The New Battleground: Song-and-dance in China’s Muslim borderlands
Rachel Harris (SOAS, University of London)

Abstract
This article explores the tensions between formulations of ethnic and religious
identity among the Uyghurs: a Turkic Muslim people who live mainly in northwest
China. It traces the ways in which these tropes of identity are played out in discourse
surrounding ‘song-and-dance’ (naxsha-usul) in the transnational space of online web
forums and social media posts which link Uyghurs in the ‘homeland’ (weten)—the
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region—with Uyghurs in the diaspora in Central Asia,
Turkey, Europe and America. China has long sought to depict its minority
nationalities as people who are ‘good at singing and dancing’, and Uyghurs have also
embraced musical performance as an important aspect of their national identity. Overthe past twenty years, however, an Islamic revival has provided the context for new
Uyghur voices that condemn song-and-dance as both un-Islamic and a tool of colonial
oppression. There is a strongly gendered dimension to this discourse, which
frequently casts Uyghur women’s bodies as the site of these contested identities. This
article considers how Uyghurs, and especially Uyghur women, express and negotiatethese shifting identities and shifting ethical norms through their embodied behaviours
in a context where verbal debate is tightly controlled by state policies within Xinjiang
and rigorously policed by Uyghur online activists in the diaspora.

Bio
Rachel Harris teaches in the Department of Music at SOAS, University of London.
Her research focuses on musical and religious practice amongst the Uyghurs. She is
the author of Singing the Village (2004) and The Making of a Musical Canon in
Chinese Central Asia (2008), and she has co-edited three volumes: Situating the
Uyghurs (2007), Gender in Chinese Music (2013), and Pieces of the Musical World(2015). She leads the Leverhulme Research Project ‘Sounding Islam in China’, and isactively engaged with outreach projects relating to Central Asian and Chinese music,
including recordings, musical performance, and consultancy.
Keywords
music – identity – gender – minorities – song-and-dance – Uyghur – Xinjiang – China– Islam*******

Song-and-danceMusical performance, dance and theatre are unquestionably central to modern
formulations of Uyghur national identity, and have been so since the early twentiethcentury (Harris 2008; Light 2008; Mijit 2016). When the Uyghur region wasincorporated into the Peoples Republic of China in 1955, the Uyghurs were formallyrecognized as one of China’s fifty-five ‘minority nationalities’ (少数民族), and thedevelopment of Uyghur national culture came under the rubric of China’s
nationalities policies. The mid-twentieth century saw the beginning of considerable
state investment in the ‘modernization and development’ of Uyghur musical traditions(Trebinjac 2000; Wong 2012), including extensive research and documentation, andthe implementation of a system of professional performing arts troupes who wereattached to towns and cities right across the region. These troupes developed styles offolkloric performance of Uyghur national traditions, which came to be termed ‘songand-dance’ (naxsha-usul).
On China’s national stage too, the minority song-and-dance troupes (Tibetans,
Mongols, Dai, Miao, etc.) came to play a highly visible role in PRC representations ofnational and revolutionary culture, and the rhetoric of the singing and dancing ethnic
minorities was born, a trope that continues to dominate representations of China’s
minority nationalities today. In Dru Gladney’s well-known but still apt formulation:
One cannot be exposed to China without being confronted by its ‘colorful’minorities. They sing, they dance, they twirl; they whirl. Most of all they smile,
showing their happiness to be part of the motherland. (Gladney 1994: 95)
As many commentators (Hann 1991, Harrell 1996) have argued, China’s promotionof ethnic minority arts serves as a pay-off for real autonomy in the political sphere.
But beyond this, minority song-and-dance has played an active role in establishingand normalizing the hierarchical relationship between Han Chinese majority andethnic minority peoples, and the territorial relationship between the Chinese state andthe regions inhabited by these peoples. In her ethnography of the Miao people ofsouthwest China, Louisa Schein (2000) examines how representations of Miao
identity on the national stage produce them as both feminized keepers of Chinese
tradition and as exotic Other against which the dominant Han Chinese can assert theirown modernity. She notes how these relationships are replicated and upheld throughnumerous representations and encounters, from glamorous TV shows and media
reports to small-scale and often seedy tourist performances. These relationships arefound across the different minority regions of China, especially in areas where
tourism has flourished in recent years. In Xinjiang, I have observed many suchencounters between Chinese tourists and young Uyghur women in performances from
Urumchi’s central tourist destination, the ‘Big Bazaar’,1 to small restaurants in thehistorical town of Turpan. Smiling young women in dance costumes serve as instantlyrecognisable symbols of everything that is good about the region in Chinese media
depictions.

Performance by the Xinjiang Song and Dance Troupe in Urumchi, May 2009,[Xinhua]
The continuing deployment of song-and-dance to symbolize the hierarchical andgendered relationship between Han big brother and ethnic minority little brothers andsisters was much in evidence at the sixtieth anniversary gala performance on Beijing’s
Tian’anmen square in 2009. Its lavish programme placed heavy emphasis on ethnic
minority song-and-dance. Alongside a military parade displaying an impressive arrayof hardware, thousands of brightly dressed, smiling young women danced in
disciplined rows to the sounds of 1950s revolutionary songs such as ‘Xinjiang is a
Good Place’, ‘Our Motherland is a Garden’ and ‘A Li Mountain Girls’. These andmany other minority revolutionary songs provided the backdrop to the political
campaigns, social upheaval and violence of the Cultural Revolution. The 2009 galacelebration was an apt illustration, indeed a deliberate reminder, of the continuities
between the early revolutionary period and the present-day in the way that ethnic
minority song-and-dance is deployed to symbolize the big family of nations thatcomprises the Peoples Republic of China.
This relationship is embodied at the highest levels of political power. Chinese media
images of the 2009 gala showed then president Hu Jintao surrounded by appropriately
costumed and smiling ethnic minority young women. The wife of the current
president Xi Jinping, the star singer Peng Liyuan, is famous for her lavishlychoreographed song-and-dance performance of the Tibetan revolutionary folk song,‘Emancipated Serfs Sing Proudly’. There is a clearly territorial dimension to thesecultural representations, since large areas of the territory claimed by the PRC areregions that were—prior to the intensive Han immigration of the 1980s and 1990s—
principally populated by non-Han Chinese peoples whose historical relationship with
China was not easily reducible to one of continuous belonging. Repeatedperformances of the minority revolutionary songs—declaring these minority peoples’
love for Chairman Mao and their gratitude to the Chinese Communist Party—on
national media, in schools, tourist shows and countless other contexts serve tonaturalize the status of these peoples as ‘minority nationalities’ and uphold the rule of
the Chinese Communist Party over these often contested territories (Yeh 2013).
And yet, Uyghur identification with song-and-dance (naxsha-usul) cannot be easily
dismissed as a top-down politicized imposition by central government. In
contemporary Uyghur society, the professional musicians of the Uyghur state troupes
are widely respected and their VCD releases are eagerly consumed. Uyghur parents
heavily invest in their children’s ability to reproduce professional song-and-dance
performances, and take pleasure in dressing their little girls in miniature song-anddance troupe outfits. Uyghur song-and-dance—as a notion and set of practices related
to but distinct from traditional forms of music-making—has a particular history andset of meanings and values, dating back to the early twentieth century. Rather thanunderstanding song-and-dance as a tool of control developed by the Chinese
Communist Party and imposed on a passive and resentful Uyghur population, we needto understand song-and-dance as a co-creation whose roots stretch back well beyond
the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. Mukaddas Mijit argues that it was theearly to mid-twentieth century Central Asian Muslim reformists (Jadids) who firstdeveloped the notion of Uyghur national culture and used musical performance toconvey social reformist messages, long before the Chinese Peoples Liberation Armymarched into Xinjiang. In part under the influence of Soviet models of culturalreform, Uyghur ‘Sanai Nepis’ theatre troupes of the 1930s produced the foundationsof a new national repertoire based on local traditions of muqam, dastan epic stories
and the meshrep songs of the ashiq Sufi mendicants: early revisions of the Twelve
Muqam, staged versions of epic love stories: Leili-Majnun, Ferhad-Shirin, GheripSenem, and many more items of Uyghur national musical culture that still resonate
strongly with Uyghur listeners today (Mijit 2015: 32-36; see also Harris 2008: 29-33).
There was considerable continuity with the work started by these Uyghur nationalist
reformers and the work of ‘developing minority traditions’ subsequently carried out
within the framework of the minority song-and-dance troupes after ‘Liberation’ by the
Chinese Communist Party. Most of the cultural workers engaged in this task in the
1940s (musicians like Musajan Rozi and Gheyazdin Barat) simply continued theirwork under the new regime. Many of them suffered badly under the political
campaigns of the late 1950s or during the Cultural Revolution—accused of ‘counterrevolutionary’ links to the pre-Liberation nationalist movements—but they cemented
their reputation as founders of Uyghur national culture, and some (such as the singer
Pasha Ishan) were rewarded by the state with (largely symbolic) positions on the
National Peoples Congress. Educated Uyghur urbanites today maintain considerable

investment in song-and-dance, which they regard as a central part of modern national
Uyghur culture and identity.
The Uyghur Islamic revival
Beginning in the 1980s, the relaxation of controls on international travel and tradeunder Deng Xiaoping’s post-Cultural Revolution reforms facilitated renewed links
between Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the wider Islamic world. These renewed ties,
alongside relatively relaxed policies on religious expression, gradually began to
introduce new ways of being Muslim into Uyghur society. The beginning of thetwenty-first century saw the rise of intense interest in ways of being Muslim rightacross Uyghur society, both within Xinjiang and in the Uyghur diaspora, cutting
across the rural-urban divide. Over the next ten years, it developed into a major
revival in religious practice. Greater numbers of people adopted a pious lifestyle, andmany travelled abroad to study Islam or for the hajj, while wealthy businessmen
sponsored the building of new mosques for their local communities. This Uyghur
Islamic revival has been accompanied by and facilitated by the circulation of a wide
range of media carrying Muslim imagery and sounds, from pamphlets on how to
perform daily prayers to recordings of Qur’anic recitation, sermons and anashid
religious songs.
The revival was largely tolerated by the local authorities, aside from occasional
crackdowns on the circulation of ‘extremist’ religious material, until the 2009
interethnic violence in the regional capital Urumchi. On 5 July, an initially peacefuldemonstration by Uyghur students was met by police violence, provoking a night ofrioting and bloodshed.2 This incident was followed by a major police crackdown that
included mass arrests, public executions, the expulsion of Uyghur rural migrants from
Urumchi, and the introduction of sweeping controls on many aspects of daily life for
Uyghurs across the region, including the shut down of Xinjiang’s Internet for over six
months. In this atmosphere of heightened repression the upsurge in interest in Islam
intensified, sometimes merging with the growing Uyghur resentment of Chinese rule.
Accordingly, the Xinjiang authorities began to tighten their control over religious
expression, routinely employing the coercive resources of the state to this end. As theanti-extremism campaign gathered in force over the following few years, the scope of
its controls widened, and an increasingly wide range of religious practices were
subsumed under the rubric of ‘Islamic extremism’ and criminalized (Harris 2015).
In this context, discussing or attempting to learn about Islam within Xinjiang became
an increasingly dangerous activity. As the region’s mosques came under increasing
surveillance, and public expressions of faith—including veiling, growing beards,
praying in public, fasting, religious gatherings—were criminalized, people
increasingly turned to the private sphere to practice and learn more about their newfound faith. In this way, Uyghur websites—usually hosted outside Xinjiang—online
forums, blogs and discussion boards began to play an important role in promoting anddisseminating Islamic texts, discussions, images and sounds. The newly emerging
field of social media became especially important as a ‘public-private’ site where
people could access a wide range of Islamic media, and as a medium for sharing new
ideas about Islam and Uyghur identity. Social media linked Uyghurs in Xinjiang with
their friends and relatives in the diaspora in geographically far-flung but virtually
intimate groups who could share and respond to media items almost in real time,awarding emoticons to particularly affective examples of Qur’anic recitation,
discussing the correct series of gestures for prayer, or sharing outrage at someperceived breach of religious etiquette.
Social media and religious identities
Here, I want to pose two questions. What role do specific media technologies play inthe making and remaking of religious and ethnic identity in terms of experience,
community, and authority? And how is the ideology and performance of song-anddance—that is the staged and mediated performance of national culture—imbricatedin this shifting field? Martin Daughtry’s consideration of the ways in which musicalicons provide texts for the negotiation of identities, is helpful in thinking about thesequestions. Daughtry discusses the debates amongst Russians over what the Russian
national anthem should sound like in the twenty-first century. Since ideologies andcollective self-images are always subject to conflicting and changing interpretations,
he argues, they are necessarily conditional, contestable and fluid. For this reason it ismore productive to regard an anthem not as the static reflection of a monolithic
ideology but rather as a polysemous text through which national identity is constantly
being negotiated (Daughtry 2003). Similarly, the powerful and fraught trope of songand-dance as a signifier of Uyghur national identity is negotiated and contested bymultiple actors in transnational contexts in ways that bear witness to, and help toshape, political realities on the ground. Aihwa Ong provides useful ways of thinking
about identity politics as they are expressed and negotiated across electronically or
digitally mediated transnational networks. Ong views discourses of diaspora not as
descriptions of already formed social entities, but rather as specific political practices
projected on a global scale. She argues that electronic technology disembeds ethnic
formation from particular milieus of social life. In this way, terms like diaspora or
nation acquire specific emotional and ideological meanings, and are invoked bydisparate transnational groups as a way to construct coalitions that cut across national
spaces (Ong 2003:88). As I will argue, however, embodied practices forged indigitally mediated circulation are often subsequently re-embedded in in local customs.
A Love Story
One example of the often-virulent debates amongst Uyghur netizens surrounding thetrope of song-and-dance emerged in November 2011, when a young Uyghur woman,
who was then studying in Turkey, appeared on a Turkish TV talent show singing asong in the Chinese language. While the Turkish judges made encouraging comments

in response to her halting rendition of the song, and stressed the friendly racial ties
between Uyghurs and Turks in their responses, Uyghur netizens based in the diaspora
responded with outrage. A video clip of her performance was posted on YouTube,and a series of Turkish and Uyghur language videos shouted ‘Collaborator!’ and‘Shame on you, Chinese whore!’ while a farting cartoon cat opined that she hadlearned the song in ‘Mr Wang’s teahouse’ (i.e. a Chinese brothel).
The controversy spread to the American state-funded Radio Free Asia Uyghur
service, where the young woman was condemned by interviewees in somewhat moremeasured terms for undoing years of hard work by Uyghur activists in Turkey inraising awareness of ‘the plight of the Uyghurs’. This act of publically singing a lovesong in the Chinese language, on what the activists in the diaspora clearly regarded as
their home turf, was anathema to them because it offered a very different impressionof Chinese-Uyghur relations from that which they sought to promote amongst the
Turkish public. For them, a Uyghur voluntarily singing in Chinese in a public forum
was tantamount to signalling acceptance of Chinese rule in Xinjiang. For a Uyghur
woman to sing in Chinese in public was a fatal moral lapse, which damaged the bodypolitic of the Uyghur nation.
The determined efforts at boundary making by the Uyghur activists belied theremarkable transnational affective history of the particular song that the young
woman chose to sing.3 This song, ‘Historia de Amor’, was composed by Carlos
Almaran in Panama and first released in 1955. It has since enjoyed global popularity,sung by a host of major artists from Nana Mouskouri to Eartha Kitt. In 1960 it wastranslated into Chinese under the title, ‘In my heart there is only you’ (我的⼼⾥只有你) and released in a lush orchestration with a Latin-style trumpet solo, poignantly
sung by the Hong Kong singer and dubbing artist Tsin Ting, who provided the vocals
for some of Hong Kong’s best-known films of the 1960s and 1970s. The song’s
popularity in the Chinese-speaking world was assured by a subsequent version by the
major Taiwanese star of the 1980s, Deng Lijun (Teresa Teng), and it was more
recently given a new lease of life with an up-tempo samba version by the
androgynous star Li Yuchun (Chris Lee), who herself came to fame through a
Chinese TV talent show in 2005 (Harris & Pease 2013). The young woman who sangit on a Turkish TV show, like many of the young elite in Xinjiang who were educatedin the Chinese system, shared in this cosmopolitan tradition of Chinese popular
culture which is itself inflected through the colonial histories of Shanghai, Hong Kong
and Taiwan (Jones 2001).
How might a performance of this globalized and highly affective hit song bereconfigured as an act of betrayal, prostituting the Uyghur nation to China? Gendered
attitudes were very much to the fore in the response of the online Uyghur activists:
not only the traditional unease with women’s public performance, but also thediasporic tendency to place the responsibility for upholding cultural values squarelyon the shoulders of women (Appadurai 1996). At a time of mourning following theinterethnic violence between Uyghurs and Han that took place in the regional capitalof Urumchi in 2009, the videos and comments made very clear, the only appropriate
sounds for Uyghur women to make were the sounds of grief and the sounds of protest.
This perception, along with the borrowed sounds and images they drew on, linked
their nationalist discourse to the sphere of political Islam.4

Still from one of the activist videos, borrowed from AFP, showing women in
Urumchi protesting against the mass arrests of 2009.
The pathways of the controversy illustrated Henry Jenkins’s (2008) notion of‘convergence culture’ as the vitriol flowed across old and new media platforms fromTurkey to the United States, and Uyghur internet activists took advantage of newtechnologies to annotate, appropriate and recirculate media content, drawing freely on
Islamist imagery and sounds, news reports from mainstream media, combining themwith nationalist rhetoric and sexist and racist slurs. It was also an object reminder ofthe ways that grassroots online discourse tends to promote traditional authority andpreserve gender hierarchies.
A WeChat Sermon
Fast forward two years, to a new media platform. By 2013, the smartphone app
Weixin (WeChat), owned by the Chinese IT giant Tencent, had become the media of
choice for some 600 million users worldwide, 500 million of them within China.
Amongst Uyghur users too, Undidar, as it is known in Uyghur, became an essential
communication tool. From mid-2013 to mid-2014, possibly several million Uyghurs
inside Xinjiang and in the diaspora were using this app, often several times a day, tochat with their friends and to participate in online groups or circles, sharing shortaudio messages, text, images, links, audio and video files. It was largely through themedium of Undidar—though also linked to other media platforms including
Facebook, YouTube, and Chinese equivalents Youku and Tudou—that we observed asteady rise in the circulation of religious images, audio-video files, audio messages
and discussion.5 All this communication continued for over a year with apparently
little control or surveillance, until the state apparently caught up with the newtechnology and implemented a crackdown in summer 2014.
A rich literature now exists concerning the role of media technologies in the rise of
new forms of Islamic ideologies and sensibilities in the Middle East and Africa.
Hirschkind’s influential (2006) study of the Islamic revival in Cairo explores themeans by which Islamic ethical traditions have been recalibrated to a modern politicaland technological order. He notes the pivotal role that cassette sermons played in the
expanding arena of debate that he termed the ‘Islamic counterpublic’. Cassette
sermons, he argues, have profoundly transformed the political geography of the
Middle East. They form part of the acoustic architecture of a distinct moral vision:
recorded vocal performances that create the sensory conditions for the emergence of
new publics and new ethical and political worlds. In Xinjiang, Uyghur consumption
and sharing of new religious media was a largely private and secretive affair.
Anthropologist Cindy Huang describes the use of religious media by one of her
informants in Urumchi in the early 2000s. When she was at home, Peride performed
her daily prayers and surrounded herself with religious media. When she was working(as a shop assistant), she rarely mentioned religion (Huang 2009: 39). Such
‘subterranean’ listening practices, and their particular entwinings of sound andsubject, are increasingly common in the modern sensory landscape (Hirschkind 2006:73), especially under conditions of tight state control. In Xinjiang, as the anti-religious
extremism campaign tightened its hold, public expression of religious faith becametoo ‘sensitive’ for the public sphere, but the sphere of social media gave people anillusory sense of privacy, a sense of speaking within a group of intimate friends. In
this sphere, emerging forms of religiosity and new forms of affective connection
flourished.
The religious media circulating on Undidar during this period was diverse, revealing awide range of religious sensibilities, and ongoing debates on what constitutes true
Islam and how to be a good Muslim. The majority of postings promoted, throughimages, text and audio files, the values of daily prayer, modesty and charity as part ofan ideal Muslim lifestyle. One circle, for example, included people from Kashgar,
Urumchi, Ghulja, Beijing, Guangzhou, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Dubai, theUS and Europe. They were involved in raising money for the poor and sick insouthern Xinjiang, and frequently shared quite gruesome images of injured or sickchildren along with phone numbers and bank account details for contributions. Many
people, especially women, posted daily images and short texts that promoted idealized
notions of Islamic womanhood, piety, and self-restraint. One educated woman, forexample, posted regularly in four languages (Uyghur, Chinese, Turkish and English).
On just one day, she posted a children’s poem in Uyghur, a short text in Chinesereading, ‘The darker the road, the brighter the light’, and another in Uyghur:‘Ramadan, don’t end. I wish for my sins to be taken away. Please take my sins awaywith you’. On the same day, a Uyghur businessman posted an image of a man atprayer, with a text that promoted emotional styles of prayer as a psychological tool forwithstanding social injustice and violence:
I pressed my forehead to the prayer mat and I said, ‘Be patient’,
There is no justice or peace in this world,
There are tears in my eyes,
Only by praying to Allah can you find peace …
My prayer mat is wet with my tears.
Many people shared recordings of Qur’anic recitation, and used them to develop theirown religious practice, listening regularly to popular reciters from across the Middle
East, and learning to recite simpler passages of the Qur’an for themselves by imitating
the recordings. Other new religious ideologies and listening practices were spreading
across Uyghur social media during this period; ideologies which provided a more
overtly political response to the situation. A Uyghur language sermon (tebligh)circulating on Undidar in 2013 provides an example. The sermon depicts the
subjugation of the Uyghurs under Chinese rule as a punishment by God for theirfailure to follow true Islam, and it links a range of immoral behaviours, including
listening to music, to the downfall of the Uyghur nation:… On the Day of Judgement Allah will open the doors of hell to the nation
who forgets him. Allah will punish the nation who does not follow him. …
Invaders will come and make them slaves; enemies will come and kill them.
There will be rumours, and no decency in society, only prostitution, drinking,gambling, songs and music everywhere, and this will bind the whole nation inchains. They will burn in hell after they die ... We are under Allah’spunishment now. We are like slaves under the oppressive Communist regime.
When will the people of this nation wake up and open their eyes, hold the holy
book in their hands, and recover their morality? When will they have hope?
When will our girls protect their modesty? Only then will great Allah will give
our nation victory.6
This recorded sermon is interesting not only for its rhetoric but also for the style ofdelivery. The voice is that of an obviously educated, young Uyghur man who speaks
in an even, restrained but insistent tone. The recording style, with its heavy use ofreverb, is typical of many recorded sermons worldwide, and indexically linked to theechoing spaces of Saudi Arabia’s huge mosques (Frishkopf 2009), the original sourceof the Salafi revivalist movements. The experience of solitary and secretive listening
to this mediated voice on a smartphone provides a particular intimacy and frisson to
the listening experience and, paradoxically, a sense of companionship and community
created in that act of listening (Bull 2000). Audio media like this impel us to pay

attention to the affective power of the voice and the particularities of the mediatedvoice. They impel us to focus on the sound quality of particular media forms. Audio
files shared on smartphone are particularly good at transmitting affective properties
because they help focus attention on the voice. The typically poor sound quality ofthese audio files—often recorded by individuals on their phones, uploaded andshared—means that they are also good at signifying authenticity, good at conveying
the urgency and affective impact of a charged moment of experience, caught andfrozen in time and shared.
Dorothea Schulz has argued that the mediated voice has a special potential formobilizing people’s agentive and affective faculties. Writing on the experience oflistening to recorded sermons in Mali, she notes that the human voice is considered bypeople in Mali to ‘touch’ listeners in a way that is physically experienced, and for thisreason it has the capacity to move individuals from an attitude of passivity to action(Schulz 2012). The movement from passivity to forms of action entail for the majority
of Uyghur listeners no more and no less than adopting the forms of self-discipline
required by a pious lifestyle: daily prayer, fasting, and especially women’s adoptionof codes of modesty. In the post-2009 period, such forms of action came to beconsidered by many Uyghurs to be the appropriate answer to their self-perception as asuffering nation under colonial rule, and the sense that only through proper religious
observance could they persuade God to change their fate. For some, however, the call
was to a more militant form of resistance. In the public-private sphere of Uyghur
social media, emerging forms of religiosity and new forms of affective connection
flourished, centred on the mediated, disembodied sound of the male voice, and theyfound their most radical expression in the sung form of anashid.
Violence and sacrifice
Letter to my Mother (Anamgha yezilghan xet)7
If someone says, you can live for a hundred years as a rabbit,
I reply, I wish to live for one day as a tiger.
Please, mother, understand that your son is now a mujahid,
I must be brave in spirit.
The rocks and stones will be my blanket.
As long as I live I will continue to do jihad.
Pray to Allah for us.
I will be happy to die on the battlefield as a mujahid.
Maybe some day you will hear a quiet voice.
If that voice says that your son has died,
Mother, then your son is living joyfully in heaven.
Never doubt that the martyrs
Will find joy in heaven.
This powerfully affective nashid circulated in audio and video versions across theUyghur diaspora and within Xinjiang, on various media platforms including Facebook
and YouTube, and we found it being shared on Undidar groups in 2013. The
recording featured a young male spoken voice, heavy with reverb, speaking directly
to his mother, followed by a sung nashid performed by the same solo voice. It was
unaccompanied by musical instruments, so in the view of orthodox Muslims ‘notmusic’, and religiously permissable. With its young male pop voice, repeated fallingriffs and use of vocal counterpoint, in melodic style it was clearly linked to thetransnational sound world of Islamic anashid.
Traditional anashid—sung poetry praising Allah—have a long history in the Muslim
world. Today, established recording industries across the Middle East and South East
Asia cater to a significant sub-culture of listeners who consume local popular styles ofanashid. These are often linked to modern, reformist styles of Islam, but are notovertly political or radical (Pieslak 2015; Rasmussen 2010). In Turkey, new styles of
popular religious song called anashid played a significant role in creating the newaesthetic and ethical conditions that led to the rise of the Islamist movement (Stokes
2016). Examples like the Uyghur ‘Letter to Mother’ belong to a sub-genre of politicalor ‘jihadi’ anashid that can be traced back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, and theperiod of violent struggle between Arab Islamist groups and governments in Syria andEgypt. Here, radical anashid formed an important aspect of the Islamist culturaloffensive, and were used to reach new youth audiences and to inspire them to join thearmed struggle (Said 2012).
Radical anashid have been used as soundtracks for videos produced by Hamas, Fateh
and Hizbolla in the context of the Palestinian struggle, and by Da’esh to accompany
videos depicting their victories in battle or the execution of hostages (Pieslak 2009,2015). The contemporary anashid developed in Iraq and Syria by Al Qaeda andDa’esh are more recognizably rooted in the globalized musical language of pop. They
commonly use a cappella song style and complex vocal harmonizations andarrangements. The use of a cappella is in part a strategy to escape the morally dubious
sphere of ‘music’. This reliance on the unaccompanied voice aligns anashid with core
sounded Islamic practices, but the style of vocalization is radically different from thatof the recited Qur’an. Gone are the nasality and melisma of Qur’anic recitation andthe strict rules of tajwid that govern the pronunciation and delivery of the Qur’anic
text. These musical productions draw instead on the world of pop, especially thebreathy intimacy of the sentimental pop ballad, indexing the listening experience of
teenagers. Anashid eschew musical instruments in order to escape problematic
associations with ‘music’ but they are thoughtfully constructed as musical works, andin terms of production quality and style they draw directly on the technologies and thevalues developed within the music industry. Their carefully crafted sonic texturedraws on techniques of reverb, delay, and various digitally manipulated effects
familiar to listeners from the world of pop music production, with the aim ofincreasing the affective listening experience and thus increasing the impact of themessage (Pieslak 2015: 25-29).

Listening to radical anashid via Undidar, then, was a pleasurable experience for many
people, and especially for young Uyghur men. The connectivity and anonymity natureof social media also facilitated the sharing of these audio files across the diaspora andinto the Uyghur homeland. Dorothea Schulz notes the ease with which social media
allow immediate sharing and commenting across geographical space, stretching theboundaries of the audience and introducing new senses of community, repositioning
listeners as co-creators. In this way locality and identities are increasingly defined
through circulation (Schulz 2006). The Uyghur-language sermon and the radical
anashid are both translations of Islamist discourse that circulates globally. But inevery different locale, this kind of rhetoric, and more importantly this style of vocal
performance, take root and works their way into local debates and sensibilities indifferent ways. It is crucial is to trace the particular ways that they play out inparticular places. In the Uyghur milieu, these new sensibilities have especially comeinto play in opposition to the trope of song and dance. This, I argue, is because of theheightened politicization of song-and-dance due to its fifty-year history of association
with the Chinese state and state representations of Uyghur identity.
An Anniversary Gala
Let us take another case study, a Facebook discussion held amongst exile Uyghurs in
the winter of 2015. The campaigning exile organization, the World Uyghur Congress
posted images of dancing children and a Uyghur music ensemble performing at a galacelebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Uyghur community in Germany. I
should emphasize that song-and-dance performance has not generally been regarded
by the political opposition in exile as a cunning plot by the Chinese state tomarginalize and disempower Uyghurs. Staged musical performance and dance havebeen a completely normalized way to perform community, assert national pride, andto do political work in the diaspora. But on this occasion, dissenting voices emerged
in a comment thread below the post:‘Unsheathed Sword’: Is our community still doing this song-and-dance?
‘Vengeance Boy’: Just when the Chinese government is trying to make our
Uyghur people into atheists by forcing them to sing and dance, our Uyghurs in
the free world are voluntarily organizing song and dance activities. Doesn’t thatprove they actually think the Chinese government is doing the right thing? …
It’s like a man whose parents have died and he wraps up the body in a reed mat
and goes to a party. Because of these constant tragedies Uyghurs areexperiencing, we should be in a state of mourning, but you guys are organizing
song-and-dance!
‘Unsheathed Sword’: Why are Uyghurs doing this in exile, when in Islam songand dance is forbidden?

‘Son of Turkestan’: This culture was taught to them by the Chinese.8
This kind of ethical religious and political stance gained increasing credibility andpower in Uyghur transnational networks in the aftermath of the 2009 violence andsubsequent crackdown. The prominence of song-and-dance in state representations of
the Uyghurs created a backlash, bringing together Islamist anxieties about music with
Uyghur nationalist anti-state sentiment. Singing and dancing was not only un-Islamic
and immoral bodily behavior, it was inexorably linked in this discourse to China’s
presumed state project to weaken, corrupt and subjugate the Uyghur nation.
In 2014, the US-based Uyghur scientist, Erkin Sidiq, a prominent member of the exile
community, started an anxious discussion on music on a Uyghur language web forum:
One of our younger brothers … asked me about the middle path of Islam, andhow we should regard song-and-dance; is it halal or haram? Some fatwa say if its
content is unhealthy then we should not listen to it. I know that in history when
Muslims went to jihad or on the hajj they would sing. In olden times armies
marched into battle playing music. [But then I heard] Yasir Qadhi [a conservative
American Islamic scholar] explaining that stringed instruments belong to Satanand it is a sin to listen to them. When I learned this I couldn’t sleep for days
because music plays an important role for Uyghurs and our identity. We cannot
maintain our culture without music. How to solve this problem? When Uyghurs
accepted Islam we already had a very rich heritage. We cannot abandon
everything for Islam, can we? We have a thousand year long history of song,dance and music. Have we been committing sin all this time?9
Several discussions of these issues were conducted on several Uyghur language
message boards: what kinds of music might be haram, and what kinds permissible,
and why thinking about music distracted the Uyghur nation from its necessary task of
self-discipline and development. Detailed fatwa on music and dance in Islam can befound on several Uyghur language websites hosted in Turkey, with lengthy quotes
from the hadith explaining the particular types of music and the particular contexts
where listening to music is haram.10 Taken together, these anxious debates evidenced
a growing divide within the Uyghur community between the educated urban elite
nationalists who had for decades worn their religion with a light touch, and new stylesof religiosity concentrated among rural dwellers and business people.
Historically in this region, musical culture has flourished as an integral part ofreligious expression, especially within Sufi orders and within popular practices
influenced by Sufism. In contemporary practice, musical traditions of muqam andmeshrep songs are performed at shrine festivals by religious mendicants (ashiq), andSufi mystic poetry is sung in sama’ rituals to the accompaniment of percussion andstringed musical instruments (Harris 2009; Light 2008). This musical-religious

culture has for centuries co-existed in creative tension with more orthodox
interpretations of the permissibility of music and dance in Islamic custom. Thesetensions and debates—which are replicated across the Islamic world—are rehearsed
in some of the earliest extant religious texts from the region, such as the sixteenth
century Treatise on Audition written by the Central Asian Sufi master Ahmad Kasani
Dahbidi. Kasani explains that human beings are composed of spirituality andsensuality. If spirituality is predominant in people, then listening to beautiful voices
will bring them closer to God, but if sensuality is dominant, then listening to finevoices will incline them towards fornication and obscenity. In other words, thepractice of listening to music is neither the cause nor the problem; the real stake is thenature of the individuals (Papas 2015). Such debates on the moral effects of listening
to music are reproduced in the folk stories that circulate in Uyghur society. A
nineteenth century tale recounts that on the Day of Judgment, Satan will appear riding
on a donkey whose tail hairs are made of the strings of musical instruments, and thesounds they produce will entice people to follow him to hell (Bellér-Hann 2000: 41).
Attitudes to music in contemporary rural Uyghur society are likewise a field of debate
and fine nuance. Village socializing revolves around live musical performance andsocial dancing in ways that are certainly not part of life for other Muslim peoples ofChina. In the village in Southern Xinjiang where I conducted fieldwork between 2006
and 2012, playing musical instruments was regarded by most people as something
inappropriate for respectable or high-status members of the community, andespecially inappropriate for women, although dancing at village gatherings (called
meshrep) was generally considered acceptable. Meshrep were highly valued, but themusicians who performed at them generally came from the lower end of the scale invillage society. For respected religious figures such as haji (those who havecompleted the pilgrimage to Mecca) or imam (religious clerics) even attending
musical gatherings might provoke comment. As the Islamic revival gathered in
momentum, voices proclaiming the moral dangers of listening to music, and theinappropriateness of public dancing for women, became increasingly dominant,within this village and right across the region.
In these new debates, which were conducted between friends meeting in town
restaurants, in village homes, student dormitories, and across transnational digitally
mediated networks, views on the permissibility of music within an Islamic lifestyleintersected with questions of national identity and the relationship between Uyghurs
and the Chinese state. The heavy emphasis on song-and-dance in state representationsof Uyghur identity created a negative cycle, bringing together traditional Islamic
anxieties about music with modern anti-state sentiment. In this climate it became
harder for Uyghur nationalists to defend their interests in what they still regarded as
their national music (milliy-muzika), but what critics denigrated as song-and-dance(naxsha-usul), precisely because it was so hard to dissociate it from support for, or atleast acquiescence in the Chinese state project to uphold its rule over the Uyghur
region.

A Wedding Video
These debates, as we have seen, are clearly articulated on transnational media
networks, but within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the religious
and political spheres are tightly policed, there is less scope for public debate on such
issues. Instead, shifting ethical norms are expressed through the ways people act,
through embodied practices. This is especially visible where different norms collide.
In his discussion of approaches to contemporary Islam in Central Asia, Johan
Rasanayagam argues for the need to study how individuals fashion themselves as
Muslim in contexts where governments maintain tight control over religious
expression. Because of these state imposed constraints, lived experience in thesecontexts is privileged over debate as a site for moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is not
only expressed through cognitive reflection but is also inherent within experience: anembodied, ongoing engagement in a social and material world (Rasanayagam 2006).
This approach also has important advantages for understanding women’s experience,in contexts where women’s bodies are foregrounded as political symbols, but
women’s voices are particularly hard to hear.
A wedding video made in the southern town of Khotan in spring 2016 provides afascinating text to analyze the complex negotiations that now surround dancing insmall-town Xinjiang.11 Wedding videos are a major industry in Uyghur society; anessential component of every wedding. Usually set to a soundtrack of celebratory
Uyghur pop songs, these often lengthy videos, running to three hours, show the wholeextended process of the wedding, including the core ritual (nikah) conducted by the
local imam, the greeting of the guests who stand stiffly to attention as the camera
records their presence, the banquet, and the convoy of cars carrying bride and groom
between destinations. They are to an extent manufactured representations of thefamily. Made to be viewed together, with friends and the extended family, andreplayed years after the event for visitors, they are intended to show off family wealthand prestige, fashion or piety. However, in the less carefully edited sections of thevideos it is possible to capture moments of tension, where people’s embodied
responses to events evidence the collision of shifting ideologies and norms of
behaviour.
In this particular video, a curious contretemps occurs as the bride and her friends
arrived in their car at the banquet venue. The sounds of a drum-and-shawm (naghrasunay) band greet the guests as they alight. A group of men in suits and embroideredhats (doppa) mill around the road, greeting each other. One man decides to persuade
the chief bridesmaid out of her car. The woman emerges, modestly dressed in a fulllength floral dress, pink headscarf covering her head and neck. “Let’s dance!” he calls.
Apparently embarrassed, she makes a token effort at the customary movements of thedance he demands, but she holds her hand in front of her face, attempting to shield her
identity from the prying camera. Sensing a dip in the celebratory mood, more of themen come forward to dance and utter celebratory shouts. As men, they have less toworry about in terms of community gossip. The woman escapes back to the safety ofher car. Then the groom arrives, and the men grab him bodily and try to force him todance. He is not at all interested, and gesticulates angrily at them. The video cuts
abruptly to a still of a flower bouquet.

Still from a wedding video, Khotan 2016, copy shared by Mu Qian with permission.
In moments like this we can observe the way that ideological debates trickle down
into popular consciousness and inform everyday actions. Forms of bodily practicehave been a key focus of analysis in discussion of the Islamic revival in the Middle
East. In her study of the revival movement in Egypt (2005), Saba Mahmood argues
that forms of bodily practice (veiling, daily prayers or reciting the Qur’an) do not
simply express the self but also shape the self that they are supposed to signify.
Ethical self-formation, such as strengthening the desire to perform the daily prayers,
can be achieved through constant vigilance, honing ones moral capacities in order toplease God. These habits of cultivation have also been central to the development of
the Uyghur Islamic revival, as evidenced by the thousands of Uyghur men andwomen who began to engage in these kinds of ethical practice over the course of thepast two decades. These forms of habitus are part of the cultivation of gestural
capacities which is central to the Islamic and Christian traditions: habitus as a set ofpractices formed through specific pedagogical processes in order to acquire moral
character.
Pierre Bourdieu describes habitus more broadly as a system of dispositions, a set ofacquired characteristics that are the product of specific social conditions. As a theoryof social power, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus emphasises change and process; it isformed through the changing dynamics between agents—individuals, groups andinstitutions—and also between agents and their environment (1984: 170). Habitus
transforms, but is also transformed by the environment within which it is set into play.

By highlighting the dynamism of habitus, Bourdieu raises the possibility of using theconcept to explain situations of radical social change. This perception is key tounderstanding the fraught relationship between Islam, Uyghur national identity andsong-and-dance in this period. As these processes of Islamic subject-formationacquired increasing importance in constructs of Uyghur identity, singing and dancing
were increasingly configured as bodily actions that were antithetical to the Islamic
cultivation of a pious disposition. If, in the view of the religious reformists, singing
and dancing had previously figured in Uyghur culture, then this was merely evidenceof a national failure to follow ‘correct’ Islamic practice, and part of the reason for thenation’s subjugation under Chinese rule. The prominence of song-and-dance in state
representations of the Uyghurs fed into this narrative that linked song and dance withnational subjugation. Only by cleansing Uyghur bodies of these un-Islamic practices
would God forgive them and throw off the yoke of infidel rule.
As we saw in the example of the young woman who sang Historia d’Amor on a
Turkish TV show, women bear the heaviest burden in terms of the new requirements
for ethical behaviour. Here again, in this wedding video, we observe women caught at
the sharp end of changing ethical standards, with dance taking its place alongsidesong as site of tension. The man’s invitation to the bridesmaid to dance is customary
practice in Uyghur weddings, part of the ritual exchange of courtesies between thetwo families. But in the new ethical milieu that took hold in Uyghur society after
2009, for a woman to be caught on camera dancing in the street was to expose herself
to public shaming. How should she respond? Negotiating the conflicting demands ofidentity politics, tradition and changing religious norms is today part of the complex
work of being a Uyghur woman in Xinjiang, a project of self-fashioning in which
opposing political forces have so much invested that the space for women to fashion
their own ways of being is increasingly conflicted and constrained.
These gendered bodily dilemmas bear the traces of the colonial and the diasporicexperience. As Appadurai has noted, women typically bear the brunt of the strains ofcultural reproduction in diasporic conditions, where women’s ‘honour’ often becomesa surrogate for male identity (1996: 44), and embodied practices are key sites for thecontesting of culture under these conditions. In the Uyghur Islamic revival, under thetwin pressures of state appropriation of musical performance and Islamist prohibitions
on musical performance, the space for women’s musical expression is doubly
foreclosed. Music is regarded as religiously suspect, and the dancing female body istainted by association with the colonial regime. The singing voice is disassociatedfrom the female body, purified and reconceived as ‘not music’. Idealized images of
Uyghur womanhood as silent, symbols of piety, veiled and eyes cast down, directly
oppose the state-promoted images of brightly coloured, smiling female dancers. In
their place, the male voice is idealised as both religiously permissible and as a symbolof national identity, and eagerly consumed through mediated encounters withrecordings of Qur’anic recitation and radical anashid.

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1

A modern complex loosely modelled on medieval Central Asian Islamic architecture which houses
KFC and Carrefour outlets and souvenir stalls
2
See Millward 2009 for a balanced account of this incident.
3
I am indebted to Fiorella Diaz for her insights into the history of Historia de Amor. At the time ofwriting, the online critiques of this performance were no longer accessible.
4See, for example, John Baily’s discussion of Taliban prohibitions on music-making in a time of
conflict (Baily 2001).
5
All the content referred to here forms part of a survey of Undidar content made during 2013-14 by
Aziz Isa and Rachel Harris as part of the Sounding Islam in China research project. For further details
see the project website: http://www.soundislamchina.org/.
6
The audio file can be accessed here: http://www.soundislamchina.org/?p=1222.
7
http://www.soundislamchina.org/av/Anamgha_yezilghan_xet.mp3.
8
Facebook thread under a post on the World Uyghur Congress site, made on 16 November 2015.
9
Erkin Sidiq (April 2014) Din, Muzika we Uyghurlar
http://bbs.bozqir.com.cn/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=8149 (accessed 15 May 2014).
10
Hosted on a multi-lingual website supervised by Shaykh Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid; also copied
on the Turkish Uyghur site ‘Islam House’ http://islamqa.info/ug/5000 (accessed 23 July 2017).
11
The wedding was attended by Mu Qian, research student on the Sounding Islam in China project,
and the wedding video was shared with him by the family of the groom.