The Sound of Salvation - (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia Un) by Guangtian Ha (Paperback)

About the Book

The Jahriyya Sufis--a primarily Sinophone order in northwest China--inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation.

Book Synopsis

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

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

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

Review Quotes

A stunning piece of work. The study of Islam in China has been crying out for works that do justice to the specificities of local traditions while maintaining a productive conversation with the wider field of Islamic studies. This book bridges that divide in a way that few pieces of scholarship have been able to up until now. It's an immensely valuable ethnography in its own right, but also one that's theoretically provocative and which offers scholars outside the immediate field of Islam in China a vantage point from which to rethink their views of Sufi practices and related forms of ritual.--David Brophy, author of Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier

About the Author

Guangtian Ha is assistant professor of religion at Haverford College. He is coeditor of Ethnographies of Islam in China (2020) and The Contest of the Fruits (2021).