the missionary incursions into the ‘pagan world’ and the ‘development agency interventions’ in the ‘developing world’ share assumptions and values of certainties derived from moral and/or technological superiority of the ‘western’ world.

‘Raising the calibre of [Muslim] women'

Religious values may be seen to provide alternative notions and directions of development and progress in a given society, challenging more established views on meanings and purpose of social change. The anthropologist Carol Delaney asks:

Where do we situate the motive forces of change, as well as the forces of resistance not only against the dominant system but also against the forces of change? We must ask whether an approach to the study of human culture that is grounded on universalistic premises about work, the division of labor, and the transformation of society is appropriate for all cultures, including Muslim cultures. In Islam the focus of attention is not on the transformation of society but on its recuperation. History does not refer to “the ever changing creation of new meanings of human life but to the struggle to recapture and immobilize an eternal experience.” [20]

In the Turkish Sunni Muslim villages studied by Delaney, she say, ‘Islam penetrates daily life as the call to prayer five times a day, penetrates one’s being heedless of whether one is a believer. There is no escape; it is the very context in which daily life unfolds.’ [21] In China , the great diversity of Muslim women’s lives reflects the diversity of the overall Chinese Muslim population. The relatively closed Sunni Muslim communities which reside in the border areas of northwest China , among them Dongxiang and Bao’an Muslim communities in the southern part of Gansu Province , are not unlike the Turkish villages described by Delaney. In these Muslim milieus, whether adhering to the gedimu or yihewani traditions, both locally embedded strands of Sunni Islam, the latter more recent and a more austere practice of Islam, the Muslim family is central to all social life; it is the miniature of the whole of Muslim society. [22] The father’s authority is symbolic of the authority of God. The daughter’s relation with the father, the wife’s relation with the husband and father of her children, all express a deeply internalized notion of the proper Muslim value, Muslim conduct, Muslim ethics and responsibility, and the proper Muslim gender.

Anthropologists like Delaney have identified the symbolic world around ideas of procreation and the overlapping of divine and worldly order, and women’s and men’s roles in this procreative scheme, as central to Islamic society, and to how social and gender relations and distribution of power and authority are organized. The decisive role in conception attributed to males and the more passive and nurturing role attributed to women are mirrored in social and kinship arrangements in the Muslim communities we study. As the feminine is excluded at the level of the divine, the exclusion becomes attached to women, who are disassociated from power and from participation in public life – as clearly visible in Dongxiang and Baoan communities. This poses challenges to those of us who arrive in these communities with missions such as outlined earlier as the defining mission of the international research programme in which I am participating.

On the other hand, cautiously critical voices have emerged from among the Hui (Sunni) Islamic communities we study in central China . Different from Muslim counties and townships in the borderland regions of northwest China , patterns of settlements in inland provinces are characterized by a wider dispersal, with Muslims living in close neighbourhood with non-Muslims, and their lives frequently indistinguishable from their Han Chinese neighbours. It is here that voices have emerged asserting Muslim identity and positionality. Although still relatively rare, intellectuals are taking part in public discourse, claiming allegiance neither to the mainstream notion of secular development, advocated by the Party/State, nor to a traditionalist Islamic position on gender relations and the role of women. My Chinese colleague Shui Jingjun, herself a member of the Hui nationality and a practising Muslim, presented at a recent workshop a brief concept paper in which she sought to clarify her understanding of ‘development’ [23] and offered a Chinese Hui Muslim understanding of development. And she drew upon a context of tidal waves of development discourse, to cite her words, which has borne down on Chinese women in general, and Muslim women in particular, since the 1990s, on which are riding the Chinese Party-State government, the All-China Women’s Federation (a mass women’s organization implementing official policies), international and national NGOs, and local philanthropic institutions. [24] These all contribute, in her estimation, to a hegemonic secularist development discourse on ‘raising the calibre of [minority] women’ (tigao [shaoshu minzu] funüde suzhi), raising to a standard, ‘naturally set by mainstream [i.e. non-religious] women’ --- whereas other voices are missing. True respect for the history, culture and aspirations of Muslim women, she says, imagines notions of betterment and progress around what is considered by women from a different religious culture as appropriate and desirable (e.g., improving services of women’s own institutions, such as nüsi/xue), instead of superimposing oppressive (secular) mainstream indicators of development (often, she says, with the help of Western NGOs).

When researchers in the afore-mentioned WEMC project came together, in the second year of our work, to discuss methodologies applied in ‘the field’ to facilitate women’s ‘coming to voice’, tensions arose over identification of ‘authentic’ voice on the part of local women, over translatability of core concepts of empowerment across cultures and belief systems! The index of progress as successful preservation of their own historical traditions, on the part of Chinese Muslim partners, came to be challenged by indices of progress, advocated by colleagues from a background of transnational feminist activism, which were predicated on the successful dismantling of all ‘tradition’ in particular those rooted in religion. On the one hand, a local perspective sought to protect the cultural and material heritage of their own, unique participation in Chinese Muslim history, the institution of women’s mosques, and invested these with renewed pride in their achievement. On the other hand, the perspective brought to bear on the debate by activists well versed in confronting political Islam’s gender rhetoric, treated women’s mosques as sites of ‘traditionalism’, as confining women’s horizon and imagination to a past-orientation that could only be obstructive to development strategies. In a failure of the imagination, the women considered ‘backward’ were not accorded the dignity of getting a hearing. It was therefore only too easy to dismiss their narratives with references to ‘provincialized’ subjectivities, in other words, women who had become too deeply habituated to gender inequality as to notice its impact on their very ability to will change.

These tensions are rooted in current transnational debates between those who call to uphold the universality of women’s rights and those who maintain that there is greater need for respect for context-sensitive women’s rights. Thus the NGO Committee on Freedom of Belief pronounced in 2002 that ‘Women’s rights are incontestably part of fundamental and universal human rights and are inherent to human dignity. Cultural and religious specificities must give way if there is prejudice to women’s dignity. Dignity is the common denominator for all peoples.’ [25] Distinguishing between the ‘universality’ of human and women’s rights and norms and values which reflect local cultural and social constellations, the Committee points to the important role played by religions to ‘restore the reforming role of religions against patriarchal domination.’ [26] While culture, freedom of religion or belief --- the fortresses of collective rights --- are held to be important but also ultimately relative, ‘respect for life, human dignity, non-discrimination and women’s rights are invariants which can serve to unite humanity.’ [27]

Yet the means by which women aspire to, and, sometimes acquire, ‘universal’ rights can only be understood in terms of their most immediate, local conditions and circumstances. However, when we are as researchers exhorted to interrogate the ‘real’ experiences of women, access to their stories is all too often guarded by immovable gate-keepers, may they represent the State or authoritative socio-cultural institutions. Shirley and Edwin Ardener introduced the concept of ‘muted groups’ to theorize dominant male systems of perceptions and women’s under-representation in symbolic, cultural and socio-political domains, moreover co-opted into, often themselves upholding, the structures of power that confine them. [28] Whether in pure academic or applied and development-focuses research, the challenge is to hear from among the caconophy of voices in the public sphere, where researchers move, the muted voices of Muslim women in northwest China. In order to understand the cultural bind of women it is necessary to consider the seemingly paradoxical State policy in relation to the ‘protection’ of ‘the minority way-of-life.’ State policy on the treatment of minority populations in China ’s borderland areas has led to the submergence of the rights of its most vulnerable members, women, into the collective identity, and interests, of their group.

State management of ethno-religious minorities / Islam in China

Map of China

The relevant Chinese political contexts which most forcefully translate the forces of globalization, are, firstly, the growing identification of many Chinese Muslims with a politicised application of ‘Islam’ and the concomitant shift of other identities, including local and national identities. The response of the Chinese State to these developments then carries implications for human rights’ movements and for women’s and social justice movements. Women’s bargaining to further their interests takes place in the interstices between collectivity and the State, an ever cautious manoeuvring through unpredictable political waters which however has reaped extraordinary benefits - for certain communities of active Muslim women believers.

The diversity of China ’s widely scattered Muslim population is informed by geography, ethnicity, cultural and material environments and by the geo-political importance of given communities to the Party/State. Aihwa Ong [29] , in her study of spatiality of sovereignty under the inroad of market ideology, has developed a helpful model of technology of government as a ‘neoliberal’ model. Strong East Asian States engage in what she calls ‘strategic and situational exercise of power that respond to crises and challenges by invoking exceptions to political normativity.’ [30] The emergency in the socialist system of production is being countered by carving up spaces (i.e., Special Economic Zones) and introducing conditions (i.e., special taxation, investment schemes, labour conditions) as calculated policies of ‘exception’. Such policies of ‘exceptions’ preserve certain benefits for citizens even under global market pressures from which non-citizens, and vulnerable groups, although indispensable to growth, continue to be excluded. Such zoning strategies, I would argue, have been equally applicable to State rule over ethnic borderland areas. Central rule was bolstered through administrative self-governing or autonomous district and provincial governments, with policies of ‘exception’ crisscrossing communities with a web of laws, policies, rules, decrees which grant circumscribed independence of finance, independence of economic planning, independence of arts, science and culture, organization of local police, and use of local language. [31]

What however in principle should have served as a sound legal and political foundation for the preservation of ethnic, cultural, and religious integrity of minority populations in China is compromised by a combination of ineffectual policy approaches by a remote State and by uneven policy implementation at local and meso level, complicated further by top-down approaches to governance and lack of consultation with local communities. Mostly found in western and northwest regions, their minority populations appear in statistics of enduring poverty fragmenting the body politic into unequal sections, marked by economic, social, cultural and technological disparities. But the marginalization of communities, in particularly the borderland regions of western and northwestern China , of modes of existence eked out as ‘bare life’ (Ong), are no longer, as it once was the case, hidden from view. New multilateral systems of interventions, such as religious organizations and NGOs, local communities and corporations, are contributing to the emergence into view, and into the international conscience, of marginal peoples as ‘morally deserving humanity.’

‘Situated NGO interventions are often determined by the nexus of political and ethical forces they encounter on the ground. In short, the counterpolitics of survival are crystallized through the interrelationships of biopolitics, labor markets, and systems of virtue. Such ethical problematization may circumvent human rights or citizenship, coming to rest on resolutions that reflect contingent and ambiguous ethical horizons of the human.’ [32]

At the same time, as zones of international NGO and development agencies have opened up ‘marginal’ China (as in the provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Ningxia, Gansu), China is also accelerating efforts to strengthen its official development institutions and policies and its indigenous philanthropy, both secular and religious, all these making a strong comeback in Chinese society. Intervention on the part of international organizations and agencies, whether social justice or development orientated, is seen with disfavour and subjected to closest surveillance by officials. There is a pervasive fear among Chinese officials and academics that Western government-sponsored development projects aim to ‘democratize China and make China a country which no longer has its own culture, politics and economy’ (private conversation in Gansu, September 2006). The outcome of this palpable tension engendered by the Chinese Party State’s difficult balancing act of retaining political control through selective surrendering of control (whether in zones of capitalist profit maximisation or in zones of humanitarian intervention) is an atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety among those who try to address social and gender injustice in local Muslim communities.

Despite extensive legal, policy, institutional resources relating to women’s rights and interests, central government policies of exception related to ethnically defined autonomous regions in Gansu Province continue to allow for situations to be observed in the communities we study where women are excluded from the public sphere of political rights and claims to societal resources. [33] From a gender perspective, where the interest of the (male-dominated) community is balanced with rights of women, and they do not always overlap, women lose out. It is the mantra of old, xian guojia, hou funü (first country, then women). Of course, this is complicated by various allegiances and loyalties.

The growing influence of a more austere Islam in bringing forth in certain areas a strengthened masculinisation of the public sphere (accompanied by women’s economic withdrawal to the home, as in central China ’s Henan Province ; absence of institutions and organizations representing the interests of women, as in Dongxiang and in Baoan communities) forms part of our investigation. Where elsewhere Muslim women activists, particularly so in southeast Asia, [34] call for State intervention to curb the power of Muslim clerics, relations of Muslim women in China with religious and State authority are circumscribed by history (the collective memory of all Muslims of oppression and outright persecution throughout the history of Islam in China) and by communal solidarity as members of besieged communities (in particular in western and northwest regions where they live in greater concentration), a situation which complicates representation of issues specific to women.

Asma Jahangir, the Special UN Rapporteur on the implementation of the 1981 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, asks for effective implementation of existing national laws and international human rights standards with governments playing a critical role in ensuring protection of women.

As many women suffer from aggravated discrimination with regard to their religious, ethnic and sexual identities, national and international action is required to prevent such aggravated discrimination and to improve the protective efforts. Prevention requires first of all identifying cultural practices that are harmful for women and girls; States should then prepare strategies, e.g. through educative, legislative and health-related measures, in order to eliminate prejudicial practices especially where they are deeply rooted in society. [35]

In response to critical questions over why such discrimination was enduring in the light of considerable action at both international and national level, researchers taking part in the Women in Muslim Context project hold that women ’s rights of full participation in private and public spheres are ‘in crisis because political Islamists claim that religion itself sanctions women’s disempowerment. ’However … ‘[the] use of culture and religion to deny women’s rights’ is neither confined to Islamists nor to Muslim contexts, … [but is] equally relevant to ‘non-Muslim contexts with other disempowering politico-religious constructions.’ [36] Insights from research in Pakistan , Indonesia , Iran and from Muslim contexts in China have shown how policies unavoidably filter through meso-level decision-making before reaching women. The purview afforded at the meso level is one of ‘localised power within partial territories of the State, such as provinces, districts, villages, households’ where women’s lives are shaped, beyond, often even separate from the macro-powers of the State wherever States exercise diminished control, have abrogated their powers or govern by indirect rule through institutions, Naila Kabeer points out, that ‘help structure the distribution of resources and activities at micro-level.’ [37] Power structures and power dynamics located at the meso level, where religious institutional authority is frequently located, can operate autonomously of the State at the macro level. Tensions between opposing forces, whether between State and locally embedded political Islamists or between rival Islamic parties, are invariably gendered, fetishizing the ‘Muslim woman’ as ‘the cornerstone of an equally constructed, supposedly “Muslim world”’. [38] The site of disempowerment for women is ‘on the ground.’ In the language of Aihwa Ong, ‘this milieu is a space of betwixt and between that is the site of the problem and of its resolution.’ [39] It is in such a space that Chinese Muslim women most closely experience the combined force of State and religious authority; in such a space are located women’s mosques, confined by government laws and bylaws, configured by Islamic doctrinal pronouncements.

But even in the apparently most repressive conditions, there exists the possibility of challenge. In the words of Anthony Giddens, ‘all forms of dependence offer some resources whereby those who are subordinate can influence the activities of their superiors’ in the ‘dialectic of control in social systems.’ [40] The creativity and bargaining power displayed in order to protect and develop their spiritual home illustrates the resourcefulness of apparently subdued and passive women.

Women’s mosques – at home during times of change ________________________________________________________________

Our knowledge of the history of Islam in China , building on rich Chinese and international scholarship, tells of conflicts and adjustments, of accommodation and of resistance, of internal purging, schisms and also of rivalries within Islam. Allès, Dillon, Boyd Gillette, Gladney and Israeli, among others, have told us of the diversity of Chinese Muslim life practices, which reflects varied geo-political constellations and relations with the central State and of changing Chinese Muslim identity as opening of borders, have also led to strengthening Arabo-centric Muslim influence. [41] It is in this context that ‘the Muslim woman’ is becoming boundary subject of Islamic, ethnic and political identity. Religious education constitutes perhaps the most important battleground for traditional ideas and progressive reforms. In the these ever more diversifying sites of secular and public, religious and private education, we are observing how institutionalisation of competing sources of authority and power - State, local community, jiao pai (Islamic sects) – mould diverse constructions of Muslim femininity as ‘corner-stone’ of communal identity and as emblematic of the construction of State legitimacy itself.

Education constitutes both possibilities, a site of State control and also of subaltern contestation in the ‘dialectic of control’ (Giddens). Noting the vital struggle of Muslim feminists worldwide to provide higher education for girls, Aihwa Ong explains that education in religion is the only way that women will ever undermine the monopoly of men over the interpretation of Islamic law and Islamic practice. Ong quotes the Algerian feminist Boutheina Cheriet who observed that ‘at Beijing [1995 World Conference of Women], for the first time, the right to religious higher education became a demand. That would then give us credibility in interpreting the texts.’ [42] The institution of women’s mosques has come out of a tradition of female teaching and learning with its own corpus of texts and oral tradition of jingge (chants which comprise a rich spectrum of religious and semi-religious contents, preserving traces of Arabic, Persian and Turkic languages, and both didactic and serving as eulogy). It is the evolution from assigned segregated space to a social institution that made possible the emergence of what Farida Shaheed terms ‘ancestor practices’ [43] – traditions expressive of women’s subjective feelings and collective practices.

The presence of women’s mosques as symbolic and cultural symbols of their historical, legitimate place in public society, form therefore an important thread in documenting women’s collective capacities to make a difference not only to themselves but also to society around them. In our research sites in central China , a region where these mosques originated historically over 300 years ago, an important indicator of women’s individual and collective empowerment is therefore emerging as preservation of tradition. Whereas this tradition is perceived by local Muslims to have proven its value to female congregations, they are increasingly obliged to defend their institution. Women are exposed to attacks of various kinds, as pointed out earlier, whether against the labelling of its sites as ‘backward’ (juxtaposed to the progress to which women, unencumbered by religion, lay claim) or indeed against fellow believers at adjacent (men’s mosques). These are invoking Islamic jurisprudence, that is the concept of bid’ah, [44] forbidding all innovations as aberration from the true doctrine, to neutralise competition from women’s mosques for economic resources and income-generation. More or less open attacks from increasingly Wahabbhi (fundamentalist)-influenced clerics exacerbate the pressure on female-led institutions.

How did the presence of women’s own sacred and social space reinforce, subvert, or alter women’s capacity to access resources to adjust or remake life as imagined and desired? The sense of safety, security and spiritual as well as social support women’s mosques provided have had varied and important consequences for women’s interaction with the local community but also with the wider world. In a predominantly gender-segregated society, the learned women teachers, later on ahong, functioned as mediators between the enclosed world of women and world of public life. Through teaching, counselling, guidance, and more direct intervention on behalf of ordinary Muslim women, these ahong came arguably to make incursions into public space, making these ‘safe’ for Muslim daughters, wives and mothers to go to, thus facilitating their access to educational and cultural as well as religious resources. They facilitated physical mobility beyond family compounds under the banner of religious learning and with the families’ support. Apart from cultivating for women a space of religious learning and worship, strengthening their place in the Muslim community, they became in the course of time also a distinct resource to women’s legitimate presence in the public sphere.

1. In the courtyard of a women’s mosque 2. Listening to the sermon given on zhuma by their ahong

3. During prayer

Many women’s mosques, in particular those who are guided by capable and respected leaderships, have come to diversify their services to a grateful community, delivering charity for families in need, providing education to women and girls (and not infrequently to non-Muslim girls in rural areas where schooling is poor) and, in recent times, vocational courses are offered to women unemployed or in need of additional skills. In this light, religion could be seen as a source of activity and agency which infuses and facilitates notions of development, betterment and of relevance to a modernizing society.

Women’s mosque leaders have these last years not hesitated to critique what they regard as contamination of the purity of Islamic life by increased commercialisation and regard to status and income over more religious principles. Some of the most independent voices among Henan’s female ahong have provided vociferous criticism of corruption in the finances of (often more affluent) men’s mosques, making themselves the vanguard of a movement calling for geng ganjing, cleaner, and more spiritual, life. Arguably therefore, mosque organisation built on institutions of democratic management committees (in place since 1957 when they were imposed on mosques by the Communist Party State) and transparent selection procedures of leaders, that is, ahong, who are given limited contracts, renewable only after satisfactory performance, have engendered an accountable, more participatory counter-culture to the opaque political culture pervasive in Han Chinese society. We have maintained in our various studies of female Islamic culture that women, more successfully than men, incorporated organizational structures imposed upon them by the State, able to turn these into models of ‘collective leadership’ of ahong and believers in joint charge. One ahong’s apt description of the symbiotic relationship of ahong, believers and mosque was that of the light of lamp shielded from volatile winds by the protective shades of the lamp. [45]

Social change and adapting to modernity must happen as women discover their own place in history and seek ways to preserve such traditional institutions and conventions that have effectively proven supportive to women’s aspirations to learn (the duty of every Muslim is to acquire knowledge), even if learning was often most rudimentary learning, to worship in line with prescribed prayers and rites, to translate commands from the Koran and from Hadiths into Muslim family relations and way of life, and to find important psychological and emotional support in living as a Muslim, to prepare for houshi (afterlife) in daily tensions between domestic and religious duties. Noa Nof-Steiner concludes her comparative report on women’s associations in Muslim countries, urging more attention to be given to women’s rights to associate and to organize. She says, ‘However, legislative reforms alone do not suffice in transforming women’s status, unless followed by a shift in social norms and changes in customs.’ [46] But as our work also makes clear, those shifts and changes must also come from within, that is, must come from the aspirations of women themselves.

In discussing religious experiences I started by asking - whose experiences? It is those with a voice, with a collective voice, with representation, who may grasp opportunities present in global society – as, for example, increased bargaining powers of local communities as national and international development agencies and organizations compete to invest in local causes. If without voice and representation, any local negotiation with transnational, frequently Islamic, funding organizations, we can be certain, will push for agendas which come all too often at the expense of the most vulnerable members of given communities. Such globalization driven by political Islamic interests works to the detriment of women’s rights, if no effective local representation exists, which, as it is happening elsewhere, is shutting women in as masculinisation of the public sphere proceeds apace. [47]

An epilogue: Shifting contexts for historical inscriptions ________________________________________________________________

What do ‘global contexts’ mean to Muslim women who are members of widely dispersed Hui Muslim communities in central China, able to look back on a long tradition of women’s mosques; and what challenges does globalization present? How do global contexts impinge on Muslim women in the more closed and inward-looking communities which occupy remote, mountainous areas in the northwest province of Gansu ? History, geography and economy all play a part in shaping conditions and circumstances, entitlements and agency of women’s lives at the most local level.

Comparison of women’s lives in the diverse Muslim communities in China , that is, comparison of communities with a tradition of female-led religious organizations with those where this tradition is unknown or was not revived when religious sites re-opened after 1978, suggest an important insight. Where women’s mosques have survived and continue to grow, they constitute an important resource for women at times of challenges from within Islam, from a rapidly modernizing State and from the reconnected link with Arab-Muslim countries. Women’s capacity to challenge discriminatory practices shows itself to be stronger when they are identified with an institution, legally registered, which has a recognized place in society. Through occupation of a social space, invested with history, tradition and material infrastructure, through such institutions leaderships may marshal political and social resources, as well as the support of the Party/State, enabling them to withstand, if necessary, attacks on their unique institution and on the legitimacy of women to exercise leadership. Globalization for Muslim women has entailed most importantly influences from the Arab-Muslim world – through funding of mosque schools, through the visits of learned teachers, through pilgrimages and tourism. How this influence plays itself out has varied with the local, institutional strength women can garner to bargain with the State authorities or their male counter-parts.

Where this tradition of women’s own organizations has not taken roots, the conservative influence of a pan-Islamic movement spreading from Central Asia into minority borderlands, according to a number of studies on Islam in the region, is exerting a very distinct impact on women’s lives. [48]

Women’s mosque: after prayer

’A space of betwixt and between’

Let me return to the women’s mosque with which I commenced my presentation. The new Beijing women’s mosque is visited, as initially hoped for by the City authorities, by numerous individuals and groups, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Chinese nationals but also by many visitors from abroad. The State project of providing a window to the outside world of China ’s model of religious and cultural pluralism has been successful. It may also be noted, however, that the mosque has as yet to receive a woman ahong. Unlike its much more humble predecessor, which was never reopened, unlike the women’s mosques in central China ’s Muslim communities, this beautiful, even lavish women’s mosque lacks a female leader which is such a defining feature of women’s tradition in China . It might therefore be argued that in the interplay of transnational and local discourses, where Arab Muslim and local conservative Islamic forces merge with the Chinese State’s tight control over its religious affairs, women’s stake in what was once their own institution has been diminished. We could point to a development in which women’s local traditions are apparently in danger of being forced out by global agendas and pressure groups.

1. Inscription in the old Shouliu Lane women’s mosque (closed down in 1958)

2. Inscription moved to the new women’s mosque (2007)

But there is another, equally persuasive interpretation. Local Muslim women who live close to the mosque, but who do not worship at the mosque, have told me that a number of respected ahong, approached to preside over this splendid window to the outside world, turned down such an appointment. That they refused to have their religious authority undermined by letting themselves be turned into curators of cultural sites in which religiosity would be on show as a Communist Party/State’s window to the world. This near invisible subtext of recalcitrance is barely discernible to the outside visitor. But like the stone inscription transplanted from a violated site of women’s worship to a site appropriated for State-supported tourist consumption, whilst its power may be dormant, its spirit is not extinguished. Pride in women’s own tradition means that they can do no less than hold out, I was told by an elderly Muslim. After all, at a safe distance from the national capital, women’s mosques continue to offer what they have offered for hundreds of years, a home to believing women in this world and a glimpse ‘of paradise’ in another world.

[1] ‘Working Paper For Geneva-Based NGO Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief and NGO Committee on the Status Of Women.’ Civil and Political Rights (Religious Intolerance). Report of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief in accordance with resolution 2001/42 of Commission on Human Rights. Annexe: Study on the Freedom of Religion or Belief and the Status of Women From the Viewpoint of Religion and Traditions, 2003, p. 29. http://www.stop-killing.org/files/UNSR on Freedom of religion exhaustive doc on religion and discrimination against women 2002.pdf.

[2] China ’s Muslim population, generally estimated to comprise about 25 million believers, is made up of ten ethnic nationalities (or ‘minorities’) among which the Hui nationality is the most numerous. Islam in China is referred to as xiaojiao by non-Muslims, that is, as a ‘minority religion’; see Dru C. Gladney Muslim Chinese. Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic. Cambridge , Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1991.

[3] R. Robertson Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture London : Sage, 1992, p.8.

[4] Fang denotes a collective identity by Chinese Muslims which is grounded in the centrality of the mosque as symbolic, social and political marker of their place in a non-Muslim society.

[5] K. Knott The Location of Religion. A Spatial Analysis. London : Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2005, p.98.

[6] All photos in this article by M. Jaschok.

[7] I have visited the Old Hui Quarter since 1995 when I commenced fieldwork on female Islamic institutions.

[8] Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam Richmond : Curzon, 2000, pp. 253-54.

[9] The Hui historian Bai Shouyi talks of the period between 14^th century to turn of 20^th century as enan shidai (age of adversity) for Chinese Muslims, under political and cultural pressures, fearful of the fate of other religions that were ultimately assimilated into the mainstream culture; see Jaschok and Shui, The History of Women’s Mosques, p. 70.

[10] See James C. Scott Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts Yale University Press, 1990.

[11] The women’s mosque in Niujie opened its gates at the end of 2006; the official approval for the construction of the mosque was not unrelated to the Olympic Games, hosted by China in September 2008.

[12] Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam Richmond : Curzon, 2000.

[13] Ursula King ‘Religion and Gender: Embedded Patterns, Interwoven Frameworks’ in A Companion to Gender History, edited by T. A. Meade and M. Wiesner-Hanks. Oxford : Blackwells, 2004, p.75.

[14] Jaschok and Shui, The History of Women’s Mosques.

[15] Merry Wiesner-Hanks ‘Studying gender and religion: A look back and a look forward’ in Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, Nr. 1-2, 2005, p. 9. Emphasis in mine.

[16] Bertram Turner, ‘Global Players & Local Agency in Rural Morocco ’, pp. 12-13, in ISIM Review 19, Spring 2007.

[17] ‘Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts. Gender, Poverty and Democratisation from the Inside Out’ is a DFID- supported research programme consortium of researchers from China , Indonesia , Iran and Pakistan (2006-2011).

[18] This approach comes within a relatively new area of anthropological enquiry, ‘aidnography’: ethnography with a focus on the culture of development and of development relations, see David Mosse, 2005.

[19] For example, see publications in: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Women, series edited by Shirley Ardener and Jackie Waldren for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, Berg Publishers, Oxford ; Gender & Development journal (Oxfam), published by Routledge.

[20] Carol Delaney The Seed and the Soil. Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society. Berkeley : University of California Press, p 20. Quoting El-Zein; emphasis is mine.

[22] Baoan: three mosques, 90 percent of believers attached to Khufiyya Menhuan . Dongxiang: five mosques, 2/3^rd of believers attached to Beizhuang Menhuan.

[23] Paper presented at WEMC-China (IGS) November 2006 workshop, Oxford .

[24] The Programme for the Development of Chinese Women (2001-2010) includes gender equality in its overall objectives, making it a basic State policy for the enhancement of national social progress. Six areas are identified for priority development: women and the economy, women’s participation in decision-making and management, women and education, women and health, women and law, and women and the environment. (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 18 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Combined fifth and sixth periodic report of States Parties. China . 2004).

[25] Working Paper For Geneva-Based NGO Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief, p. 5.

[28] Shirley Ardener, S. (ed.) Perceiving Women. London : J.M Dent & Sons, 1975.

[29] Aihwa Ong Neoliberalism as exception. Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. London : Duke University Press, 2006.

[30] Ong Neoliberalism as exception, p.18.

[31] Rights enshrined in the Chinese Constitution and in the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Regional National Autonomy, include independence of finance, independence of economic planning, independence of arts, science and culture, organization of local police, and use of local language. Modelled on the Soviet-Union, 5 autonomous regions, 30 prefectures, 117 counties, and 3 banners were established after communist takeover. Autonomous administrative areas, as well as the various rights granted to them, are affirmed by the government as a positive example of local self-rule in ethnic areas, and an acknowledgement of minority self-determination unprecedented in Chinese history. They are seen as preserving the culture of minority peoples within a larger, stable Han Chinese society. Critics of this policy point to lack of autonomy, given government-appointed officials, and they draw attention to the real site of authority. Whilst the head of local government comes from the minority population (unlike the officials serving in the government), the local Communist Party secretary does not.

[32] Ong Neoliberalism as exception, p.25.

[33] ‘Public sphere’ here understood as rights to which Chinese women are entitled by virtue of citizenship, equal rights to political representation and participation in the labour market, among others.

[34] In Malaysia , a senior cleric, Datuk Abu Hassan Din Al-Hafiz, recommended that women wear chastity belts to thwart rape and molestation. ‘My intention is not to offend women to safeguard them from sex maniacs. Probably, this is the best way.’ He added, ‘Besides, husbands could also feel more secure, if you know what I mean.’ Such was the rage of women’s organisations that the cleric had to retract the Statement. The Malaysian Women, Family and Community Development Minister stated that she was not interested in ideas from the pre-Islamic age of jahiliyah (ignorance)! http://thestar.com.my/news/story.sp?file=/2007/2/16/nation/16902904&sec=nation

[35] HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL Fourth session, Item 2 of the provisional agenda. IMPLEMENTATION OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION 60/251 OF 15 MARCH 2006 ENTITLED “HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL”. Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Asma Jahangir. A/HRC/4/21 26 December 2006. During the period from 1 December 2005 to 30 November 2006, a total of 64 communications were transmitted to 34 different countries. The Special Rapporteur sent communications also to China (People’s Republic of), amongst 42 sent out altogether to Asia Pacific countries.

[36] Proposal on Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts: gender, poverty and democratisation from the inside out. 1 March 2006. Hong Kong: WEMC, Southeast Asia Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong .

[37] Naila Kabeer Gender Mainstreaming in Poverty Eradication and the Millenium Development Goals. A handbook for policy-makers and other stake-holders. Commonwealth Secretariat. International Development Research Centre. Ottawa , 2003, p. 35.

[38] From Proposal on Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts.

[39] Ong, Neoliberalism as exception, p.13.

[40] A. Giddens The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of structuration. Cambridge : Polity, 1984, p.16

[41] Élisabeth Allés, Musulmans de Chine: Une anthropologie des Hui du Henan Paris : Éditions de L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2000; Michael Dillon, China’s Muslim Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1996; Maris Boyd Gillette Between Mecca and Beijing . Modernization and Consumption Among Urban Chinese Muslims Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000; D.C. Gladney ‘Making Muslim in China : Education, Islamicization and Representation’ in Postiglione eds., China ’s National Minority Education: Culture, Schooling and Development. London : Falmer Press, 1999; Gladney, Dislocating China . Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects London : Hurst & Company, 2004; Raphael Israeli, Muslims in China . A Study in Cultural Confrontation London : Curzon Press, 1980.

[42] Ong, Neoliberalism, p.41

[43] Farida Shaheed Great Ancestors: Women Asserting Rights in Muslim Contexts. 2 vols. Lahore : Shirkat Gah-Women’s Resource Centre, 2004.

[44] See: Ignaz Goldziher Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981; for a feminist response to patriarchal uses of bid’ah in Islamic jurisprudence, see: Fatima Mernissi Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory London : Zed Books, 1996.

[45] “If an Ahong is like the light of a lamp, women believers are like shades which surround the light”, Yao Ahong, Kaifeng, quoted by M. Jaschok in ‘Sources of Authority – female ahong and qingzhen nüsi (women’s mosques) in China’, chapter contributed to Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (Forthcoming, Leiden: Brill), edited by M. Bano and H. Kalmbach.

[46] Noa Nof-Steiner ‘The Multi-Faces of Islam: A Comparative Report on Women’s Associations and Association Laws in Muslim countries’ in International Journal of Civil Society Law Vol. V(2), 2007, p. 52.

[47] M. Jaschok and Hau Ming V. Chan ‘Education, Gender and Islam in China : the place of religious education in challenging and sustaining “undisputed traditions” among Chinese Muslim women’, International Journal of Educational Development as part of Special Issue on ‘Education in China.’ doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2009.04.004 .

[48] M. Dillon Xinjiang: China ’s Muslim Far Northwest. New York : RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. D. C. Gladney, D. C. ‘Making Muslims in China : Education, Islamicization and Representation’ in China ’s National Minority Education: Culture, Scholing and Development, edited by G.A. Postiglione. London : Falmer Press, 1999. R. Iredale and F. Guo ‘Overview of Minority Migration’ in China’s Minorities on the Move: Selected Case Studies, edited by R. Iredale, N. Bilik and F. Guo. New York : M.E. Sharpe, 2003.