Anthony Garnaut
ABSTRACT
China’s leading Muslim writer, Zhang Chengzhi, published in 1991 an historical novel about a Sufi Islamic community, entitled The History of the Soul. The novel covers the two hundred years leading up to 1919, the year of the May Fourth Movement that is conventionally considered as the beginning of modern Chinese history. During this period, the Sufi community that is the subject of Zhang’s novels, called the Jahriyya, was involved in a series of violent clashes with the Qing imperial state. The author weaves through his historical narrative of a Chinese spiritual community the story of his own spiritual crisis, which he underwent in the 1980s and finally overcame through his encounter with the Jahriyya. Zhang embarks on a journey of historical and self-discovery from his home in Beijing to the present day heartland of the Jahriyya community in the Xihaigu region of Northwest China, which lies adjacent to the site of the first base area of the Mao Zedong’s Communist state in the Yan’an region.
The shared geographic boundary between the Jahriyya and Maoist heartlands allows Zhang to bring into dialogue the two seemingly unrelated traditions of Communism and Sufism. Led by his muse, a poor Jahriyya peasant from Xihaigu, Zhang constructs an epic narrative structured around themes relevant to both of these traditions, such as spiritual commitment, martyrdom and rebellion. The imaginary borderlands between mainstream Chinese history and that of a remote, marginalised community is where Zhang finds a new authorial voice as ‘the pen of the Jahriyya’.
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